There is Money to be Made in Niche Content

Those interested in the newspaper/media business will do well to read a story published in the New York Times yesterday about the Rivals sports network.

Rivals maintains a website for every large college in the country and has 1-4 reporters dedicated to covering each school’s athletic department in depth (many of the reporters are part timers who have other jobs)....

Pentagon: Milblogs a security risk

Xeni Jardin filed a report with Wired magazine to describe the new pressure placed on military bloggers, or "milbloggers" by the Department of Defense. Milblogs are written by active duty military personnel, with some directly reporting from the frontlines. Jardin notes that with the number of reporters in Iraq decreasing, milblogs are possibly the only way to get a firsthand account of ground operations in Iraq....

Hotsoup is a mess

So Hotsoup, the much hyped political social networking site, launched quietly a few days back.  I hope for the sake of founders Mark McKinnon, Joe Lockhart  Matthew Dowd and Carter Eskew that this is an alpha release or something because it is a mess. 

I've been working in web development for ten years now and after wasting spending thirty minutes going through Hotsoup I still don't really understand what they are trying to accomplish here. ...

Vox Launches

Vox, the hybrid blogging/social networking platform, has left its beta test phase and is now allowing anyone to sign up. I've written about it before and think it is fantastic.  Give it a look.  I really think it is going to catch on with personal bloggers.

Read more about it on the Team Vox blog and on Techcrunch. ...

Newspaper Website Performance: More than Just the Features

Inspired by our meeting last week with LA Times reporter T. Christian  Miller, I decided to take a closer look at some of our data from the newspaper study we conducted this summer.  I wanted to see how the online versions of newspapers are performing compared to their print circulations.  The findings were interesting and indicate that there are many ...