Discussing whether news organizations should or shouldn’t innovate is silly and pointless. Of course they should. Every industry must. The conversation needs to be about making smart choices and maintaining standards, and how to do that in a challenging business and technological environment.
The company invites players to sign in with their Facebook account and then spin the wheel to potentially score a discount on select Groupons ($5, $10, $50 or $100).
Facebook users need horizontal pictures and they’d love to get ahold of professional-quality shots of their city or local tourist attractions or their local football stadium. Meanwhile, we have archives overflowing with nice pictures of those very things. And visuals pros who can easily crop the pictures into the correct proportions and resolution.
Google made yet another change to its search function by adding "personal results," or items that have been shared by people within your social network. The only problem? It only includes items that were shared on Google Plus:
Google Plus may have more than 65 million users, but for a lot of people, it’s not yet where their friends are doing their real sharing. They’re doing it on Facebook and Twitter. But Search Plus Your World doesn’t spotlight those shares in anything like the same way it does Google Plus posts.
"The days of wasting people’s time with 1,000 words about a record that we don’t even think is good is over," says SPIN senior editor Chris Weingarten. A majority of SPIN's album reviews are being exiled from the print edition and will instead appear in 140-character tweets from the account @SPINreviews.
AdAge found that a third of all magazine and newspaper iPad apps have serious bugs:
The biggest issue revolves around authenticating print subscribers … But there are a host of other issues as well. Pages, video and audio can fail to load. Links may be broken. Audio sometimes won't turn off, leaving users the choice of closing the app or continuing to listen against their will. Spontaneous crashes are common. Downloads continue to be a problem with many apps, particularly when consumers want to download issues over a 3G network or without high-speed connections.
And finally, via the fine folks at The Stranger, here's an innovation that's all but certain to revolutionize the newspaper industry — The Page Turner:
