poynterinstitute:

latimes:

Behold: The amazing “electric newspaper!”

Pictured above is the The Los Angeles Times-Richfield “Electric Newspaper,” seen during its test run way back on Oct. 12, 1931.

From the original L.A. Times article announcing the bulletin:

As the vast grist of the day’s news pours into The Times’ offices by telegraph, telephone, radio, mail and messenger, it will be concentrated into brief, snappy, informative bulletins by expert newspaper men and flashed by teletype to an office in the Paramount building at 6th and Hill, where is located the huge controller of the electric bulletin board.

Here another squad of men will transcribe the bulletins by stenciling machines on the wide, endless tapes which, fed into the controller, project their perforated letters on the screen, made up of electric lights in multiple banks. The effect is that of letters of light, forming words and sentences and moving continuously from one end of the board to the other, a distance of some eighty feet.

That sounds a whole lot more complicated than sending out a breaking news tweet…

For the full story, head over to Framework.

Photo: Los Angeles Times

We’d like to see this on city streets more. 

Was this the first of its kind? 

A study of American newspaper front pages suggests that ‘conventional journalism’ (that based purely on factual reporting) has been in decline for at least five decades and possibly as long as a century.

A guide to the discussion at the ChinwagPsych event, which focused on the new fields of digital psychology and anthropology. One take-away from all this is that in the era of big data you can end up with big mistakes with correlation if you aren’t testing real hypotheses.  

Jay Rosen rather neatly summarises the challenge of crowd-sourcing in an interesting piece from Matthew Ingram:

90 percent will never participate, so what do we have for them? 10 percent might engage, but you have to have the right ask, the right incentives, the right UI. One percent are your core contributors, but you have to find them, deeply engage them, compensate them. That is way harder than ‘let’s crowdsource this!’

“As much as we’re told e-mail isn’t sexy, no one sends more e-mail than Facebook or Twitter,” says Berry, the former chief technical officer of the Huffington Post. “And the reason they do is we’re all on e-mail and it brings you back” to the site that sent it.

I love it when the Economist just shakes off its  analytical and empiricist chains and comes up with something as mad as this — almost all the world’s problems could be solved if leaders followed the advice given in the lyrics of popular musicals. 

And can the Phantom of the Opera really have grossed  $5.6 billion? 

Stephen Wolfram has analysed the data from a million Facebook users who have his analytics tracker and come up with some fascinating findings including this visualisation of how age affects the interests of users.

It’s almost shocking how much this tells us about the evolution of people’s typical interests. People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the weather. Men typically talk more about sports and technology than women—and, somewhat surprisingly to me, they also talk more about movies, television and music. Women talk more about pets+animals, family+friends, relationships—and, at least after they reach child-bearing years, health. The peak time for anyone to talk about school+university is (not surprisingly) around age 20. People get less interested in talking about “special occasions” (mostly birthdays) through their teens, but gradually gain interest later. And people get progressively more interested in talking about career+money in their 20s. And so on. And so on.

The full post is long but well worth a read, not least for a brave attempt at visualising the different kinds of networks — some 32 types are identified but most users fall into a handful of simple network types. 

ckanal:

“Starting anything is a roller coaster with the highest highs and lowest lows.” -Jack Dorsey

The conditions under which crowds can be wise are rather restrictive: members need to be diverse and to be thinking independently of one another. There are online techniques for harnessing such intelligence but they are almost certainly less engaging than the immersive approaches taken by sites like Reddit. This is according to James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds: 

The problem from Reddit’s perspective, of course, is that this method of sleuthing would be far less exciting for users, and would probably generate less traffic, than its current free-for-all approach. The point of the “find-the-bombers” subthread, after all, wasn’t just to find the bombers—it was also to connect and talk with others, and to feel like you were part of a virtual community. But valuable as that experience may have been for users, it also diminished the chances of the community coming up with useful information. Reddit has done an excellent job of being engaging. Now it needs to figure out if it wants to be effective.