Sky News — a 24-hour UK news site owned by News Corp. — is changing up their entire newsroom to focus more on Twitter.

The organization is installing Tweetdeck on staff computers to stimulate news gathering via social media, according to reports from a UK blog.

The Tweetdeck rollout to staff is scheduled to be completed within the month. While journalists using Twitter is pretty commonplace, an organization-wide rollout is significant. The decision signals a change in ideology around conventional news gathering, and points to the need for journalists to use Twitter to keep pace with the flow of news.

Julian March, executive producer of Sky News Online, made the following statement to Journalism.co.um on the Tweetdeck rollout:

“The big change for us in 2010 is evolving how social media plays a role in our journalism. We no longer ghettoise it to one person, but are in the process of embedding throughout the whole team.”

For those of you who work in more traditional work environments, you can appreciate the significance of software installs on company machines, typically regulated to lock down or limit employee downloads. The vetting of Tweetdeck as an application worthy of a serious news organization is one that should not be overlooked.

via Tweetdeck Infiltrates the News Room.

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Image by Gauravonomics via Flickr

Walt Mossberg talks about True/Slant, a new breed of digital journalism.

More details on True/Slant

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Over the past three years the average U.S. adult has nearly doubled their daily use of the Internet as the average U.S. adult spent 2.1 hours per day online in 2006, compared to 3.8 hours in 2008, an 81% increase over three years. As a result, the Internet now represents 32.5% of the typical “media day” for all U.S. adults when compared to daily exposure to newspaper, radio, TV and outdoor advertising. Even those who are considered heavy newspaper readers spend about as much time online today as the typical U.S. adult. Heavy newspaper readers, those who spend more than an hour per day reading, currently spend 3.7 hours per day online. In 2006 the Internet represented only 18.4% of a heavy newspaper reader’s “media day,” but today it represents 28.4%, according to a new report by Media Audit.

The report further reveals that seven daily newspapers have achieved a net unduplicated reach of 80% or more when the past 30-day website visitor figure is combined with the past month print readership figure. Among these newspapers are the:

* New Orleans Times Picayune with a total unduplicated reach of 85.8%
* San Antonio Express-News (80.6%)
* Post-Standard in Syracuse (84%)
* Buffalo News (83.3%)
* Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester (80.9%)
* Peoria Journal Star (80.4%)
* Omaha World Herald (82.2%)

In addition, a new ranking reveals that among the more than 100 daily newspapers measured in the U.S. across 88 markets, New Orleans’ nola.com is the top daily newspaper website based on the percent of adults within a metro area who have visited a daily newspaper website in the past 30 days. Nola.com reaches 50.4% of the more than 800,000 adults who live in the New Orleans metro area. The figure represents 422,354 unique monthly visitors. The website audience, when combined with the Times Picayune’s monthly print readership figures, represents 85.8% total unduplicated reach among adults 18+ in New Orleans for the Advance Publications, Inc. owned newspaper.

San Antonio Express News’ mysa.com tied nola.com with a 50.4% rating, however, the unduplicated reach for the website audience and print readership was 80.6% compared to the Picayune’s 85.8%. Washingtonpost.com ranked third.

Rounding out the top ten daily newspaper websites is Ann Arbor News’ mlive.com, followed by the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s ajc.com, The Post-Standard’s syracuse.com, Indianapolis Star’s indystar.com, Birmingham News’ al.com, Virginian-Pilot’s hamptonroads.com/pilotonline.com, and Reno Gazette-Journal’s rgj.com.

Daily newspapers were the first to embrace a multi-platform distribution strategy amidst a period when consumers were spending more and more time with the Internet. And as a result, newspapers followed the way of the consumer. By doing so, they have broadened their reach to include younger consumers. And these consumers are buying new cars and driving sales for retailers who represent a significant portion of the newspaper industry’s revenue.

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Now in beta, Knewsroom publishes the “Knews” every morning, featuring the previous day’s top stories in politics, business, technology, design, sports and entertainment. Which stories rank as most important is decided by the audience of readers, in Digg-like fashion. Going far beyond Digg, though, Knewsroom rewards contributors with a portion of 20 percent of every dollar it earns in advertising revenue. Members of the Knewsroom community can participate by proposing topics for the next day, submitting syndicated or original stories, and voting on favourites. Active members earn “watts”—the official community currency—for their contributions, and they can invest them to varying degrees in the stories they think have the most merit. Investing watts in topics is like investing in mutual funds on Wall Street, Knewsroom explains, offering a lower risk but lower rate of return; betting on stories, on the other hand, is more like investing in individual stocks, with a higher risk but a higher potential return. Whichever way they choose to invest, readers get rewarded each day at deadline, when Knewsroom runs its matrix algorithm to determine the Top 5 topics and the Top 5 stories in each section. Contributors who bet on a winner get a share of all the watts that were invested in that winner along with a cut of the ad revenue generated that day, which gets credited to their Knewsroom MasterCard. Contributors of original content can earn an extra USD 150 for their submissions as well.

There seems to be no doubt that citizen journalism is here to stay, but how it will reshape the news landscape is still being decided. Between Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and others, the race is on to decide what tomorrow’s newspaper will look like. Will Knewsroom take hold? Only time will tell. In the meantime, one to test out!

Website: www.knewsroom.com
Contact: team@kluster.com

Published with permission From Springwise

Springwise, an independent new business ideas/innovation firm, scans the globe for the most promising new business ideas. The company was founded in 2002 by trend watcher and entrepreneur Reinier Evers and is headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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I thought I had the social network angle all covered with my Facebook profile, Linkedin profile, Plaxo, my website and a blog. But then I noticed people “Twittering” and “Zanneling” through my Facebook updates and I was intrigued. What were these new strange verbs, I thought?

So I went over to www.twitter.com and www.zannel.com and I looked around.

What I found was people of all ages, all across the globe sharing their lives in bite size bits — sharing web pages, photos, news stories and conversations being overheard. More bits sharing ideas, new product launches, videos, bookmarks and slideshows. Even more bits with moments of the mundane, the sad and the peculiar.

Then I dug a little more and found that there are many more sites with strange names, encouraging people to share their interests, loves, hates and lives. Some of the sites share information with other sites. They create a daisy chain effect where, for instance, I can Zannel a new video of the woodpecker harassing me during my conference calls, and it will feed the link to my Twitter account, which then feeds Plaxo and Facebook.

But what if you wanted to share and collect all the information on all your friends regardless of which site they are using?

Enter FriendFeed. (www.friendfeed.com) FriendFeed enables me to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that my friends and family are sharing. It automatically imports shared stuff from a list of 35+ social-oriented sites across the web.

The list of sites that feed into the service includes popular photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa web albums and Smugmug; video sharing sites including YouTube, Vimeo and Seesmic, and even online radio services like Pandora and Last.fm. In fact, pretty much anything you want to share with others can be fed into FriendFeed.

Here’s what I learned today from my friends on FriendFeed: Xerox is getting out of the copier business. Robert Scoble has 25 stickers on the side of his Mac. A company named Infectious is offering custom art to personalize the outside of your car. I also found out Marcus needs more sleep.

So what do all these little updates and tidbits mean to me?

Well, last week I removed Fox News from my home page feeds because the “news” they report is never new. It feeds on the downtrodden, the mentally ill and the foibles and tragedies of mankind. I had enough.

With FriendFeed, I get news that my friends think are interesting in their lives and the lives of others — the people I share with and follow provide updates on things they are building, investing in and caring about. They provide a vision into the goodness of this world that seems to have lost its way in mass media. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend my day being fed a healthy diet of optimism.

It’s good to have friends.

Feel Free to Join My Networks! LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | FriendFeed | Zannel

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