gil asakawa | media stuff

Cool list of online firsts...

Yahoo's purchase of a 17-year-old's app that summarizes news articles into byte-sized chunks doesn't mean journalists need to write short and sweet. They can, but there's still room for long and meaty. It's all in the quality of writing, even in our mobile, techified age.

70% of smartphone users rely on their mobile devices to get local information.

On the SPJ Net Worked blog: My take on a story about how news will change because of devices like Google Glasses.

Rob Denton, a junior at the University of Colorado's Journalism and Mass Communications program and one of the managing editors of www.cuindependent.com, was one of 14 students chosen to help cover Barack Obama's second inauguration for PBS Newshour. Here's a 10-minute video he produced about his experience covering protests by Westboro Baptist Church.

Smart or too little too late to save the print edition?

It's regional: it really is the "best of the west." 

This is pretty frightening...

Is this a portent of the future of "hyperlocal" sites?

That's 100 hyperlocal sites out of 900 that are making money. It's a very long haul for AOL to make Patch a business model that works. I still wish 'em luck, since AOL was the first to try a form of "hyperlocal" way back in the day, in 1996, when I ran Digital City Denver for them....

Kun Gao knows streaming media -- he's the founder of www.Crunchyroll.com, a site that streams anime and Korean dramas via licensing deals with studios.

Some names aren't surprising... but the Omaha World-Herald?

Some great food for thought here: Journalists regularly copy and paste tweets and Facebook updates in coverage of stories. But what are the implications of this for privacy, journalistic ethics and copyright? And what happens when we copy and paste, retweet, share or otherwise broadcast comments by minors, without permission, without asking minors' parents for permission? The times, they are a-changing, indeed....

Buttry is Digital Transformation Editor for Digital First Media, the company that operates the newspaper and television properties of both Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group. A veteran newspaper journalist who has embraced the new order of digital media, he knows a lot and shares a lot. The students and staff (very few faculty, unfortunately) at CU's journalism program benefited from five hours with the man.