A tale of two very different journalism start-ups

One journalism start-up tries to restore things to the way they were. The other is looking to a different future. Bill Grueskin, academic dean at Columbia University’s Journalism School and a former managing editor of WSJ.Com, compares them in this guest post.By Bill GrueskinYou can learn a lot about where journalism is headed by looking under the hoods of two new startups.The companies –

Diving circulation? Raise newspaper prices

Instead of fretting about the all-time record dive in newspaper circulation the last six months, publishers should focus as never before on the quality, not the quantity, of their audience.That means, among other things, proving the passion and loyalty of their readers by raising the single-copy and home-delivery prices of their daily papers to at least the cost of a venti, double-shot, half-caf

Microsoft is adding a "Windows XP Mode" to Windows 7

Now Windows 7 gets built in XP mode..
Microsoft is adding a "Windows XP Mode" to Windows 7, in a move to encourage users to make the switch to the software vendor's forthcoming operating system.

The firm has built its XP mode into Windows 7 by using the Windows Virtual PC technology Microsoft acquired in 2003, to make the OS compatible to run apps designed for Vista's predecessor.
Redmond was keen to emphasise in a blog post late on Friday that it's hoping to woo small businesses to move to Windows 7 by bigging up the XP mode feature.

"Windows XP Mode is specifically designed to help small businesses move to Windows 7," said Microsoft. "Windows XP Mode provides you with the flexibility to run many older productivity applications on a Windows 7 based PC."

Users can install apps directly into the virtualised XP environment. The applications are then published to the Windows 7 desktop and they can be run from within that OS.

Microsoft said it will release a beta of Windows XP mode and Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate "soon" but wasn't more specific about when the test builds will land.

When Microsoft released Vista over two years ago, many businesses and individuals complained about compatibility snafus with applications that simply wouldn't work within the new OS

Content cops or Keystone Kops?

Beleaguered newspaper and magazine publishers may gain a certain amount of emotional satisfaction from mounting elaborate efforts to chase down online content poachers, but the payback may be more psychic than economic.While print publishers are well within their rights to crack down on web publishers who violate their copyrights through the unauthorized use of articles and visual media, the

Attributor test delivers so-so results

Attributor pretty much represents the state of the art these days in tracking down copyright violators. To see how well it works, I took a test drive of the free version it offers to bloggers. The results are fair to middling. Attributor works by gathering all the content on a publisher's website and then crawling the web to see if it finds sites that have picked up some or all of an article.

3 jailed journalists, 2 very different reactions

Three American female journalists are being held on charges of spying in two of the scariest countries in the world but their news organizations couldn’t be treating the matters any more differently.Everyone knows that Roxana Saberi, a contributor to National Public Radio in Iran who has been in custody since January, was convicted last week of spying after an evidently coerced confession. You

He makes $1 million crowdsourcing sources

Peter Shankman, who describes himself as a marathon-running, sky-diving, cat-loving PR guy, says he is grossing nearly $1 million a year by using the web to help reporters find sources for stories.He crowdsources sources with a nifty and thoroughly modern service called Help a Reporter Out, or HARO. It works like this:A reporter who needs to interview someone for a story sends Shankman a request,