January 2008 – Page 6

Followup to Chinese blogger death post

I posted this last week about a Chinese blogger who was beaten to death. Here is an update on the case from David Barboza, a New York Times business reporter based out of Shanghai:

Bloggers Push China to Prosecute Beating Death

It’s encouraging to learn that “[c]ity officials in Tianmen in Hubei Province in central China are being punished and investigated for their role in the killing of the man, Wei Wenhua, the general manager of a construction company, and the beatings of five villagers during a dispute on Jan. 7, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported.”

As a side note, I had the pleasure of meeting David when I was in China last summer on a UM study abroad trip. Here is a story I wrote about him.

Newspaper site traffic data

From Editor & Publisher online, citing Nielsen Online:

EXCLUSIVE: Our Monthly Top 30 Most Popular Newspaper Sites — ‘Newsday’ Pulls Ahead of WSJ.com

By the numbers:

Brand or Channel — Unique Audience (000) — Year-over-year % Change

NYTimes.com — 17,177 — 29.9%
USATODAY.com — 9,939 — 9.1%
washingtonpost.com — 8,478 — 11.2%
Newsday — 6,450 — 182.8%
Wall Street Journal Online — 5,409 — 109.0%

LA Times — 4,607 — (-6.4%)
Boston.com — 4,364 — 15.0%
Chicago Tribune — 3,891 — 14.0%
Daily News Online Edition — 2,956 — 23.2%
New York Post — 2,851 — (-5.7%)

SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle — 2,785 — (-30.9%)
Philly.com — 2,300 — 33.4%
International Herald Tribune — 2,250 — 14.9%
Village Voice Media — 2,224 — 70.6%
Chicago Sun-Times — 2,186 — 8.3%

Atlanta Journal-Constitution — 1,974 — 26.2%
The Houston Chronicle — 1,946 — (-18.6%)
The Seattle Times — 1,840 — (-19.3%)
DallasNews.com – The Dallas Morning News — 1,828 — 21.9%
Seattle Post-Intelligencer — 1,785 — (-0.1%)

The Politico — 1,672 — N/A
Orlando Sentinel — 1,522 — 78.6%
NJ.com — 1,455 — 40.1%
Azcentral.com — 1,435 — (-36.6%)
Baltimore Sun — 1,332 — 26.2%

MercuryNews.com — 1,315 — (-15.1%)
The Detroit News — 1,256 — 21.4%
The San Diego Union-Tribune — 1,180 — 10.4%
Detroit Free Press — 1,168 — (-22.9%)
The Washington Times — 1,161 — (-24.9%)

Weigh in: Does Newsday pulling ahead of WSJ surprise you?

NYT improves coverage of toilets

The saga continues. I’m telling you, the New York Times has some of the best toilet coverage around:

Prelude to a Public Toilet: Thank This Man

Here’s my first post on this phenomenon from Jan. 11: It’s potty time!

School of Comm dean finalist for Syrcause spot

Here’s a breaking news story I reported Tuesday night, thanks to an item from Romanesko:

Communication dean finalist for spot at Syracuse University (The Miami Hurricane)

This was the first local reporting of the story, which broke in Syracuse. It has more background and the first public comment from Grogg.

Opening Knight

The University of Miami‘s Knight Center for International Media named its two chairs this morning:

Joe Treaster (left) formerly of The New York Times, and Rich Beckman formerly (right),of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Their appointment comes almost one year after the Knight Foundation announced a $10 million grant to the school.

Here is the UM press release, here is a letter from the NYT’s business editor and below is a video of the press conference:

We’re on our first deadline of the semester, so I’ll add more to this post after we finish. Stay tuned.

UPDATE, Jan. 17 @ 9:58 P.M.: Both of these guys look like great additions to the School of Comm. Their words at press conference were very encouraging.

Check out two of Beckman’s projects from when he was head of visual communications at UNC:

The Ancient Way (about elders in Galicia, Spain)