The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism recently released its 2010 State of the News Media report, and it includes tons of great information. Much of the report is dedicated to the impact of new media, as evidenced by the six major trends Pew identified:

1. As we learn more about both web economics and consumer behavior, the unbundling of news seems increasingly central to journalism’s future.

2. The future of New and Old Media are more tied together than some may think.

3. The notion that the news media are shrinking is mistaken.

4. Technology is further shifting power to newsmakers, and the newest way is through their ability to control the initial accounts of events.

5. The ranks of self-interested information providers are now growing rapidly and news organizations must define their relationship to them.

6. When it comes to audience numbers online, traditional media content still prevails, which means the cutbacks in old media heavily impact what the public is learning through the new.

The section on online media can be found here.

I meant to link to this a few weeks ago, but Colin over at Epolitics has updated his How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win in 2010 E-book. You can download the updated PDF, which includes a set of great ideas that can be applied just as easily to nonprofit and foundation environments, here.

Residents of Mexico-U.S. border cities with high rates of violent crime, such as Reynosa, are using social media sites like Twitter to communicate with each other. One of the individuals leading the effort cites Twitter’s role in Iran’s ‘Green Revolution’ as an inspiration.

Mashable has a solid side-by-side comparison of the social media strategies adopted by Yahoo and Google. Their conclusion? Neither company’s strategy is inherently better, but both are pretty well suited to their particulars needs, and thus, relatively effective.

Also via Mashable, Comscore has just released data on online video viewership for January 2010. In total, 173 million U.S. internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January. Nearly 40% of the videos were watched on Youtube and other sites owned by Google.

What are you reading today?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just released a fascinating new study called Understanding the Participatory News Consumer. Here are the study’s findings on where Americans get their news:

* 78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station
* 73% say they get news from a national network such as CBS or cable TV station such as CNN or FoxNews
* 61% say they get some kind of news online
* 54% say they listen to a radio news program at home or in the car
* 50% say they read news in a local newspaper
* 17% say they read news in a national newspaper such as the New York Times or USA Today.

And here are their big three takeaways on the changing nature of how people get news:

* Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
* Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
* Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

There was a fascinating piece in Tuesday’s LA Times on Members of Congress who use Twitter:

It came to our attention last year that lawmakers better known for bellowing and bloviating were starting to tweet. We caught them doing it in the middle of one of President Obama’s first big televised speeches.

But if our nation held out hope that its notoriously verbose legislators would lose interest in anything that cuts them off at 140 characters, that hope appears dead. Congressional tweeting is on the rise. The Congressional Research Service — Congress’ think tank — noticed the trend and decided to spend 61 days last summer studying how technology’s latest craze was going over in a place that never got rid of its spittoons.

It turns out that more than 200 of 535 members have jumped on the Twitter train. Representatives do it more than senators; Republicans more than Democrats. Wednesday is their favorite day to tweet, and their favorite subject to tweet about is a trip to the district. The California delegation has the most tweeters — 15 of 55 members.

Want to find your members of Congress on Twitter? Tweet Congress has an excellent set of tools for doing so.

Please take a few minutes to view our new promotional video:

On Monday I mentioned a variety of community news sites nonprofits and foundations can reach out to in order to get their news to the broader public. Megan Tady at In These Times has a great piece on this phenomenon yesterday. I’ll quote from it here, but you really should read the whole thing:

Across the country, community media projects have been sprouting out of a dying traditional media system that has often failed to deliver what the public really wants: local news and information. Now, more than ever before, citizens are taking the media back, using this time of media chaos to forge ahead with news projects that serve their interests—regardless of whether they graduated from J-school or not.As a “trained” journalist, I understand those who feel threatened by these upstart media projects: Where’s the professionalism? The hard-hitting reporters and fact-checking? But that’s really just my ego talking; there will always be “professional” news outlets in some form. In other words, rather than take the place of mainstream media, new websites are doing something much more essential: reigniting democracy at the grassroots.

In the piece, Megan mentions three locally-oriented community news sites:

NorthamptonMedia.com (Western MA)
The Rapidian (Grand Rapids, MI)
Duke City Fix (Albuquerque, NM)

I’ve written frequently on this blog about reaching out to bloggers to share information on projects your organization is working with. In addition to independent blogs, there are a growing number of nontraditional news websites you can reach out to as well.

The Knight Digital Media Center’s blog is keeping a running list of such sites, which I’ve found to be extremely useful. Here are a few of the geographically-focused independent news sites — which they call Community News Sites — that they are tracking:

California Watch
Chicago News Cooperative
CT Mirror
Gotham Gazette
Minn Post
New England Center for Investigative Reporting
New Haven Independent
St. Louis Beacon
Seattle PI
Texas Tribune
Voice of San Diego
Wy.O.File

Is there a site like these in your state that I haven’t mentioned here?

Mashable reports:

An analytics company called Net Applications has determined that Google’s Chrome web browser is stealing market share from both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

In January, Chrome (Chrome) grew by 0.57% to 5.20% of the browser market. Meanwhile, Firefox (Firefox) shrunk by 0.20% to 24.41% and IE shrunk 0.51% to 62.18%. Safari and Opera both stayed put, more or less; Safari (Safari) grew 0.05% to 4.51% and Opera (Opera) shrunk 0.02% to 2.38%.

Here is what that looks like in pie chart format:

So why should nonprofits and foundations care?

You need to make sure any websites you have — your main organizational website, your blog, your Youtube page, your Twitter profile, etc. — display properly in all popular web browsers. Each browser renders the HTML (and other code) in your website slightly differently. This can impact the design of your website both in terms of spacing issues and coloration. A few years ago you could simply check Mozilla (Firefox) and Internet explorer. Now there are five browsers worth testing.

There are two simple ways to do this type of testing:

1) Download all of the browsers on your computer and test them. The advantage of this approach is that you can see for yourself exactly how the website displays with each browser. The disadvantages of this approach are that it can be very time consuming, especially if you test for different screen resolutions as well.

2) A service called Browser Shots can generate screenshots of any website with a broad variety of browsers, settings and screen resolutions. The advantage of this approach is that you can test for nearly every setting. The disadvantage of this approach is that you end up viewing screenshots, rather than live versions of the site in various browsers.

Want to dig further on this? Using Google Analytics you can determine which browsers visitors to your website are using. To do so, follow these instructions:

1) Select the date range for which you’d like to get data on browser usage.
2) On the left-side navigation, click ‘visitors.’
3) Under that, click ‘browser capabilities.’
4) Under that, click ‘browsers.’

This will display a list of browsers in order of popularity, as well as a pie chart. Here is an example:

So for this site, for example, Firefox was considerably more popular than it is across the web as a whole. If this were my website, I’d take Firefox into greater consideration when designing my website than I would for most other sites.

Change.org has just announced their 2010 Ideas for Change in America competition:

What’s Your Big Idea for Change in America?Ideas for Change in America is a crowd-sourcing competition that empowers citizens to identify and build momentum around the most innovative ideas for addressing challenges our country faces.

The 10 most popular ideas will be presented at an event in Washington, DC to relevant members of the Obama Administration, and Change.org will subsequently mobilize its full community to support a series of grassroots campaigns to turn each idea into reality.

This is an excellent opportunity for any nonprofit seeking to advance social change.

Learn more here.

I wanted to pass along information on two upcoming social media-related events in the Washington, DC area. I will be attending both, and they both look worthwhile.

CITIzens Forum on Social Media
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 from 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Many of you are likely already familiar with tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and are using them to advance the mission of your organization. What’s working well and what are some of the challenges you’ve faced? Join your colleagues to share tales of your adventures in social media and gain insights and tips you can use to improve or begin.

RootsCamp DC
Saturday February 20, 8am until Sunday February 21st, 6am

Join us for a candid reflection on all of the online and offline organizing done in 2009. We’ll talk about what was successful and really worked, and learn from everything that didn’t. Everything from how organizations use online organizing successfully, which organizing tools really make a difference, and how to strike the balance between offline and online organizing to accomplish progressive goals.