Quick hits

Various quick hits as I play catch-up:

Poynter released its latest Eyetrack study. You can get a summary brochure (PDF), but the good stuff coming later will cost you ($695). Also read Howard Owens' cautionary words about it. Alan Mutter is even less impressed.

Tim Porter points to the dismal findings in an updated Knight study about newsroom training (hint: 30 percent have increased budgets, but 20 percent have decreased and 11 percent have no clue).

Bryan Murley and crew at Innovation in College Media blogged up a storm about their first conference in Nashville. See video interviews with Gannett's Jan Carroll, San Antonio's Angela Grant and Knoxville's Jack Lail, among others.

In my wanderings, it was good to discover that the old GoSkokie project at Northwestern, one of the seminal citizen journalism projects, has been picked up by that town's public library as Skokie Talk. Makes me wonder why more libraries don't do this sort of thing. (Actually, at least one is. The Friends of the Chappaqua Library in Westchester, County, N.Y., just got one of the J-lab New Voices grants to help fill the void in an area that no longer has its own paper. See details of that and the other New Voices grantees.)

Matt Waite of the St. Pete Times has an excellent post on how he put together noise maps to tell the story of the loudness of the Grand Prix race there. In his words: One of the big issues newsrooms have to work through on this explosion into the future is how to change how we work. After lifetimes of producing a product for one media (ink on trees), how do you change what you do so you can still serve that one media, but also serve another? And change to take advantage of both medium? And do it all in the same amount of time, if not faster? It is possible. Not always, but more often than we think.
(Also, read one of Waite's earlier posts ("Not my job doesn't exist anymore in newspapers")

Dan Gilmor makes a prediction, that with sites like Palatial and Google Maps persional version, Mapping is about to go super-mainstream, and we are just at the edges of understanding how powerful it will be. But Simon Waldman also has some earlier, leavening words about the mad rusn into mash-ups.