CircLabs’ Bill Densmore on tracking readers’ habits to build new revenue streams for news organizations

By Joshua Benton

CircLabs, the hard-to-describe startup that aims to create new revenue streams for news sites, has detailed a little more about its plans. And Martin Langeveld, who’s involved in the project, has written more about it too. (You know Martin from his writings here.) Their initial product, Circulate, seems to be a browser plugin that tracks your browsing patterns and information you give it to recommend content you might like. CircLabs promises publishers a variety of potential revenue streams off that model, including the ability to use Circulate as a pay wall or a micropayments engine.

CircLabs is an offshoot of the work Bill Densmore did on what he called the Information Valet Project as a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. I talked with Bill a couple months ago about his work on IVP; the video of our conversation is above. While IVP covered a broader set of ideas than Circulate does, I think it helps explain what the new project is all about. Full transcript below. Keep reading »

Run Well: The New York Times branches out into a web app to manage your marathon training

By Ian Crouch

Running a marathon this fall? The New York Times wants to be your coach.

The Times recently debuted what may be a first for a traditional newspaper: an interactive marathon training application called Run Well. It lets you choose an upcoming marathon to run and offers six training programs — from famous coaches including Greg McMillan and Jeff Galloway — tailored to a reader’s running experience. Once you chose a program, the tracker displays a full training calendar, a progress chart, and detailed information about each day’s run. You can log each day’s workout, adding any specific comments you’ll want to remember later.

The Times has featured a lot of marathon coverage under the Run Well brand in past month, starting with Well blogger/columnist Tara Parker-Pope’s first post in May announcing her own plans to run the New York Marathon on November 1. There have been running-tech reviews from the Gadgetwise blog, fitness-advice pieces from the Personal Best blog, and a photo profile feature called Running Voices. But, while a web app to track runs may seem like a departure from the Times’ traditional content, Pope sees it as a natural offshoot of the Well blog, which has been one of the Times’ biggest blogging successes.

“If this didn’t fit with the Well blog, then we wouldn’t have done it this way,” she told me. “We realized that the project was very consistent with the mission of Well, which is to empower readers to take charge of their own health.”

The app was built by in-house by Alan McLean and Ben Koski of the Interactive Newsroom Technologies group, with assistance from the Times’ graphics department. It is not the first run-tracker on the web (see Nike’s Training Log, the Runner’s World guide, and others) but it appears to be a first for a news site.

Keep reading »

Meet the Lab summer interns

By Joshua Benton

When I announced we’d be having a few interns (er, “microinterns”) this summer, I could not have guessed the response: 166 applicants from six countries, a huge swath of them terrific. It was a long battle winnowing their number down — and I ended up taking more than I’d expected — but these seven won out:

— Michael Andersen, a Grinnell and Northwestern j-school grad who writes for The Columbian in suburban Portland;

— Lois Beckett, a Harvard senior studying at Trinity College Cambridge this summer;

— Ben Cohen, a senior at Duke currently interning at the sports blog Deadspin;

— Ian Crouch, a Duke graduate currently getting a master’s in journalism at NYU and who just completed an internship at Slate;

— Haley Sweetland Edwards, a Yale and Columbia j-school grad who formerly worked as a reporter at The Seattle Times;

— Ernesto Priego, a Mexico City native currently pursuing a Ph.D. in information studies at University College London; and

— Jessica Roy, an undergraduate at NYU majoring in new media and journalism.

You’ve already read some of their work over the past week; you’ll see a lot more of them in the coming weeks and months. My sincere regrets to all the other qualified folks I had to turn away. (On the plus side, we’re hoping to have another round of interns in the fall, if all goes well.)