Newsroom Magazine USA Edition USA Edition Today Is Tuesday, May 21, 2013

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Thanks To You We're Growing Faster Than Ever Before

Chances are you've noticed that Newsroom Magazine is a very different publication.

We care about journalism -- and we're well aware many other organizations do it far better than we.

Our editorial standards, rules of custody, and skeptical editing for everything we produce, disseminate or expose to public viewing reflects a seriousness of purpose.

Six years after our founding, Newsroom Magazine continues to evolve the online publishing and preservation model we pioneered.

There is good news to share: Newsroom Magazine is is thriving.

And some less good news: Our limited resources, both journalistically and financially, are limiting our expansion of content.

Online News Preservation

In the six years since its founding, Newsroom Magazine has extended the field of news publishing into previously uncharted areas.

We take a long range view of news -- one that considers both timeliness and historical merit.

What we do, and how we do it, was not possible in the print media era -- for our content is both timely and timeless in the sense that we share the power of immediacy with all online media plus the perseverance of an encyclopedia.

Newsroom Magazine's publishing model goes beyond immediacy -- for unlike the newspaper era -- what we publish is permanently preserved. And tagged, indexed, and constantly updated by automated sitemap sharing with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Sogou, Ewatch, Alexa, Facebook, and others at home and far away.

All of our content, is meant to be preserved. Thanks to the capture and storage of our content at Google, including all updates and changes, and full collection archiving by the U.S. Internet Archives, everything we say, write, opine -- whether wise, foolish, or inconsequential-- is preserved.

Newsroom Magazine content remains forever online, searchable and accessible 24 hours a day worldwide.

What's Hot Is Rarely What Matters

What we publish today is rarely as timely as the more traditional publications and online newspapers. What we choose to publish, sometimes days or months after a story first breaks, or on a subject neglected by most commercial media, is chosen to reflect one aspect of an ongoing reality for long term preservation.

From a handful of English-only readers when we published our first article -- the 1958 Edward R. Murrow speech before the Radio Television Directors Association in Chicago -- we have grown and wizened about our responsibilities to our readers and our own limitations and shortfalls.

Our most read article so far this year, The Adventures Of Bernie In Wonderland, was published November 23rd, 2009. The article consists of the unexpurgated SEC interview of Harry Markopolos in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi swindle case. It is not very interesting reading and it is very long -- but we published it in the belief that what it revealed was important and unlikely to remain online in its original format.

Newsroom Magazine's Storehouse Grows Every Day

The number of publications who devote themselves to publishing credible, responsible and probative content for posterity has dwindled.

Today Newsroom Magazine publishes a storehouse of credible, probative and relevant content -- well over 5000 articles including commentaries, essays, definitions, photographs, stories, reviews, discussions, tutorials, and logical explanations.

Our readership is nearly three times was it was only last year. Few might come to our content for entertainment -- for our purpose is otherwise.

If You Publish, They Will Come

We are read on Capitol Hill, along K Street, and in the halls of government inside the beltway and around the world.

We are read daily on college campuses at home and abroad. We're visited from military ships at sea. We serve law-firms, major corporations, Wall Street the UK Parliament, state governments and cities with credible useful information.

Some of the world's most prestigious news organizations use Newsroom Magazine for fact-checking.

Government Information Unfiltered, Sometimes Imperfect

The amount of official news proffered each day by government, whether at home or abroad, is accelerating. Some of it newsworthy, most of it not.

Our job is to thoughtfully choose what's worthy of the attention of our readers.

About 1% of government issued news we receive each day qualifies as newsworthy. Only the most relevant, or reflective of government at its best, or at its worst, or evidence of overreach, or ineptitude makes it newsworthy.

We leave the issue of deciding which if any of these qualifications applies to what we publish up to the reader.

Formatted For People On The Go, Or On The Hunt

All of our government news content includes above the headline call out meant to convey the principal facts, action or information for those with little time to read a long document.

Our job is to carefully and skeptically choose relevant governmental content for our readers -- and to include the unexpurgated original source material, whose chain of custody we control.

Online Editorial Standards, Ethics And Purpose

Our commitment to time-honored journalistic standards and a clear statement about the ethics to which we agree to be held today and tomorrow, Newsroom Magazine began publication when the Internet was young -- 2006.

Our prime mission then, as now, is to publish non political ideas, definitions, essays and editorials.

To speak to the state of this honorable calling.

And to inform the public about those things, events and ideas that matter most to us all.

Today, tomorrow, forever.



Editorial Standards & Policies
   Browsing Newsroom Magazine Section Organized In Date Order [ 90 items ]   
First Item Earlier Middle Item Later Last Item
Published: Wednesday April 10, 2013 9:05 am EDT
Updated: Wednesday April 10, 2013 10:15 am EDT
Control Room Section
Article Length: 679 Words
Reading Time: 3 Minutes

Newsroom Magazine has been conformed to the evolving news presentation formats, navigation and searching tools, tabbed linking, embedded multimedia and extensible typographical standards for desktop and mobile display systems. These changes have substantially altered our front page, side panel policy, navigation systems and mobile device browser compliance.

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Online News Standards And Mobile Device Formatting

Some of you may have noticed recent changes in NM layout and cosmetics. They are meant to move the publication from 20th century ideas to 21st century realities: Today’s newspaper look and feel, and fully-extensible formatting, imaging, audio and video integration. Our cosmetic systems have been redesigned to support browser preferred typography for mobile devices, high resolution fonts, high definition display platforms and tomorrow’s ultra high definition displays.

What’s Very Old Is New Again

The era of print news standards that endured for nearly two centuries proved incompatible with electronic media. The new era, which has been in competitive development for nearly two decades, has begun for online content points of presence — especially news publishing sites including Newsroom Magazine.

Just as the old DOS operating system is obsolete, so too are old notions about pixels and even font descriptions.

Until now we’ve lived in a single font definition where a letter is defined exactly in terms of its detail and size. But the NM display you see today accommodates all the prior character definitions as well as those on a high resolution iPhone device.

Gone are letters defined by 7×7 or 9×9 pixel models. Today’s NM can work with 128×128, or even 4096×4096 pixel character definitions which will make our text sharper and clearer.

 

High Definition Typography

Newsroom Magazine has been conformed to the evolving news presentation formats, navigation and searching tools, tabbed linking, embedded multimedia and extensible typographical standards for desktop and mobile display systems. These changes have substantially altered our front page, side panel policy, navigation systems and mobile device browser compliance.

The front page changes are most obvious, while the shift from a defined format system based on 20th century limits on screen aspect ratios, pixel definition ( was then fixed but is now variable ), and vastly expanded browser differentiation concepts is immensely challenging.

The NM look and feel today is far different from what existed during our first six years — although it has been implemented to make most of our content look very much like what was in place before.

Technological Background

Our new formatting facilities ( called CSS ) are suggestions to the receiving device where the prior formatting facilities were more akin to an order. The new system is meant to make our presentation similar on every browser, mobile device, TV screen, no matter if the screen is palm sized, or movie theater quality.

Where once our formatting systems ordered the user’s browser to display a line of text in a specific font, we now offer a list of several suitable fonts ( known as font families ) from which the user’s device and browser can decide which is best for the user. This takes some getting used to by the publishing community, while making possible a more readable presentation on the vast array of viewing devices in use today, and tomorrow.

You Are The Judge

Effective April 1st, NM moved into a browser defined higher definition display system. Pixels are out and EMs are in. An EM is a definition of character size relative to what the receiving device and its browser wants — not what we think it ought to be.

As a result, looking at the same NM article in different browsers will usually display two similar, but not identical pages. Same for variations in receiving device size, screen resolution, mobile unit browser, and even language.

Take a look at what we’ve done– and share your thoughts with us.