Sun-Times subscribers can pay with bitcoin

Sun-Times subscribers can pay with bitcoin

The Chicago Sun-Times has started accepting bitcoin for yearlong print subscriptions and subscriptions to the newspaper's digital replica. Payments will be processed via Coinbase digital wallet technology.

The cheapest digital replica option costs $47.88 for 12 months.

In February, the Sun-Times did a 24-hour test of a paywall powered by startup BitWall to accept small, name-your-price payments for access to the site.

It yielded 713 bitcoin donations, but payment was optional and bitcoin users — many of whom likely weren't regular Sun-Times readers — rallied to support the experiment.

The Sun-Times has also recently run Bitcoin advertorials online and in print.

While accepting bitcoin for subscriptions is an interesting cutting-edge move for the paper, the real promise of digital currencies is that they could support micropayments unfeasible with traditional currencies due to high bank transaction fees. Today's news just means an alternative way to pay for longterm access to content; the game changer would be offering users who don't want to pony up for full digital access an easy, frictionless way to pay for single articles or time-based access to a site.

Dorian Nakamoto: ‘I’ll keep my bitcoin account’

Dorian Nakamoto: ‘I’ll keep my bitcoin account’

In a video filmed alongside Andreas M. Antonopoulos, who is writing a book about bitcoin, Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto again says he's not Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin's founder. Newsweek last month said he was.

"Of course if I was the real creator I would never use my real name," Nakamoto says. He says he received a bitcoin account from Antonopoulos and is "very thankful for you, all these people in U.S., Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in South America who supported me throughout." He says 2,000 people donated. "I'll keep my bitcoin account for many, many years, and hopefully I can also contribute as you did to me," Nakamoto says.

Last month, Nakamoto said he'd hired a lawyer and that his "prospects for gainful employment has been harmed because of Newsweek's article." Newsweek issued a statement March 7 saying it stands by its story.

Redditors furious Newsweek ‘doxxed’ Bitcoin founder

For its return to print this week, Newsweek has a splashy story: Senior Writer Leah McGrath Goodman found the mysterious Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto. She did it with public records:

It was only while scouring a database that contained the registration cards of naturalized U.S. citizens that a Satoshi Nakamoto turned up whose profile and background offered a potential match. But it was not until after ordering his records from the National Archives and conducting many more interviews that a cohesive picture began to take shape.

Two weeks before our meeting in Temple City, I struck up an email correspondence with Satoshi Nakamoto, mostly discussing his interest in upgrading and modifying model steam trains with computer-aided design technologies. I obtained Nakamoto's email through a company he buys model trains from.
This kind of derring-do plays well with journalists: "How to find Satoshi Nakamoto: The phone book. Wow," BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith tweeted. But on Reddit, "doxxing" (releasing personal information about someone) is a cardinal sin. And Goodman's revelations about Nakamoto -- including his picture and one of his house -- are not terribly popular on r/bitcoin.

"[D]oxxing people is apparently fine if you are a 'journalist,'" one commenter wrote. "Well, yeah, sorry Reddit's rules don't apply to the real world in that regard, they never really have," another replied.

"Can anyone here locate the address of one Leah McGrath Goodman - perhaps we should post her address, license plate and picture of her home, so people can come and comment on the article?" wrote another. "if you can please post it here; She probably can't wait for people to knock on her door.. I mean obviously - she doesn't care about privacy."

(On Twitter, Leah McGrath Goodman noted that addresses and car registrations are already public.) "Reddit users are welcome to share their own opinions on the whereabouts and identity of Mr. Nakamoto but we would encourage them to abstain from ad hominem attacks on our reporter, Leah McGrath Goodman," a Newsweek spokesperson told Capital.

It was Redditors who falsely identified Sunil Tripathi as the Boston bombing suspect. Reporters from Politico, BuzzFeed and Newsweek carried his name forward. Tripathi was later found dead, and Reddit General Manager Erik Martin apologized for the site's role in spreading misinformation:

A few years ago, reddit enacted a policy to not allow personal information on the site. This was because “let’s find out who this is” events frequently result in witch hunts, often incorrectly identifying innocent suspects and disrupting or ruining their lives. We hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong. The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the types of vindictive internet witch hunts our no-personal-information rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different.

The British site Ampp3d specializes in data journalism with a tabloid twist

Conrad Quilty-Harper, 26, is a wunderkind of the British data journalism scene, lauded by The Guardian on its “30 under 30” digital media list for “playing a key role in progressing British data journalism.” He works his wonders at Ampp3d, the new data journalism site run by Trinity Mirror, publisher of Britain’s third most-read newspaper, The Daily Mirror.

Designed and built in only eight weeks, Ampp3d was launched in December 2013 as part of The Daily Mirror’s campaign to attract digital readers who wouldn’t normally come to the paper. While broadsheets like The Daily Telegraph tend to be serious in tone, tabloids like the Mirror are more lighthearted equivalents of the New York Daily News. Ampp3d’s idiosyncratic name stems from new formats editor Martin Belam’s efforts to find one that was available across multiple domains and social media networks. Quilty-Harper is one of three full-time staff, writing about everything from British politics and London real estate to soccer player Wayne Rooney’s salary.

Like traffic behemoth UsvsThe3m, another Trinity Mirror site that specializes in fun internet odds and ends, Ampp3d reels in clicks by making readers laugh. But it also publishes stories grounded in in-depth data analysis and tries to make them think.

Data journalism is increasingly popular in the UK, and Ampp3d and Quilty-Harper are right at the forefront of it. CJR spoke to Quilty-Harper about Ampp3d’s balance between serious and irreverent content, and about making data journalism fun.

While I can think of several data projects run by broadsheets, Ampp3d is the only one I can think of run by a tabloid. Do you think that helps give it a distinctive voice?
Definitely. It’s been an interesting experiment. Most of the people who work on Ampp3d have come from a broadsheet background. So we’re not tabloid journalists by our experience. It’s been a sort of learning curve for us actually, learning the sensational style that you get in tabloids. But it’s been really fun and a really interesting process, … taking data and trying to make it relevant to someone who had never heard of data journalism before.

The first thing I saw on Ampp3d that really got my attention was the explanation of recent British elections, using Lego bricks.
That’s one of the fun parts of the job really and that’s definitely a tabloid style. That news should be fun and entertaining. That’s been one of the best things about Ampp3d and what’s unique about us, I think, is that we’re not too serious about things, unless we think they need to be serious and told in a serious way.

The team set-up is really conducive to having fun and trying things out … We’re in an office together and we chat a lot about the news, but also with a very clear understanding that it needs to be fun and light and tabloidy.

Is there a particular audience that you’re trying to reach?
It’s a similar audience to the Mirror I think. The Mirror has been doing an advertising campaign recently called “Made you think” and trying to set the branding towards becoming an intelligent tabloid. Ampp3d was kind of the heart of that idea, that you can have a tabloid that’s intelligent, but also keep all the good things about a tabloid, that it’s fun and engaging.

How do you manage to make everything look so visual?
From the very get-go we were always about infographics and visuals, and I think it really comes down to this idea that we’re trying to create a very shareable website. I think people share images and they share pictures. They talk about fact, but it’s much easier to share a single picture that captures an emotion about a story, than it is to share an 800-word thinkpiece. I think it also comes back to the mobile phone thing. Because if you have a Wayne Rooney calculator that’s counting up in real time and it’s on your mobile phone, you can show it to your friends and they can see it from across the room, and that’s what we’re trying to capture.

How do you decide which stories to highlight?
We’re a popular product, so we’re trying to capture and work on maybe the five biggest stories of the day and that’s usually quite easy to find out: Google News, Google Trends, Facebook trends, what’s trending on Twitter.

When we’re deciding what to do, it’s about what we find fun and what other people aren’t doing … It’s also kind of a similar model to websites like Quartz. Quartz has a model where reporters choose their specialisms and they can change them over time, and they’re not necessarily the big, traditional specialisms like sport or finance. It might be Bitcoin or the Ukraine crisis. It’s more unique and [more like] how people actually follow stories. People follow the Ukraine crisis; they don’t follow international political relations as a topic. They follow what’s relevant to them at the time.

What’s the future of Ampp3d?
We’ve hit on a formula I think that can work … It’s just trying to hone that over time and get a bit more discipline now that we’re past the trial period.

We all really actually enjoy doing the kind of content that we’re working on. I think that’s one of the unique things about Ampp3d that’s different from a lot of other places we might have worked for—that fun can actually be part of a serious news operation.

Tweaking ‘twerk Bitcoin’ Word of the Year lists

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Time for all the familiar clichés, misused or mispunctuated tho’ they may be, and time for the meaningless “XXX of the Year” lists.

But who are we to sniff at such treasured traditions? For people who deal with words, the “Words of the Year” lists can be interesting, if specious.

As we said at the beginning of 2012, the picks for WOTY are frequently so fleeting that many “do not survive much beyond the year in which they were singled out.” In 2011, for example, dictionary.com, which picks a WOTY because it “captures the character” of the year, “regardless of its popularity or ubiquity,” chose “tergiversate,” which means, effectively, to flip-flop. It has not yet caught on in popular usage. This year’s dictionary.com selection was “privacy,” which at least is a word most people know, even if they and their government don’t agree on what it means.

For the first time, dictionary.com also picked the “misspelling of the year”: “furlough,” which was misspelled “furlow,” “furlo,” and “ferlow” by people looking it up on the site. (It’s hard to believe, as the site says, that no one looking up “sequester” or “sequestration” misspelled those.)

Before the lists were released, one safe bet seemed to be “twerk” (rhymes with “jerk”). But Oxford, which publishes dictionaries throughout the English-speaking diaspora and requires that its WOTY “demonstrate some kind of prominence over the preceding year or so,” chose “selfie.” “Twerk” was on its shortlist, as were “bedroom tax” (from a UK plan to penalize households “that were receiving housing benefit and that were judged to have bedrooms surplus to their requirements”) and “olinguito” (a mammal discovered in South America), among others.

“Twerk” and “olinguito” were on the Collins Dictionary shortlist, too, which opted for “geek” as its WOTY, acknowledging its morphing from “a boring and unattractive social misfit” to “a person who is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a specific subject.”

Grant Barrett of public radio’s A Way With Words included “twerk” on his list, along with “ITAP” (I took a picture; see “selfie”), “sharknado,” and “Obamacare.”

“Bitcoin” appeared on lots of lists, too, some of them lexicographical, and some of them regulatory.

Global Language Monitor chose “404.” Other top GLM choices, including “fail!” and “hashtag,” could indicate that the site, which offers “‘algorithmic services’ to help worldwide customers protect, defend, and nurture their branded products and entities,” lags actual word usage by a year or three. (“Hashtag” was the American Dialect Society’s WOTY last year; its 2013 WOTY will be selected in January.) To be fair, “twerk” was on GLM’s shortlist, and it chose “twerk” as its “Top Teleword of the 2012-1013 TV season.”

Merriam-Webster also picks its WOTY based on “the greatest increase in lookups this year as compared to last year,” but its list is far less faddish. “Twerk” was nowhere to be found. The top word this year was … “science.” “A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy,” M-W’s editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski, said. Other top words included “paradox,” “ethics,” “metaphor,” and “visceral.”

Use all those words in a sentence and you can describe “twerk”—and its impact.