It chimes every time someone buys an online subscription to The Times.

It was built by Peter MacRobert from News International‘s R&D Lab. Peter explains a bit more about how it works in the video below:

“The subscription ringer is an Arduino circuit developed in the News International R&D lab. The battery-powered circuit polls an API regularly via a Wifly wireless shield. When the daily subscription count has increased it pulses a solenoid against a bicycle bell.”

• Achieving Sustained Cost Reduction – Brad Power – Harvard Business Review
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• Dagbladet Information launches crowd-sourced think tank – Editors Weblog
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• New Statesman – The path to "ethical journalism" starts here
  It should be a source of shame that big online publishers — including one of the biggest, the Mail Online- – are as a matter of course not linking to sources.
  (tags: journalism hhldn ethics)
• Who does all the text messaging? Young adults by far.
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• A network infrastructure for journalists online | Online Journalism Blog
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• GeekWire » Four ideas from news geeks that all geeks should know about » GeekWire
  (tags: innovation, tools)

As you may have heard, I will be leaving The Times at the beginning of October to start a new role at The Guardian as their Digital Development Editor.

• 5 Things Social Media Can't Do – TNW Social Media
  For all the upsides that social media can bring to your business, there still remains a great deal of uncertainty and misconceptions about what social media can actually accomplish in terms of overall business growth. Far too often, high (read: mismanaged) expectations can lead to disappointment, even frustration with the mechanism.
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• We are the robots: Can automated news really replace human journalists? | TheMediaBriefing
  Narrative Science takes key facts and adds in connective sentences so a story makes sense. This college football report (American football, not football) was generated using NS’s algorithms. It’s not Pulitzer Prize winning material, but it’s factually accurate, informative and functionally does the job of creating a short match report.
  (tags: innovation journalism)
• How to kill journalism – Columns – Detroit Metro Times
  What our poor, overworked, underpaid, technology-crazed editor has completely forgotten is the purpose of journalism. Which is, to make sense of a bewildering array of events for people.

  We're supposed to give them a manageable digest of events — national, state and local, plus some good reading and useful information. Nobody wants to read a whole goddamn city council agenda. Nobody human wants to look at video of residents at a city council meeting, except those who care enough to go.

  (tags: future journalism tools)
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Raise high the paywalls, publishers
  The internet has changed patterns of supply and demand in media businesses in profound ways. We're not going back to the way things used to be. But it's a mistake to assume that the contours of the landscape in the immediate aftermath of the disruption are the permanent contours of the landscape.
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• Untitled
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• Johann Hari: A personal apology – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent
  An interview isn’t an X-ray of a person’s finest thoughts. It’s a report of an encounter.
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• “CMS – the software UX forgot” – Karen McGrane at Content Strategy Forum 2011
  We’ve done a poor job, she said, of convincing people of the real benefits of structured content over bespoke digital layout. She compared Condé Nast, who have tripled their workload by needing one print and two bespoke iPad layouts of every article, to NPR who have built an API that makes “Create once, publish everywhere” a reality. A graph she showed of the sales of Glamour suggested that investment in bespoke layouts was sometimes selling less than 3,000 copies of an app – a shockingly poor return on investment.
  (tags: design development usability)