Exploring Media in Transformation | Transforming in Media Exploration
/ˌtrænsfərˈmeɪʃən/ n. 1: a process of change from one form to another.
Perhaps publishers and journalists should focus more on writing for search rather than spinning over social while so much there is in turmoil. (“Google” by nicoangelo is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)
For thoughtful, explanatory stories, yes. But the battle for who wins the user’s attention is shifting to new fronts.
Read MoreJeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? weighs in on the row between French publishers and the search behemoth.
They - like other publishers and journalists - think a market should be built around what they need and that there is a fair share that belongs to them even though they did not innovate and change so those who did should rescue them. But as Scott Karp has said, no one guarantees them a business model.
Here's Jeff's 'riposte':Try life without Google, France
Americans often feel a bit put off when they head to France. To put it frankly, the Gauls can seem a bit rude. I don't share that viewpoint, but maybe that's because I spent a year there in high school and I speak French quite well.
So I wonder if Google News' Josh Cohen was ready for the pasting his company took at the hands of French publishers. My colleague, Eric Scherer of AFP, has the blow-by-blow. Typical of the complaints:
"...your business model has become predatory. The pricing model (of online advertising) is currently threatening the entire industry."
Romanesko discovers a truth about journalism that is already being played out on the Web:
"Now that information is so plentiful, we don't need new information so much as help in processing what's already available," writes Philip Meyer, author of "The Vanishing Newspaper."
Web edtiors have known this for a long time. The jobs we are hiring for in Web journalism are centered on organizing, editing and curating content -- not so much on gathering it.
Danny Sanchez warns in: Google News drives $100 million in revenue to Google, says VP
If you aren’t already, start worrying about your event listings, restaurant reviews, comment boards, public records data and any other number of searchable things of which your news organization makes use. Google probably won’t be far behind.
Jeff Jarvis suggests in Google as the new pressroom that we should stop trying to create a "local" Web site just as we should stop trying to print a local paper:
Get out of the manufacturing and distribution and technology businesses as soon as possible. Turn off the press. Outsource the computers. Outsource the copyediting to India or to the readers. Collaborate with the reporting public. And then ask what you really are. The answer matters dearly.”
(Thanks, Scott Anderson)
We've had a bit of a firestorm on dallasnews.com of late, ignited by a nugget of friendly help from the managing editor on how to search our site, and stoked some by our own colleagues on our Opinion blog. Because the public chimed in with various and sundry gripes about our site, I felt the need to respond.
Here's the thread - infused with a measure of snarkiness typical to the Opinion blog.
Google is now allowing anyone in the U.S., Australia, or New Zealand to improve Google Maps by editing places for everyone else to see.
Everyone's buzzing about Yahoo Buzz, including Tech Crunch, the Bible of Silicon Valley, in this post: Yahoo Buzz: Yahoo Reveals Stats From The First Two Weeks. In short:
"...it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer. That will keep the Buzz publishers, who must be invited into the service, paying attention."
We certainly are. Yahoo linked to us 5 times in the past couple of weeks and absolutely blew away our traffic. As more and more publishers vie for this kind of link, we can expect that we'll be chosen less and less frequently.
Recently I wrote about Mahalo, the human powered search engine.
Now, we're talking more seriously about how our editing muscle might help make search better. And so is Newsweek. (Thanks for finding this, Bob Yates.)
So there may be a bright future for editors after all. And to give proper credit where credit is due, that hopeful thought has been voiced before -- for instance in the otherwise gloomy "Googlezon" video, a tale of the death of newspapers first released on the Internet back in 2005 or so.
From Jennifer Okamoto, who led the charge on this:
Starting today on dallasnews.com, readers can vote for the most interesting stories of the moment as part of a partnership with Yahoo.
The Dallas Morning News is contributing to Buzz, Yahoo’s newly launched social news site. It pulls feeds from 100 sources, including newspapers, blogs and magazines and ranks their stories based on readers’ votes, searches and forwarded e-mails.
Look for the Yahoo ! Buzz button on each story on the site to vote for an article and see how it ranks among other stories online today. Stories with the highest Buzz score may be displayed on the Yahoo.com home page.
Buzz is similar to another popular recommendation tool, Digg. Users can “Digg” a story on dallasnews.com by clicking the “Bookmark” link.
There was some talk here this morning about how newsrooms could help in human powered search. That brought to my mind a new search site that's getting funding and buzz, Mahalo. Here's how they state their mission:
In the past six months, some of the digerati notably, Robert Scoble, have been suggesting this kind of editorial effort could succeed Google, which relies on computer algorithms.
There was some talk here this morning about how newsrooms could help in human powered search. That brought to my mind a new search site that's getting funding and buzz, Mahalo. Here's how they state their mission:
In the past six months, some of the digerati notably, Robert Scoble, have been suggesting this kind of editorial effort could succeed Google, which relies on computer algorithms.
My best hire ever, and former colleague, Danny Sanchez, has this take on Google's recent upgrade to deliver more targeted local news:
*Tap* *Tap* Is this thing on? — WE MUST START GEOCODING STORIES. Google is starting to do it. EveryBlock is already doing it really well. Topix sorta does it. A few others are doing it too. Groups of engineers have already written scrapes that scan the text of news stories. They’ve written algorithms that detect and process addresses for geocoding. Let’s not re-hash the whole newspapers-are-always-falling-behind speech; just get moving already.
I hear you, Danny. Been shouting it myself for the last couple years. But turn the mike up, because I worry that the people who need to know don't.