Exploring Media in Transformation | Transforming in Media Exploration
/ˌtrænsfərˈmeɪʃən/ n. 1: a process of change from one form to another.
Of thePBS Idea Lab post Twitter has become the place to get breaking news first, Romanesko says:
That's Chris O'Brien's observation. The first quake-related tweet on Tuesday came nine minutes before the AP pushed out its first story. Gawker's Sheila McClear isn't a Twitter fan, though; she calls it "perhaps the most idiotic form of communication of our time."
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.
J-Lab, The Institute for Interactive Journalism just sent out a notice about a niftylearning module they've created called, "Twitter tips." Why shouold you care?
Over the last several months Twitter has finally hit its stride as a leading tool for finding and sharing timely information from all sorts of places and sources. Its usefulness for breaking news is obvious. However, Twitter is equally useful for tracking ongoing stories and issues, getting fast answers or feedback, finding sources, building community, collaborating on coverage, and discovering emerging issues or trends.
The Houston Chronicle's tech reporter Dwight Silverman has appeared a couple times on a podcast that I (and a zillion other Silicon Valley tech-obsessed digerati) listen tocalled This Week in Tech.
And on TWiTshow#150 here, Dwight and host Leo LaPorte along withWeblogs Inc. guru and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanisstarted talking about the future of newspapers in a digital era, about newspaper bloggers and the rise of advertorial editorial content. Download the show and zip in about 22 minutes and you'll hear them start talking on the subject. Quote from Dwight:
"We tell our writers to use their blogs to do their print jobs. If you take it and integrate it into your workflow, it works great."
The print-Webgenerational divide turned ugly recently following a post by an intern supporting the Tampa Tribune's editor. I noted it here.
Now Jay Rosen of pressthink tries to psychoanalyze the full-throated anger and animosity that's roiling in our industry.
We’re in pain and looking for a place to direct our anger [one commenter says]. Some chose to beam that rage at the young woman who identifies with the female boss. She’s not one of us, not really “of” the newsroom. She’s cheering one of them: the executives who screwed up our thing. Them: the know-nothing, misspelling bloggers. Them: our unpaid or lowly paid replacements. Them: generaton whoop-dee-Net. She’s one of them. Her post proves it!
This is boundary policing, in which deviant behavior is denounced and community bonds are renewed in a casting out motion. You can hear worse than casting out in comments like this. It’s almost newspaper revanchism, an irrational demand to restore the Kingdom of Print, and the suggestion of a monstrous, industry-wide lie preventing that restoration.
I just discovered this post from University of Florida's Mindy McAdams -- who wrote the book (literally) on multimedia journalism. Mindy looks at what she calls the "500 pound gorilla" in our business -- who's going to fund what we do -- and suggests some facts we should probably just accept so we can move on to finding an answer. Among them, for instance:
Journalism CAN be done, and done well, without newspapers. It’s okay if you love newspapers, but they’re really expensive to produce and the audience is abandoning them, as are the advertisers, so it doesn’t help us much to go on talking about newspapers.
It's worth clicking above to check out the other 9.
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)
Kent Fischer addresses that in Something has to give to innovate on the Web, as he talks about what he's had to give up to do the DISD blog.
Yes, you make your day longer but you also stop doing stuff you did before. For me, the trade off is the enterprise reporting. Not every reporter is going to want to give that up, because generally that’s the fun, stimulating stuff. But for me, that’s what got dropped given the ridiculous amounts of daily news produced in a huge city school district that needs reporting.
From Beatblogging.org:
The Listening Post, Wired's multi-author music blog, joined Twitter a few days ago and promises to use Twitter to deliver micro-posts of information to music fans.
Jennifer Okamoto, our crack Web editor for Lifestyles at The Dallas Morning News penned this note today:
This weekend, I got to spend some time on my favorite website, TED.com, where I watched this video by Jonathan Harris, an artist and computer scientist who reorganizes the information we post on the web in unusual ways. In it, he explains two projects he’s working on.
One is We Feel Fine, which searches blogs for the phrase “I feel” and organizes every sentence with that phrase by emotion, age, location and more. The site offers an interesting look at the global mood at any given moment. (Right this second: lucky, panicky and fat.)
Another is Universe, which turns current events into constellations of words, which you can sort by person, event, place, etc. For example, see at a glance who Bill Clinton was talking with in a given week, where he was, and that he took Saturday off.
Both are cool, but even better is that it helps me understand our work as singular points of data, and the interesting ways that data can be used. So when you blog, fill in those keyword and category blanks. Make sure your headline is SEO friendly. Who knows how your words could be used to help people out there?
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.
At The Dallas Morning News we're preparing to launch a tool that allows people to comment on articles. Many, many other news organizations have done this already, so we're late to the game.
On the plus side, that gives us some real world experience on which to base our expectations for what will happen when we let our users in to converse. Here's a great post on Poynter about the experiences of other newspaper companies discovered by Belo TV station WVEC news manager Pete McElveen.
Washingtonpost.com's model is one we'll be mirroring:
We have a profanity filter that catches basic stuff, but besides that, we deal with issues after publication. Every comment has a "report abuse" link to allow readers to help us identify problems, and we have staff that helps deal with problematic subjects such as local crime, politics, etc. We also keep a close eye on all stories played off the home page.
Steve Outing crystallizes the gap in understanding that we have as a newspaper covering a local events, which is article driven, vs. the way in which the Web needs to 'cover' a locality. Here's his post: Finally: the answer to hyper-local coverage. In short, it's not about the articles:
Local newspapers need to figure out how to find the data and information like train delays and dog-park news, then deliver it to the people who care about it. That is the “hyper-local news” that will allow newspapers to renew themselves as important in people’s lives.
This isn't a revelation, but it is a change in mindset that means we can't assume that taking what we do for the zoned sections of the paper, or asking users to submit 'their news' can substitute for a truly unique online experience.
Be sure to click the link above to see Steve's recommendations for what to do.
Following up on my thread about the link economy, I saw a white paperfrom Forrester that emphasizes the point. Nut graph:
"...newspaper eBusiness professionals ask Forrester how the competition for content verticals will evolve in the future — and this is fundamentally the wrong question. It’s clear from the data that newspapers no longer own the content verticals that make up their core products. Newspapers’ survival, in any media, demands a revolutionary shift in focus from being in the content business to being in the audience business."
The full white paper is available for purchase here. (Thanks, Bill Tanner)
Blogger Felix Salmon is a bit concerned about just how much Forrester 'gets' when it comes to Web 2.0 things such as RSS feeds. In a post called "Why Newspapers Must Embrace RSS," he contends Forrester doesn't adequately praise the effect that distributing content offsite can have.
"...embrace the bloggers in your area, encourage them, feed them, give them full RSS feeds sliced and diced to whatever specifications they desire, and let them bring you the new generation of readers which will replace the old print subscribers who are dying out."
(Thanks, Jennifer Okamoto)
Jeff Jarvis makes an important point in The link economy v. the content economy about what the currency of the Internet is. Paraphrasing his point -- it's not about the content, it's about getting links. Content has become a commodity on the Web - you can get the information you need anywhere and everywhere. So for the content producer it's about getting links to the content, which translates to traffic, which translates to value, which translates to advertising.
It's a provocative argument - suggesting that content isn't important - but it's also a key transformative feature of digital news. The link economy is why we are hiring someone to help us distribute our content better on the Web. We're calling this person, who's a journalist, mind you, an audience acquisition editor. The Washington Post recently advertised for a similar position, a content distribution manager.
One could argue that we have all the content we need - we just don't have the links.
Leonard Pitts has a call to arms for newspapers today in the Miami Herald. But it isn't about saving the paper, it's about moving to the Web.
I submit that our primary mission is to report and comment upon the news and that it is the newspaper itself that has become ancillary. So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do, but as the core thing we do. Maybe we should maximize the fact that we know our cities as no one else does. Maybe we should make our Websites not simply online recreations of our papers, but entities in their own right....
I haven't been on Romanesko yet, so maybe it's there, but if you haven't seen it, click through.
(Thanks, Michael Landauer)
Here are a couple of neat maps folks have sent me recently.
One is from a friend in Tampa, business journalist Rich Mullins: a Google map of notorious crimes, which he says is getting tons of traffic.
And then there’s a map chronicling tornado destruction in one town that Des Moines did that editor Michael Landauer found. I think they’re using Arc GIS on that but I'm no mapping expert.
Great job!
Cory Bergman reports that ‘hundreds’ will be shooting video at Washington Post.
Already 185 people have been trained at the paperand the goal is to get over 300 shooting. Some of the comments on Cory's blog, which caters to TV news folks, show they're getting a little uneasy about our embrace of their medium.
Sorry, but I'm on a Buzzmachine tear tonight. Ever provocative, the blog contends editing’s a drag and makes a good point about how we use our Web systems to the detriment of the pace of news.
Jarvis talk about the editing process and how that can work against our audience. I would add to that the fact that the content management systems we use for news are similarly inadequate.
They're mostly designed to publish 'an article' to 'a spot' on 'a page' and can't keep up when the article, the spot and thepage have to change dramatically in real time.
That's why we've adopted blogs as our new content management systems in recent years -- they're much more flexible in a 24/7 environment. In most newspaper.coms these days at least 10-percent of Web traffic is going to blogs -- which are generally done outside the traditional content management system, because the 'tradtional' system just can't handle the pace of publishing necessary to maintain user relevancy.
Jarvis writes about links offsitein:The ethic of the link layer on news
"...link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff. This emerges from blogging etiquette but is exactly contrary to the old, competitive ways of news organizations: wasting now-precious resources matching competitors’ stories so you could say you’d done it yourself. That must change. This ethic of the link will become all the more important as news organizations pare down to their essence. I’ve said often that they will have to do what they do best and link to the rest."
He's also got a lot to say about the Ohio revolt over AP fees. In case you've missedit, they've decided to share stories without going through AP first -- because it's cheaper and quicker. Jeff likens this to Web links:
By running other papers’ stories, the newsrooms are participating in a print version of linking to original journalism. Importantly, these stories are not going through the AP mill, being rewritten under an AP style and brand (which its contract with papers allows because the AP is a cooperative). Instead, now the original stories are getting more attention across the state.
