One of the recent commenters to dallasnews.com summed up how comments tend to go on our site. Sadly, he's funny because he captures a measure of truth:
1.Story breaks
1a. Someone wonders why this is considered Top News
2.Ethnicity is brought up immediately
2a. If Bush or Obama are mentioned get ready for Obama is a terrorists, if Bush he is a dummy and shouldn't move to .
3. Bashing of anothers views
4. Somewhere around this time KKK is usually mentioned to all whites by black posters. At which point all blacks claim that all whites are saying they are criminals.
4a. If a mexican name is involved anywhere in the story many many folks will claim that individual as an "illegal" (look up for definition)
5. My personal favorite the Grammar Gods arise and anything and I mean anything that one types is criticized. The accusers post stating this usually has at least 3 errors of their own. Hint: add webster link to your favorites.
We require registration, we ask users to flag abuse,and do monitor our comments after the fact, but it sure is hard to keep things as civil as we would like.
CNN recounts how social networks are becoming key ways in which news is distributed and discovered by digitally-active citizens.
More people are turning to social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr when news breaks to share stories and pictures.
As I have said many times before, this means news organizations, such as ours, have to get out onto social networks and become trusted friends with people, if we want to stay vital in the coming decades.
Check out the engrossing article about the NYT's newsroom Web geeks. They're engaging in R&D every day -- able to cut across the bureaucracy that slows down innovation at papers everywhere.
Key to their effort are the following ingredients:
- Resources -- a 10 person journo-developer team plus an R&D lab
- Mandate -- they can cut across existing lines of authority to get things done and they're empowered to take risks
- Vision -- they understand and respect the journalistic brand of the NYT and yet know how to project that in new ways
Wow.
(Thanksfor the tip, Bruce Tomaso.)
Jeff 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
Click the link to find a shortlist of more than 25 of Danny Sanchez's favorite (and mostly free) multimedia tools. Hint on usefulness: Twitter and CoverItLive are on there.
URL: 25+ of Danny’s Favorite Multimedia Tools
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."
The Diane Rehm show tackles our business in an hourlong radio show. You can listen to an archive copy of it here.
This week's bankruptcy filing by the Tribune Company is the latest sign of trouble for the news business. A panel joins guest host Katty Kay to discuss how the on-going recession is affecting the already struggling industry and what it could mean for how Americans get their news.
When I ran the Web team in Orlando, we used to use a home madetool (by staffer Ray Villalobos)called Table Tango to quickly create Web tables.
So now another ofOrlando's top-tier Web staff, Danny Sanchez, has updated the product and made it available for everyone. Click to Danny's blog post, Journalistopia, to learn more.
It's because there's a better way to share content on the Web -- by linking to it at its source:
The syndication model is dying. As the content economy is supplanted by the link economy, reselling the same story over and over again becomes increasingly impossible. Click for more: No more alphabet-soup news
It's no secret I'm a fan of the way Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis thinks about news. He's ruthlessly honest about the facts all around us, incisive in his analysis of information trends and refreshingly original in how he frames solutions. I've read the recent criticisms about his style. Sure he's a bit of a gadfly and a self-promoter but don't let that obscure the message. What Jeff says and thinks about newsbears careful study, because he's often the first one to think it.
With that in mind, his recent roundup of thought on where local news is going is well worth reading. Headline: Local news will get smaller, networked, collaborative and distributed.
Northwestern's increasingly prolific Media Management Center has released a terrific report on the skillsets we will need in the newsroom if we're to prosper in the future. I recommend reading the executive summary at least and asking yourself: Do I have one or more of these competencies?
Quoting the news release on the six recommended competencies:
- The Platform Strategist: To capture market opportunities by leveraging content over and across multiple platforms, news organizations must understand the unique attributes and capabilities of each platform; know consumers and spot their unmet needs; understand their own strengths and offerings, and develop products accordingly.
- The Marketer: News organizations need to think like the best marketers - carefully defining their brands and working to develop deep consumer engagement with them. The essential first step: identifying more clearly what differentiates them in the marketplace and determining what unique value and role they provide.
- The Community Builder: News organizations need to become more expert community builders, using technology to help connect people around shared interests. Using the increased technological capacity for information-sharing between individuals and groups, news organizations can more effectively shape dialogue and enable consumers to link to discussions of increasingly wider context.
- The Data Miner: News organizations that become expert data miners and managers can develop unmatched depth of insight about consumers that they can use to profitably deliver both personalized content and targeted advertising. They can also unlock the value of their current and archival content.
- The Complete Storyteller: Digital technologies give news organizations a much broader palette and set of tools to use in their storytelling. It's not just text, photos and videos - it's a mix of all three plus interactivity, games, charts and much more. Excelling at these new kinds of storytelling is a competency that can differentiate news organizations from competitors.
- The Entrepreneur: In this environment, news organizations must develop their ability to think like entrepreneurs and identify assets they can leverage and new services they can provide, by pursuing partnerships, experimenting smartly and developing new models of advertising.
Jeff Jarvis asked attendees of his "New Models for News Summit" what kind of newsroom they would build if the paper went bust.
They calculated the likely revenue Philadelphia could support online and then figured out what they could afford in staffing. Instead of the 200-300-person newsroom that has existed in print, they decided they could afford 35 and they broke that down to include a new job description: “community managers who do outreach, mediation, social media evangelism.” They settled on three of those plus 20 content creators, two programmers, three designers, five producers... and — get this — only three editors.
Check out, rate and review finalists for the "We Media Game Changer Awards" at gamechangers.wemedia.com. From the news release:
Digital journalism from Iraq, a mobile news project from Kenya, two social networks, two digital artists, two science research collaboratives, two foundations and two online advertising marketplaces are among 35 finalists for the 2009 We Media Game Changer Awards. The awards recognize people, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media.
It's being replaced with a curated, topical page
It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.
Jeff Jarvis explains in his new book how business models should mirror Google's success:
In an economy built on networks, you want to be a platform. Google is. It enables countless businesses to run thanks to its revenue (AdSense), its content (Google Maps), its functionality, (Google Docs), its services (Google App Engine), not to mention its distribution.
In the book, I make a fanciful argument that a car company - any of the once-big three - could become a platform for more car companies to build atop it - if it came out with an open-source car. If it did, its capital needs and risk and labor and benefits coasts would decline; it could grow again without going into debt to do so. I have other ideas for what a car platform is. Universities should become platforms for aggregated educations. Doctors’ offices should be platforms for health. In this new world, you don’t want to own everything - indeed, if you’re like Google, you want to own as little as possible. Instead, you want to enable everything.
I learned a few things at this past weekend’s American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, thanks to a presentation by Matt Thompson. Matt had a number of good concrete ideas for boosting user-generated content. I recommend you ask yourselves how we can incorporate them into what we do.
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The Yahoo advertising platform that we newspaperswill be a part of is the subject of arecent article in Investor's Business Daily.It explains how the deal will work:
Newspapers hope to take advantage of Yahoo features such as behavioral targeting. With this tool, Yahoo tries to target specific ads to specific people, based on what searches people do online.
Oh, and they quote me too. <insert smiley face here>
In his post, Not-to-miss multimedia training workshop coming to Miami, Danny Sanchez reports:
The infamous multimedia boot camp at the University of North Carolina is now coming to the University of Miami in Miami, Fla. Taking a look at the roster of instructors, I get goosebumps at the freaky amount of talent that’s going to be teaching multimedia skills. They’ve got Alberto Cairo. They’ve got Andrew DeVigal. They’ve got Brian Storm. If you’re looking to learn about creating awesome interactive graphics, that’s the mod squad right there.
He's right about that. The reason it's moving: Rich Beckman, guru of multimedia, has moved from UNC to Miami. I recommend multimedia editors attend.