August 2007 Archives
Lots of people chiming in on Google's use today of full-text Associated Press stories instead of linking to AP member Web sites.
People had been wondering whatever happened to the AP-Google agreement announced a year or so ago and now we know.
It looks somewhat like a play to catch-up with Yahoo News, which already uses the AP wire. In July, Yahoo News had an audience of 33.8 million to Google News' 9.6 million.
For the AP, well, as the AP story says:
In recognition of the challenges facing the media, the AP froze its basic rates for member newspapers and broadcasters this year and already has committed to keeping fees at the same level next year.
That concession has intensified the pressure on AP to plumb new revenue channels by selling its content to so-called "commercial" customers on the Web. Those efforts helped the not-for-profit AP boost its revenue by 4 percent last year to $680 million.
My take: While traffic from Google is hugely important to any Web site, traffic from Google News to AP stories isn't big for most AP-member newspapers. But it will enhance Google's stature as a news and information source.
For newspapers, kind of a yawner in the swirling scheme of things.
(I did find it interesting the story didn't make the AP's Industry News blog. Waiting for the Google News Alert?)
But others got more excited about the alignment of the storied wire service and the world's favorite search enigne. Here's some react on the Google News-Associate Press story.
- Danny Sullivan: Google News Now Hosting Wire Stories & Promises Better Variety In Results
- Tim O'Reilly: Google to Host AP News
- Danny Sanchez: Google to publish Associated Press, other news content
- Updated: Rafat Ali: Google News Starts Publishing Full Stories; AP, AFP, PA and Canadian Press; Still No Ads and Google Rationale For Deal With Wires: "Duplicate Detection"
- techdirt: Google Finally Hosting News On Its Site: Will Newspapers Get Pissed Off At AP Now?
- Josh Cohen/Google News Blog: Original stories, from the source
- Updated: Patrick Beeson's pre-announcement Newspaper wire services are obsolete and post-announcement Google hosts AP, death knell for wire services
- Glenn Franxman: Death of the AP
- Updated: Dan Gillmor: Google Now Officially Competing with Newspapers; So is AP
- Updated: Jeff Jarvis: Link v. read
- Updated: Mathew Ingram: Google and the wires torpedo newspapers
- Updated: Tony Hung: Google News Vindicates Conspiracy Theorists: To (Re)Publish and Host News!
- Updated: Donna Bogatin: GOOGLE MEDIA: One-Stop News Empire for Stories, Videos AND Letters to the Google Editor
- Updated: Doug Fisher: Common Sense Journalism
- Updated: Andy Dickinson: Google+Agencies= return to good content?
- Updated: Forbes: Google Begins Hosting News on Its Site
- Updated: Alfred Hermida: Google takes another bite out of online news
- Updated: Scott Karp: Google News Hosting Wire Service Stories Diminishes Value Of Duplicate Content
- Updated: Howard Weaver Google hosting wire stories
- Updated: Shane Richmond: Google News prods newspapers towards the future
- Updated: John Battalle: Google Hosting News: This Is A Big Deal, Announced Quietly
- Updated: Cory Bergman: Time to rethink the AP model?
- Updated: Ryan Sholin: All I'm going to say about the Google/AP thing
A July study of video distribution by start-up tubemogul.com highlights an interesting pattern in video viewership.
The study sought to measure the effect of using multiple distribution channels instead of just YouTube and one's own Web site.
It wouldn't take a study to figure out if you had more distribution, you'd have more viewers, right? And, indeed, it did find that to be true and that supplying video into several channels far smaller than YouTube actually resulted in a huge growth in views.
The test site's video views grew by nearly 250 percent.
What I found more interesting was something else the tubemogul folks discovered. Videos are not uniformly popular across sites; they don't each become more or less popular at the same time. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Videos bubble up and down to each site's own rhythms.
While YouTube is still the preeminent force in online video, video producers who employ a multi-site distribution strategy receive greater viewership than those who do not ...
This certainly supports the advantages of trying to build audience and awareness through a multi-channel, see-it-anywhere strategy. Are you just presenting video on your site? Do you post to YouTube? Do you post to multiple networks?
This study would suggest you are passing up audience if you are not. And even if you are posting to your site and YouTube, substantial upside potential exists in posting videos into other networks as well.
See the full study (short).
That's a new one.
But Stan Oleynick, a 23-year-old Sacramento, CA., is taking bids on his Web site, holdmyrecord.com, to rename himself.
It's a ploy to raise money for his start up. The winner also gets a 10 percent stake in the fledgling company, which may release its "revolutionary" product in September
Oleynick promises to try to break a Guinness Book record to get his new name some good pub.
And you can buy it now for $250,000 or bid on it. The current top bid is $16,000.
It was crazy enough to get me to write about it.
(via Read/WriteWeb)
During the first half of 2007:
- 62% of consumers viewed news clips
- 38% viewed movie trailers
- 36% viewed music videos (sharply down from 2006).
(via Gavin O'Malley in Online Media Daily)
Hey, add this blog to your feeds!
Now that Twitter has a search box, i discovered A.C. Entertainment Twitters.
Last few Tweets ....
Wondering exactly how Tiny URL works. about 1 hour ago from web
---
Reading Wayne Bledsoe's review at http://www.tiny.cc/NQD7C about 1 hour ago from web
---
Keeping an eye on http://www.roanecounty.com for a story about a 32-year-old sweater that belonged to Alice Cooper. about 1 hour ago from web
---
Still coming down from last night's old-school rawk 'n' roll onslaught by Alice Cooper. about 2 hours ago from web
Definitely worth following.
Follow me and/or follow knoxnews.
TV New Media consultant Terry Heaton says the deal (known as the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium) poses risks to newspapers' ability to have a return on investment and ignores the shadow across Internetland that is Google.
Course that is the damnable part of risk-taking -- it involves risks, uncertainties that have to play out.
Heaton's better option is "the creation of locals networks and a local ad network that serves both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets." Huh? That is essentially what newspapers have been trying to do all along with limited success and will continue to try to do even with the Yahoo! deal. He is right that the Yahoo! framework's scale is requiring tremendous focus, substantial resources and more bodies to execute. It's certainly not a half-hearted bet.
An interesting outside-looking-in analysis. Give it a read.
I wish I had thought of this description: Facebook Is Viral Viagra
(via Jeff Pulver)
Mike Cassidy on Media Post's Video Insider blog on newspaper video:
Many newspapers can, and I believe will, become more dominant again -- but not in their current form. In the long term, the newspaper itself may be the least popular source of information and will remain a newspaper in name only. These publications will ultimately succeed by redefining themselves as content distributors through all sorts of channels with no limitations. Online video is the first step toward achieving this goal, and is the driving factor in how these storied companies will once again reclaim some of their allure.
He says every story needs to be done as video to compete compete with broadcasters online and to try to capture the young audience.
If true, we have a ways to go. TV doesn't do every Web story as video.
Almost 11 months ago, Cathy Clarke, a News Sentinel photographer, was seriously injured in an automobile wreck while on assignment. See earlier posts.Some photo staff folks got together for a luncheon to present her with a Tennessee Associated Press Managing Editors' first place award in feature photography. The winners were announced in Nashville in July.
See Joe Howell's auido/photo column.
For my muggy Sunday mid-morning jog, I listened to the sweet blue-eyed soul sounds of Marc Broussard's S.O.S.: Save Our Soul
, which was released the last week of June. The video above is of the first single from the album. Man, he can do justice to a good soul tune.
More Marc Broussard videos on YouTube.
The album is a collection of soul classics, plus one original number. The classics covers include a fabulous version of Al Green's "Love and Happiness" (hint, play the video), Stevie Wonder's "You Met Your Match," Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long," a crank-it-up Staple Singers' "Respect Yourself," Blood Sweat & Tears and Donnie Hathaway's "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know," Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell's "If I Can Build My Whole World Around You," Bobby Womack's "Harry Hippie," Rance Allen's "Let the Music Get Down in Your Soul," and the Pointer Sisters' "Yes We Can, Can."
The lone original number is "Come in From the Cold,"
I saw Marc Broussard when he opened for Bonnie Raitt at the Tennessee Theatre in December 2005. He was pretty good then, but they seem to giving him a different look these days sans his hat. Whatever the image, he sounds good.
As strange as it may sound for someone who's also a big fan of bluegrass, I love classic souls artists like Al Green, Marvin Gaye, the Staples, the Pointers, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations and a slew of others. Not anybody better to get sweaty too.
Track listing:
- You Met Your Match
- If I Could Build My Whole World Around You
- Harry Hippie
- Let The Music Get Down In Your Soul
- I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know
- Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)
- Love And Happiness
- I've Been Loving You Too Long
- Respect Yourself
- Yes We Can, Can
- Come In From The Cold
Here's my week:
Sessions
Calories burned
Time exercising
Miles jogged/eliptical
4
2378
3:07
12.16
4
2000
3:15
No advice
Month-to-date miles: 48.64. It's kind of tough in this heat.
A lot of the "mashups" (a web application combing data from more than one source) I see only cover San Francisco or California or maybe just a few major metro areas, but here's one that includes data on Knoxville -- and it's useful too.
Vision 20/20 has created a nationwide sexual offender database/map mashup.
Go to the map search and enter Knoxville for city and TN for state. You might be surprised.
The company, which says it is committed to "Peace of Mind" products, frames this one around:
There are 650,000 registered sex offenders in America - and that number grows by about 25,000 every year. Wouldn't you like to know if any of them are living in your neighborhood?(via TechCrunch)
There shouldn't be any issues for existing people who follow my feed. I redirected the old links. But if something doesn't work for you, let me know.
And subscribe to my feed.
Melissa Worden has a nice post on the Multimedia News Producers Workshop in Minneapolis.Someone put together a funny video about newsroom training being similar to training cats to fetch. Since herding them didn't work, maybe teaching them to fetch will? I have to agree that training about "that Internet" is a lot of like teaching cats to fetch. We had a senior editor bail out of a training session last week after five minutes. (sigh)
Worden makes the point that we have to figure out how to make training fun like Kate McGinty taking the multimedia plunge. But watch the training cats video. It's great.
She also posted this great guide that was presented at the workshop on rating video stories and the time they can consume. I need to circulate this one around my newsroom.
>> One star: Raw video, recorded for no more than 45 seconds. The final product has no editing or titles. Production time: 1-2 hours, which includes shooting, ingestion, formatting and posting.
>> Two star: Very rough cut video. Two to four cuts in a short video with limited titles. Production time: 2-4 hours, which includes shooting, ingestion, formatting and posting.
>> Three star: Project is shot, edited and posted the same day. Includes 1-3 brief interviews (A roll) with other shots (B roll). Titles are used as intro and to introduce people. Production time: 4-6 hours, which includes shooting, ingestion, formatting and posting.
>> Four star: Often supplements in-depth enterprise stories. Video may contain several interviews and voiceovers or on-camera reporter interviews. Production time: May take several days to complete, which includes shooting, ingestion, formatting and posting.
Somehow I totally missed this Tennessee tale.
Drew Curtis, founder of the hugely popular "news" site Fark.com, says the new media manager of a Memphis Fox TV station tried to hack his site.
Curtis has done e-mail interviews with Mediaverse, a Memphis media blog, and ValleyWag, the Silicon Valley alpha-attitude gossip blog.
Curtis says he's got Darrell Phillips of WHBQ Fox13 99.9 nailed.
The Fark founder says deceptive emails were sent to him and several Fark employees or volunteers in an effort to get them to unwittingly download a piece of Trojan Horse software that communicated back to a computer in Memphis with captured passwords and user ids. Efforts were made to hack into Fark's servers.
Curtis wrote Mediverse:
"Our chances of being wrong are close to nil. Even with the information we currently have we're standing at 99.9%. Our data indicates that only one individual was using the dphillips Fark account for the entire time it's been in existence. That individual worked at Fox, used a verizon wireless card, and a comcast cable modem account in the Memphis area."
Here are some links:
- ValleyWag: Exclusive: Fark founder accuses Fox newsman of hacking
- Mediaverse: On Getting Farked (A Detailed Wagging)
- Mediaverse: On Getting Farked (99.9 percent)
- ValleyWag: Followup: How a Fox-linked hacker failed to fool Fark
That is totally bizarre. Must be the Memphis heat.
The stock market is generally believed to be a leading indicator of future economic performance in a Wisdom of Crowds
But the tea leaves are a little more nuanced, says Mark Glaser of MediaShift.
The staffing situation at traditional media companies is much more fluid than the simple cut-and-slash horror stories that play well in the press. The dire layoff scenarios at major news organizations are not as dire in smaller rural communities, where local newspapers and TV stations still perform well, or overseas where competition, audiences and ownership structures are different than in the U.S
Smaller papers are hiring and digital staff are being fattened, according Dan Rohn, a former WashPo reporter who runs JournalismJobs.com. And if they're not hiring to add more resources to online, they are shifting print jobs to online, or adding additional online responsibilities to traditional print roles, Glazer notes.
Are newsroom shrinking? Undoubtedly. But the hiring is pointing to a remolding of editorial staffs as smaller and more digitally oriented organizations.
.Updated: Dan Gillmor says There's never been a better time to be a media entrepreneur.
My oh my, co-worker Michael Silence has stirred up a debate about attribution in blogs with "all the news that's fit to print."
Quite a lively comment discussion there.
One idea here (and there are several) that I liked a lot is that of a local social media package that would give you the tools to be plugged into a city, scene, location. Here' s the concept that Chris Brogan outlines in his blog post:
If I show up at an airport terminal, I wish there were a social media PACKAGE to collect for my phone or my iPod. It would have local podcasts about the area, the restaurants, the night spots, parks, and/or options on whatever other things might matter to me. I like photos? Here are the local Flickr groups, and a videoblog post of local areas to watch. I want to run? Here's some annotated Google maps PLUS a 15% off coupon (digital) for the local running store.
When you're visiting a city or planning a vacation, it's really hard to get the complete picture.
No one site seems to have it covered and then there's the whole problem of panning the gold from the sand of search engines.
That's certainly the attraction of Mahalo's links pages -- the good stuff all in one place. High signal to noise ratio.
But it's more just a set of links; it's a container delivered digitally to an iPod or iPhone or cell phone or even laptop that allows for the serendipitous discovery of everything you want to know about some physical place. It's more than see and do; it's what Brogan calls "local social media." I'm thinking of it as Spatial Serendipity.
It's community personality and personalities. It's vibe and energy. It's you gotta go, you gotta see, you gotta do.
It would be interesting.
UPDATED: Chris has more on this riffBut get this straight: Just because a site has 100 million users, that doesn't mean 100 million people see your ad. It's not TV. Repeat: It's not TV. The only people who will see your ad are the ones who see the page on which it appears. If you buy 10,000 impressions, aka eyeballs, you can buy them on a big site or a bunch of small sites, it doesn't matter. Big brings no advantage other than convenience and it also brings some disadvantages like inefficiency and price. This is the essence of the change in the economic model of media. Post that on your wall and stare at it.-- Jeff Jarvis
Is's almost comical how so few people get this.
A look around the curve to find Traffic Happens Elsewhere
Bigger than Web 2.0, but you can ride, Steve Rubel says, by:
1) Thinking web services, not websites
2) Connect people.
3) Make everything portable.
It's about taking advantage of distribution to get to the audience's door rather than putting up neon signs and tossing dollars so the world can beat a path to your door.
Didn't jog as much as normal; did weights instead.
Did listen to an old album, Hot Rize's 1979 first album.
I really liked it when it came out and it holds up well, I think.
Here's the lineup: Peter Wernick (Banjo), Nick Forster (Bass), Tim O'Brien (Fiddle and Mandolin), and Charles Sawtelle (Guitar).
Track listing: Blue Night, Empty Pocket Blues, Nellie Kane, High on a Mountain, Ain't I Been Good to You?, Powwow the Indian Boy, Prayer Bells of Heaven, This Here Bottle, Ninety Nine Years (And One Dark Day), Old Dan Tucker, Country Boy Rock 'N' Roll, Standing in the Need of Prayer, Durham's Reel, Midnight on the Highway.
They broke up in 1991 or 1992.
Tim O'Brien has a successful solo career; I've bought several of his CDs and those of his sister Mollie, too.
Peter Wernick also has had a solo career and is known as "Dr. Banjo." He narrowly escaped death in the crash of United Airlines Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa. Some 110 of the 285 passengers died and one of the 11 crew members.
Nick Forster, a bluegrass musician who was born in the unlikely Bluegrass birthplace of Beirut, is the host with his wife, Helen, of the public radio show etown. It's a great show with a wide range of guests and it's about a lot more than music.
Charles Sawtelle developed leukemia and died in 1999.
I saw the band once at a bluegrass festival at Brown Loflin's "Denton International Airport" in Denton, N.C. The airpost was a grass strip, but he was thinking big when he named it, I guess.
Not only did Hot Rize appear, but also their alter-ego band, Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers
Red Knuckles showed up in the "breaks" in the Hot Rize show.
Back to the first Hot Rize album.
Hot Rize, the album, was one of those great debut albums and the band went on to produce a string of others.
There's a couple gospel tunes that are just Sunday-morning-country-church there, like "Standing in the Need of Prayer."
Not my mother, not my father, but it's me oh Lord
Standing in the need of prayer
Not my mother, not my father, but it's me oh Lord
Standing in the need of prayer
If you've never heard of them, check 'em out. My favorites of the band are the self-titled first album
Well, you see how my mind goes elsewhere when I'm exercising.
Sessions
Calories burned
Time exercising
Miles jogged/eliptical
4
2034
3:07
9.53
4
2000
3:15
No advice
Miles to date in August, 36.48
- Tony Hung: LA Times: "... Its Bigger Than Jesus, Worse Than Bin Laden!"
- Ethan Kaplan: Newspapers are Committing Recursive Suicide
- John Battelle: Newspapers: Stages of Google Grief
- Danny Sanchez: L.A. Times editorial board decries Google News comments
- Mathew Ingram: Newspapers ignore Google at their peril
- Dave Winer: Journalism is the new Catholic Church
- Scott Karp: Journalism Is Now A Continuous Dynamic Process, Not A Static Product
- Robert Niles: The L.A. Times tells its readers: 'Shut up'
- Jeff Jarvis: Just Kidding?
- Mike Keliher: LA Times misses the point on Google News commenting
- Brad Linder: LA Times: Google News isn't journalism
- Donna Bogatin: Google News is a Joke: LA Times is NOT Laughing
If you're still trying to figure out the whole Facebook thing, then here's a cheatsheet:* Over 150,000 registrants daily. That's 1 million a week since January.Got it, now?
* 35 million users today. Of course that number will be off a million one week from today.
* Half user are outside college. That number was zero in Sept. 2006.
* 0ver 40 billion page views in May 2007
* Average visitor stays 20 minutes
* Most growth is among people over age 25.
* 47,000 Facebook groups.
* #1 photo sharing app on the web. 2.7 billion photos on site.
* More than 2000 applications. The Top 10 are: Top Friends, Video, Graffiti, MyQuestions, iLike, FreeGifts, X Me, Superpoke!, Fortune Cookie & Horoscopes. The smallest of these has over 4.5 million users.
(via Jeremiah Owyang via Shel Israel)
Stop calling everything "content". It's a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the '90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online. It's handy, but it masks and insults the true natures* of writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still, blessedly (if adjectivally) call "editorial". Your job is journalism, not container cargo.
-- Doc Searls (on advice to newspapers)
Survived upgrade. Still tweeking. Moved blog and blog feeds to root of www.jacklail.com. Users should be automaitcally redirected. Feeds should update.
Most difficult part was updating the templates. I finally found it easy to "export" the blog entries, delete the blog and re-import them into a new blog by old name.
Please excuse the mess, I'm upgrading to MT4 today.
I like this Top Ten Newspapers Web site list, too.
It was done by Howard Owens, director of Digital Publishing at Gatehouse Media, who took issue with some of the picks in the Bivings Group Top 10 earlier this week.
Of KnoxNews, he said:
5) KnoxNews.com. Jack Lail has long run one of the best newspaper web sites in the country, and its one of the few sites that has continued to improve with each iteration. The current site features a top half of the home page that is damn near perfect. The bottom half could almost be entirely lost and never missed, which would improve the home page greatly. The overall site architectures is outstanding. There’s room for participation on Knoxnews.com, and blogs and a nice mix of video offerings.
There are 15 newspapers Web sites between the two lists:
Bakersfield.com
Chron.com
denverpost.com
FresnoBee.com
KnoxNews.com
LJWorld.com
MercuryNews.com
NaplesNews.com
NYTimes.com
SFGate.com
SignOnSanDiego.com
statesman.com
TBO.com
Tennessean.com
USAToday.com
Those have been among the best and among the most innovative in the business for as long as I've been in it. Certainly arguments could be made for others (Morris sites in Augusta, Savannah and Jacksonville come readily to mind; and, of course, startribune.com)
Make your own list; it's a non-contact (usually) indoor sport for the dog days of summer. And when you look at your list, I think you'll have to agree with Howard that some of the most interesting sites are out in the mid-to-smaller markets. Rob Curley and crew's pre-Washington Post days at Lawrence and Naples being the most over-the-top examples.
Tags: online newspapers | Howard Owens | newspapers | web design
Some of my younger co-workers say their perception of out-of-the-box thinking at a newspaper is of someone ever-so-slightly opening the top of the box and taking a furtive glance; maybe on a bold day, cautiously extending a moistened finger to check the direction of the wind.
That mental picture is apt, unfortunately, more often than not despite protestations of the contrary. This tends to create "issues" when one or more in the box actually want to stretch a bit. Some suggest a meeting. Others say do market research and analysis. Still others suggest a focus group. And before proceeding, we must review the potential impact on anything and everything else. After a near-endless series of meetings, task forces and planning scenarios, the thought of stretching passes and life continues apace in the box.
One of those who against those obstalces actually got out and stretched is Online Journalism Review Editor Robert Niles. He has a five-step plan to free those left behind.
He says it starts with saying "yes." Check his post for the details on just saying yes and the other four steps.
Tags: newspapers | entreprenuership innovation
Note to self: This won't work.
Tags: Facebook
This was a very pleasant surprise.
(6) Knoxville News Sentinel: I’m not sure a newspaper website could look any better than this one. When we talk about de-cluttering sites and making them look “clean”, this is what we mean.
(Hat tip to Andrew Eder)
Tags: online newspapers | Bivings Group | newspapers | web design
Even with newspaper video, the reruns can be better. Some fascinating discussion on low-end vs high-end video (does there have to be a versus?).
I think this is an important discussion. Newspapers have a disruptive opportunity with video that shouldn't be overlooked by anyone developing Internet strategies for newspapers. Should we be as passionate about producing good online video as Angela Grant and others? Sure. There's room for both.
The latest reruns on the newspaper video debate (Updated):
- Craig Rubens: Essay: Internet Killed the Newspaper Baron
- Howard Owens: There’s still no evidence that ‘big and huge’ is the right video strategy
- William M. Hartnett: When it comes to newspaper video, focus on the bigger picture
- Ryan Sholin: Why shoot newspaper video?
- Angela Grant: One-hour production time is unrealistic
- Howard Owens: Key points in a disruptive newspaper video strategy
- Patrick Thornton: Video does not equal new media
But let me add another wrinkle to this screen grab on the state of newspaper video.
The disruption is in the distribution -- or ability to attract audience. At knoxnews, we post standalone video on our site, into the AP Online Video Network, and YouTube.
Where do we get the most views? YouTube!
Maybe others have a different experience. But that says something about the power of distribution. Whoever gets the distribution, wins. That's one reason why lots of video now makes sense, but finding the right avenues for it to reach the audience that wants it is critical.
It will take more than putting video on a newspaper dot com Web site whether it is low-end on-the-scene video or a piece that took days to produce.
Tags: video news | newspaper video
Are newspapers irreconcilably screwed as Internet economy analyst Henry Blodgett says.
London-based strategic analyst Seamus McCauley says no, but he doesn't see happy days for lots of them either.
Blodgett's argument and the argument of many others is that we're overflowing with news and this gives news creators no pricing power. And even in the reduced costs world of producing content digitally, the costs of producing news will be higher than what newspapers can command. Thus, no business model.
McCauley says, however, walk Blodgett forecast backwards and it unwinds -- to a degree.
If Blodgett is right, McCauley argues, then news won't be a scare commodity because most of the players will have exited.
What prospects then for the handful of high-quality producers of journalism who survive to ring in this future? Far greater pricing power. More money. Perhaps online profitability for their far scarcer news content.
McCauley makes another prescience point:
Third, a point I will return to again and again, newspapers' core value is not their content but their validation. Sure it's expensive to create content. In the long run this probably doesn't really matter. There's plenty of content. The value that newspapers add to the picture is verifying which of it is true.
I tend to believe that unlike the New York Times, locally focused newspapers do have scarcity on their side and do have a trump card in hand in validating news. Most, however, are still devoting far too many resources toward regurgitating commodity news. And even in the best of scenarios, the business model is difficult -- even after the transition to a new, lower cost model.
Is Blodgett right? Wall Street tends to think so or at least is hedging its bets. Even with McCauley's analysis, there will be a winnowing of content providers. And for rest? Without some creative leadership and some changes that will result in vastly different newspapers, yes, the ones left are screwed, too.
(via a Techmeme Twitter)
Tags: newspapers | economics
Is Twitter the future of breaking news?
A post by David Erickson has a fantastic collection of how people (as opposed to the nada phrase "Citizen Journalist") covered the Minneapolis bridge collapse. Be sure to browse that.
Erickson is an Internet marketing and PR guy in Minneapolis. He first got wind of the collapse via a Twitter post from an area blogger. After observing how people and big media in town covered the news, he has several observations. Among them:
The eyewitness blog posts, the on-the-scene photography, and even the handheld and cell phone videos complete with their jerky motion and blurry, overcompressed images, all contribute far better than the mainstream media, to giving you a more accurate sense of being there. The videos, especially because of their amateur look, gave the viewer a powerful sense of the frantic chaos on the ground.
The tools are there for people to cover breaking news as it happens and if they are there, they may be able to do it quciker than any mainstream media via mobile devices or available broadband Internet connections.
But the platforms of choice for people reporting news, such as flickr and YouTube, are not very good for breaking news because of the lag time before those items are actually searchable. They are there, but you have to know where.
I suspect that's also the culprit in this experiment, instead of not enough SEO hokum, but that's another story.
That has me thinking that's where social networks (loosely defined) could help in locating the photos, videos and blog posts. The organization that figures out how in a local content to aggregate this material quicker and better, and, as Erickson notes, separate the quality from the crap will have a powerful news mechanism.
Those are bridges that have to be built before the next collapse.
Erickson said, except for Minnesota Public Radio, people with the stories were viewed as resources, not story-tellers or newsgathers.
If you're a media outlet, is aggregation part of your disaster coverage plan?
Are there good examples of aggregating breaking news content from disparate sources and leverage that information through good organization, presentation and editing? I'd like something that produces better quality results than Google News and includes photo and video sharing sites and blogs as well as "news" sites.
Tags: citizen journalism | citizen journalists | micro-blogging | breaking news
It's rough jogging in this heat!
Sessions
Calories burned
Time exercising
Miles jogged/eliptical
5
2592
3:36
14.74
4
2000
3:15
No advice
Miles to date in August, 26.95
Tags: jogging | fatbloggers | jason calacanis
In early 2006, according to Greg Sterling, the Kelsey Group found print Yellow Pages were the “first choice” for local business information.
Fast forward a mere year and a half, and a new study from TMP Directional Marketing finds 60 percent of consumers use the Internet as their primary information source for yellow page type information.
Sterling says:
This is the “tipping point” everyone has been talking about — it’s been reached.
Is the venerable phone directory good for anything other than flattening papers? Some 90 percent believe a printed yellow pages is more accurate and complete than other sources, but two out of three are USING other sources first.
I think the tipping point is being reached in a lot Internet spaces and movement to Internet platforms and technologies is accelerating.
Tags: yellow pages | local search
It’s like the web has now moved so close to reality now that we want reality to be more web-like.
-- Angela A. Thomas, who teaches English education and is the author of Youth Online: Identity and Literacy in the Digital Age
In Second Life, she is known as Anya Ixchel and teaches and conduct auto-ethnographic research
Tags: web reality
Think just getting more organized will make you more productive; maybe not.
Jimmy Guterman found the GTD regime does not work if ...
It turned out that my problem wasn't that I was insufficiently efficient. The problem was that I was way too overextended. I had taken on more than even a very efficient person could handle. Efficiency is great, but it can only get you so far.
In the do-more-with-less world of newsrooms, overextended is the daily malaise. if you have the discipline, systems like Robert Allen's Getting Things Done