October 2007 Archives

See some more of my 2007 Halloween photos at flickr. This pumpkin was carved by Amy. Some people have had a hard time seeing the design. Do you see it?

An update on the Oct. 4, 2007, posting about YouTube pulling a video of knoxnews that was flagged by 20th Century Fox for copyright infringement.

The video above of the Reno 911! guys was shot by our TV critic Terry Morrow and so we filed a counter-claim with YouTube. I got an overnight email that the video has been restored.

The YouTube process is pretty streamlined, but still, we should have never gotten the copyright infringement claim in the first place.

The UK's  Daily Star is promoting its RSS feeds with the photo at right. No wonder U.S. newspapers are considered dull.

Subscribe to this blog feed.


(via Martin Stabe / Daily Star photo)

Bryan Murley recorded a brief audio clip of New Media journalism's Billy Sunday at a tent revival in DC.

What? Well, it's really the Washington Post's Rob Curley at the CMA/ACP National College Media Convention. But there's not a more passionate evangelist for journalists to get their careers saved by adapting and adopting. And for those that don't listen, there's career fire and brimstone awaiting.

Give it a listen. The advice holds as true for aspiring journalists as veterans. Better to listen to him than me. After a talk I gave to a group of journalists, one blogged that I was "such a bore."

BYOMD = Bring Your Own Mountain Dew.

Previous Rob Curley posts on this site.

(Bryan Murley photo)

Think the social nature of the Internet is just for 18-to-34 years olds -- or younger? Think community is your neighborhood? Think everything online happens in the highly wired, tech meccas?

That would be wrong.

You might ask Clyde Clark about that.

Clyde's not from Silicon Valley. Besides, they call valleys "hollers" in the hard scrabble hills of Lee County in Southwestern Virginia where he grew up.

At 86, he's a couple of crisp October days past the target demographic of most social networking Web service startups. I'm fairly certain he's not on Facebook or has a MySpace page. But one community for him is the Tennessee sports email list he been on for years and in which, he has developed many friendships he would not have had, and which he says he cherishes.

His list friends organized a surprise lunch in his honor on Saturday prior to a little evening event with South Carolina at Neyland Stadium. About 20 people from Texas, Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee and Florida showed up at popular Knoxville restaurant and watering hole. As the administrator the list, but not an active community member, I came because Clyde is that kind of guy and I had never met face-to-face Clyde or most of these long-time members.

If your email account is, as Steve Rubel says, your "social network hub," then Clyde, who lives in Roanoke, Va., is riding the cutting Web 2.0 wave of social networking. The sports list I watch over is a heavy volume list; often more than 100 messages a day generated by a mere 300 users. The list population sometimes grows to double that number, but only the dedicated can handle that kind of daily volume of banter, opinions and gossip on anything...

Many have been on it for a decade or more.

Of course, Clyde and several other of those gathered, ribbed me a bit about the time I banished Clyde from posting for some flagrant off-topic threads. That sparked a groundswell movement within the list to "Free Clyde Clark" and wisdom prevailed over stubbornness. Community at work!

It's not about age or geography or slickness; it's about growing connections.

Question: Does a team fall apart from the stress of things not going well or do things begin to not go well when the team falls to work together?

For those who aren't NASCAR followers, this is a photo of Roush-Fenway driver Carl Edwards getting angry enough to almost punch teammate Matt Kenseth following Sunday's race in Martinsville, Va.

See the YouTube video.

Edwards yesterday said a feud had been brewing. Both drivers have been fading in the Nextel Cup Chase.  Edwards is fifth and Kenseth is 12th.

OK, so Al Gore didn't invent the Internet (single-handily), but he did make global warming a movie and he has now re-defined TV. And TIpper cleaned up the record industry. That dynamite group gave the prize to the wrong couple; It should have been Al and Tipper, not Al and the UN.

What I like about Current, apart from the awesome design, is that they're attempting to change the way television is consumed and created. It's a much more interactive experience, where the audience participates and creates.

-- Richard MacManus

Gore's Current, to use a bit more brevity than MacManus, is pretty cool. I posted a RandomThis video on it over the weekend.

(AP photo)

Andy Dickinson has done an analysis of a video survey he did among newspapers. Among the highlights:

• The average length for video is between 2 -3 minutes
• The average production time is between 2 -4 hours
• The most common camera used in newsrooms is the Cannon XH-A1
• The most common edit software in use is Final Cut pro
• Daily papers produce around 4-8 videos a week compared to 1-4 for weeklies
• Publishers with daily and weekly papers produce 2-4 videos a week
• It takes 1 hour to produce 1 minute of video

See his whole recap.

Crammed four sessions into three days. Ought to be doing five instead of four.


Month to date miles: 46.15

A video clip of Jason Calacanis in Greensboro, N.C., last week talking about why it must suck to own newspapers.

I wouldn’t want to be in that business…I’m not so tied to the idea that there has to be a local paper….Maybe a local blog is a better concept….Maybe a group of local bloggers having their work appear in one location is better.

Calacanis is a journalist-turned-scrappy-seria-entreprenuer. He is currently CEO of the search engine Mahalo, which has a cadre of folks doing something akin to journalism. A mostly lovable self-promoter with a gift for getting attention, he gives those who see local newspapers as part of the hallowed foundation of community and modern society something to think about when he says: "Why does the local newspaper have to be saved ... I'm not not so emotionally tied to the idea there has to be a local paper."

Leonard Witt, who interviewed Calacanis, says it's the first of a series on the future of jouranlism. And he's looking for others to do their own take on video and send him a link. Sort of a group edit, he says.

Now, it's your turn.

(via, of course, Jason Calacanis)

On the widely varying results of Web audience measurement:

“One of them can be right, or the other one is right, but they can’t all be right,” said Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting System. “It’s interesting that people keep talking about it as much more accountable than other media, but we’re not finding that to be the case yet because there’s no agreement on metrics or accounting methods.”

-- New York Times

It's not measurement; it's guesstimate.

The "measurement" firms each claim to have the secret sauce so instead of working together to make their counts more accurate, they just pound their chests and say theirs is better than the other guy's.

And this is a business? Works like the Mafia. Publishers pay "protection money" for the right to at least challenge the data and clean up the most egregious errors. Marketeers in the speakeasy are buying drinks all around.

I think Nissan has the right idea. Measure results.

There are several examples of how this system is being using in the Forbes article linked above, but here's a telling example:

For a recent car launch Nissan tracked how ads in different media outlets affected consumer behavior. It spent 66% of its ad budget on TV commercials, 28% on print ads and 6% on search and banner ads on the Internet. After surveying car shoppers Nissan found out that 53% of those who saw the campaign on TV, in print and online had a favorable impression of the vehicle, compared with 37% who didn't see any of the ads. Among those surveyed, 19% of respondents who saw all three types of ads said they intended to take test drives, while only 9% of Nissan ad nonviewers planned test spins. The model also indicated that the carmaker would have sold just as many vehicles but spent less on advertising if it had allocated 40% of its budget to print and dialed back spending on TV spots to 54% of its budget. "The cost implications [of that conclusion] are huge," says Stephen Kerho, Nissan's director of media and interactive marketing.

Nashville-based Nissan U.S. operations have been able to cut advertising costs per car by getting more value out of their ad dollars. Now, that's audience research and good marketing..

(via Lost Remote)

A local business blog has has some insights to an interesting new Web venture in KnoxVegas, bmovies.com from DMGX.

It launched Oct. 5 without advertising or SEM, but is attracting viewers rapidly.

Wade Austin of DMGX says:

The business plan is based on 2 core premises: 1. People will watch anything for free, and 2. Off the radar movies can be broadcasted for next to nothing.

Pop some popcorn, grab a Coke and check it out.

And his biz plan of $400,000 a month in advertising when it reaches 1 million views per month vs $15,000 in server costs gives free a pretty good profit margin.

Good luck!

Random thoughts on cursing, cussing and dirty words in general.

Steven Pinker uses 5,200 words to explain why we we curse in The New Republic article Why we curse, but he could have just stuck with "To begin with, it's a fact of life that people swear"

It's interesting that The New Republic decided not to use the illustration that was created for the article.

A lot of people have happily picked up on this report that Swearing at work 'boosts team spirt, morale' But it's not likely to win friends in HR.

And then there are words that sounds dirty that aren't.

And ones that should never be used in an email subject line.

Cartoon from Jeffrey Rowland/Overcompensating.com (larger version) and tip via  Brittney Gilbert 

"Link Crack" for blogging enterprises; they can't stop.

Buried in Valleywag's gloating over a tiny dip in print ad revenues at The Wall Street Journal was a more telling stat: The paper's print readership went up 8 percent in the past year after its publishers cut subscription rates. Average income for the Journal's two million-plus daily readers is around $200,000 a year, their average net worth over $2 million. Sixty percent are classified as "top management." If the wantrepreneurs packing Web 2.0 don't read the Journal, here's another way to look at it: Maybe they should start.

-- PAUL BOUTIN in Valleywag

Stephen Colbert thanks Craigslist founder Craig Newmark for killing the American newspaper.

I, like Dan Pacheco, believe the tipping point for traditional newspapers is within three to five years. Depending on how you look at it, the tipping point has already past, but like an earthquake in the middle of the ocean, the waves haven't hit shore (but that doesn't mean they aren't coming).

Ken Doctor seems to suggest that the tipping point came one evening at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver in 1998 about the time many of us thought we were near the beginning. Maybe.

Truth be told, the history of newspapers on the Internet is littered with missed opportunities, wrong turns, and a lack of investment that all seemed smart (or at least prudent) at the time because of the industry's strong herd instincts.

Update: The McClatchy company, which acquired the assets of Knight Ridder, is now worth less as a company ($1.5 billion) than it paid for those assets ($4.5 billion). (Knight Ridder itself was compelled to sell by a disgruntled shareholder who didn’t like the company’s valuation.) -- The Marginalization of Newspapers, Greg Sterling.

Back to AOL, which was like newspapers in its heavy dependence on subscriber revenues. Reacting a few days ago to the latest round of bloodletting at the once mighty "You've Got Mail," Pacheco says:

The problem ... is that sometimes changes in consumer behavior force transitions to happen too quickly for mainstream companies to react as gradually as they're designed for. So first they panic by laying people off to trim operations, and if that doesn't work they often end up laying off even more people just to pay the bills. And sometimes they go out of business, or are sold to the highest bidder.

It's knowing that the waves are coming that provides the opportunity even if we can't predict with certainity the exact day and time.

Oh my!

Greg Sterling on his encounter with a restaurant that has posted a sign that says "No Yelpers."

Snarky! Imagine that.

Could this be UCG backlash?

To work, users reviews aggregated have to approach the truth to be valuable to the community using them. Buyers/user/patron reviews are powerful influencers of behavior. But what of trolls, people with a vendetta and people who just get it wrong?

Interesting debate. 

Did AC Entertainment break some news yesterday on Twitter?

Announcing Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder's Christmas Show with The Whites at the Tennessee Theatre on Dec. 15! On sale Friday

AC_Ent on Twitter

(Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my feed!)

Someone drew these chalk messages on the Lakeshore Greenway trail in Knoxville for an organized walk or fun run. I like seeing them while I'm jogging. A couple more are at flickr. It's going to rain this week so they'll be gone soon.

Ok, now stats for the week.

Month to date miles: 31.50

There's been an on-and-off again debate about reader comments, how to manage them, whether real names should be required, should there be moderation and more. Comments have been generally supported as allowing reader interactivity or participation and (buzzwords of buzzwords) increasing engagement.

The New York Times is even promoting them at times to the front page of the Web site.

But are they generally bad for business?

FORBES CALLS JOURNALISTS an endangered species. It doesn't have to be that way, though journalists seem to be doing their best to undermine their own profession.

-- Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit

Also on Forbes list of Worst Jobs For The 21st Century: computer programmers, radio announcers, economists, farmers, insurance agents, commercial fishers, jewelers, travel agents, federal workers.

(Source Forbes article)

This post could be called the Harvard Guide to Business Success (if your dog is named Harvard).

There's some treats in there that could well be applied to business -- and life.

And I'll add one: Getting hung up on details is like having fleas.

You can go this way, refined a bit here, or this way, with some more thoughts here.

You're drivin' your career, make the call.

Good live Twitter stream today (10/10/07) from the Networked Journalism Summit by Ryan Sholin. Follow it.

Whooo, Sunday evening was the best of these sessions. It was cooler as the sun set and some old Steve Winwwood was rockin'.

Month to date miles: 15.75

History tells us: convenience wins, hubris loses. “Who is going to want a shitty quality LP when these 78s sound so good? Who wants a hissy cassette when they have an awesome quadrophonic system? Who wants digitized music on discs now that we have Dolby on our cassettes? Who wants to listen to compressed audio on their computers?” ANSWER: EVERYONE. Convenience wins, hubris loses.

-- Ian Rogers, Yahoo Music

There's some lessons in the post this quote was drawn from not only for the music business, but the news business as well. One of the most consistent complaints through the years about newspapers has been they're too hard to do busienss business with and newspapers artfully managed to reproduce that experience online.

And what is Jimmie Dale Gilmore thinking? See for your yourself

(via O'Reilly Radar)

Boots suffering through a photo while she wanted to be asleep on a Sunday afternoon. More photos here.

Meranda A. Watling, a 20-something newspaper reporter in Lafayette, Ind., reacts to Allan Mutters' post last week on the newsroom Brain Drain with her own experiences of being the token "target audience" in a newspaper new product development committee.

If you haven't already, read Mutter's post and particularly the comments. And read Watling post and the comments. And read Mindy McAdams' take, including more comments.

An organizational nerve has definitely been hit.

On the positive site, Watling is a creative young journalist with a position attitude. Just the kind of person newspapers need.

She says some good ideas fermenting in the new product development group are moving forward and some bad ideas got skimmed out.

She sees her organization as being proactive and feels good about that. But she also says in "Letting the young'ns have our say:"

That said, this isn't a fairy tale I'm living. And for the successes I've watched, I've also seen and been disappointed. I've seen our own best intentions get in the way of what could be really cool.

Watling's not a whiner. In fact, her experience has likely been better than most who have been through similar experiences. It's not uncommon for newspapers to invite young staffers to provide ideas only to dismiss those ideas as from the "too young to understand."

As a fifty-something manager, I'll admit I may have no clue, but I'm not so sure at all it's really an age thing. Now that online is actually considered mainstream, a vital part of future viability, and not an ancillary, there's a full scale battle over old ways  vs. new ways, or maybe it's better said as new ways of doing the same old things  vs. adopting new ways of doing.

The new ways of doing the same old things may be winning, or at the very least providing enough drag to put both camps into a protracted stalemate in a long snowy winter without supplies.

This may be just a part of the difficult transition of organizations cemented in their ways. It may be the inevitable result of trying to accomplish organizational change by committee: Committees are to get everybody together and homogenize their thinking -- Art Linkletter.

We could use a lot less homogenized thinking.

You can see the rift where Watling says she suggested writing a blog and "the response was basically that I have more than enough on my plate already, which to be fair is definitely true. But it begs the question, are the right things on the right plate? "

That would not be unique to her newsroom. What should be on the plate is at the heart of the change -- or lack thereof.

Quick tour of the 30th Annual Unicoi County Apple Festival in Erwin, Tennessee.

Subscribe to my blog!

Now, East Carolina football fans (where I went to college) have had a rep for being a tad bit on the rowdy side. There have been those four little incidents (see photo caption), among others, at N.C. State.

But louder than Vol fans in Neyland?

ECU athletic director Terry Holland includes this quote in an email to ECU supporters:

"To be honest, I'm not so sure that 43,000 wasn't louder than that 107,000," Southern Miss defensive coordinator Jay Hopson said. "I was like, 'Goolllyy!' That was a loud crowd that rocked for 60 minutes."

Southern Mississippi took on the Vols the week before. Times are tough in Volville when the opposing team says what often is the largest crowd in college football on any given fall Saturday is just not as loud as some places they visit. 

I found several excellent videos on some of the potters I know in Seagrove, NC. We've bought several (as in lots) of pieces of Terry and Anna King and their daughter, Crystal. Terry King, who I went to high school with one year, also talks a bit about my favorite Seagrove potters, Dorothy and Walter Auman, who made our wedding china. You need to go yourself!





The videos were done by Dan McCoig. He's got lots more videos from the Southeast. I noticed several out of Great Smoky Mountains and East Tennessee.
 
Hey Dan, I like that Knoxville cap. I'll send you a knoxnews.com cap if you want one!

Has this happened to you?

At knoxnews, we post a lot of our videos on YouTube, especially those done by our TV critic (they get a lot more traffic there than on our site).

However, we recently received this email from YouTube.

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation claiming that this material is infringing:

"Reno 911!" officers "ain't retarded": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl4V4lzTyI8

Ok, this is a video that our writer shot. It wasn't shot on a movie or TV set. It's not a bootleg movie or even a movie trailer. It's journalism; it's an interview!

Here's the offending clip in Windows Media (WMV) format.

What's up with that?

It makes me think that the garish cigar-chomping studio bosses of yore would like come back as the studio bosses of the Internet. But the studio system ended sometime back in the 20th century, right? Maybe not at 20th Century Fox.

Now, that's retarded.

The camera wielding woman in the foreground is Knoxville News Sentinel online editor Jigsha Desai. She was getting react to the jury verdict that found the county commission had violated the state open meetings law. The lawsuit, one of the most intently followed stories of the year in the Knoxville area, had been brought by the newspaper.

And it marked an innovative experiment with bloggers. Because of the newspaper's conflict of interest, Editor Jack McElroy  enlisted the help of three bloggers to help cover the trial and the newspaper's coverage. They did many posts, one live-blogged several days in court, one did podcasts and questioned our motives, one did daily no-holds-barred critiques of the coverage. The three bloggers were David Oatney, Russ Hailey, and Russ McBee and it was good stuff. And, of course, they weren't the only ones blogging it.

Jigsha Desai did daily video coverage of the trial as part of a package that included stories updated several times a day by reporter Jamie Satterfield and photos by several staff photographers throughout the trial.

But this front page photo says it for me in how this business I've been in for 30 years is changing.

(News Sentinel photo by J. Miles Cary)

18,000 words just lost their hyphen, victims of tex(-)messaging and e(-)mail.

But Google still loves 'em.

(via Steve Rubel) 

This strikes me as just crazy: The nation's daily newspapers are spending nearly $1 billion on postage for services from the U.S. Postal Service.

-- From the Newspaper Association of America.

I found this a striking finding in a new survey. I wonder if it's the clunky hardware/technology of mobile telephony or it's just lifestyle:

Mobile multimedia usage was the one area that lacked strong penetration--even with connected consumers--as the majority (64%) said they never used their mobile phone to "check weather, news or sports headlines." Similarly, 76% never used mobile to watch video, 68% said the same for listening to music, and 58% had never used their phone to check email. Some 53% of connected consumers, however, had used their phones to take photos and then share them on the Web.

That graph was from a MediaPost story on a newly released study done for Avenue A | Razorfish. It was of "connected consumers," people that use social media sites, have broadband, are over 20 and have dropped a couple hundred bucks online in the last year.

Most mobile news and information content is one-way: pushed to the consumer, while the Web 2.0 world, which this survey was studying, is about engaging or creating a relationship with the user. What these respondents had done is used their mobile phones to create media (photographs). Yeah, the iPhone may be a game changer, but it's not the mobile Web; it's the real web gone mobile.

Other findings: Video is big with this group (95 percent watch it online) and blogging (78 percent read them; 41 percent blogged) and news content (91 percent rely on the Web to get current news or information) and, despite sounded like the acronym of an obscure government agency, 53 percent are using RSS.

Even more telling for this group was the amount of media they are creating rather than consuming on the Web:

• 49% have uploaded a video in the past 3 months.
• 41% write or post to blogs
• 53% share bookmarks with others through services like del.icio.us
• 41% use photo-sharing sites such as Flickr

The details of the "Digital Consumer Behavior Study" (creative with naming aren't they) are at the Digital Design Blog of Avenue A | Razorfish.

The study has some really smart advice:

1. Make Content Portable – Ride the personalization wave by making your content portable. RSS offers a great means for users to subscribe to your content and get frequent updates. Widgets enable consumers to have deeper and richer experiences with a Web site’s features and functions anywhere.
2. Enable Consumer Ratings and Reviews – Ensure that consumers can contribute and access peer reviews. Retailers should enable consumers to rate and review products. Publishers should allow “commenting” whenever possible.
3. Invest in Online Video – Online video is the next great growth wave in the industry. Make sure all video assets become digitized and integrated with existing content and services. Look for near-term advances in video advertising to help monetize the effort.
4. Think Beyond the Web site – Your Web site plays a much less central role in today’s consumer Web experience. Think about how search, advertising, social media sites and the blogsphere are related to your digital marketing efforts and invest appropriately.
5. Take Small Steps with Mobile – Mobile data usage is still nascent. Take a measured approach to investing and keep an eye on Apple’s iPhone for near-term breakthroughs.

Those are definitely five good things to have at the top of your goals list. The home page as a starting point or an end point destination is becoming a much less meaningful goal in interacting and engaging with an audience.

Walked instead of jogging more last week than I normally do. Good week.



Month to date miles: 64.66

Where have I been been not to know this.

(via J.D. Lasica)

He's sold me on this place.