Apr 21, 2009
Recent posts at Nieman Journalism Lab
As I’ve been doing all my journalism-related posting at Nieman Journalism Lab, and my higher-ed posting hasn’t yet ramped up here, my blog has gotten cobwebby in the past month.
So, this list of what I’ve been up to lately. I’d be honored if you follow any or all of the links below. You can also find all my posts aggregated on one page at Nieman Lab as well.
More here soon, including a long-promised (to myself, at least) redesign.
- I reported on a great new weekly podcast with Dave Winer and NYU’s Jay Rosen called “Rebooting the News.”
- I reported from a talk by Baltimore Sun editor Monty Cook where he said, among other provocative things, the days of 6-part series may be numbered. “Watergate was beat reporting, not a series.”
- I took on David Carr, of all people, for his drumbeat in favor of paid content.
- I started a robust discussion by suggesting that the backlash against the DiggBar was a sign that users are much more in control than the publishers.
- I chided the Los Angeles Times for their front page fake news article advertising, not because it was bad journalism, but because it was bad advertising.
- I suggested a few items that were missing from Dean Singleton’s speech to the Associated Press. Stuff like vision. And ideas.
Thanks for reading.
I continued on my soapbox rant against useless and insulting robolinks at news web sites.
Mar 17, 2009
How Apple media swarms the news
On the Nieman Journalism Lab today, I point to the semi-yearly ritual of Apple-focused media covering today’s iPhone 3.0 announcements as a great example of distributed reporting, well-suited to a web and mobile delivery model.
For more, and links to all the iPhone 3.0 action, please join me at The Lab.
Mar 13, 2009
Why won’t news sites link?
It’s a great story. A magician posts videos of him shipping himself to Vegas from upstate New York via UPS. The Feds investigate. Turns out it’s a hoax and a publicity stunt. Hilarity ensues.
So far, so good. But you’re reading this online. What’s your first thought?
Right: Where’s the video?
You won’t find it in the AP retelling on the Newsday.com site.
You won’t find a link to the YouTube preview, or the special microsite set up to detail the fake journey.
You won’t find the links in the original story, in which the Syracuse Post-Standard is punked by the magician. (You will find the non-linked name of the web site, a sure sign that this is an automated port of a newspaper story)
And you won’t find them in the follow-up story on the Post-Standard either.
I’m picking on this one story, but it’s typical of far too many news web site stories that have obvious link potential: You won’t find links there.
Mar 11, 2009
More evidence that social media works
Susan Mernit — another prolific and incisive writer that may not be yet be among the bookmarks of enough journalists — shares a long excerpt of an even more exhaustive White Paper on how she and her team used social media to significantly raise awareness of the most recent Knight News Challenge.
In “Case study, using social media for social good: The Knight News Challenge 2008/09,” Mernit shows, step-by-step, why you weren’t imagining things when you thought that there was an awful lot of publicity about the Challenge this time around.
Click here for the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
Mar 11, 2009
“Predisposed to miserabilism”
While we’re thinking Big Thoughts about what to do after the last press wheezes to its end, I thought I’d share this funny graf about newspapermen from James Lileks, newspaperman:
You can’t avoid being tagged as habitual downers when you’re in the news business, because the Truth Hurts, or at least Hurts Someone Else – but sometimes I suspect many people in the news business are temperamentally predisposed to miserabilism, because the idea of an unjust world run by monied smileys explains why the cheerleader turned them down for a date in high school. But I know too many who don’t fit that mold. So ignore the above, except when it seems to explain something. Except when you read someone who seems to think that by afflicting the comfortable, the afflicted are automatically comforted. As if writing is charity.
From today’s Bleat.
Mar 4, 2009
Einstein proves advertising and content are not necessarily opposites
The current newspaper business revenue crisis has led to some old ideas being dusted off and presented as new (Paid content! Micropayments! Preservation of print circulation!), and who knows? Maybe some of the experiments rumored and foreshadowed in Long Island and Seattle and across the Hearst Empire will net some needed dollars for the ongoing operations.
But what about advertising, which remains a huge part of any revenue strategy? Surely the banner ad isn’t the sum total of our creativity in commerce? Google couldn’t have managed to build the most perfect form of commercial speech on their first try, could they? Where is the creativity in commercials? How can local newspaper companies — with their deep ties into their communities, their newsrooms full of subject-matter experts, and their platoons of sales people — have managed to not move the needle more than a few notches in 15 years of building and selling ads online?
I was wondering this last week as found my mind drifting away from the evening clot of sheet metal and tires inching northwards toward the ‘burbs and thinking about the life of Albert Einstein. My Einstein reverie wasn’t out of the blue; it was prompted by an equal parts funny and entertaining riff by The Chicago Sun-Times’s tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, who was recommending — at length — an audio book about the atomic genius.
And here’s the point: it was an ad. It’s part of a weekly feature on the popular podcasts from Leo Laporte’s TWiT network in which journalist panelists on the showstep ever-so-slightly out of their traditional roles to talk about a book that they love that happens to be available for download as part of an Audible.com subscription.
Listen below as Ihnatko and Laporte talk about Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson.
Forget TiVo-proof 30-second spots, that’s a 12-minute ad! Or, to be more precise, it’s 10 minutes of interesting and entertaining content that happens to also be the largest part of an ad.
Feb 17, 2009
The “new newsroom” is being created one reporter at a time
(Cross-posted to Nieman Journalism Lab)
What does the journalist of the future look like?
PR whiz Steve Rubel says he looks a lot like Peter Abraham, who is not some vaporware demo from 2015, but a flesh-and-blood reporter covering the Yankees spring training camp in Florida.
Abraham is the Yankees beat writer for the Journal News in Westchester county (a NYC suburb). According to Burrelles Luce, it’s the 94th largest newspaper in the US with a daily circ of 100,000 readers.
Abraham is on the scene in Tampa where the Yankees are training and he’s doing it all – in addition to filing regular reports for the paper that appear in print. Here’s an inventory of his social media footprint….
First, he has a blog with a full-text feed that includes several posts/day and hundreds of comments/day from readers. It dates back to 2006.
In addition, Abraham has a Facebook group that has about 1600 members.
He is posting photos from spring training using his iPhone. Note the gear the others are using by comparison.
There is a podcast up on iTunes that right now is updated daily with audio.
Finally, today he was using both CoverItLive and Mogulus to have a live video/text chat with readers.
While Abraham is still a bit of an Edge Case, what’s really heartening is that, with each passing day, stories like this become less amazing, as they become more common. What examples have you seen in your market or nationally of journalists redefining the profession?
Me, elsewhere