Archive for April, 2006

Spam filters are both blessing and curse. Don’t get me wrong; I’m thankful that my filters pick up the majority of junk e-mail that’s aimed at my in-box. But there’s a dark side to spam filters, which I was reminded of when reading Randy Cassingham’s This Is True newsletter last night.

The weekly humorous-news e-newsletter (free version) contains four items, with full text. But here’s the third item this week:

THE STORY IN THIS SPACE cannot be e-mailed due to its “adult” nature (a particular word in it will trip many spam filters). To read it see http://thisistrue.com/smothering_skills_government_division_9296.html. You are of course welcome to send the URL around to others.

The dark side of spam filtering is the effect it has on legitimate publishers in curbing what they write. No naughty words; no commonly used words that trip spam filters. Rafat Ali with his PaidContent.org e-newsletter goes so far as to purposely misspell words like “free,” because correct spelling will prevent delivery to his opt-in subscribers.

This is not a new problem. But I wonder if the filters will ever get enough intelligence to permit a non-porn use of the word “masturbation,” as Cassingham attempted, without blocking legitimate e-mail delivery. I’m not hopeful — and meanwhile, this item may get blocked from some subscribers’ in-boxes. Sigh.

So I’m looking for a summer intern for my new company. I’ve sent announcements to the journalism programs at a couple of the major universities near me, the University of Colorado here in Boulder, and Colorado State University. A handful of resumes have come in, but I’m underwhelmed.

This is an intern position, so I’m not expecting lots of experience or killer skills. What I’m hoping to find is a student who is passionate about new media; who understands what I mean when I say that my company embodies the spirit of “citizen media”; who knows what blogging and podcasting are about; who gets why YouTube.com is exciting; who recognizes where the media world is heading and doesn’t aspire to a traditional TV or newspaper job after graduation.

Most of the resumes that have landed in my inbox don’t demonstrate any or much of that. I’m shocked. It makes me wonder if those journalism programs aren’t adequately preparing their students for the media of tomorrow.

Maybe the intern position looks too boring? I doubt it. Our business model touches on most of the cutting-edge developments in media. We deal with fun content (adventure sports).

Are most of today’s students stuck in media’s past? Where are the students looking for a fun part-time job in Boulder, Colorado, for the summer who fit my description above?

Here’s something profound from Berkeley Breathed, creator of Bloom County (the classic, now-defunct comic strip) and Opus (currently running in Sunday newspapers). This is from an LA Times article:

“I don’t think you’ll ever see another ‘Calvin & Hobbes,’ ‘Bloom County’ or ‘Doonesbury‘ again,” says Breathed, 48, who received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. “The popularity of those strips was built on a young audience — great comic strips are not built on the backs of aging readers.”

He’s right. Cartoonists need to be thinking about building the “next Calvin & Hobbes” for the Internet first, and printed newspapers secondarily. If a comic is to get truly popular, it must reach a large audience online. And the next Calvin & Hobbes probably won’t be static pixels, but rather multimedia, a la Mark Fiore’s great opinion cartoons.

I’ve been in the Internet business a long time (since 1994), so I’ve experienced the days when most people didn’t have a clue why anyone would need this Internet thing, to these days when the Internet is another vital utility as important to most people’s lives as the phone.

Today here in Boulder (Colorado), I saw two things that made me appreciate how far we’ve come:

1. The lead story in the Boulder Daily Camera this morning was that the city of Boulder is considering contracting to provide wi-fi Internet access to the whole city.

2. Walking to a music concert this evening at my youngest daughter’s elementary school, I noticed a large, permanent banner that had recently been installed over the walkway from the parking lot to the building. It reads: “www.douglasselementary.com”.

(The school website in its current form was put together by another parent and me a couple years ago, though my activity with it has dropped back considerably because of the time my new company is taking.)

In my latest Editor & Publisher Online column, mentioned here the other day, among other things I suggest that all journalists should have a blog and that they should use it — and the interactivity with the audience that blogs afford — to be more transparent and open about their lives and activities. I meant that as a means to get out of journalism-ivory-tower mode and present themselves as more human.

For another viewpoint, I encourage you to read this piece in Snarkaholic by Tish Grier, who makes some good points about journalists who may have less than idyllic lives and may have good reason for not sharing too much.

Grier wrote this to me in a personal note (published here with her permission):

“Many, many adults should not mix their personal blogs or too much personal information with their professional writing. Face it, Steve, unless an adult has a wonderful, wholesome personal life — replete with spouse, kids, and the right social connections — his/her personal life is not something that most people want to know about. It becomes, in colloquial lexicon, ‘Too Much Information.’

“And, let’s face another fact, some of the best journalists and writers are folks who live a bit on the edge — who are single, who are a bit debauched, who are free spirits with complicated lives. They’re not always good family men and women attending the right charity fundraiser.

“It would be a shame to force journalists to put up personal pages that would be constructed only to show the world a perfected public personna that one is agreeable to the wider world. That would be just as, if not more, dishonest than if they’d made up a story about a kid dying of cancer.”

Some good points, Tish. I don’t advocate that media organizations mandate “getting naked,” as you put it. Yet I still think that for most journalists, opening themselves up to their audiences can be a very good thing.

Who says old dogs newspapers can’t learn new tricks? Take a look at this MySpace user page. It’s actually a persona for 7, the weekly entertainment section of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington.

Online publisher Ken Sands of the newspaper explains: “It’s our way of joining the social network of local musicians (and a jillion other young people).”

Very smart. If you’re a local newspaper, you don’t have to spend all your effort trying to compete with MySpace for the attention of young people. Spend some effort joining in and taking advantage of what MySpace can do for you.

Aargh! One of my main e-mail addresses isn’t working (steve@outing.us). Until it’s fixed, I can still be reached at steve@enthusiastgroup.com.

(Fixed now. If I bounced your mail to me, please try again!)

My monthly column for Editor & Publisher Online has been published: “Home, Home on the Web: Giving the Audience Some ‘Space’ of Their Own.” Here’s the description: “Millions of people — yes, more of them young than old — are creating their own personal spaces online at these huge websites, sharing their lives, often in intimate detail, with the world. Yet with rare exceptions, the newspaper industry is avoiding this personal-page and social-networking trend.”

Walker Thompson, enthusiast-in-chief of my company’s first website, YourMTB.com, travels light when he heads out on his mountain bike. Even on long epic rides, he takes along just a small Camelback for water and stuffs his rear jersey pockets with a few necessities.

With his new responsibilities for YourMTB, he’s now shooting video of his rides. So how’s he going to fit a video camera on board? Well, I did a bunch of research on small digital video cameras and helmet cams, and we decided on the Samsung SC X210L Sports Camcorder.

This thing is amazingly cool. It’s about the size of an iPod and has a separate helmet cam that you strap on and plug into the main unit (tucked into a jersey pocket). I’m excited about this product because I’m hoping a lot more people will buy them and have fun videos to share of their adventures.

Walker’s still playing with his new toy and experimenting with settings. The quality of the videos is pretty good for the web. Click the photo accompanying this item to launch a short video of Walker’s latest: A friend shot him navigating the trickiest part of Fruita’s epic The Edge Loop ride this weekend.

Kevin Sites is an old journalist (CNN correspondent) who became a new journalist (correspondent for Yahoo! News). Associated Press reporter Anick Jesdanun profiles Sites and his Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone feature for Yahoo!

I’m sure we’ll see many more reporters like Sites in the years ahead, operating as independent correspondents and funded by non-traditional organizations. Yahoo! News is mostly about aggregating news content from external sources; its game plan does not appear to include replicating an ABC News-like operation, but rather funding a few independent news mini-sites like Hot Zone.

I was quoted in this AP piece, and I told the reporter that Sites reminds me of the NY Times’ op-ed columnist, Nicholas Kristof, since both tend to shine spotlights on stories in parts of the world where the mainstream press is underreporting or ignoring them. Used to be that only a major news organization like NYT could afford to send a correspondent around the world the way it does with Kristof. Not so any longer, as companies like Yahoo! get into the correspondent game. I wonder what company will be next to enter the news game in this way?