Archive for August, 2007

Take a look at this ad from Facebook, which is in between two items in my account’s Newsfeed:

I’m not sure if this format is new, but until a couple weeks ago I never noticed any ads or “Sponsored” messages in my Newsfeed. There were only vertical banner ads in the left column — which are all but invisible and I’m sure suffered from dismal clickthrough rates. I know that I hardly ever look at the banners. If we did an eyetracking test on Facebook’s left-side banner, it would perform pathetically. (I managed an eyetracking project when I worked at the Poynter Institute a few years ago.)

But the new ad format set within users’ Newsfeeds is brilliant. It follows some of the advice that we gave in Poynter’s Eyetrack III study to make online ads most effective:

• Inset the ad within the flow of “editorial” content, so the eye has no choice but to go over it. (The left-side banner can be avoided; the eye isn’t forced to go there.)
• Use similar colors and design look and feel as surrounding editorial content.

Critics may argue that this approach by Facebook tries to trick users into viewing the ad, by doing the above. I don’t buy that. The “Sponsored” text cue is enough for me; it makes the point without going overboard to announce “Hey, this is an ad!”

Editor & Publisher Online published some of the letters from folks who hated my most recent column. Here.

I’l resist debating everyone, but this particular statement galled me:

… Advocacy journalism involves artfully telling the reader what they should think, Steve, not the other way around. Its great practitioners, from Ida Tarbell to John Stewart, don’t waste time on such self-important navel gazing.

That was from someone at a newspaper (I’m not surprised), and it falls into the trap of failing to understand the nature of the media transformation we’re in the middle of. It presupposes that only the anoited few have the power and influence to engage in advocacy journalism. Hey, Jon Stewart is great, and his wonderfully expressed opinions no doubt influence a lot of people on political issues. But the revolution in digital media, which gives everyone the “power of the press,” to an extent, means that people really do have power nowadays — and the masses through various interactive digital media can be equally as influential.

A creative and powerful amateur video, spread virally on Youtube, may get more viewers than an episode of The Daily Show. A swarm of bloggers advocating on a particular issue can make huge waves.

And one more thing. (I know, I said I really didn’t want to go overboard on reacting to this controversy, but …) Some of the letters E&P published are from journalists, who berate me for suggesting that a newspaper might advocate on an issue. Yet their papers all have editorial pages that routinely advocate on all sorts of things. But the suggestion that on a critical issue a newspaper cannot go beyond the editorial or op-ed page is viewed as heresy. Well, that strikes me as an anachronism in today’s media environment.

The world is changing folks. Stop hanging on to a past media “nirvana” that has plenty of issues of its own.

It’s interesting (and amusing) to see some bloggers attack me for my recent Editor & Publisher Online column about press coverage of global warming/climate change.

I don’t intend to turn my blog into a venue for debating political issues. (I do wonder why the debate over human influence of climate change has become a political issue; it should be a scientific one, leaving out the absurdity of people trying to convince us that the climate scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.) I’ll stick mostly to where I have expertise, which is new media. But I do want to express one (I hope last) thought to follow up my previous blog item.

If you look at why people believe in “God,” an argument you often hear is: “No, i can’t prove that there is a God, but I’d rather place my bet that there is and worship that God. There’s too much to lose — I could go to hell — if I decide not to believe, then discover at the end of this earthly life that I was wrong.” It’s too much of a gamble — there’s too much at stake — to not believe in and worship God, and if you do believe and it turns out you’re wrong, there’s no penalty, their argument goes. (This is otherwise known as Pascal’s wager.)

Personally I don’t buy that, yet I do take a similar view when it comes to taking action to alleviate climate change. If we listened to the skeptics and did nothing because we thought the climate scientists wrong or alarmist, we’d be taking a huge gamble with truly dire consequences for future generations if we lost. To keep buying SUVs, not change our lifestyles, and otherwise continue as usual to my mind is immoral.

I’m willing to bet that some of the global warming skeptics criticizing me are religious people, who have taken Pascal’s wager on God. Why they would choose to not apply that approach to doing something about climate change is beyond my comprehension.

My latest Editor & Publisher Online column, published this week, was a bit out of the ordinary for me. Instead of sticking to online media trends and news as I usually do, I did an opinion piece about climate change and how the newspaper industry fails to use its power to influence positive behavior because of a tendency of editors and publishers to refrain from declaring that the “debate” over global warming is essentially over (by taking too seriously the increasingly irrelevant skeptics). Newspapers could, for the public good, I suggested, consider taking an advocacy approach and encouraging behavior change by people.

I guessed I’d piss off some people with that, and indeed it appears I have. A quick blog search on my name reveals that I’m getting called a bunch of nasty names. (“What rock did this guy crawl out from under…,” etc.)

My column hasn’t generated vitriol like this in a while. I guess I’ve been too bland of late, till now. Oh, well, if it gets some people thinking about the issue of global warming and the press’ role, then that’s great — and I’ll take my lumps from the blogosphere.

One thing about the arrows coming my way, though, bugs me. Editor & Publisher is often brought up, as though E&P (the premier trade publication of the newspaper industry) endorses what I wrote. Hey, this was my opinion, not theirs. E&P was nice enough to not reject my column rant, but the words of a freelance columnist have no bearing on the policy of the magazine. It’s like the letters to the editor you see constantly complaining about some right- or left-wing column that was printed in a newspaper — “How could you publish that trash?! Cancel my subscription!” — when the paper routinely publishes various points of view.

Me (Dad): “If you could only have one available to you, which would it be: TV or computer/Internet?”

Daughter, age 15: (without hesitation) “Computer, because with TV I couldn’t be in touch with all my friends. You can do so much more on the computer — even watch some TV. TV is just one small thing, but the Internet is so much more.”

Is anyone surprised by that answer? I’m sure it’s typical of people her age. (Actually, I’d give the same answer.)

From the Hollywood Reporter, citing a media usage survey by IBM:

Personal time that consumers spend on the Internet is rivaling their TV time, with user-generated content and networking sites among the most popular destinations for entertainment seekers. Plus, people seem more open to mobile content and are looking for more traditional entertainment offerings on their mobile devices than previously thought.

That’s no surprise, after watching my teenage daughter come home from 4 weeks at summer camp (where there were no Internet or cell phones). You’d think she’d want to catch up on her favorite TV shows after being unplugged for that long. No, she spent the first few hours back in the modern world using MySpace, Facebook and IM.

Company portrait: Enthusiast Group LLC, Boulder, Colorado (Neal, Liz, me, Ben, Derek, Yann)

At one point in time I used to check my spam folder in Gmail to make sure nothing important slipped in there by accident. I’d regularly find a personal message or two. But now, the amount of stuff going into the spam bucket is so huge that I don’t have time to look for good messages that may have slipped through. I can only hope that Gmail is doing a good job.

Have you e-mailed me and haven’t gotten a responses? While it could be that I’m overwhelmed with non-spam e-mail and haven’t had time to respond, the other possibility is that you were tagged by Gmail as spam — and I’ll never know.

Perhaps the young generation has it right. Many of them consider e-mail their parents’ generation online tool and communicate via instant messaging, SMS phone messages, Facebook and MySpace. Spam is a bit less of a problem since those direct-communication channels are open primarily to friends — not any anonymous spammer who wants to come calling.

I’ve written periodically about Twitter, as a new form of (really short) writing. I still haven’t figured out how to best use it — that is, what to write about when I’ve only got 140 characters. But now I’m getting periodic notifications when someone signs up to follow my Twitter log. (I follow a couple of friends’ and colleagues’ Twitter logs, myself.) The numbers are still minuscule, but I’m starting to feel the pressure to put something interesting up there!

As any journalist knows, it’s often easy to write long than write short. To keep the word count down and still express yourself is not always easy. So Twitter isn’t as easy as it looks, unless you just use it for mindless drivel.

A social network for college students. … No, not Facebook or MySpace. A new one, operated by a local newspaper, just for students in its coverage area.

Does it have a snowball’s chance in hell going up against FB and MySpace, when accounts on those giant social networks are ubiquitous among the college crowd? I’m not sure, but I’m glad someone’s trying it.

According to this report, the Roanoke Times in Virginia has built a website for college students in the Roanoke-Blacksburg area, called BigLickU.com. It may be the first attempt by a metro newspaper to reach into the college market with a social networking site.

The assumption behind the initiative is that “local matters,” and that it can pull in students despite the wild success and huge numbers of students who have Facebook and MySpace accounts. (I have a sense that it would be difficult to find a student these days who doesn’t have a Facebook account.)

Let’s watch and see. I think it’s got a chance. It reminds me of efforts like the Bakersfield Californian’s Bakotopia, which is a social network and free classifieds service that basically took on Craigslist for its local market — and seems to be doing well.

Is a successful national service that does a great job of localizing social networking (Facebook) vulnerable because it’s gotten “too big”? I don’t have the answer to that, but a lot of people are hoping that the answer is yes.

One bit of advice I’d give news folks thinking of creating social networks for their local college market: Don’t create an island, but figure out how to utilize Facebook, which makes it easy to create applications for use on its platform. Facebook is the classic “frienemy” in that while it’s certainly the big competitor, it also offers ways to leverage it to serve your own website(s).

(If you’re a local news organization and are interested in developing a social network a la BigLickU.com [or some variation], do contact me. My company, the Enthusiast Group, is now in the business of developing social networking and grassroots media sites for publishers and other companies.)