Archive for September, 2007

Journalism department chairman resists his dean’s proposal to dispense with print edition of student newspaper and go with online only version, and is fired. Below is the banner ad that showed up when I viewed this story.

Duncan Riley writes on TechCrunch about ABC News letting go of Amanda Congdon, the Rocketboom girl:

As much as we wish Amanda the very best in her future endeavors, her failure to move from online celebrity to mainstream media company successfully does bring into question the ability of online stars to go mainstream.”

Ummm, no it doesn’t. It proves that one Internet celebrity perhaps was not a good fit for mainstream media. And that’s it.

It’s reality that nowadays, some mainstream media people will come via the route of online first, before moving to mainstream media jobs. For someone yearning to work in TV, a career path that begins with online is a legitimate one.

Indeed, in today’s media landscape, it’s legitimate also to go the other direction, from TV to online.

Riley’s statement implies that Internet “stars” are somehow lesser talents than old-media ones. That is just plain wrong.

I’m not at all surprised that NYTimes.com has decided to scrap its TimesSelect paid premium content program. That was the program that put (among other things) the Times’ popular op-ed columnists behind a paid subscription wall.

The Times story on the move blames Google, in effect, for the failure of TimesSelect to do better. More traffic than anticipated came from search engine referrals as well as inbound traffic from blogs and other websites, rather than directly through the NYTimes.com homepage. And that other-sourced traffic was less likely to pony up for a paid subscription. Ergo, it was time to figure out how to monetize that other inbound traffic; TimesSelect wasn’t helping.

Looking back on my writing, when TimesSelect debuted I gave it a chance of succeeding but was skeptical. I guess I should have been much more skeptical.

Does this mean that paid content is dead for online newspapers? No. It does mean that the bar for what can be charged for is set higher. If you’ve got truly unique content that people want, and that can’t be found elsewhere, there’s still a chance.

After reading the Enabling the Social Company white paper, which I wrote for the Enthusiast Group and released last week, Nupur Sen sent me a bunch of follow-up questions about social networking/media and how companies are starting to use it. Perhaps our exchange will be useful to others exploring this burgeoning field, so I’ve published it over here (on a Facebook group devoted to the white paper).

That’s in a discussion area, so feel free to join in if you have a comment or want to take me to task on anything.

I really like this e-mail I just received from NYTimes.com:

One of the mega-trends when it comes to news consumption is, of course, that consumers no longer rely on a single brand — or even just a few. Great, credible news sources from around the world are available freely with a few clicks. There are lots and lots of great blogs and alternative news and information sources. The modern news consumer samples many of them on a regular basis.

The news website that treats itself as an island, featuring only its own content and not linking out to the rest of the information world, is bucking that trend. MyTimes acknowledges the inevitable change in news consumption behavior and figures out how to serve it. That’s simply smart.

Which would you rather use: An automated or mostly automated news aggregator like Google News or Yahoo! News or Topix.net? Or a service that does pretty much the same thing but is tied to your favorite news brand? If I have great respect for the brand (and I certainly do for NYT), then I well might choose the latter.

Marc Fest, director of communications for the Knight Foundation, sent along this intriguing note:

The Knight Foundation’s News Challenge contest offers $5 million for digital media ideas that ‘foster community.’ The contest’s website states that the digital projects have to reach people ‘in a specific geographic area.’ You would think that’s pretty easy, but last year amazingly only 200 applications ended up meeting all contest requirements and being innovative at the same time. It’s worth reading the rules, because 26 of last year’s 200 finalists ended up winning more than $12 million altogether. Statistically, that’s an extraordinary winning chance.

Deadline for applications is October 15,  and anybody worldwide can apply.

Last time I spoke with Gary Kebbel, who heads up the News Challenge program, he predicted that the contest would see several thousand entries this year — well above last year’s. I thought that sounded so competitive that unless your idea was absolutely killer, why go to the bother of applying. But this changes things. If you’ve got an idea that fits within the contest critiera, go for it!

Since I wrote an Editor & Publisher Online column recently about media coverage of climate change — and got a ton of flak about my views, much of it negative — I was intrigued to hear an NPR report, “News Corp. Sets ‘Green’ Goals,” earlier this week. The piece by Nate DiMeo talks about News Corp.’s new initiative — supported by Rupert Murdoch himself — to lessen the organization’s carbon footprint and influence public behavior.

The move by the parent company of conservative news network Fox News emphasizes such things as using the company’s entertainment offerings to influence people. For example, global warming/climate change references will be incorporated into plot lines of some Fox TV shows. The company recognizes that it can influence people with its popular and much-watched entertainment products into lessening their own carbon footprint and being aware of the problem. To that I say, bravo.

The initiative will not cross over to the news division, however. Indeed, Fox News’ conservative commentators like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly could be miffed at their boss’ initiative in other divisions, since they tend to side with and give voice to global warming skeptics.

I still find it odd that news organizations mostly refuse to go beyond their role of strictly reporting on and analyzing climate change news. Helping to avert planetary environmental disaster, I’d think, is a cause worth championing. (To reiterate, I am NOT talking about abandoning objective coverage of climate change; some critics seemed to think that’s what I have suggested.)

This column from a couple weeks ago by Mark Lynas, in New Statesman, is pretty close to my view. He’s commenting on the larger issue and a specific recent incident where the BBC cancelled a project called Planet Relief, which was a proposed day of climate change-related programming and entertainment modeled on Comic Relief. BBC Newsnight editor Peter Barron was quoted as saying in explaining the cancellation: ”It is absolutely not the BBC’s job to save the planet.”

Wow. I find that attitude — which is clearly prevalent in the news industry — sad. Lynas responded eloquently:

“If Barron is really suggesting that the BBC should be ‘neutral’ on the question of planetary survival, his absurd stance surely sets a new low for political cowardice in the media. It is also completely inconsistent. On easy moral questions, such as poverty in Africa, the BBC is quite happy to campaign explicitly (as with Comic Relief or Live Aid), despite the claim by the corporation’s head of television news, Peter Horrocks, that its role is ‘giving people information, not leading them or prophesying.’ By analogy, the BBC would have been neutral on the question of slavery in the mid-19th century, and should be giving full voice today to the likes of the British National Party — all in the interests of balance and fairness. Likewise, it should not cover the plight of Aids orphans in South Africa without constantly acknowledging the views of the tiny minority who still dispute the link between HIV and Aids.”

I’ve been alerting folks in my professional contact network about my new white paper. One of the ways I did that was to go through my Facebook friends list, and send messages — via Facebook — to those I thought would be interested.

Now, I could have sent them e-mails, but using Facebook to send the messages was easier and faster. (Facebook profiles show friends’ e-mail addresses, but you can’t copy and paste them.)

I’ve been wondering if I’ll get any backlash for this, but so far nothing. Folks don’t seem to mind, and they reply to me, usually, with a Facebook message sent to my Facebook inbox.

Using Facebook for messaging is problematic in terms of archiving. To look for old messages, I now have to search not only Gmail (the service I use) but also Facebook. I await a solution to tie those together. Google, when will you have that ready? (Part of Socialstream, maybe? I don’t see mention of e-mail integration, just integrating across multiple social networks. But solving this little problem sure would be nice!)

Written by me for my company, the Enthusiast Group: Enabling the Social Company.

OK, you know it’s practically the definition of a corporate white paper that there’s an ulterior motive. Mine is that my company is now in the business of providing social media/social networking technology, community management and strategic consulting (we call the whole package E++, aka the Enthusiast Engagement Platform). So some folks who read the paper will become aware of that.

But I’m a journalist at heart, so I wrote Enabling the Social Company with the idea of offering some useful information for media and brand companies that are trying to figure out how this whole social media / social networking / conversational media / conversational marketing trend means to them, and how to take advantage of it. (I also include a couple pages of definitions of all the overlapping terminology.)

Short version: It’s good to talk with your audience and your customers. Get over talking to them; that’s so 1990s. Media and marketing in 2007 and beyond are conversational. We are in the age of ubiquitous digital personal expression. It’s gone too far to fight it, so figure out how to take advantage of it.

I hope you find it useful. Report PDF can be picked up here.

Continuing on my temporary climate change theme (I hope you’ll bear with me just a bit longer), I want to offer this excerpt from a column by Sacramento Bee executive editor and senior VP Rick Rodriquez:

“A group of the world’s leading scholars on climate change had a message for news executives earlier this week: In reporting the global warming story, you have taken ‘journalistic balance’ too far.

“A bit of a switch since the media are usually accused of not being balanced enough.

“The scientists’ point cut to the core of how journalists do stories. Is it right, they asked, to give equal weight to the comparatively small number of scientists who say humans aren’t contributing to climate change when the vast majority of those who have studied the issue say they are?

“In other words, when is there enough science for the media to say global warming is occurring rather than framing it as an unresolved issue?”

I’m glad Rodriquez acknowledges the scientists’ views, but I’m disappointed in his remarks further down, such as this:

“These will be the subjects of the next generation of news stories on global warming. What newspapers and other media can do is try to provide context, connect the dots and ask tough questions in order to further the public debate.

“On many of those questions, there are no definitive answers yet. That means there will be more of the ‘he said, she said’ journalistic balancing the scientists complained about.

“But it will also mean an important issue will remain in the public view and consciousness. And in every debate on a controversial issue, that’s an important step toward finding the right answers.”

To my mind, that’s wimping out and ignoring the point those scientists were making. It ensures that the news media will not be part of the solution, but rather accomplices with global warming’s skeptics in blocking human actions that might help to alleviate the inevitable problems coming our way (and already in clear evidence).