Archive for January, 2008

New column from me for Editor & Publisher Online:

This Should Be Your Mantra: Be Everywhere

I think that the theme of this column will be something that we in the news business (well, broader media, too) will be talking about and dealing with a lot this year.

Although, comments and e-mails on this column, which was released this week, have been minimal. I guess everyone agrees with me.

The guys over at Evomo must be ecstatic about this. They make stylish mountain biking apparel (including some branded t-shirts commissioned by my former company, the Enthusiast Group), and one of their fans asked if he could get a tattoo using Evomo’s “Braincase” design. The answer from Evomo head honcho Bryan Thombs: “Hell-yeeeaaaah!”

So here’s the pic. The crazy mountain biker didn’t go so far as to brand Evomo’s name on his skin, but that’s still a pretty nice bit of free customer marketing for the company. He’s a walking billboard for Evomo, since everyone’s going to ask him about it.

That is a pretty cool design. If I were younger, I might wear that t-shirt; it doesn’t really fit my 51-year-old sensibilities. Tattoo? Probably not.

I’m a fan of good infographics, especially multimedia. (I spent a few years of my traditional newspaper career working on infographics, and back when I worked at the Poynter Institute I studied multimedia graphics as part of an eyetracking research project.) It’s always nice to point to good work, and NYTimes.com has produced a great multimedia infographic about Super Bowl ads over the years:

The Super Ad Bowl: Two Decades of Players

See for yourself, but what I like is how easy this infographic is to use. A simple slider takes you back through the years, where you can click to watch the ads. (I do wish the Times had found more old ads to include, though.) The graphic doesn’t feature flashy, sexy design — actually, it’s a bit bland looking — but it is brilliantly designed. The form is good enough; the function is what makes it.

In Melanie McFarland’s farewell column as TV critic of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (she’s taking a web job with Amazon.com’s IMDB.com), she writes:

Although I won’t be under the globe anymore, a number of talented reader bloggers and regularly updated articles from TVGuide.com will continue to make this one of the best places for couch potatoes to camp out.”

I’m not sure whether that means she’s not being replaced, but it sounds like not. That’ll be another sad indicator for newspapers. As more features and staffers are dropped and the quality of the product heads downhill, you have to worry that the snowball effect is already in place.

Is this story a joke? “Clinton, Obama keep distance at Bush speech: Rivals come within a foot of one another without acknowledging it.”

The Associated Press report, as spotted on MSNBC.com, also includes an accompanying video and this earth-shattering news:

In other handshaking news, Bush shook Obama’s hand after the speech but not Clinton’s.”

So this is the state of political journalism? I thought I was reading an April Fool’s joke.

Time to go read about Britney Spears now.

The great promise of the Internet is that it empowers the voices and knowledge of so many people, and smart entrepreneurs and others can harness that to do great things. Wikipedia is the classic example of the potential: An army of volunteers, not paid a cent, have created a living encyclopedia that has become an essential and highly trafficked resource.

I think that the news industry — probably mostly due to cultural reasons that limit innovation when it comes to tapping the resources of the human web (the “we’re the professionals, we know best” mentality) — has been largely blind to the opportunities that are present.

Now is a good time to take a look at what other industries are doing to tap the collective intelligence. A GREAT example is this video from Google of Luis Van Ahn giving a talk on this topic. The solution to finding an army of non-paid online users to catalog images on the web — so that doing an image search on Google by typing in words will bring back accurate results — is stunningly brilliant.

Watch this video and see if it doesn’t get you thinking in new ways.

No sooner had I finished off a draft of my January Editor & Publisher Online column (probably to be published next week) on how news organizations must learn to share their content any- and everywhere, than did news of ESPN’s WidgetCenter arrive on my radar screen. (I think it launched last month, but I must’ve missed it then. I’ve added it in to the column.) It nicely confirms the wisdom of my advice in the column.

Check this out. ESPN is now offering widgets that you can put on your blog, website, social network profile, or wherever. Here they are embedded in this blog item.

Back in the dark ages of my college years, I was a reporter and managing editor of the Rocky Mountain Collegian, the student newspaper at Colorado State University. (How dark? Reporters used electric typewriters and copy was taken to the composition department to be set into cold type.)

So it was with interest that I saw today that the Collegian might enter into a strategic partnership with Gannett’s The Coloradoan, Fort Collins’ commercial daily. According to this report in MediaDailyNews, “In effect, Gannett would be buying the paper. As the rest of the newspaper industry takes a beating, Gannett’s interest reflects the continued popularity of campus papers — and their importance to advertisers targeting young adults.”

Talks are preliminary, and a Collegian “takeover” is not imminent.
Here’s a report from the Collegian itself.

Perhaps that is a smart move by newspapers, though I see value in an independent student press, and worry that corporate interest would influence student media in a negative way. I remember my Collegian days as free-wheeling, where we sometimes took stupid or naive chances that most likely wouldn’t happen with corporate oversight. Those were great learning experiences. I’m not sure that the student-media culture is a proper fit with big corporate media.

I hadn’t taken a look at The Collegian’s website recently, but I see that it’s pretty standard and could be more innovative. This is the topic of another blog entry some day, but it’s unfortunate that student newspapers like The Collegian aren’t experimenting vigorously — and helping lead the newspaper industry to a new model that might work in the years ahead. One possible plus to corporate involvement could be to provide resources for more innovation — but I’d rather see the university’s journalism program (which I graduated from so long ago) be the one to push that.

Robb Montgomery posted this quote as a Facebook status. Not sure if they’re original, but I think these are words that everyone in my business should live by:

Deal with change before it deals with you.”

On a small e-mail discussion list that I’m on, one of the participants inadvertently sent everyone a PDF of a couple prescriptions for a family member. Obviously, her e-mail was intended to go elsewhere — probably her pharmacist. It was one of those “oh, s***!” mistakes that the speed of digital communications makes too easy.

Who among us hasn’t done something like this? If you can say that you’ve never sent an e-mail or instant message to the wrong person and it ended up being embarrassing, then you must be an abnormally careful person.

This incident reminded me of my worst instance of this kind of boo-boo. It was an instant-message exchange, using a corporate system (since this was well before IM entered the world), between me and a co-worker at a newspaper. I was working as a copy editor, and I was exchanging messages with a reporter, who was in another room not 50 feet from me. We were discussing the section editor, who was in his office nearby.

In addition to messaging the reporter, I was also messaging the editor; two instant online conversations were going on simultaneously. You can guess what happened. … The one message I sent to the reporter that was disparaging of the editor, well, that was the one I accidentally sent to the editor. Oh, s***!

What’s your most embarrassing digital working-too-fast moment?