Today I finally got around to fixing this blog’s RSS feeds, which got messed up some time ago when I stopped using another domain name and fouled up my Feedburner settings. In repairing the damage, I seem to have lost lots of people who subscribed to this blog’s feed. Ugh.
If you’d like to be alerted to new blog items posted by me, please click the “Subscribe in a reader” link in the left column. If you prefer e-mail alerts, type in your address in the “Receive new posts by e-mail” box and click “Subscribe.”
Thanks, and apologies for the bother if I suddenly dropped out of your RSS reader.
Since much of my attention these days seems to be on how to get writers and media companies paid on the web, allow me to pass along the latest scheme I’ve learned of. Payyattention.com (2 y’s?) looks to be promising for bloggers and individual writers wanting their fans to voluntarily pay for their work. The social aspect of the service is what makes this more than your standard tip-jar web service.
Check out the video explanation. (Sorry, can’t embed video here; that ability has been disabled by video’s creator.)
This strikes me as so funny and unusual, I have to blog it. … So earlier today I posted this to Twitter:
A short while later I notice that I’ve turned up on Columbia Journalism Review’s website on its “The Kicker” blog, where the (short) blog item is actually longer than my tweet!
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this; I’m happy for the exposure of my candid Twitter thoughts to CJR’s audience. It just amuses me that my 140 characters could grow into something more.
(And thanks, Megan, for referring to me as “new media guru” — although I always feel unworthy on the rare occasions that I get described that way. I have learned a thing or two about digital media over the years, but don’t yet feel worthy of the guru moniker!)
Since John McCain has stated that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, his campaign’s reaction to someone hacking into running mate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account and spreading the contents around the web should come as no surprise. (It appears that the e-mails are legit.) His campaign manager, Rick Davis, appears to be as equally clueless about “the Internets.”
“The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them.”
Oy! Perhaps they still use typewriters over at McCain campaign HQ. Davis must be thinking we still live back in the day when the news media could be persuaded to squelch something like this. If the media decided to hold back (because, after all, this was an illegal act committed by someone, and old media probably wouldn’t touch a story that’s so ethically and legally challenged), then the public wouldn’t see the e-mails.
Sorry, Mr. Davis, but we don’t live in that era anymore. Even if your lawyers convinced Gawker to take them down (unlikely), there are copies popping up on websites all over the place, and all over the world. Any attempt at playing digital whack-a-mole with Palin’s personal e-mails would be fruitless. Many Internet users will take it as a challenge to spread the e-mails even further if you try to (pointlessly) tamp this down.
I’m not saying that I condone someone breaking into Palin’s Yahoo account. What I am saying is that now that this has happened, the McCain camp is basically screwed.
My advice to the campaign: You’ll look foolish and demonstrate your lack of understanding of the Internet if you try to get everyone to take down those purloined e-mails. You’re in a lousy place, so put your focus on dealing with the content of the e-mails, and explaining why it was OK (if you can) that Palin was conducting official business using Yahoo.
The other dilemma here is for traditional news organizations. Will they publish the e-mails? I doubt it, and I certainly wouldn’t encourage them to. But they should report on the brouhaha taking place online about Palin’s e-mail account, and can address the personal account used for official business controversy.
OK, perhaps the second sentence is paraphrased, but I really like it. “‘Dog bites man’ is newsworthy if you know the man, or dog,” so nicely sums up what I’ve been thinking for some time about what many have termed “hyper-local” journalism.
Yes, dog bites man, or 5th-grader hits winning home run, or woman wins teacher of the year award at Smith Elementary are boring items to nearly everyone — but not to the people involved and the people who know them. For the latter group, it’s important stuff.
We now have the technology available online (and for mobile devices) to deliver that boring-to-everyone-but-me stuff to the right people. We don’t need to produce a weekly give-away print product filled with boring dog-bites-man stuff, because we can deliver it to the people for whom it’s important, interesting, and vital — and not bore everyone else.
To critics of hyper-local news or “citizen journalism,” I will argue that it can be powerful stuff when and only when it’s targeted well. I can envision a future — and I look forward to it — when services are available to send me news on my smartphone letting me know that the guy down the street got bit by a dog.
Fascinating story from NY Times today: “For New Journalists, All Bets, but Not Mikes, Are Off.” The short version is that a “citizen journalist” working for Huffington Post’s Off The Bus was talking to Bill Clinton at a campaign rally, and the ex-prez blurted out some unsavory words thinking that he was just talking to an ordinary person, and not expecting his comments to be recorded and broadcast out to the world.
The Times piece has much navel gazing, including journalists bemoaning the “bad form” of a non-professional journalist in “breaking the rules” that reporters have for so long operated under by recording Clinton with a digital recorder without his knowledge. (Though he was in a public place at a public event, so he should have known better.)
Get over it, journalists! In a world where any and everybody can publish what they hear or experience (or record with a camera phone), lots of people are not going to follow old “rules” that they don’t understand or even know about. Bemoaning bad behavior by ordinary folks suddenly thrust into the role of “citizen journalist” shows lack of understanding of what’s happening here.
Politicians, especially, have got to understand that in this new broadband world of ours, everything that they say to anyone is potentially on the record. They can’t know if the person they’re chatting with informally at a campaign event has a blog that will get used to share off-the-cuff remarks, or if they’ll post to Twitter and the politician’s remarks get amplified from there.
Traditionalists in politics and the media can bemoan this “unseemly” situation, but it does nothing to change the reality. Everyone in the public eye needs to be more careful about the words they utter all the time, now that everyone else in the room has a digital megaphone.
I have a few projects going right now, and I find that I’m remembering to post to this blog less often than I usually do. It’s not just that I’m busy, though; I’ve always been busy. No, I think that in part I’m blogging a bit less because I’m tweeting more. (To “tweet” is slang for posting to Twitter, but I’m using the term here to represent posting to various micro-blogging and personal-update services — which are proliferating, BTW; just yesterday I signed up to Plurk.)
Used to be that whenever a stray thought or insight came into my head, I’d blog about it. But now I’m more likely to condense said thought/insight into 140 characters and tweet it. If it can’t be boiled down to that, then it becomes a blog item.
How is this working out for you? Are you blogging less now that micro-blogging services like Twitter are gaining in popularity?
I was a bit taken aback this evening when I saw that Derek Willis quoted one of my Twitter posts from earlier today on his blog, The Scoop. (That’s an insightful item, by the way, about the behind-the-scenes situation at the Washington Post where interactive star Rob Curley and his team are departing.)
Now, I don’t mind at all that Willis used my tweet. But it did get me thinking about my postings to micro-blogging sites like Twitter. I need to start thinking before I post something that it could show up anywhere, and get much wider distribution than just the couple hundred people currently following me on Twitter. I suggest that you start thinking likewise.
Today’s tweet went beyond my Twitter followers; will yours?
I remember many instances in recent years where people naively posted something to their blogs and expected that to be private conversation between the few friends who follow their blogs. By now, I sense that most folks have figured out that when they post to their blogs, it’s anything but “private.”
Twitter posts aren’t private or even semi-private, either.
Please take a look at my latest column for Editor & Publisher Online, posted today: “How to Create Killer Niche Web Sites Without Hiring.” I think the two initiatives I’ve profiled are truly significant innovations that can move the news industry forward.
For lack of a better term, Examiner.com’s Examiners program and the Mail & Guardian’s Thought Leader initiative might be described as “Citizen Journalism 2.0.” Thought Leader’s developer also uses the term “By Invitation 2.0.”
The key point is to leverage citizen media and blogging intelligently by integrating it with traditional journalism practices like (what a shock!) editing and gatekeeping. I’d like to hear your opinions on these innovations.
