Blogging

This is a great quote, by Dan Gillmor (via a Twitter post by Dan Pacheco):

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.

April 1 seems like an appropriate day to debut a humor project: techGRL.com.

California artist Steve Kearsley (a colleague from my long-ago San Francisco Chronicle days) and I have been working on this for a while now, and today took the wraps off the site. We’re working toward “reinventing the comic strip,” applying social networking and social media concepts to the conventional comic, and developing other innovations.

This is an “alpha” release, so I make no guarantees that everything on the website is working yet. We’d love some feedback, and let me know if you spot any glitches, please.

As I write this we’ve got 5 comic strips live. Each comic has an accompanying blog item written by the main character, Lexi. Short term, we’ll be producing 2 new comics each week; we’ll ramp that up as we can. (This isn’t a full-time thing for either Steve or me.) Multimedia we’ll get to in time. For now there’s just the website; presence on other platforms will come soon.

Lots of stuff is planned, but this is as far as we’ve gotten so far. A key theme in what we’re doing is reader/user interaction with the comic strip and its characters. Readers can potentially become characters themselves, and can send messages to the characters (and get a response).

We’re really early into this, so we’d appreciate feedback and reaction. Thanks!

Next time you make a comment here, you’ll notice that I switched from the default Wordpress commenting feature to using Intense Debate. Let me know what you think of it, please.

Intense Debate is a new company based here in Boulder, and I know its recently appointed CEO, Tom Keller. What they’re doing definitely looks interesting. The idea is to take the vanilla user commenting system that’s typical of most blogs and supercharge it.

I actually tried this a couple months ago on another Wordpress project of mine and had trouble, then uninstalled it. But I gave it another chance on this blog and found that it’s been improved, apparently. Installing and importing old comments went off without a hitch.

Aack!! I just realized that Wordpress stopped delivering me e-mail approval alerts when new comments get posted to this blog. I moderate comments in order to spare you from comment spam. (I must admit to having neglected this blog recently in terms of upgrading to current versions of Wordpress and the Askimet comment-spam filter; ergo, manual moderation is necessary.)

Anyway, a bunch of legit comments had stacked up in the approval queue and I just published them. … I thought it had been awfully quiet lately! Sorry about this.

I’ve just debuted a new website/blog designed to be a resource for ideas, tips and advice for online news publishers. It’s called GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com, and it’s NOT another industry news blog. The focus is exclusively on advice. I hope you’ll find it useful.

I soft-launched the site yesterday, so hardly anyone knows about it. I’d love it if a few of you checked it out and maybe commented on the early posts. My intent is to post a tip a day. There will be ideas on how to increase traffic and earn more money, primarily. I’m aiming for actionable tips and advice.

Obviously I don’t know it all, so I’ve made the site open to everyone to participate in and contribute to. Comment on the posts. Submit an idea of your own if you’d like me to write it up for you (and credit you). Create an account and blog to the site directly. (I will be moderating submissions.)

I’m also looking for sponsors, so give me a shout if it looks like that might be useful to you.

Many of us watch Romenesko to keep tabs of the news business. The venerable media blog, which is published by the Poynter Institute, is great for giving a sense of where the industry is at.

I’ve yet to see anyone use Romenesko for research. (Have I missed it?) But I wonder if a careful analysis of all the media news that gets pumped through Jim Romenesko’s filters would turn up some trends. One I would expect to find is an increasing pessimism by traditional news organizations, and an increase in stories about news company cutbacks, layoffs, stock price falls, circulation dips, etc. — increasing over time.

For fun, I did a quick and completely unscientific survey of what was in the latest Romenesko e-mail, which covers the last 4 days of blog entries. Here’s what I found. (Note: If you tried this, you might categorize things differently. But here’s my attempt. Some stories got counted in more than one category.)

• 26 - News personnel (announcements, awards, changes, deaths, profiles, etc.)
• 13 - Demise/decline of newspapers
• 10 - Ethics-related
• 9 - Bad news about industry stock prices, real estate sales, acquisitions
• 6 - Transition of media, online trends, user interaction, etc.
• 6 - “Inside baseball” stuff (that only true industry geeks care about)
• 6 - Journalism craft news
• 5 - News about the news business (excluding the “The End Is Near” coverage)
• 4 - College journalism, academia, research
• 4 - Oddball stuff
• 3 - Labor news
• 3 - New publications, websites, programs announced
• 2 - Stories with mixed good-bad news about news industry
• 2 - Credentials and access issues
• 2 - Objectivity in journalism
• 2 - Gossip
• 2 - Events, conferences
• 1 - Negative stories about Internet, blogs, user content, etc.
• 1 - Media law
• 1 - Audience, circulation news

Perhaps someone with more time on their hands than me can find interesting Romenesko trends over time.