Media

Does your news organization have a YouTube video channel featuring a fresh stream of originally produced videos? It should. And it wouldn’t be that hard to do, nor expensive.

So that idea came to me after having watched a couple great videos on The Official Google Channel on YouTube. (I’ve attached one of those videos, a talk on the Google campus by Getting Things Done guru Dave Allen, to the end of this blog item.)

Google, being a great place to work, apparently has a stream of guest speakers coming through giving workshops and lectures. The company, smartly, videotapes the talks and puts them on YouTube. Being a smart company, they don’t keep this great information to themselves and restrict access just to their employees — even though Google paid for the speakers. Google is, after all, all about sharing the world’s knowledge, so it’s a fit with the company’s mission and ethics.

You know, of course, what organizations also are well positioned to have their own channels: newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, magazines, and online news sites. Nearly all news organizations have a steady stream of politicians, celebrities, athletes, experts, etc. coming through their doors — for interviews with reporters, with the editorial board, and so on.

So here’s a simple notion that’ll amp up your presence on YouTube and other channels (such as Facebook, MySpace, et al): Create your own channel, a la Google, and post raw video of interviews with some of those people. Record editorial board meetings where there are guests and post the video. This requires a change in mindset, from those interviews being a part of the reporting process not meant for outside consumption, to the interviews actually being content.

This would be relatively cheap to do. The only thing holding you back is clinging to the old ways.

Now here’s the Dave Allen lecture. As not of the most organized people in the world, I’m trying hard to learn from Allen. His Google lecture is worth a viewing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I missed last night’s The Simpsons, but according to Mediabistro’s FishbowlDC blog, there was this funny scene:

“Did you watch last night’s ‘The Simpsons’? Like when Dan Rather introduced his panel of debate moderators, including ‘Ron Lehar, a print journalist from The Washington Post.’

“Prompting Nelson to point at him and say ‘Ha ha: Your medium is dying!’

“Rather: ‘Nelson!’ (Actually, it was Principal Skinner who says this.)

“Nelson: ‘But it is! There’s being right and there’s being nice.’”

A joke for we media geeks.

Addendum: Here’s the clip, found on DailyMotion.com:

In my latest Editor & Publisher Online column, I asked a smattering of news industry folks what they would have me fix at their organizations if I walked in the door with a magic wand. A common theme came through: We need serious cultural change in the newsroom in order to transform our companies, so fix everyone’s attitude so that they all embrace the change necessary to save us.

Mindy McAdams did a nice blog riff off my column, “Time to Get Crazy,” and presents some more pushing-the-envelope ideas.

(That column is actually my December one. Me bad. I turned it in during the week between Christmas and New Years Day, and E&P didn’t get to posting it till this week. I’ll have one more column during January.)

Since it’s winter and much of my exercise has been indoors, I’ve been watching DVDs to pass the time while on the treadmill or bike trainer. Right now I’m watching old episodes of “My So-Called Life,” a great drama from 1994. In case you don’t remember it, Life was a “realistic teen drama series that takes a look at a 15-year-old girl and her trials and tribulations with being a teenager and dealing with friends, guys, parents and school” (description from the Internet Movie Database). While critics loved the show, it nevertheless got canceled after only one season.

I fell in love with this show when it came out, but re-viewing it more than a decade later, it’s even more poignant. (That could be because my eldest daughter is now 15, and Life’s fictional family is identical to mine right now: married couple with 2 daughters, and the youngest TV daughter is about the age of my youngest daughter.)

But I’m not writing this blog item to recommend the show. (Well, I do; it’s good.) Rather, watching the episodes I’ve been struck by how much things have changed since 1994. That was the first year after I left the traditional newspaper world and started working an Internet career. I was one of those rare birds who dived in to the online world then. Most people still didn’t understand it, much less made it a big part of their lives.

I suggested to my 15-year-old that she watch the first episode of My So-Called Life, and she did. What surprised me is that she thought the show was OK, but it didn’t reflect her life. 1994 suburbia was different enough from today that she couldn’t relate to it.

Part of her “that’s how it used to be reaction” is probably because of the technology differences between then and now. (The emotional and relationship story lines certainly haven’t changed.) In 1994, no one had a cell phone, and certainly not every other teen you know. The Internet wasn’t part of a teen’s life (unless you were a tech geek). The computer in your house was probably shared by everyone, and was pretty lame compared to today’s. There was no MySpace or Facebook, and teen relationships were still based on personal interactions, not digital ones. Most everyone still got their news from the daily newspaper and TV news.

As we enter a new year, I can’t help but look back to 1994 and marvel about how far we’ve come. Digital technology now so pervades our lives that even looking back only to 1994, it seems like a very different world. It was one that today’s teenagers can’t relate to, because it seems foreign to them.

As news and media companies embark on figuring out how to survive and prosper in 2008 and beyond, they might want to keep this in mind if they hope to be relevant to my daughters’ generation.

NYTimes.com released its Top 10 Viewed Features of 2007 (even though 2007 isn’t over yet!), and here they are:

1. Magazine: Sweeping the Clouds Away
2. U.S.: Virginia Tech Shooting Leaves 33 Dead
3. U.S.: Virginia Gunman Identified as a Student
4. Health: Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter
5. Magazine: Unhappy Meals
6. Maureen Dowd: A Mock Columnist, Amok
7. Books: An Epic Harry Potter Showdown
8. Multimedia: The Victims
9. Circuits: The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype
10. Dining & Wine: 101 Simple Summer Meals

I’m trying to make sense of this but am having a hard time. What do you make of the list?

I’m baffled by the top traffic-getter, the story about classic videos of Sesame Street being released. That’s the most popular story of the year on NYT?! (My inability to relate to that story may be because by the time Sesame Street came on the air I was too old for it.)

I definitely don’t get why 3 of the top 10 stories are about the Virginia Tech shootings (2 articles and a multimedia graphic about the victims). NYT wasn’t the local paper(/website), after all.

Some stories on the list make perfect sense for getting high traffic: a review of the latest Harry Potter novel; a review of the iPhone when it came out; Stephen Colbert “filling in” for Maureen Dowd; the story about why the flu likes winter. (The latter is one of those stories that captures lots of attention because we can all relate to it. Ditto for the “Happy Meals” story about what we should eat to stay healthy and avoid disease.)

But overall, I don’t know, I expected to be able to identify some trends about what attracts online news readers. What do you see here?