Uncategorized

Outside Magazine, January 2009 print edition. (Ah, yes, in the age of instant digital news, we still get our print magazines dated weeks in the future!) On page 25 is a nice photo and brief story about professional climber Katie Brown. (Katie was editor of my defunct company’s YourClimbing.com site that we published from 2006 to 2007.)

Lower right box on the page: “For more photos of Katie Brown, go to outsideonline.com/katiebrown”. But the link doesn’t work.

I know Katie has a blog (link above). But Outside’s page doesn’t note that either.

OK, go to Outside’s website and perhaps I’ll spot a link to the photos of Katie and catch up with her life. Nope, nothing. Even using the search box doesn’t turn up the alleged “more photos.” Sheesh.

I only have to turn back to page 22 to see how Outside remains clueless on the opportunity to link print and digital. There’s a cool photo, graphic and short story about a flying car with a paraglider wing and a propeller in back. But I can’t learn more (no URL for company’s website); there’s no URL to go view a video or animation of more photos of the prototype car.

Oh, I get it. Outside expects me to go to Google and get that. Parajet info here and here. Thanks, Google. Thanks for nothing, Outside.

Just as with newspapers, the future of magazines will depend on a strong and useful integration of print and digital. The printed magazine won’t be enough for tomorrow’s readers. If magazine publishers can’t even get the few website refers they publish in print right, I have my doubts that they’ll figure out how to serve, entertain, and attract the younger generation of digital natives.

Just more of the same from print publishers: blindness to the opportunities to establish relationships and conversations with their print readers via online and mobile innovations.

As an old-media guy myself (working for newspapers and magazines for the first decade and a half of my career before moving it online in 1994), I find this so discouraging. Aaargh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On LATimes.com today, Andrew Malcolm posted this on the site’s political blog: “After Sarah Palin VP debate, Joe Biden to step aside for Hillary Clinton?.” It’s a long analysis of an Internet rumor that, near as I can tell, has no solid basis for taking seriously. (See Snopes.com’s analysis.)

Hmmm, a mainstream media outlet has devoted 23 paragraphs to an unsubstantiated Internet rumor. The author is “a veteran foreign and national correspondent” who has served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004.

Now contrast that to the Internet rumor that surfaced a few weeks ago, first on DailyKos.com, that VP candidate Sarah Palin’s new baby was not hers, but actually was her’s eldest daughter’s (ergo, cover-up). At first blush, the rumor appeared potentially credible, since the DailyKos author presented a bunch of photographic “evidence.” The rumor was eventually debunked.

What did mainstream media outlets do with that one? Mostly left it to percolate and grow in the blogosphere, keeping their hands clean because the rumor was “too sensitive” to touch. When the din got loud enough, there were a few mainstream reports about the brouhaha. No one in the mainstream press, to my knowledge, dived into this rumor with significant coverage. (We can discount the National Enquirer crowd. And there probably were some mainstream reporters digging around to confirm or refute the rumor, but since nothing was found there were not major mainstream-media stories.)

So, ummm, what’s the difference here? In both cases, the din rises online, and people start to wonder. Is Trig really Sarah’s baby? Is Biden really going to drop out? Both rumors could and should have been treated similarly. But the Palin routine was considered off-limits, while the Biden rumor was not.

I’m still annoyed by the Palin rumor and how the press handled it. Most editors and reporters felt the rumor was too politically charged to go after; they’d get accused of “left-wing media bias” for going after a story that was perceived as belonging in the gutter. Bullshit. It was blowing up and spreading widely, and mainstream reporters could have served the public by getting to the truth.

With Malcolm posting such a detailed piece on the Biden rumor, I sense some press hypocrisy. Yeah, Malcolm is one writer and does not represent the mainstream press. But the LA Times chose to publish his thoughts, which were based on an unsubstantiated rumor. One of the top mainstream news organizations just went crazy with an Internet rumor. Why didn’t it treat the Palin rumor in the same way?

To offer a more constructive thought, perhaps the press would do well to take a look at what Snopes.com does so well: confirm or deny Internet rumors. It seems to me that that’s a pretty good thing for news organizations to be doing. Ignoring some rumors — even when the conversation about them has reached fever pitch — while covering others is strange.

Finally, here’s Malcolm’s response, e-mailed to me earlier today:

“It’s a fully qualified article about rumors and how/why they stick sometimes. In this heated election climate 40 percent of the country takes turns wanting to censor articles on itself. Too bad. This is now the 72nd ranked blog in the world and second highest newspaper politics blog. Millions of people are reading our unexpected items and we’ll keep writing them.”

(Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Malcolm’s piece; I am criticizing the press for avoiding addressing the Palin baby rumor.)

The concept of “citizen journalism” has been around for a while now, and early applications of the concept typically have involved creating a platform for people to share what they know. A classic example of this is CNN’s iReport website, where all of us are encouraged to put on our amateur reporter caps and share news that we encounter. There are plenty of similar initiatives at local media websites, such as YourHub.com.

What if this is the wrong approach? I’m beginning to think it is.

Now, I do not argue that many people — empowered by the web, e-mail, digital cameras, social networks, blogs, micro-blogging services, smartphones, etc. — want to share their experiences. The popularity of social networks and services like Twitter offers plenty of evidence that people like to talk about what is important to them: themselves, their friends, and their experiences.

What we’re seeing is people spontaneously sharing their lives, and sometimes their personal experiences overlap with “news.” So if someone, like the guy above, happens to witness something extraordinary these days — say, a tornado that came close to his house — he might snap a photo or video with his cell phone. Then maybe he’ll post it to Youtube, or Flickr. He may post 140 characters about it on Twitter.

Those sort of reactions are, for the modern and digital-savvy person, becoming natural. Certainly not everyone reacts this way, but a growing number do.

What’s not as natural is posting to a news organization’s “citJ” website. It’s much more natural to share your experience with your social network, as opposed to sharing it with some company (news organization).

Ergo, I’ve started to realize that news organizations would be wise to focus less on creating their own citJ platforms and hoping someone will post something, and more on leveraging the social networks where people already are posting news. My previous post about Twitter touches on this; that micro-blogging service contains (amid all the personal fluff) real news that people are witnessing.

News organizations need to think outside themselves, which of course is something they’re generally not very good at. Perhaps instead of sinking a pile of money into their own citJ platform, they should instead be developing means to tap into the external venues where people already are sharing their news, filtering and aggregating that on a local level as a service to their own audience.

What do you think?

There’s been plenty of fretting in journalism circles this week about comment threads on news stories. My position: Don’t publish without them, but figure out ways to keep the conversation civil and ban the trolls.

The website of my local newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera, has pretty active comment threads, and, predictably, the more bizarre the story, the longer the list of commenters. A story today generated a ton of comments: about a woman athlete cycling with her young son in a child seat who had another cyclist come up to her and grab one of her breasts. She chased the guy down while calling 911 on her cell phone, and police caught the weirdo. Yeah, you know that one is going to generate a lot of discussion.

Skimming through the dozens of comments, I was intrigued to see that the victim joined in the discussion, thanking other commenters for their support. (Many called her brave; a few said she was foolish to put her son at risk by giving chase.) Her participation in the after-publication public commenting added nicely to the story. Sure, some of the other comments were dumb, as always. But this was an example of user comments adding value to the coverage.

Argh! Intense Debate (used for comments on this blog) has been having problems today that still aren’t resolved. I know from their tech support folks that they’re working on it. Meanwhile, comments to this blog are stuck in moderation queue and I can’t get to them to approve for publication. I can be patient, but I wonder if many of their others users won’t be.

This points to the dangers of relying for outside services. You have to be prepared for the occasional glitch or outage that’s beyond your control. Not that the same thing can’t and doesn’t happen with internal services.

Apologies to anyone who left a comment here today. Perhaps I can get to them tomorrow.

(Update: Intense Debate did fix this problem and it’s back to normal. Excellent customer service — especially when you consider that the service is free to use!)

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.

How depressing. Did you see this Rick Edmonds post at Poynter.org? “Far-out Ideas? We Have No Far-out Ideas.”

He reports on the Capital Conference newspaper convention in Washington, D.C. last week, where Anthony Moor (a smart and innovative guy now at the Dallas Morning News) asked some publishers on-stage: Can you each give an example of one of the most far-out ideas you have heard recently for editorial and/or business? Not necessarily one that you would do, just that you have heard about?

The question was, according to Edmonds, answered with initial silence and then some pretty lame, not very innovative answers. Edmonds: “So after countless references in this conference (as in last year’s) to transformational change and an excellent panel the day before featuring CEOs from other industries who have pulled off huge makeovers, it comes down to this: The publishers can’t think of anything transformational and are into incrementalism instead?”

I read this after spending time yesterday answering criticisms of my last Editor & Publisher Online column, in which I announced that I was suspending my print-edition subscription and warning newspaper publishers to expect a wave of people behind me doing the same thing. A bunch of newspaper editors and publishers berated me; it felt like I was in 1998 again, not 2008.

Geez, perhaps it’s time for some of those folks to retire and hand over the reins to a younger generation of managers who probably could answer Moor’s question in a heartbeat.

My April 1 Editor & Publisher Online column (not an April Fools joke) about ending my long-held subscription to my local newspaper’s print edition generated a fair bit of controversy in the form of letters to E&P. I apologize for not responding more promptly, but it’s been a crazy period for me. Belatedly, here are some of the letters received (previously published on Editorandpublisher.com), and my responses to them.

Continued

You know how on the web you’re always serendipitously running into odd (and often interesting) stuff. That happened to me tonight when I was looking up the right way to spell the slang word “biatch.” I spotted this odd video of teen girlfriends “biatch slapping” each other.

Now, I have a daughter around the age of the girls in this video, and I realized after viewing this that Youtube is giving me a glimpse into the once hidden world of today’s teenagers. As a parent, obviously I’m not likely to be aware of this odd behavior (and probably worse) occurring when friends get together. But with this current generation of teens, they don’t keep their behavior (including bad stuff) to themselves; they post it for the world to see!

This is pretty amazing when you think about it. Sociologists must be having a field day with stuff like this.

For me, along with artist Steve Kearsley, last week I launched techGRL.com, an online comic strip that has as its heroine a 15-year-old, tech-crazy girl. So I need to try to get into the heads of girls that age. While observing my own daughter is useful in that regard, even better is the opportunity to peer directly into the world of teenage girls.

Thanks, Youtube!

Google: a smart and funny company. Here’s today’s log-in page for Gmail: