A Cheap Shot at the Pittsburgh Market?
Posted: July 30, 2009 Filed under: Department of Broadcast | Tags: pittsburgh, seattle, sports section Leave a comment »Our tour of the AP and newspaper industry is taking a quick detour to the Sports page, today, because the MLB Trade Deadline is coming fast and furious in the next 30 hours or so (I even admitted in a tweet last night that my Desert Island news source until July 31st is MLBtraderumors.com).
Friends and any other people out there know that my favorite convenience is when all my worlds collide into one fantastic display. So, special thanks to my friend and resident Blogadilla contributor Brian Roundy for pointing me to this gem buried in a Yahoo! Sports notes section on the fantasy (yes, remember, geek here) recommendation for a pitcher recently acquired by the Seattle Mariners Ian Snell. Make sure to read the highlighted part closely.
I got a chuckle out of this inclusion for one reason: Seattle has been the center of a lot of my watching because one of its papers went online only this year. However, the presence of the additional media from overseas in Japan as a distraction? A little stretch, and certainly not “recommendation worthy.”
There’s a common divide in sports between major market teams – LA, NY, Boston being the standard bearers, but also Philly, DC, Miami and Dallas – your mid-markets and minor ones. The idea of “playing under the lights of a big city” as a distraction to some players is a common complaint. This new development is a first to me, at least in terms of two cities that actually have a lot in common as the mid-major markets.
If I’m Pittsburgh, I’ve just been told that we’re a smaller market than a city that lost one of its newspapers. Ouch. Then again, you have a Lombardi and Stanley Cup to keep you company, so, I’m not going to leap to very much more defense than this.
Kindergarten, Cut and Paste and the AP
Posted: July 29, 2009 Filed under: Department of Digital, legal department | Tags: associated press Leave a comment »Now, the below diagram isn’t a sarcastic Boomtown/Kara Swisher creation. It’s not from TechCrunch. It’s not even from Ezra Klein, the Post‘s king of whimsical and informative charts.
It’s from the AP itself, explaining it’s new rights management system (the AP News Registry) for its content (via BoingBoing):
As Cory Doctorow goes into in his post at the BB, “A lot of copyfighters were mystified by the Associated Press’s recent announcement (complete with a bonkers diagram straight off a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s) that they had spent millions of dollars on a DRM system for news that would limit how you could paste the text you copied from your browser window…This is a seeming impossibility…it just seemed too weird to think that no one at the AP had said, ‘Wait, what? This is dumb.’”
Jumping back to that wonderful diagram, here’s my sticking point: it is undeniable, from a usability standpoint, that the more steps that you add to spreading information, it will get to less people. Sure, there’s a chance this model actually may protect some of the AP’s specific original content. But there may be one additional step to getting to the consumer: full buy-in from the editorial universe.
The way I see it, this actually hurts publishers more than the AP (of course, that chart is so confusing, there may be nine extra steps to protect them, however, I’m getting off track). There are still a ridiculous number of derivative placements that stem from each posting. Is the AP planning on holding them hostage to this system? More steps, more checks and, of course, more dollar signs are the last thing the newspaper industry needs – especially those publications that rely on AP to fill out their content on a daily basis.
Information is to be shared, not hoarded and certainly not passed through a series of tubes until it’s potentially rendered useless to that very fact. We’ve been cutting and pasting since we’ve been toddlers. We figured out to make photocopies of news stories, the power of e-mailing and tweeting links; it’s taken millions of dollars to create this system and it will take less than a week for someone to beat it and go back to our blasphemous, pirating, copy-and-pasting ways.
Accept it and change, or keep trying to live in your old paranoid, business model. Your choice.
Dead Tree Media: just $99 a year!
Posted: July 27, 2009 Filed under: Department of Print | Tags: USA Today Leave a comment »For just $99 each year, you can get an exact, digital replica of USAToday online. That’s not all, act now and it comes with pretty interactive features, including such luxuries as “it’s part of the Internet.”
No, seriously, that’s a selling point:
Connect to Internet – All links throughout content and advertisements will be clickable, allowing readers to access Web sites outside the digital reader environment.
I feel a little insulted. Just go to a hotel and steal it from the lobby like everyone else. Except for the sports section and pretty (albeit, occasionally trivial) infographics, does anyone truly read USA Today anymore anyway?
In some ways, I’m not surprised that USAToday/Gannett was first. I actually wonder if this will trickle through each Gannett operation across the country. Needless to say, but I will anyway, this isn’t the solution to falling revenues.
H/T to Fishbowl DC
Stealing Time and Filling Up
Posted: July 22, 2009 Filed under: social media | Tags: interconnected media Leave a comment »
(cc) Flickr user jtravism
Really fantastic post from an old classmate and research colleague of mine (and all around great guy, without whom I never would have completed research for my own thesis) on coming to face the reality of wasted time. He puts it into the context of a really solid frame, “The Threshold of Care.”
There will always be a unit of time, a unit of anything really, that is indivudally beneath counting or caring. That could be 3 minutes, eight-nine cents, one more bite, one more wedding guest. Individually there is always room for this unit, just beneath the “Threshold of Care” and it’s usually a single noun. Psychologically it’s just simpler that way, “always room for one more”: person, dollar, line, guest. Beneath the Threshold of Care anything goes, that’s why ninety-nine cents was pioneered as a marketing device (and later as folks got wise to the ninety-nine cent phenomenon, the ninety-five-cent and eighty-nine cent innovations).
One thing that will move that imaginary line in the sand, to me, is the barrier of entry. Cost is obvious, but what about access? Is the $1 worth it if I have to get in my car to drive past three places that are $1.29? Higg makes a great connection with a different kind of threshold – communication – and it hinges on this notion:
While a phone conversation runs the risk of going over the Threshold of Care, a text stays comfortably beneath it. Even an exchange of texts over the course of an hour can remain, at least in our minds, beneath the threshold, like those six eighty-nine cent burritos from Taco Bell.
Try to stay with me because I want to take this a step further to overprove my favorite point. Newspapers aren’t “dying,” (a) completely and (b) because of our shrinking attention span. Having information “first” is just a terrible business model that MSM refuses to let go over high-value content.
You remember how we always used to be told, “Don’t fill up on bread” before a meal? That’s what’s happening – it’s truly the bite-sized messages or blog posts that we don’t let creep above into the realm of information overload. MSM may start writing shorter articles, but it really isn’t out of a need to fit into what we want. It’s not a shrinking tolerance for hard forms of media; it’s the power of a crowded, specialized marketplace that is filling us up before a big meal.
Just save room for dessert.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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To save newspapers, “Buy One Anyway”
Posted: July 9, 2009 Filed under: Department of Print | Tags: buy one anyway, newsprint, Slate Leave a comment »H/T to All Things D for posting this Slate gem:
“Just because I don’t get my news from it, doesn’t mean it’s not useful”
Could Twitter save real journalism?
Posted: July 8, 2009 Filed under: journalism, social media | Tags: interconnected media, Twitter Leave a comment »
One of the most shocking sports stories from the last week included the shrouded news of Steve McNair, former quarterback of the Baltimore Ravens and Tennessee Titans as well as a breakthrough college star at Alcorn State. On Saturday July 4th, news started coming from a variety of sources that McNair had been found dead in his home; a true loss for the sport overall because of the level of play, commitment, and toughness that McNair showed.
The manner in which the story broke on the holiday led to several more examples of the Statusphere vs. Mainstream Media. There were some that were brutally scathing of MSM’s coverage, such as Aaron Brazell’s piece over at Technosailor:
WKRN, in Nashville, was the first with the news and it quickly disappeared off their page – a result of too much traffic or erroring on the side of caution, who is to really know.
NBC Affiliate WTVF, Channel 5, was the second to report it filling the gap where WKRN dropped off.
It was a long time (30 minutes or so) before national media picked it up. ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in Sports by their own slogan, didn’t have it. No one did. We were left gasping for more. Is the rumor true? Can anyone confirm? Can police confirm?
Was any of us on Twitter making calls? Maybe. A few possibly. Not many.
There were a few other comments in and throughout Brazell’s post, as well as follow-up from the readers questioning his rush to blame, but I think that he may have taken it too far to the end of the spectrum. When it comes to a story surrounded by so many circumstances, it is obviously in the best interest of the journalistic community to get the story right. 30 minutes to check the story is better than getting it wrong, correcting it, and making the error the story, not the event.
On the complete other end of the spectrum is an old media guy accusing Twitter of being too involved in the conversation about the former-MVPs passing. Tim Keown, a long-time writer at ESPN put together this piece in response to the reaction of another NFL QB’s wife that was captured in the midst of the coverage. The same negativity Brazell had toward ESPN for failing to report the story, Keown has toward Twitter for pressuring MSM to respond:
The problem is, there is a widespread attempt in the media to bring validity to the enterprise. There’s pressure to get stuff out there, to be connected to the story. CNN wants us to follow it on Twitter, when following it on CNN should be about all it demands of us. Viewers are invited to respond, and there’s nothing quite like the awfulness of a guy reading a truncated, abbreviated, code-language message from someone with no expertise beyond opposable thumbs.
(And I’ll say it before you do: There are exceptions, and the election protests in Iran are a big one. Without Twitter, the amount of useful information leaving that country would be minimal at best. This leaves aside the validity of the information being Twittered — or whatever the heck you want to call it — but that’s secondary to the importance of the technology in spreading useful information.)
The bold in the above section is mine. Also, I wanted to include Keown’s waiver to not completely throw him under the bus, but that shouldn’t be a complete hand washing for the piece.
Twitter has broken stories, we know that. Folks in DC will recall when Twitter was in its mainstream infancy and news about Tim Russert spread, in addition to the reference Keown makes and the many other breaking outlets. Remember: that’s not what Twitter’s purpose is, to be a journalistic mainstay. It’s for information sharing, not confirmation; we need to recognize the bridge between the two.
Sure, as a reporter, you have to move a little quicker now, but let that be an advantage, not a hurdle. Keown opined that this stuff will sink the media ship, but he places to high of a premium on what it means for journalism to be accompanied by “You heard it here first.” That’s ignorant, to me.
For journalists, the service should be used like a hiker uses a compass: it doesn’t show you the trail, just points you in the right direction. We are telling you where to go, just don’t get lost along the way and everyone stays happy.
Instant Reaction: Twitter Volleys to Mainstream Media
Posted: July 5, 2009 Filed under: Department of Broadcast, social media | Tags: NBC, sports section, Twitter 1 Comment »
(cc) Flickr user Koltregaskes
Laptop open here in front of me, I’m absolutely engrossed in about the third hour I’ve watched in a row of this fantastic tennis match at Wimbledon’s Centre Court.
The match literally just ended, and a heartbreaking five-set match (including a 30 game, 16-14 clincher for Roger) has been nothing short of amazing. The thing is: I know I wasn’t alone in watching this historic match.
I started watching pretty early on this morning, around the third set when Roger was pulling together a tie-breaker win. The general chatter among friends and followers had little to do with tennis, or if they did, it was a small acknowledgment of that Twitter would keep them in the know.
I find it fascinating though that the normal, Sunday morning, light chatter on Twitter quickly turned into a “are you watching this?” as the fifth set kept plugging along. It was more a call of the community to get to their television and flick straight over to the epic set. It was a grueling match, completely entertaining – but the word of mouth power of Twitter drove the audience away from 140 characters to live television.
This is what I think is the most misunderstood power of Twitter. It isn’t about keeping a contained conversation – it’s about flagging things that need to be developed further. Whether it was something vain like the call to watch Chuck or something more breaking or revolutionary, the questions within these trending topics wasn’t what was inside the twittersphere, it was why we needed to look beyond it.
Wimbledon was a tiny, ignorable case study for the most part. It wasn’t self-contained to Twitter, I saw similar questions in my Facebook stream. It’s probably another chink in the MSM armor, but, to me, it’s fascinating that global events have a community that exists beyond ISPs, time zones, and borders.
Sports and media go hand in hand, especially major and live tournaments. The US Soccer run from the last weeks had similar legs online, but I don’t know if we’ll get a real test of the system any time soon. I’d argue that the Winter Olympics offer the opportunity, but given they are in North American time zones, the possibility for an overseas spoiler is slim because of the timing of events. Had this been around for Turino in 2006 – or if the medium still exists/operates like it does in the summer of 2012 for London – it presents a fascinating challenge for sports media. (Just like year’s past, I’m assuming that ESPN will broadcast next summer’s World Cup live, so we won’t get to test this theory then).
NBC had the live broadcast this morning – it would have been useless to those who tracked it online if they didn’t. This just may be the biggest change for which media will have to prepare. The twitter sphere demands live coverage (just check #CNNFAIL). Does this mean that it will be necessary to broadcast non-primetime, live coverage of overseas sporting events from now on? It’s the only way media will be able to provide the access and coverage the audience wants – and the word of mouth among fans will have to be the TV guide we need to find the way.
