Quote of the Day: “Social” Media
Posted: September 29, 2010 Filed under: social media Leave a comment »
“I think socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.”
~Aaron Sorkin, author of The Social Network screenplay during an interview on The View
Yes, that is correct. It’s a network, not social. In fact, social media is a medium, not about interaction.
Print Will Try “We’re Not Useless” Ad Campaign
Posted: September 29, 2010 Filed under: Department of Print Leave a comment »The ever crucial Jack Shafer recently pointed to one of my favorite little mysteries of the media industry: when newspapers and magazines take out their own ads to promote their well being. Take this ad for magazines:
I love when Mr. Shafer gets on a rant, so I turn it over to him:
If anybody understands how to make a print advertisement that really, really works, it should be newspaper and magazine people. But these two [new advertising] campaigns are so bumbling, so unpersuasive, so dull, that you’ve got to wonder whether any advertising intelligence went into making them. Maybe the goal was to sell the newspaper and magazine businesses as outposts of the desperate and pitiful worthy of advertiser charity. If so, Clios all around.
(Why do I get so entertained by this? It happened last year, too. When newspaper execs wanted to convince advertisers around Thanksgiving, they also went with the full page billboard. Still about as useful.)
[Station Break] Best Pun Involving My Last Name Ever
Posted: September 28, 2010 Filed under: Department of News Leave a comment »I give you an elevator that doesn’t go straight up and down: The Levytator.
Invented by Jack Levy at the University of London. H/t Tony Romm
I Take No Responsibility For Any Time Lost: YouTube Time Machine
Posted: September 26, 2010 Filed under: Department of Digital | Tags: nostalgia Leave a comment »Alright, go ahead and tell your family you love them, because the nostalgia here will probably cost most of the afternoon if not the entire week. I give you, via Lifehacker, the YouTube Time Machine:
Specify a year, some categories of things you want to remember, find a perfect spot on your couch and enjoy the rest of your Sunday. This is likely the best use of the archive of YouTube ever.
Quote of the Day: On Print’s Durability
Posted: September 23, 2010 Filed under: publishing 1 Comment »
“You know what’s great about printed books? [Slams a copy of the collected works of Erasmus against the chalk board] You can’t do this with your laptop.”
~Prof. Burke Griggs during my freshmen year history lecture. Sure, nearly a decade ago, but I’ll never forget it.
Moral of the story: stop saying print is dying – the nature of the media is changing but it is by no means a death knell for the printed word. Go buy a copy of Strunk and White to make up for your sins.
Quote of the Day: New Media’s Square Peg in a Round TV Hole
Posted: September 22, 2010 Filed under: Department of Broadcast Leave a comment »“$#*! My Dad Says (which debuts Thursday at 8 ) is what happens when you try to apply old-media values to new-media material….[the writers] Kohan, Mutchnick and the rest have pounded and pounded until they got the premise of the Twitter feed to fit the needs of a traditional half-hour sitcom, but the end result is largely unrecognizable, pointless and profoundly lame.”
~Alan Sepinwall, TV Critic at HitFix in his review of the pilot of the based-on-Twitter sitcom $#*! My Dad Says.
Community is the New Local
Posted: September 22, 2010 Filed under: Department of News, journalism, local news Leave a comment »
Question: Comparing your satisfaction with other local news sources such as newspaper or television, what would you say your satisfaction with your community news site is? Study conducted by Adam Maskal, Reynolds Journalism Institute at University of Missouri
A doctoral study out of the Missouri School of Journalism may have just formalize the new classification of local media. For time, local news has been network TV syndicates, local dailies and then other combinations of public broadcast or less frequent newspapers. The online world has mirrored that, generally, except for local blogs here and there.
Generally speaking, the data from the study is interesting. Maybe the only thing that leaves it as an outlier is the fact that survey was available by links on these sites, so it was dealing with a known audience. Still, with more than 1,100 respondents across 19 sites, you get an idea that there is something different going on in the online community news realm.
All things considered, we need to figure out some defining characteristics for the hypercommunity sites associated with things like Patch (or even those more focused on regional) that have become the flavor of the year in journalism. These aren’t individually run or even networked blogs, but associations with professional journalists who are looking for alternatives to newspapers, in my opinion. That’s where the bullpen gets stocked from 80 percent of the time when building out a community site. The way I see it, the strength and growth of community news sites has been on the backs of people who’s day jobs would be in a news room, looking to reinvent their model.
I think those who should be most worried are probably the “weekend bloggers” who still offer legitimate services to their communities. Unless community sites pull a TBD and bring the independent blogs directly into their content, the only way to get that news impact is probably to become the professional. I’m not saying these bloggers don’t have the chops – actually, having worked directly with some of the best bloggers in my city, I know that they actually may have honed the skill fairly well. What I do think it is apparent, though, is that supporting independent news ventures is going to get a lot harder without a community.
When J-School Becomes About Business, Not Just Reporting
Posted: September 20, 2010 Filed under: journalism | Tags: future of journalism Leave a comment »Hats off to CUNY’s Grad School of Journalism, the Tow and Knight Foundations for launching a Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Working with Professor Jeff Jarvis, the center is dedicated to innovation (my favorite thing) and finding new business models for news. The dedicated study of building the future of journalism isn’t just in creating good reporters, it’s also necessary to train the executives who will someday be making the decisions. Right now, those executives think about traditional models and things like subscriptions and pay walls. We need a new generation, and hopefully this program is part of the first step.
From the release:
The Center, which opens next month, will work to create a sustainable future for quality journalism in three ways:
- Education of students and mid-career journalists in innovation and business management;
- Research into relevant topics, such as new business models for news;
- Development of new journalistic enterprises.
[...]
Faculty members are developing courses for the new M.A. degree. The courses, which will be pilot-tested next spring, are expected to teach business and management skills, the new dynamics of news and media economics, and technology and project management, with apprenticeships at New York startups. Upon approval by the New York State Education Department, the first entrepreneurial degrees are expected to be awarded in the spring of 2012, to students currently enrolled in the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
Excited to see what may come out of the Center.
Disc. – I have a soft spot in my heart for the Knight Foundation. Several years back in grad school, I worked as a research assistant under Syracuse’s Knight Chair. No way does that impact my thoughts on this Center.
“Five Mistakes” Extend A Lot Further Than Local Blogs
Posted: September 20, 2010 Filed under: local news | Tags: local blogs Leave a comment »Great piece up over on Media Shift about five mistakes that lead local blogs to failure. Spot on in my opinion, and the brief on the five points are good to keep in mind:
Five Mistakes
#1. You’re doing it alone.
#2. You don’t know your market.
#3. Your content is weak.
#4. You haven’t thought through your business model.
#5. You have no distribution strategy.
This advice should go far beyond local blogs, and you can start with the center point. Content wins, and a plan to get it done (with other writers and on what topics) and a plan to get other people to see it (distribution) are the keys. Good writing isn’t a commodity that generally sticks out to advertisers, but it is how you grow an audience, and that’s the number that matters. These points can help out anyone if you think about it slightly more broadly. It doesn’t have to be a local market – it can be in a niche vertical or broader subject matter – content is the core, and everything goes from there.
