Citizen Journalism at its Finest: Amateur Meterology
My Twitter stream is flooding (ha!) with tales of power outages, WMATA hold-ups and flood warnings from around the DMV area this morning. That massive storm that came through was fun to watch if you were inside, but being caught in it could not have been fun.
The other thing I’m realizing is that I never would have even gone to an accredited meterology source like Weather.com if it wasn’t for that linked article I put together for We Love DC. In fact, it’s been a lot more fun to follow local Twitterers as they share the on-the-street happenings and images. Just in the last few minutes I’ve seen shots of Constitution Ave underwater, and probably the best shot of the day will be this Twitpic from the middle of Northwest DC:
The running joke in DC is that “weather has brought us together” this year. I think the overly-connected DC social grid is responsible for that. This is a smartphone town, and the fact that everyone is at the point of something happening makes it really easy to create news – even if it is just about a fast moving Tornadocane. At least among this crowd, it felt like it was smarter to turn to Twitter than the news channels this morning. The information was more valuable (knowing there was a flood at one of the metro stations, what did that mean for the commute) because it came from the people actually affected by inclement weather.
No news organization could pay – nor should they – for that many voices and eyewitnesses. But, as I write this, TBD is killing it by tapping into that network and pushing out updates from others, not trying to make their own. Even moments ago they opened a live chat shows that they are willing to hand over the speaker if needed.
Hey, it’s the weather. We always talk about the weather, right? Someone will say the fact that we’ve moved beyond what we eat on Twitter is progress. Maybe they should log in and realize the value that comes with it.
And the TBD Experiment Begins…
Overnight, the switch on TBD.com was flipped. Instead of a waiting and guessing game for the DC-based hyperlocal media experiment/outlet, we now get a reality to poke and prod around. The bench of staff writers and partner blogs (one of which I write for, We Love DC) will ensure significant content that is both original and from the closest sources to relevant news that matters.
I won’t try to snap judgement today – there is a lot on the site to play around with and I’m just in the shallow end this morning – but, in true hyperlocal form, the best place to start seems to be the story-by-zip-code option. 10 stories already this morning for my Virginia neighborhood; 61 stories close to my D.C. office.
While I continue to poke around and as TBD gets rolling over the next few days, I’ll let Erik Wemple’s Letter from the Editor about the launch take over the last word as it comes to expectations for what could be:
So here it is. A news site. It won’t serve you a cup of coffee, no matter what you click on.
Quote of the Day: Dan Abrams on Media
“In five years, anyone who is not actively involved in the Web is not in media.”
~Dan Abrams, a TV journalist best known as the chief legal analyst on NBC and MSNBC.
Via Mediaite, which is a site Abrams owns and for which I write
The Future of Newspapers is History
Some pretty telling new stats are coming out of a study at Annenberg’s (USC) Center for Digital Future about who will be reading the newspaper in the future. The answer? Well, the number isn’t going to get better. Mathew Ingram at GigaOm breaks it down further, but one metric stands out the most to me:
59 percent [of people surveyed] said that if the print edition of their newspaper stopped publishing they would read the online version. Only 37 percent said that they would read the print edition of another newspaper.
Think about that one. People aren’t overly unsubscribing from newspapers, but if the newspaper disappears, they won’t go get another one. Add that to the much larger concern: the younger generation isn’t exactly replacing them with new subscriptions of their own.
Please note: The death of newspapers is *not* the death of journalism. That is all.
Journalists and Programming
Should journalists learn programming? A non-ironic and decently useful flowchart from 10,000 Words. Click for their site and the larger version:
Stats on The Times Paywall Attempt
Three weeks ago, British daily The Times erected a paywall to all of its online content. Non-registered subscribers were kicked to places where they could sign-up if they tried to find some content. How have things gone since then? According to stats from Hitwise:
- Between February and June (when the wall went live), Times has seen a 90 percent drop off in visitors, from 1.2 million daily users to just above 190,000
- Before the wall, Times accounted for 15.4 percent of all UK “quality press traffic;” now, it is just 4.16 percent
- A free online subscription is available for the 150,000 print subscribers to the paper, but estimates indicate that there are about 15,000 people who pay £2 a week for access. This works out to approximately just £1,400,000 pounds a year (approximately $2,135,560) – probably not enough to save journalism.
Data was reported by The Guardian, which doesn’t have a paywall and lets me link to it.
Twitter, One Goal and 23 Languages
With minutes remaining in extra time, Andrés Iniesta’s goal was all Spain needed to earn its first ever World Cup trophy.
It was a moment we were all watching together, and thanks to some global, digital channels like Twitter, it’s a moment that encapsulates how different this year’s World Cup truly was from those in the past.
It didn’t just unite us, it was a joyous explosion that came from every corner of the world. According to Twitter’s World Cup wrap-up post, that moment bounced around the cyber world in 23 different languages from 81 different countries. Check out this sweet Wordle released by Twitter for Tweets that were sent when Iniesta’s ball hit the back of the net:
We’ll see you in 2014. Man, I’ll miss the World Cup.
A Little Less Painful Than a Pay Wall: The Pay & Sit
Better not let the Old Media people see this, or they will wire your computer to shock you if you don’t pay for online news stories. I give you the Pay & Sit bench:
H/t Geekosystem
Federal Media Stimulus Would Be The Easy Way Out
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger took to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal this morning to talk about the future of the media, it’s financial situation – and recommending that maybe the federal government should step in to assist these organizations.
By the second paragraph, I can already see where I’m going to have a small issue with Mr. Bollinger:
At the same time, however, the financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core. The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated. My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future.
He’s missing a word in that first sentence. It should read U.S. institutional press. Bollinger discussed the idea of the institution throughout the rest of his Op-Ed, and then points to public media organizations within our country (PBS, NPR) as well as others on the international scale (BBC). The balance, he commented, between federal, mixed systems does not mean that the words would be controlled by the feds – the First Amendment would be safe, in his view, because of the same firewall that exists between a newspapers sales and news desks already.
My thought is not a “only the strong should survive” mentality towards the media world. While worldwide bureaus are shrinking, there are so many other realms of journalism that are expanding. The institution is changing, but the citizen footprint is making sure that there are boots on the ground covering stories as they happen – the same technology that is shifting the journalism world and splintering it into a fractured base also is making seemingly myriad contributors to help report those stories.
The reason for a foreign bureau is to ensure first-hand news gathering at a level of access that was fairly expensive except for those major media conglomerates. But that access isn’t nearly as expensive anymore, and it isn’t as high of a barrier of entry. Significant news gathering can be done on a leaner budget by working with the citizen journalists – even in developing regions.
In terms of local journalism, there have been several other models that still provoke the inquisitive and democratic process on the non-profit and crowdsourced model (most notably, in my opinion, would be Spot.us). This isn’t time to run to the Capitol and ask for a check. It’s a time to think about how to make technology work.
Of course, the irony of all of this could be that the link to the above Op-Ed may end up being behind a paywall on the WSJ site. Nothing could be more fitting for an opinion of the nature of Bollingers. The power of tradition, keeping the idea in.
You Don’t Say [Daily Show and NPR Edition]
In a completely unshocking recommendation, Facebook wanted to let me know that many who like The Daily Show also like NPR. I’m not surprised. Really. I’m not.
Maybe Facebook does know too much.
