The Guardian published a series of booklets with the great speeches of the 20th century and distributed them in the paper. When I saw him in Cambridge, Alan Rusbridger said this boosted circulation by five figures daily. Think that could happen here? I have my doubts.
Archive for May, 2007
Beats bingo
Saturday, May 26th, 2007Confession is good for the soul
Saturday, May 26th, 2007Writing in the UK Press Gazette, Simon Bucks, associate editor of Sky News, makes a welcome admission:
The cultural issue is altogether tougher, not just for Sky News, but for all news organisations. Most journalists have grown up with the idea that we tell people the news which we think they should be told.Confession time: I was guilty too. I once argued that you wouldn’t trust a citizen journalist any more than a citizen heart surgeon. It was a paternalistic and sermonising approach that most of us shared, but it won’t do any more.
Web 2.0 (the generic name for the interactive internet) is giving the media to the people. On-demand news means that people can choose the news they want, when they want it. And they can interact with it, rant about it, and contribute to it. The coming generation of news-users, the 16- to 24-year-olds, have grown up with this concept, and expect nothing less.
Bucks also writes about an impressive video he made that I saw at the Murdoch confab in Monterey that posits a world of instant, interactive news we don’t have yet but that is quite possible today. My Monday column for the Guardian is somewhat related, talking about other structures for web content that are possible today. The internet has become too formatted and formulaic already. Time for some dynamite.
International phone tricks
Saturday, May 26th, 2007Dave Winer has questions about using mobile phones in Europe. My answer (which I learned from Ken Rutkowski):
1. Get a local SIM card for GSM phone.*
2. Forward your US number to your Skype number.
3. Forward your Skype number to your European GSM number.
This way, people can call your local number and you can talk to them without paying international roaming. Calling the US won’t be cheaper on your mobile phone; for that, use Skype on your laptop while online.
* This requires that you have an unlocked GSM phone. Many GSM phones can be unlocked; just Google for those services or pay your provider for the privilege. I used a really old Nokia phone for years but got a web-ready PDA-phone in January so I can also get email on my phone — a godsend. Also, most providers in Europe sell pay-as-you-go SIM cards that don’t expire; that’s just reason No. 476 why their phone system is better than ours. The EU is also limiting roaming rates within Europe.
Also, Dave, find out whether you need an adapter on the plane for your laptop power. If you’re taking your MacBook, you have to buy that adapter from Apple and only Apple because it has the proprietary magnetic plug.
YouGoogle
Friday, May 25th, 2007I just found the official Google channel on YouTube. It appears to be three months old but they just uploaded lots of stuff within the last day or so. Here’s the amazing Marissa Meyer explaining universal search:
More fascinating stuff there.
Reach out and Google someone
Friday, May 25th, 2007In the last two days, I ended up reconnecting with two dear friends with whom I’d lost touch — my fault in both cases — and I’m so happy I did. One of them I had tried to find in Google for sometime but she left no apparent shadow there; my shadow is long and so it’s through Google that she found me. I sat in a friend’s office two days ago and she got a call from a 30-year-ago lost boyfriend who said that Google was kinder to her than him. That sounds tantalizing. In generations to come, you’ll have your archive of FaceBook pages and the links that make up a life. It’ll be far harder to lose people. For my generation, we risk never reconnecting. But I’ll tell you that it’s also nice to find them. So go Google an old friend tonight.
The audience network
Friday, May 25th, 2007CBS continues to extend its notion of the audience as the network, today announcing a bunch of deals with social services to enable and encourage embedding of their clips — among them WordPress, Ning, and Voxant. I’m not sure, for example, what a deal with WordPress means; I can already embed clips from a number of CBS’ distributors. But it’s the thought that counts. And that thought, to repeat the words of Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive: “We can’t expect consumers to come to us. It’s arrogant for any media company to assume that.”
The head of one of these distributors, Voxant, just emailed me with his success stories. Voxant enables embedding and pays the embedders. Jeff Crigler emailed (and note that as far as I’m concerned, he misuses the term ‘mash’ — which means to remake and manipulate — when he really means ‘embed’):
I know you have been following this long-tail syndication stuff. We’ve had an interesting couple of months at voxant. I think its kind of relevant to how ultimately new media gets its legs.About a month ago we signed the NHL deal and got their hockey videos up in TheNewsRoom.com Three weeks ago we started blogging about it and sending very personalized emails to some of the top hockey blogs and small web sites. Then an amazing thing happened. One of the hockey blogs came to TNR and mashed [that is, embedded -ed] some clips. then a couple of others…. then a swarm of others. All of the sudden we are driving gobs of traffic to hockey sites who have grabbed our game highlights and “hockey fights” videos from the news room. The echo chamber actually started working. Before you turn around a third of our traffic was hockey stuff and we had bloggers and web sites coming back on a daily basis to get the latest game highlights.
So, for demonstration purposes, here’s a CBS clip via Voxant. This is one of those ridiculous you-could-write-them-before-you-see-them stories TV loves to do: Amercians are taking to the road this holiday weekend… gas prices are higher/lower… the triple-A says…. yadayadayada. Note that I just made fun of the segment and got paid for it. But that’s good: you want to be in the midst of the conversation, sometimes starting it.
60 Minutes, it ain’t
Friday, May 25th, 2007For your amusement, here’s David All’s shooter shooting me shooting him for PrezVid. How meta can you get?
And now here’s the product from me. Yeah, sure, it’d be better if I used the tripod and had lights and two mics and real questions and bothered to edit it. But who wants to be real TV?
Will’s formula for dynamite
Friday, May 25th, 2007Will Bunch, columnist, visionary, and rabblerouser in Philadelphia, has written a book, The News Fix, with his vision for the future of newspapers — or rather, to assure that there is a future.
The book is my heartfelt, yet occasionally snarky, plea for a new way to cover the news in the 21st Century, for saving news organizations — “norgs,” I suggest calling them — like the Daily News by reinventing them, with newfangled digital tools and an old-fashioned bond with readers, especially citizen journalists. There’s a lot in there about what’s wrong with today’s media — the cult of objectivty that makes newspapers both boring AND easy to manipulate, and reporters bonding with the powerful folks we cover instead of the communities where we live.But the main message is hope for the future, in the new kind of investigative reporting that’s now being pioneered on blogs like Talking Points Memo, in harnessing the power of the Web, and in the possibility for new alliances between digital rabble rousers and ink-stained wretches (like me).
IdolCritic finale
Thursday, May 24th, 2007Bittersweet: One more episode of IdolCritic, but the last . . . for now. More to come on different fronts. In the meantime, savor Liza:
Pay doesn’t work
Thursday, May 24th, 2007Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Wall Street Journal and iTunes. But once you list a handful of exceptions, it’s just true that paying for content doesn’t work online. And there’s one fewer exception in July: CNN is abandoning its effort — its second effort — to charge for video online. In a distributed media environment — where you will want your content nuggetized and widgeted and available everywhere — it will be even less practical and possible to charge. (Hat tip: Steve Gorelick)
A pro’s advice for the candidates
Thursday, May 24th, 2007I asked Fred Graver — who makes real TV at VH1’s Best Week Ever and Acceptable.TV — what advice he has for the candidates and their online video and got a smarter answer to that question than I’ve gotten yet. And funnier. Because Fred knows funny. Enjoy:
(Crossposted from PrezVid)
In with the new
Thursday, May 24th, 2007I read all the way through Robert Samuelson’s Newsweek column about the fate of journalism thinking that I was reading another lament. But then came this gem of an ending:
The changes involve more than economics. When I started, print journalism required two basic skills: reporting and writing. Now, journalists are expected to be multimedia utility players, feeding Web sites, posting videos and doing TV. Up to a point, this is valuable: finding new ways to engage and inform. But it’s also time-consuming and detracts from reporting. Just what constitutes journalism is less clear. . . . The skills that are rewarded are shifting from diligent, curious and clear, to tech-savvy, quick and edgy.If the Internet permanently crashed tomorrow, I’d be thrilled. Still, the sky-is-falling view of the news business is a triumph of heart over head. Parts of the news complex are expanding. Bloomberg News has 2,300 reporters and editors worldwide, up 300 from early 2006. Among most reporters and editors, journalistic norms—respect for facts, an effort to be fair—endure. Despite problems at individual news organizations, the public has access to more news than ever. People are no less informed. A poll by the Pew Research Center reports that in 2007, 69 percent of the public can identify the vice president, down from 74 percent in 1989; but 76 percent know which party controls Congress, up from 68 percent. “[T]he findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge,” says Pew. The real news about the news business is that it isn’t collapsing. It’s merely changing.
