I love Jimmy Justice, the guy who wanders the streets of New York videotaping traffic cops who are violating the traffic laws they are supposed to enforce and confronting them with their sins. This is the power of the people, armed with their own cameras and the internet, acting as watchdogs on government. Isn’t that journalism?
On the Today Show this morning, David Gregory got on a high horse interviewing Jimmy, asking whether he wasn’t just a bit obnoxious. (I dare you to try to find the story on the show’s site; I can’t.) *
Well, what’s any less obnoxious about a reporter asking the same question? That’s exactly why subjects so often think reporters are rude: they’re being asked questions they don’t want to answer. But here’s Gregory calling a citizen with a camera obnoxious for doing what reporters do. Maybe that’s because Jimmy has an accent and an attitude. Gregory clearly thinks that asking the question in a tie with a sterile TV voice is less obnoxious: more professional. Style is substance on TV. And I can hear someone now saying that Jimmy has an ax to grind, a bias, an agenda. Well, yes, but so does a reporter when he decides to follow that cop and confront her about her actions; that agenda is precisely the motivation for the question. It’s all journalism.
If they really care about watchdogging government and its abuses of power, the proper response from the Today show and any journalistic organization should be to encourage more people to do what Jimmy is doing. What’s wrong with more watchdogs on the street? Indeed, Today should hand out some video cameras or at least share a few lessons with Jimmy about how to shoot video without giving us motion sickness. And it would be generous of them to talk about Jimmy’s rights to shoot public officials’ actions in public, since those officials try to threaten and intimidate Jimmy.
Hey, Mr. Gregory: You and Jimmy are on the same side. You’re doing journalism. It may not sound as slick, but the end result is the same.
* LATER: Thanks to Dan in the comments for finding the Today segment. David Gregory’s fuller quote: “It’s a little obnoxious. Do you not worry about coming off as an obnoxious, aggressive guy here?”
Do reporters? Should they?
Jimmy says he was frustrated getting anyone to pay attention to his complaints about the traffic officers: “I had to bring it to YouTube. I had to show it to the people.”
Neil McIntosh has damned good advice for journalism students, following up on a report about the state of j-schools and technology, below:
Again, for those at the back: if you think you want to be a journalist, I now don’t think there’s any excuse not to have a blog. The closer you get to looking around for jobs, the better it should be maintained. If you enter the jobs market without one, no matter how good your degree, you’re increasingly likely to lose out to people who better present all they can do, and have the experience of creating and curating their own site.
Still catching up on my RSS reading, I see this disturbing report from the journalism educators’ conference on the state of new media art in j-school and college papers. You’d think that they’d be way ahead of the industry, right? The young people live and breath this stuff, or so we’re told; soon we won’t even need to train them in multimedia because they’ll come in growing up omnimedia. Not so fast:
About 91 percent of college newspapers had online presences in 2007, but the percentages are much lower for other forms of college media — 36.3 percent for radio stations, 20.9 percent for television stations, 18.1 percent for magazines and 6 percent for yearbooks. There were, however, “appreciable gains†in the proportion of college media outlets using multimedia technologies in 2007 compared to 2006: For instance, in 2006, 20.9 percent used podcasts, versus 38.4 percent in 2007. The use of Weblogs increased from 19.8 to 35.8 percent, RSS feeds from 23.5 to 35.1 percent, streaming video from 16.6 to 30.5 percent, embedded video (including YouTube) from 9.6 to 42.4 percent and comments features from 39.6 to 57 percent.
It’s good news that only a third of college papers use blogs and RSS? Ouch. This isn’t just about being cool. It’s about jobs:
Meanwhile, even the smallest commercial newspapers, with 10,000 readers or fewer, are looking for reporting candidates with experience writing for the Web and uploading stories to the Internet, according to a survey of newspaper managing editors conducted by Wendelken and Toni B. Mehling of James Madison University. Of nine respondents in the “large daily newspaper†category (those with a circulation of 44,000 and above), eight required reporters to have skills in capturing audio while four required audio editing skills. Five required reporters to have skills in capturing video, while one required video editing expertise. Major newspapers, said Wendelken, “are looking at reporters to do these things from the start.â€
When discussing barriers to new media education, panelists and audience members cited costs (although Murley stressed that many of the technologies can be used fairly cheaply), in addition to resistance from some faculty who lack multimedia skills themselves or otherwise don’t see the need to instruct undergraduates in the emerging platforms. But they also cited resistance from journalism students themselves.
“A lot of college students select their medium in high school. When they come onto campus, they’re already a TV person or a radio person or a newspaper person,†said Wendelken.
“I’m a print journalist,†he continued, imitating the attitude of many aspiring journalists. “Why do I need to learn video?â€
There is no such thing as a print journalist anymore. There are journalists who now can work in any medium for any media company.
Just saw this in a UK print trade publication: A newspaper trade show has been scrapped for “lack of interest from the industry.” This would seem to be a pretty clear sign of falling investment in old, print technology and infrastructure. I think that’s a good sign.
Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation wonders about extending the idea in the infrastructure project into her territory: tracking Congress.
I wonder what the analogue to what might be in our world of Congressional activity? A Google map of earmarks? A map that reflects where lawmakers have their fundraising events with lobbyists? (Yes, still permitted.) A Gawker Stalker effort that tracks lobbyists visits in the halls of Congress? A map that shows the land deals lawmakers have that also shows earmarks from the same members? A map of lawmakers daily schedules, each point representing the location of the group/business/person the lawmaker is meeting with (not the location of the meeting). More ideas?
How about mapping a politician’s donors to see how much comes from local support vs. outside interests (i.e., how much comes from Washington itself)?
How about mapping that against corporate headquarters in industries (e.g., someone on a health oversight committee gets lots of donations from New Jersey because there are so many pharma companies there)?
How about timelines showing how active each congressman is, visualizing their productivity: bills introduced, votes, and such?
How about mapping that against the timing of donations from various industries, showing the correlation (if not cause-and-effect)?
I’d like to animate the Washington Post’s wonderful candidate tracker against time to see who’s paying attention to what states when and what pays off.
I’m working on an essay I was assigned on what newspapers will be like in 2020. And it occurred to me that we are at the halfway point between the birth of the browser and then. Browsers started spreading 13 years ago, in 1994. Now they’re asking me to predict what will happen 13 years hence. Consider the changes in the world since ‘94 and now consider the pace of change moving forward. Newspapers? What’s a newspaper, Daddy? What’s a browser? What’s a PC?
My blogging friend Scott Karp takes the tarp off of his new venture today: Publish2 will attempt to gather the collective intelligence of journalists — small ‘j’ — with a combination of social networking and useful functionality. Scott sets the table and serves the meat in his introductory post; go over and dig in.
When I heard that Scott was cooking something up, I had to find out what he was up to because I’d learned through our blog discussions that he’s smart, incisive, and insightful — and I think that even though, or because, we sometimes disagree. When he let me in, I was excited with the many possibilities for what he’s building. And so I’m trying to give some advice to Scott and his cofounder, Robert Young (with whom I almost crossed paths when I was at Delphi, briefly — tiny world, ours). Howard Weaver of McClatchy was already giving him advice. And Scott wants more. So go to his new Publish2 blog and tell him your wants, needs, and ideas.
Mike Seery at the Economist’s Project Red Stripe responds to the considerable discussion inspired by his team’s effort at innovation. As he says, “It’s not for nothing that providing advice on how to innovate is a massive business.” My Guardian column on the project here.
I had a wonderful breakfast the other day with the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher, talking about lots of things from Yahoo’s doom to entrepreneurial journalism. Her video over the omelet here.
Her colleague Walt Mossberg was having breakfast at the next table and as he wandered by he spotted my Treo on the table. Walt shoot his head. “You can do better than that,” he said.
I explained that I’m not allowed to have an iPhone yet. My son bought one with the proceeds of his Facebook app writing for a VC. And my wife said that if he teaches me to write apps, maybe I can get an iPhone, too.
Rubber chicken is no longer the staple of political roadtrips. Soft-serve ice cream is. The other day, John McCain licked some. Now it’s the Edwards’ turn.
I think it’s wonderful that The New York Times did a deal to bring Freakonomics under its wing — hosting it, selling ads on it, promoting it, but not buying it or hiring its creators and not treating it like so much freelance fodder to go through the Times’ editing mill. That’s new. This follows my somewhat similar deal at PrezVid with the Washington Post and another big-media outlet to be named shortly, in which they also leave PrezVid as an independent entity (in this case, we keep our site and URL) but take up some of the content onto their sites.
What I like about this is that we see big-media services starting to act like members of networks. They are beginning to realize that they can’t — and don’t want to — do everything themselves. They are also recognizing that creators want to keep ownership of their creations and so hiring or buying isn’t always the best option.
But so long as these services still want to serve content from their own sites, there will be issues. In my deal, the sites pick the posts they want; if they don’t like something, they just don’t take it. But in the Times’ case, all of Freakonomics is now served under the Times umbrella but without the usual Times process. I think that’s a good thing. But some folks didn’t a few days ago when the Freaks started a discussion speculating about the best ways for terrorists to attack America, something that quite a few commenters and bloggers thought was dangerous and just stupid and unbecoming the Times.
And this leads me to suggest that syndication is still not the best relationship for big services and the new independent players. I’m delighted that there’s marryin’ in the air. But I think the independent guys are better left independent. And the proper relationship, I think, is a network. Imagine, instead, if the Times declared Freakonomics part of its quality blog network. It could sell ads there, telling its advertisers that it had found the best of the blogs just for them. It could direct its readers to lots of great new content. By promoting that content, it also increases its ad value: a virtuous circle. But there remains a distance that defines independence: The blog is free of the worries of what happens under the Times address and brand — though if they go too damned far, they can be dropped. And the Times has a certain deniability — it is clear that this content was not a product of the Times, though, again, if advertisers don’t want to be on that blog, it will be dropped. The further advantage for the big guy is it can grow much bigger much faster by becoming a member and enabler of a much larger network. The Times doesn’t have to create or pay for or host or be responsible for all the best content around. It can find it and help support it and bring that new, larger world to its readers and advertisers.
Be a network more than a site, that’s my advice.
This is what Glam has done, creating an ad network across independent sites and growing hugely, bragging that it is the no. 1 women’s site (service, network?) with 19.1 monthly uniques, growing faster than MySpace and larger than iVillage, AOL Living, and all of Conde Nast combined.
At TechCrunch, Mike Arrington ridicules Glam’s claims, saying: “A minimal amount of research into their business shows that the company is an ad network, not a content site.” With respect, I disagree
I say that’s what makes Glam so smart. As the web becomes more and more distributed — more widgetized with tchotzkes of content and functionality spread everywhere — the idea of measuring size by just measuring a site becomes obsolete. And here’s the fringe benefit: it’s better and cheaper to take your content to the people rather than marketing to bring them to you. This is the essence of CBS’ audience network strategy.
This is, dare I say it, the essence of 3.0: join and enable a network instead of trying to buy content and eyeballs on a site.
There are still issues of quality. As both Arrington and VentureBeat point out, a network can grow too big by including junky traffic; that is why networks have gotten less respect and thus lower value.
But now let’s return to the Times and Freakonomics. No junk there. It’s quality, albeit sometimes controversial quality. The Times wouldn’t have embraced it otherwise. Its advertisers and readers know that. So there’s a power in the Times and the Post (which also runs a travel blog network) and a major wire service that’s about to launch a network of its own and other of the big guys growing bigger not by hiring and buying and building but by networking.
And by the way, I’d like to hear the Freakonomics guys explore the power and value of networks vs. closed content systems.
Tonight is the premiere of the third season of Weeds. I’m a huge fan of the show. And, no, it’s not just because Mary-Louise Parker is the sexiest mom in America west of my backyard. That helps. But it is a brilliantly over-the-top portrait of the ills of suburbia and the pressures of families. And the cast is stellar. I inhale every episode. (Sorry.)
But I don’t watch Weeds on Showtime. My cable system’s deal for getting the channel is ridiculously priced and so I missed out — until I watched it via iTunes. And I ended up buying every episode of the first two seasons: $1.99 each.
This season, because I’d blogged my affection for the show, Showtime let me watch the first episode on the web — and it has opened this up to other “insiders” (all you have to do is register, I think). They also sent me the next three episodes and a nice little schwag garden bag I’d give to my daughter of it didn’t says WEEDS on the side. And now I’ve watched them all. Sucked them right up.
Only problem is, now I’ll have to wait a very, very long time for the rest of the season — until it is off Showtime and some contractual time has passed and it finally shows up in iTunes.
Damn. This is no way to run an industry based on popularity. If I’m willing to pay for the show, I should be able to watch it now.
I was thinking about this the other day when I saw other cable shows — free cable shows — advertised on my subway. I might want to watch some of them. But there’s not much of a chance that I’ll even go to the trouble of telling my TiVo to record them. And I certainly will never shedule my life around them. But I’d still watch them, if only I could watch them on my schedule.
All TV should be on demand. If you can charge and get money, fine. If you can charge for watching early and get money, fine. If you just want to expand your audience, great.
But TV networks are horribly inefficient means of distribution from our side of the equation.
I want my fix of Weeds and I want it now. What a silly industry it is the denies me this pleasure. Even drug dealers are smarter.
