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McSneaks!

I wasn’t quite sure how to react when Clyde passed this link to me and the rest of the Cyberbrains. My wife was sittingWebcam mug Hans next to me in our downstairs office / sewing room (She sews, not me!) and I didn’t want to break into histrionics. Besides, she’s an intelligent news consumer as well, with a perspective that’s different, and probably more grounded in reality than mine.

But as I explained to her why it’s bordering on blasphemous for anything resembling a newscast to try to sneak an ad past its consumers, I actually made sense, so much sense, in fact, she encouraged me to share it. Her exact comment was something along the lines of, “Don’t you have a blog for this?”

So here’s the rub, and I’ll try to get to it without resorting to the tired arguments that news should be a public service, news shouldn’t focus only on money, big business shouldn’t control the news because frankly, we know none of those are true. News has always been, and should be to some extent, about making money, maybe not obscene 30 percent margins, but at least some. It makes the news gatherers responsive to their audience, which I think citizen journalism has taught us is needed now more than ever.

We also know that as nefarious as McDonald’s is, they aren’t placing fake cups of iced coffee on the morning news desk in a plot to take over the world or even control the news. How many McDonald’s related stories will the Las Vegas station cover anyway?

I also won’t talk about how news needs to fix its broken trust with its audiences, as Roy Peter Clark discussed today in Poynter’s Centerpiece, because while I do agree, I’m not sure that this move really adds to the woes the media have already inflicted by allowing front page ads or signing revenue sharing agreements with sports stadiums. The real problem with these ads, as Clark states, is they lack transparency, a vital cog to reconnecting with audieces. Audiences deserve to know who journalists spoke to, who they didn’t, and how they gathered their stories. In the same vein, they deserve to be told explicitly they are watching an ad, and this is where I think Clark misses the point.

I would not have a problem if the newscast began with, “This insipid babble brought to you by McDonald’s, your stop for scalding hot coffee.” I’d even have less of a problem with this if the anchors were told they had to drink from the cup three times each hour, while also uttering, ”MickeyD’s now serves iced frappalattachinos.” What I dislike and what I think goes against a core journalistic value is that it looks like the news station is trying to pull a fast one. It’s like they are the Wizard of Oz saying, “Pay no attention to the beverage on the desk, except of course when you are driving down the road past some Golden Arches and you’re thirsty.” 

I like my news like my McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with Cheese. I choose both because I know what I’m going to get. Let’s keep it that way.

Posted 24 July 2008 † Hans Meyer § From The Cyberbrains ‡ Comments (0)

A prophecy fulfilled

While reviewing Dan Gillmor’s We The Media for my comprehensive exams, I came across an interesting prediction about the 2008 campaign.

Gillmor had just spent pages talking about the 2004 Howard Dean campaign, how his choice to open up the lines of conversation using Web tools helped fuel his rise from a nobody to the front runner by the end of 2003. The grassroots organization that happened via social networking became an engine for activism, volunteerism, and fund-raising.

While many looked at Dean’s subsequent implosion as a sign that all of the Web activity was merely a bubble, Gillmor rightly said those critics are off base. His fall from the top of the heap isn’t a sign the movement wasn’t sustainable; it was a sign that using interactivity on the Web can turn an unknown into a contender. What Gillmor noted is it takes the right kind of candidate to lead that kind of a movement. Dean wasn’t it, but they do exist.

Then he closes the discussion with this, written in 2005:

Open-source politics is about participation - financial as well as on the issues of policy and governance - from people on the edges. People all over the world work on small parts of big open-source software projects that create some of the most important and reliable components on the Internet; people everywhere can work on similarly stable components for a participatory political life in much more efficient ways than in the past. … A safe prediction: Net-savvy campaigning will be the rule by 2008, and it will be lower-level candidates who do the next wave of innovating.

Sound like anyone we know? It’s hard to believe, but a year ago Barack Obama was given no chance at the Democratic Party nomination. But I continue to believe one big reason for his success is he understood the Internet better than any other candidate. It isn’t just fundraising; his Web site is fully interactive and implements social networking tools that allow people to connect to one another. This allowed people “on the edges” (as composed to people at “power centers” who control all decisions; this is a big concept in Gillmor’s book) to get his message out. Eight years ago, it’s hard to imagine Obama finding success using the old template.

Crossposted at Creative Destruction

Posted 18 July 2008 † Jeremy § Jeremy Littau ‡ Comments (0)

Hope for the news business

A friend of mine sent me an interesting article about how Coldplay inadvertently got a #1 album in terms of sales and #1 song by giving away music. The music industry is facing a lot of the same problems as the news business in that, with so much media available for free on the Web, people are not as willing to pay for it anymore.

Or are they? A small nugget at the end of the article gives hope for the news person:

Following the precedent of Radiohead, Wayne has demonstrated that giving away music can actually be good for business. But, just as significantly, he has made something so exciting people will pay to hear it. This, rather obviously, may be the key to the music business’s malaise: quality begets sales.”

One of the big problems in the past 30 years in newsrooms is that management has cut newsroom staff to increase profits, or to make up for profit shortfalls when they don’t meet projections. This shareholder-driven way of managing newsrooms have been criticized by media scholars such as Phil Meyer for years as a “death spiral.” In this scenario, newsrooms eat their own seed corn by getting rid of the very people who produce strong original content and then fill those spaces with AP or other wire copy. The drop in quality is noticeable to the news consumer.

But perhaps Coldplay has inadvertently demonstrated that you can give some of it away for free and still charge for content. The key is it has to be quality. The romantic journalistic view of our work is that, of course, it is all quality. But journalists readily acknowledged they are crushed for time and being asked to do more with less. Investing in the newsroom during lean times can increase quality. People will pay for that in their music, why wouldn’t they pay for it in something that has an even greater impact on their lives such as news?

Posted 26 June 2008 † Jeremy § Jeremy Littau ‡ Comments (0)

Vanity Fair’s history of the Net

jpkthumb.jpgThis month’s (or actually next month’s, July-month’s) Vanity Fair has a great article “An oral history of the Internet: How the Web Was Won.”

The article does just that, with quotes and anecdotes from the big names today, the guys and gals who made all the dough and quotes from the egg-heads who made it all happen.

Here’s some highlights in case you don’t want to shell out six odd bucks:

Jim Clark is one of the founders of Netscape:

“One of the things that struck me at that early embryonic state (the early 90s) was that the Internet was going to mutate the newspaper industry, was going to change the classified-ad business, and change the music business. And so I went around and met with Rolling Stone magazine. I met with Times Mirror Company, Time Warner. We demonstrated how you could play music over this thing, how you could shop for records, shop for CDs. We demonstrated a bunch of shopping applications. We wanted to show the newspapers what they were going to undergo.”

The venerable Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone wasn’t a taker and neither were the newspapers. DOH!

They got another chance, however.

Vinod Khosla created Sun Microsystems with some Stanford buddies and later joined a prestigious venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“The media people essentially did not think the Internet would be important or disruptive. In 1996, I got together the C.E.O.’s of 9 of the 10 major newspaper companies in America in a single room to propose something called the New Century Network. It was the C.E.O.’s of The Washington Post, and The New York Times and Gannett and Times Mirror and Tribune and I forget who else. They couldn’t convince themselves that a Google, a Yahoo or an eBay would be important, or that eBay could ever replace classified advertising.”

DOH! DOH!

Don’t even mention Craigslist to them. And speaking of that list. Continue Reading

Posted 12 June 2008 † Joe Kokenge § Joe Kokenge § From The Cyberbrains ‡ Comments (1)

TV strikes out; CJ’s in the bullpen

As hard as it might seem on sports fans now, the demise of local sports on television might be the precursor to a jock-world bonanza.

KRCG in Jefferson City, MO recently eliminated its sports department as part of a cost-cutting binge of layoffs. ???????? ????? ????????Clyde BentleyBut it is not the first station to do so. Stations from Norfolk to Las Vegas have given sports the ax in a move that seems antithetical to our belated realization that “local” means “popular.”

The trouble with local sports on television, however, is not the content itself. It’s the demographics of the market and the logistics of television.

Sports sections, be they on TV broadcasts or in newspapers, are advertising dogs. I cannot tell you how many times when I was a newspaper general manager I had to discount agency ads when they ended up in the sports section.

Sports fans are loyal readers or viewers. But they are guys. And guys seldom make buying decisions in American households. A study by Mediamark in 2004 showed that just under half of male readers go to the sports section but that less than a quarter of women do. That alone might not be a marketing challenge, but 63% of women peruse the general news section – joined by 57% of the men. You can also get a closer point spread in business, opinion, classified and even the comics.

An advertiser has to ask why they should display their wares to a bunch of fellows who don’t know a sale from a sail when they can get both the men and the real buyers in many other sections of the paper or segments of the TV news.

That’s bad for newspapers, but the emphasis on local news is doubly bad for television.

A newspaper typically covers a city and a few small towns around it. But the television station in the same market beams its programming over hundreds of square miles. The newspaper may have three or even a half dozen high schools in its coverage area. Even a small market station like KRCG has dozens of high schools, scores of junior highs and perhaps thousands of Little League teams. No one can afford to send reporters to all the games and no evening newscast has enough time to air all the stories.

TV stations do best covering what a whole lot of people want to watch. Local sports are important, but I have absolutely no interest in the junior varsity volleyball scores from a town I’m not sure how to drive to.
Fortunately, there is a great solution in the wings. And we don’t even have to invent it.

The Internet provides an easy way to disseminate that information widely without requiring everyone to read or watch it. As my old friend and media watcher Vin Crosbie once said, “The Internet is not a mass medium. It’s a massively delivered niche medium.”

Internet-facilitated coverage is ideal for sports. It’s cheap to publish, easy to access and allows the consumer to pick just the stories that interest them.

Of course, the technology alone doesn’t answer the staffing problem. That’s still a whole lot of games to cover. So bring in the citizen journalism cavalry.

I spent several years as a Little League then youth soccer dad. I bought an outrageously expensive telephoto lens so I could capture the mud on my goalkeeper-son’s face as he dove for the ball. And I wasn’t alone. It was surprising how many times I had to jockey for shots with other parents.
The parents are there, they are interested and they are shooting photos and recording stats. The hard work is organizing the effort to collect that information. Those of us who have worked in citizen journalism for any time at all know the fallacy of the “Field of Dreams Syndrome.” Just because you build the Web site doesn’t mean they will come.

Good. That means careers for journalists. Organizing parents and sports fans is not all that different than coordinating a huge newsroom. Or riding herd on the freelancers for a magazine. It can be done.
So sorry, sports fans. The tube is going dark. But not to worry, as the game will go on. Just stay tuned.

Posted 26 May 2008 † Clyde Bentley § Clyde Bentley ‡ Comments (0)

Taking CJ to the ‘hood’

What happens when citizen journalism collides with traditional journalism?

Bentley bookcaseLike any collision, you could expect a few injuries – at least damaged egos. But so far neither type of journalism has been fatal to the other. What is of concern, however, is that the bumper of the CJ Prius doesn’t mesh well with that of the Traditional News SUV.

Here at the Missouri School of Journalism, our citizen journalism efforts are narrowly focused on its relationship with traditional journalism. We are the world’s oldest journalism school and have served that profession for a century. My charter from Dean Mills was to find some way to keep trained journalists in the user-contributing future media picture.

Our first research planning meetings were marked by loud arguments over whether it was even possible, whether we would ruin journalism or whether it would make any difference at all. The first consensus was unexpected: Citizen journalism approached by a traditional organization must have a revenue stream.

The blogs, discussion boards and news groups that spawned citizen journalism had little profit motive. We quickly realized that the burden of paying a staff significantly changed a medium.

Continue Reading

Posted 24 April 2008 † Clyde Bentley § Clyde Bentley ‡ Comments (1)

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

jpkthumb.jpgSix weeks ago, the first MyMissourian site died an ignominious death at the hands of rogue spammers (which is the Web equivalent of choking on a hot dog.)

Needless to say, as with any total Web site annihilation, there was a fair amount of teeth-gnashing, fingernail biting and general angst from the staff. I think I even saw Jeremy weep one manly tear of grief.

But, with the gracious help of the tech boys in the back room, we downloaded some content to fill the newshole of the print version of MyMissourian, refilled the grave of the Mambo version of MyMissourian and let her Rest In Peace.

Clyde, ever the master of HTML tables, rigged a quick placeholder to fill the URL and we waited a few days for the boys in the back to recode the site into WordPress. Now, six weeks later, it’s like it never happened. We have a new home, with more functionality with barely a beat missed. Indeed, if I weren’t so lazy, I could have written this post a month ago. The fluid changeover was almost imperceptible — so easy, in fact, I had to stop and reflect to realize what had just taken place.

Imagine if we were a print-only publication and our presses or whole building even had burned down? What would we have done, then? The teethgnashing and nailbiting would have been far more dramatic, to say the least. And, with the present financial state of the newspaper industry, it’s doubtful there would be such a swift rebirth, if a rebirth at all.

Sure, replacing a Web site is easier than replacing multi-million dollar presses, but that’s not the point here. Iterating is the point. That’s a word I first heard uttered in a Web setting by the Star Warsian Roelof Botha.

Botha is one of the “big-wigs” at Sequoia Capital and has made money as a venture capitalist on projects like PayPal and YouTube. His name gets bantered around with the likes of Michael Mortiz and Elon Musk. I once worked at a Web site in Santa Monica, mahalo.com, in which Sequoia Capital was a principal investor. Botha came to the office one day to give us a pep talk, not about the vulnerabilities of the Death Star, but about what would happen once mahalo.com went live. Continue Reading

Posted 15 April 2008 † Joe Kokenge § Joe Kokenge ‡ Comments (1)

Something is brewing in journalism

I am up to my digital derriere in a project to write a “definitive” paper on cititizen journalism. The problem with “definitive” is that, well, it’s not very definitive. My mind has raced back and forth over the various aspects of this phenomenon that have either pleasantly surprised me, met my expectations or sideswiped both me and the journalism world.

clyde-tea.jpgLast week I had the good fortune to get the journalist’s traditional source of inspiration: A new and very short deadline. The Donald W. Reynolds Institute at Mizzou asked me to knock out a quick look at citizen journalism for its Web site. Isn’t it amazing how much better you can write with an editor breathing down your throat?

So here it is, right out of the microwave: A nice cuppa CJ:

It’s difficult to imagine two words that have caused more anxiety among news media professionals than “citizen journalism.” There have been endless arguments over what the term means, who it includes and whether it will kill or save the American new industry.

For the past four years, a team at the Missouri School of Journalism has studied citizen journalism from the closest of quarters. Although we were all traditional journalists and all professional skeptics, we followed the “do it to learn” philosophy of the world’s oldest journalism school and launched MyMissourian.com on Oct. 1, 2004. Aimed at the community around the University of Missouri rather than the school itself, MyMissourian features content written by non-journalists but lightly edited by the staff. We then insert a selection of the content in the free-circulation Saturday print edition of the Columbia Missourian.

Four years later, I’m very comfortable with both the citizen journalism concept and the phrase, but I’m still frustrated that my colleagues have such difficulty with it.
Citizen journalism is no more a replacement for traditional journalism than teabags are a replacement for water. Both can stand alone comfortably, but when combined they produce something quite wonderful.

The “citizen” in the term is a continual irritant to news people, who complain that it implies they are excluded from citizenship. Wrong definition of citizen. The better analogy is “citizen soldiers” — the militia and National Guard that serve our country “part time.” As my chief warrant officer father explained, Guard members want to help shoulder the responsibility of defending the nation – they just don’t want make a career of it.

Similarly, citizen journalists don’t want newsroom jobs – they just have something to say. And often they want to say it because those of us on the professional side are too busy with the big stories to see the little items that mean so much to people. It’s unlikely citizen journalists will ever effectively cover Congress, but they sure get their neighbors’ attention with tales of pets, kids and community activities.

Our research continues to show that citizen journalism expands the range of topics available in the mass media as it expands the range of voices. And the team – now known as the Cyberbrains – is confident that the recipe for the future of news is to drop that citizen journalism teabag right into that boiling pot of newsroom water. The resulting brew, as Thomas Lipton said, is more than good. It’s “brisk.”

Posted 08 April 2008 † Clyde Bentley § Clyde Bentley ‡ Comments (1)

Light my fire

A bunch of fellows with calloused hands, tattooed arms and ability I envy recently taught me an important lesson about the new era of journalism.

Clyde the welderFor the past four years, I’ve talked, research and cajoled my colleagues in an effort to get them over their fear and loathing of citizen journalism. But when I look back at it, my efforts were pointed primarily at the loathing part of the equation. My assumption was that once they overcame their biases about news-like content from untrained non-journalists, the fear would vanish also.

What a mistake. I learned that in spades by donning a heavy leather apron, pulling on a Darth Vader-ish mask and trying to burn up the world.
My son Garrett, who is soon to graduate from engineering school, has a knack for picking the right presents. Even as a little one shopping Dad’s money, he could point to just the right piece of jewelry or clothing to light up Mom’s eyes.

Last Christmas he surprised me beyond words. His gift to me was a four-week class in welding at the Columbia Area Career Center – our local vocational training facility.

Keep in mind that the qualities I’m often known for are a lack of coordination, the dexterity of rhino and a touch of impatience. OK, more than a touch. But I also subscribe to the mantra of doing what you fear most – at least once. I know computers, I know writing and I can even hammer nails. But sparks, flames and glowing metal were out of my league.

But there I sat in a room full of guys with hot-rod T-shirts and gimme caps as a gravel-voiced instructor showed us how to turn on an oxy-acetylene torch without blowing up the building. I’m sure I looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights.

Somewhere near the end of that introductory demonstration, I realized my panic was the same as I had seen on the faces of dozens of students, friends and fellow journalists when I tried to explain the wonders of online citizen journalism.

It’s not the loathing, dummy. It’s the fear.

My failing as an evangelist for citizen journalism is the paucity of reassurance I offered to those who see their jobs, their passion, their worlds at risk by the new twist on the word that defines their lives. I’m a change junkie, so “new and improved” makes me happy.

Unless I’m faced with something as alien as a welding torch.

I eventually took my own advice, checked that there were plenty of fire extinguishers around and just did it. By the end of the four weeks, I could shower the floor with sparks, adjust a torch flame to a needle point and fuse two chunks of steel together into something that was more-or less-recognizable.

Just like me, citizen journalism won’t burn down the world. It may singe a few hairs and it will undoubtedly produce journalism only “more-or less-recognizable,” but the concept, need and utility of news will survive. Just as I learned that using a cutting torch employs some of the same skills I learned with an X-acto Knife, we need to enjoy finding how our traditional journalism skills apply to citizen journalism.

Now if we could just find an excuse to wear one of those helmets …

Posted 03 April 2008 † Clyde Bentley § Clyde Bentley ‡ Comments (0)

Leading, not following

Jeremy LittauMark Cuban had an interesting post pertaining to the news media and blogging this past week. Cuban’s a sharp guy, he’s an entrepreneur who “gets it” when it comes to striking that balance between technology and content distribution. Plus he remade the Dallas Mavericks, maybe he can take over the LA Times next and make that thing work too.

He correctly diagnoses a big problem with media sites and blogs, in that they don’t seem to have a direction:

“Why. Why ? Why do you do what you do. Is it because:

  • You get paid to do it ?
  • Because you want to promote something or to promote yourself ?
  • Because you want to start a discussion ?
  • Because you want to communicate with customers, fans or ??
  • Because its a way to say whats on your mind ?
  • Because you want to make money from it ?
  • I’m sure there are other reasons to communicate on the web. What software you use, even whether you use video, text and/or pictures, really doesn’t matter.

What matters is why you do what you do.

I see this over and over again, both on content sites and in newsrooms I’ve been in (past and present). They tell a reporter one day they’re blogging, then leave them to figure out what that means. Oh, the technology is set up by the company, but determining the content? On your own, dude.

Clyde has already said before on this blog that journalists are afraid of too much commentary on their blogs, because having strong opinions might bump up too much against their strained notions of objectivity, and he’s right on that point. Many newspaper blogs I’ve read seem to be extensions of a reporter’s own reporting, stuff that doesn’t make it into the story. In doing this, news sites are falling into a trap, churning out blog material that pretty much mirrors what non-legacy media already are producting. Cuban sums it up nicely:

“If you are a blogger, and you work for a major media company, you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth. You are granted a platform with traffic. Thats the good news. The bad news is that you also have ratings. If you can’t hold your traffic or build upon it, you better hope you generate sufficient value in other places, or your days of publishing on the web may be numbered. For those of you who haven’t noticed, paid bloggers do come and go from media websites if they don’t produce. But wait, there is worse news.

The media companies that have traffic foundations and can dual purpose people so that they can publish off line and online come with their own set of problems. They are paddling as fast as they can to retain their offline businesses. Newspapers, to continue to use them as an example, are pushing as hard as they can to sell papers and retain advertisers. For those who think that a newspaper is just like a newsletter, you have never been a paperboy.”

And later …

“That is the endgame I see for newspapers that publish complimentary content on their website. You can call it blogging. You can even call it something else. The point I didnt make clear enough in my previous post, is that it has to be something else. No matter the quality of the writer, its just another stab at an audience in a medium where there are no barriers to entry. Its just one more example of the newspaper business following everyone else onto the web and doing exactly what everyone else is doing, but expecting they will be better because they are “The big paper”. Thats a huge mistake.”

Cuban’s post is worth reading, I just gave you the highlights. But by trying to keep a foot in both camps, a lot of people are starting to wonder if journalists are degrading the product. Just producing news content on a blog won’t cut it; that is being done by everyone else.

When I teach students here about how to blog for their job, I tell them to get out of the concept of reporting the news. And don’t do the “check out today’s issue for a story on such-and-such” posts either. Instead, consider the other things related to your beat (or even NOT related to your beat) that you can talk about:

  • The process of making the news. Apply some transparancy to enhance the story a person reads. What was it like to gather info for this behind the scenes?
  • Color material. What is a source like during an interview? Tell them details that are irrelevant to the story
  • Blog about things off your beat. What has your attention these days? What’s in your CD player? Doing this kind of thing humanizes the reporter (and this CAN’T be worse for credibility than the ivory tower mentality, could it?). It also is exactly the kind of commentary that makes blogs interesting.

The key seems to be to find a way to have your blogging job not cannibalize content the content from your regular job, but also to do it in a way that enhances your reporting, making the NEWS more valuable. In this manner, the blog is there to grab eyeballs and keep them there so they read the news, sort of a gateway drug for news use.

That would be my idea. I am curious what others think about Cuban’s post and how we can reimagine this thing.

Posted 22 March 2008 † Jeremy § Jeremy Littau ‡ Comments (3)