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Kevin: Paul Conley says: “No ‘print’ journalist should assume that there’s a place for him in the new world’. Worth the read, but the battle between ‘print’ and ‘web’ people isn’t over.
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Kevin: Mindy McAdams highlights a post from journalism student Jared Silfies who takes a picture of his mobile backpack. My kit bags in the past actually counted as excess baggage. Things are faster, better, cheaper and much, much smaller.
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Kevin: WSJ looks at study on blog reading habits. It’s a relatively small study. “Rather than focusing on helping readers wade through a deluge of information content, one could envision tools that focus on the reader’s relationship with the blogger or
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Kevin: Must read from Q&A with Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com. “We’re trying to create something that’s true to this medium, that borrows the best of what works in print and that takes advantage of the unique aspects of digital media.” Halleluj
Monthly Archives: April 2008
links for 2008-04-21
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Kevin: Faster, better, cheaper. Audio-video online isn’t about replicating the experience (and economics) of broadcast television. It’s about using lost cost digital tools to change the economics. MediaShift gives you a list of these.
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Kevin: Interesting acquisition by SixApart. Anyone who has done business with SixApart knows that they have often steered clients to Apperceptive to fine tune their Movable Type installations. Makes sense to bring them into the fold.
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Kevin: Lisa Williams has a top 10 list for journalists of how to survive in a high-tech industry. I like the one time is on your side but only if you take it. Set aside some time to learn something new.
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Kevin: Via Mindy McAdams. Journalists can be passionate about journalism and the business. We have to pay the bills. There are very few of us who can rely on public money or trust support. Smart digital journalists are spinning ideas for the future.
links for 2008-04-19
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Suw: One of the reasons that I’m a stalwart freelance is that I love being able to decide from where I work. Mainly, that tends to be my couch, but perhaps I should get more adventurous.
links for 2008-04-18
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Kevin: Alf Hermida blogs about the Toronto Star laying off all 10 of the firm’s internet production staff. Sensible integration or short-sightedness?
links for 2008-04-17
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U.C. Berkeley student’s Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt – ContraCostaTimes.comKevin: Via Ryan Sholin. If anyone asks you the value of Twitter, here is a good example from the world of activist communication in Egypt.
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Kevin: Sarah Perez looks the time spent on ‘soical media’. Interesting conversation on the blog and here in the office about what ‘real people’ are.
Twitter interviews on ReadWriteWeb
I already added the post Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media on ReadWriteWeb to del.icio.us because it talks about participation inequalities and relative time spent by people on various social media sites and services. The post has kicked off an interesting discussion in the comments as well as at the office. But as a journalist, one thing caught my eye. Sarah Perez ‘interviewed’ people on Twitter about how they spend their time using social media. Now, obviously, this isn’t a broader sample of people who simply don’t participate, but it does give a snapshot of social media usage and a range of participation.
I’ve used it personally if I have a tech question I’m stymied by or want to get a range of views on a movie or a restaurant. Suw jokingly refers to it as a query for the ‘lazyweb’.
However, there is definitely something useful here journalistically. Sarah’s use of Twitter also shows how using the service not only as a way to promote your content but also to create community could be used to add to your journalism. No, it’s not a random sample. But since when are ‘man on the street’ interviews?
Technorati Tags: social media, social networking, Twitter
links for 2008-04-16
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis restates something that Suw often says: You don’t make money with a blog, you make money because of it. Jeff and Suw have created personal brands and businesses with their blogs.
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis talks about the press-sphere. ” I think newsrooms will need to be organized around topics or tags or stories.”
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Kevin: Must read post on blog and online journalism success metrics. I like the idea of a ‘loyalty index’. Regular readers. Original reporting. Getting people to comment, sign up for the RSS feed or get involved in other ways.
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Suw: I wish that more people in Stage 2 would just, y’know, shut up.
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Kevin: Tim Robbins gives a modern version of Newton Minnow’s Vast Wasteland or possibly Network. The activist actor takes broadcasters and US leadership to task. Shame on the NAB for turning off the cameras. Irony?
Real-time innovation in news organisations
Ryan Sholin has started a great conversation about how to create cultural change at newspapers.
The important part of the job isn’t speaking to the first 20 people on the conference call for an hour, it’s maintaining contact with the one person on the call who has the potential to Get It: Moving from the Paper business to the News business isn’t as simple as picking up a different skillset; it’s about changing the mindset of journalists.
It reminded me of a question I’m often asked about cultural change: How do you turn journalists into bloggers? The simple answer is that I don’t. I find journalists who happen to be bloggers or who show an interest in blogging, give them all the technical and editorial support that I can, and then I try to share that knowledge and success around the organisation.
How do I spot a good blogger? I ask whether the journalist is already aware of other bloggers writing in their beat. I try to determine whether they are willing to engage with other bloggers and people who comment on their posts. In short, are they ready to join the conversation?
Sharing the success stories helps spread the culture. As David Anderson of Fairfax Digital in Australia told me recently, you need success stories to tell your managers, and I would say that you also need success stories to win over journalists, who are professional sceptics. You have to spread culture up and down the organisation.
I’ve been fortunate. At the BBC, I had support at all levels for digital experimentation and, when I came to London, it was great to see evangelism from people like Richard Sambrook, the head of the Global News Division. At the Guardian, we’ve got digital evangelists all the way up to The Editor’s office. However, both the BBC and the Guardian still grapple with cultural change. And I couldn’t agree with Ryan more when he says you can’t mandate change from the top down.
Anyone who has worked with me will attest that sometimes I get frustrated at the pace of change in the industry. I really thought digital journalism would be further along by now than we are. The dot.com crash wiped out a lot of talent in the industry and set us back years. And I’ve crossed swords with a fair number of nay sayers. I’m not sure there is much we can do for the close-minded, and the need for change is urgent enough that arguing with the Andrew Keens in the industry just isn’t worth your or my time.
Industry scale change will only come with time. The industry is struggling because the depth of digital culture is still too thin and still so new. Don’t sweat that. Don’t even try changing your organisation wholesale. We might have the experience, but as Steve Yelvington says, we still don’t have the political capital. Many of you will run into middle management who ‘own’ the bureaucracy and have an investment in the status quo. They’ve spent several years supporting the Andrew Keens because it protected their position and power. Now, they have a new strategy: They are fighting over who owns change rather than focusing on actually creating change. While they’re fighting, us digital journalists need to get on with it:
- Start small with an event or story-based project.
- Bring the cost of the project down as close to zero as possible from a technical standpoint. Use open-source or free net-based services.
- Try one new multimedia story-telling feature or engagement feature with each project.
- Debrief. Learn. Repeat.
This is based in part on my interpretation of the Newspaper Next project. As Steve Yelvington says:
We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We’re taking too long to create ‘perfect ‘ systems that don’t meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.
This is real-time innovation. Try journalistic projects with existing tools and learn journalistically and technically from that. That takes zero development and relatively little time. It’s about editorial creativity, not about development cycles or budgets. If you find something that works, then you know where to focus product development. What can you do with Twitter, blogging software, YouTube, Seesmic or FriendFeed to create a journalistic project and help build your audience?
links for 2008-04-14
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Kevin: Suw is a huge fan of QR codes, bar codes that can be read by mobile phones that can have embedded text or URLs. Can they succeed where the Cue Cat failed?
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Kevin: Eight mistakes that lead to special section failure. Get linky and reach out to bloggers.
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Kevin: Ryan Sholin posts about how to change the culture from newspaper to news. Focus on supporting change agents not changing the entire culture in one go.
links for 2008-04-11
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Kevin: Via Martin Stabe. A great list of must read posts for J-School grads by Jack Lail. Most of them reinforce the idea that grads need new heroes.