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Kevin: I was recently asked about what impact Amazon's Kindle would have on newspapers. I think Steve Yelvington is right in this post that newspapers are wary of Amazon becoming a content broker, just as the music industry woke up too late that Apple is now a broker for music. But I was very interested in Steve's comment at the end of his post. "The traditional newspaper — an omnibus collection of often unrelated news, information and advertising, bundled up into a monolithic product — is being torn apart by market forces that no e-reader will change. But news in some form will be there. It is, after all, everywhere else."
links for 2009-03-05
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Kevin: Alan Mutter and his Newsosaur blog is one of my regular reads. We really need more business-oriented voices in terms of journalism blogs. Motley Fool looks at some of Alan's suggestions for the future of the newspaper industry. He's got three suggestions including printing only when advertising will support it, charge for original content (note not all content) and develop advertising models beyond banner ads. The post is worth a read, and Alan's Newsosaur is worth following on a regular basis.
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Kevin: Yahoo has launched a major challenge to Facebook connect with a service became available on 600,000 sites. The Yahoo Updates service is a partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit. It uses the open standard OAuth in its system and ReadWriteWeb says it's quite easy to use. Off to give it a try.
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Kevin: The New York Times has an excellent graphic that shows: "Job losses have been most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing and those that already had the highest unemployment rates." My home county in Illinois has a Chrysler plant and 14.9% unemployment. Excellent visualisation.
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Kevin: The BBC has announced an expansion of its social media stragegy. They will add a 'social discovery' mechanism in which site users would have an activity page. The article says that this would include links to other social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The proposition isn't really clear from the article. Will this service merely allow BBC site users to aggregate their social media activities on the BBC. They will also create a new 'Head of Social Media'. Alas, most efforts in the BBC are dissipated through bureaucratic dampening.
links for 2009-03-04
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Kevin: Mark Jones, the Global Community Editor at Reuters, writes on his personal blog about the best uses of Twitter by news organisations. He's right to flag up the Austin Statesman page for highlighting their Twittering staff. I think there are lots of excellent individual efforts in relationship to journalists and Twitter including Rory Cellan-Jones and Darren Waters at the BBC and Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss here at the Guardian. But I think Monica Guzman with the Seattle PI does a great job. It's the people using the service for social media journalism who stand out in my mind.
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Kevin: Friend and colleague Jemima Kiss flags up a McKinsey and World Economic Forum visualisation of innovation and cities around the world. It really tells a story, including the huge output of Silicon Valley, Tokyo and even Chicago in terms of patents. The location of London on the map should have UK policy makers worried. US policy makers should be worried about details in the report of highly skilled immigrants returning home. Positive immigration policies can help deal with these issues. However, this map takes into account US patents, which one would assume would over-represent US cities in the data.
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Kevin: Wiki vendor SocialText add status updates like Twitter or Facebook, calling them 'Signals' and add an Adobe Air application. TechCrunch says the Signals feature competes against enterprise micro-messaging services like Yammer or WIzeHive.
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Kevin: Clay at Sunlight Labs talks about the issues he has with content management systems and argues that web frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails are a better option. It's an interesting wrinkle on a common discussion in the industry, and it's worth the read.
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Kevin: ReadWriteWeb looks at three servicers, XMarks, Evri and Ensembli that add semantic web features and help show related content through natural language relationships and other emerging semantic web technologies. As RWW says, we haven't arrived at the glorious semantic web future, but these are steps on the path.
links for 2009-03-03
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Kevin: Lawrence Lessig and Joe Trippi's new project pushing for a mix of small-dollar donations and public financing for US Congressional races.
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Kevin: Ten ideas to make the Twitter web interface better. Some of these are small interface tweaks, but many are already built into stand alone Twitter apps.
Yahoo! behaving badly. Again.
In July 2007, Yahoo! gave users of it’s Yahoo! Photos service just three months to retrieve their pictures before closing the service and deleting all of the unclaimed images. As recently as December 2008, I was still getting comments on my post about it from unhappy people who had entrusted photos to Yahoo! and had only just discovered that their archive had vanished. I thought that Yahoo!’s behaviour in closing their photo service was pretty shoddy. I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t stop accepting new uploads, and delete people’s photos piecemeal, as and when they had been transferred to Flickr or some other photo service. For such a large company to close a service with so little communication to users and such a short time frame for those affected to act was incomprehensible.
That was eighteen months ago, so obviously things have changed at Yahoo!, right? They’ve learnt that data portability and clear, timely communications are important, right? I mean, they wouldn’t repeat such mistake would they? Summarily shutting down a service with almost no notice?
Sadly, yes. They would.
Three days ago I got this email:
I very nearly deleted it as spam, because it had no content apart from the two attachments. But, curious to know if it really was an official email, I took a closer look at the headers, then clicked “View” for the first “noname” attachment. I got this:
I checked out the links and yes, this is legit. This is the email that Yahoo! has sent its Yahoo! Briefcase users in order to tell them that all the files they had kept online are going to be toast at the end of the month. An empty email with two identical “noname” attachments. Well done Yahoo!, I think you’ve just earnt the first Strange Attractor Fuckwit of the Year 2009 Award. And it’s only February.
Unlike Yahoo! Photos, Yahoo! aren’t suggesting an alternative service, and they’re only giving users one month instead of three to get their stuff out. I only have one file in Yahoo! Briefcase, but that’s neither here nor there. It could have been something important and I could easily have deleted the email from Yahoo! as spam.
Why have Yahoo! not given people more notice? Why did their ill-conceived email have no content? Why put all the content in a couple of attachments? Why delete people’s data instead of archiving it until people can delete it themselves?
I’m not even going to get into asking why Yahoo! have ditched this service, instead of polishing it up and making it suitable for use in today’s cloud computing world. I’m just stunned that, once again, Yahoo! has shown such astonishing arrogance and disinterest in their users’ needs. Instead of learning from the closure of Yahoo! Photos and doing a better job this time, they’ve actually taken a step backwards.
Shame on you, Yahoo!.
links for 2009-02-28
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Kevin: Steve Yelvington takes a post by my colleague Charles Arthur who observed that news is fungible and moves it on. He looks at newspapers from a consumers point of view, and asks why people buy newspapers. "The problem of fungible commodities is that open markets relentlessly drive prices down toward the cost of production. You want profit margins? Look for scarcity."
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Kevin: My esteemed colleague Charles Arthur writes on his personal blog about why the fungibility of news means for the future of newspapers. In a word, he thinks that newspapers are screwed. The post paints a sobering portrait of the newspaper business. I think that a fair few clear headed people know where we're at, but I think the next step is to figure out where we go from here. News is no longer scarce. We're often chasing the same stories and produce a lot of the same content. We really need to ask what it is that we're producing of unique value for our audiences. The market is currently punishing journalists for not asking that question clearly enough.
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Kevin: I heard from an attendee at Webstock that Bruce Sterling just seemed to be 'trolling'. I think it's interesting to hear alternative points of view and keep a healthy distance with complex trends like Web 2.0. Not sure that this was a cogent critique
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Kevin: A discussion at BeebCamp on how the BBC should use Twitter. It's an interesting discussion that I am sure is happening in a number of media and news organisations these days on how (or if) they should use Twitter.
Rocky Mountain News Final Edition
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
A poignant presentation about the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News. It closed just two months short of its sesquicentennial. (Hat tip to Rich Levin who pointed this out on Twitter.)
Focus on editorial ideas, then find the right tool
My esteemed colleague and comrade in digital arms, Jemima Kiss, Twittered this very astute observation, in less than 280 characters, about Twitter and use of the micro-blogging application by news organisations:
jemimakiss: Common mistakes news orgs make with Twitter 1) That it’s all about Twitter, rather than how people are actually using Twitter and..
jemimakiss 2) They get fixed on using a tool, like Twitter, rather than working out what they want to do & finding the best tool for it. That is all.
She’s spot on when it comes to Twitter. There is a tendency for organisations to rush with the herd to a new social media service or site without thinking about what, editorially, they are trying to achieve. I’ve seen the same thing happen with blogs and Facebook. After entering the mainstream, some journalists demanded their own blog. Why did they want a blog? They saw it as a back door to having a column. They had always wanted an opinion column because it was a sign of status and as we all know, blogs are just opinion (sarcasm noted). A typical conversation in the industry might go like this:
Editor: How often are you planning on updating your blog?
Aspiring columnist: Oh, once a week should do.
Editor: Were you planning on linking to anything?
Aspiring columnist: Why would I do that? This is my column, er, I mean blog.
Editor: Are you going to take part in the conversation and respond to comments?
Aspiring columnist: No, of course not. I’m far too busy for that kind of thing.Editor: So why do you want a blog instead of a column in the newspaper?
Asprining columnist: *silence*
That’s not to say that the journalist wouldn’t get their own column, er, I mean blog, thus continuing traditional media’s focus on celebrity over interactivity. Some journalists make incredibly good bloggers, but when a blog is used simply to replicate what possible in print, it is an editorial waste.
Functionally, there might not be a great difference between a column-with-comments and a blog, but editorially, there is a huge difference.
- Bloggers post frequently.
- Bloggers take part in the conversation and respond to comments and questions.
- Bloggers link to the conversation on other sites.
Blogs take part in a distributed conversation in ways that columns rarely do, whereas columns – even ones with comments – provide a relatively closed, introspective conversation.
Jemima has flagged up how much the same is happening with Twitter. This all comes down to understanding how social media differs from traditional uni-directional publishing and broadcasting and thinking about the editorial concept and the unique opportunities for engagement.
links for 2009-02-24
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Kevin: We need more clear-headed analysis like this about what is working and what isn't with newspapers in terms of the business. Lauren Rich Fine says: "Bottom line, it becomes increasingly clear that newspapers are in dire straits. They won’t all survive, nor by the way, should they all. Newspapers’ unwillingness to grasp what is before their very eyes has been at the core of their current woes—but even if they had gotten it, the challenge would still be enormous."
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Kevin: Pramit Singh looks at 14 different business models for news, some real and a few simply proposed and asks which is the best one.
NUJ training chair at centre of blog storm
Over the weekend, I was tempted to write about the blog dust-up between Chris Wheal, chair of the National Union of Journalists training committee, and Adam Tinworth, the head of blog development at Reed Business International, on Adam’s personal blog, but I decided to let Suw fight her corner in the comments. However, I have written up a post looking at the debate with interviews from Chris and Adam over at the The Guardian’s media blog Organ Grinder. Adam’s post had kicked off a great debate about a range of issues, and I agree with him when he says that this kind of debate needs to happen out in the open.
I have to agree with Adam to say that this isn’t a print versus online debate. It’s not a bloggers versus journalists debate (thankfully). This is a new intramural debate amongst digital journalists. We’re now at the point where there are journalists who have been working online for a decade or more. This debate is amongst digital journalists who have embraced social media, and I’d include myself in that camp, and those who see it as a threat to traditional journalism values.