-
Kevin: The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, looks into instances of plagiarism by Zachery Kouwe, a blogger with the business blog Dealbook. Kouwe was caught lifting passages from other blogs and news sources. Quoting and linking is part of blog culture and is acceptable. However, lifting others writing shouldn't be a part of journalism or blogging, or any marriage of the two.
-
Kevin: Felix Salmon at Reuters wades into the discussion about Zachery Kouwe, one of the journalists writing the Dealbook business blog at the New York Times. After complaints from Wall Street Journal and an internal investigation at the Times, Kouwe resigned. The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, said that "Plagiarism is a mortal journalistic sin".
Salmon has a different take, and one that I agree with. He argues that far from adopting blogging culture, Kouwe didn't go far enough. "The fundamental problem with Kouwe was that when he saw good stories elsewhere, he felt the need to re-report them himself, rather than simply linking to what he had found, as any real blogger would do as a matter of course." -
Kevin: Juditgh Townend at Journalism.co.uk looks at whether the culture at the NYTimes DealBook led to plagiarism and the resignation of Zachery Kouwe. Judith does a great round up of the analysis by Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor, at the New York Times and other analysis from Felix Salmon at Reuters. Felix raises another issue for the NYTimes, and one that I tend to agree with. "The answer, in truth, is not that the NYT has gone too far down the bloggish rabbit hole, but rather that it hasn’t gone far enough." Quoting and linking is part of blogging, but if you take text not as a quote by passing it off as your own work and don't link, that indeed is plagiarism.
-
Kevin: I've been working on how location can easily be integrated into a journalism workflow since I geo-tagged pictures, Tweets and blog posts during the 2008 US election. While many commercial geo-location services have arrived, including Fire Eagle, Gowalla and Four Square, geo-location lags at news organisations. Juniper Research says that mobile location-based services will generate $12.7b in revenue by 2014. As we've seen with other technologies, location is moving from early adopters quickly to early mass adoption driven by social networking applications. The Next Web looks at some of the revenue streams that will drive location based services. Definitely one to read.
Balancing blogging
Joel Spolsky writes one of the best blogs for programmers that I, as a non-programmer, have ever read. Joel on Software is soon to be ten years old and has provided me with some real insight into how software companies work. One of my favourite essays of Joel’s is Hitting the High Notes, which he wrote in 2005. I still refer back to it even now because it contains truths that apply not just to programming but to many other areas as well.
In his Inc.com column, Joel takes a look at what makes a good business blogger. He says:
These days, it seems like just about every start-up founder has a blog, and 99 percent of these bloggers are doing it wrong. The problem? They make the blog about themselves, filling it with posts announcing new hires, touting new products, and sharing pictures from the company picnic. That’s lovely, darling — I’m sure your mom cares. Too bad nobody else does. Most company blogs have almost no readers, no traffic, and no impact on sales. Over time, the updates become few and far between (especially if responsibility for the blog is shared among several staff members), and the whole thing ceases to become an important source of leads or traffic.
I’ve never counted to know if ‘most’ company blogs are like this, but certainly too many are. It’s something I come across over and again: The business whose social media presence is all about them.
Reading these blogs or Twitter streams or Facebook walls or LinkedIn Groups is like being trapped in a noisy restaurant with the worst date of your life who just cannot stop talking about how great he or she is, how well travelled they are, how fascinating their life. By dessert you’re eyeing your spoon, trying to figure out just how blunt it is and just how hard self-disembowelment would be.
Joel goes on to paraphrase Kathy Sierra:
To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you’re using a blog to promote a business, that blog can’t be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it’s hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.
Kathy is, of course, spot on. Blogging, along with other forms of social media, is not about blowing your own trumpet or bragging about you or your company’s achievements, its about giving people something interesting, entertaining, useful or valuable. It’s about having a conversation and listening as much as talking.
But where Joel surprises is in his announcement that he’s quitting blogging, writing columns and public speaking:
So, having become an Internet celebrity in the narrow, niche world of programming, I’ve decided that it’s time to retire from blogging. March 17, the 10th anniversary of Joel on Software, will mark my last major post. This also will be my last column for Inc. For the most part, I will also quit podcasting and public speaking. Twitter? “Awful, evil, must die, CB radio, sorry with only 140 chars I can’t tell you why.”
The truth is, as much as I’ve enjoyed it, blogging has become increasingly impossible to do the way I want to as Fog Creek has become a larger company. We now have 32 employees and at least six substantial product lines. We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them. And my daily duties now take so much time that it has become a major effort to post something thoughtful even once or twice a month.
The best evidence also suggests that there are many other effective ways to market Fog Creek’s products — and that our historical overreliance on blogging as a marketing channel has meant that we’ve ignored them.
I think that’s an understandable move, but for my money it’s also an overreaction. Blogging alone is not a marketing plan. Social media doesn’t stand isolated from other marketing techniques, but should instead be part of a wider strategy.
My advice to Joel would be:
- Don’t abandon your blogging and public speaking, just scale it back.
- Look at your new markets, the ones you want to move into, and figure out what those people want to hear about.
- Start a new blog aimed at your new market. Better yet, get someone else in your company who is already interested in these new markets to start it.
- Do whatever other marketing you were planning on doing as well. Remember, this is an ‘and’ world, not an ‘or’ world.
One doesn’t have to sacrifice a blog for traditional marketing – the two can coexist quite happily.
links for 2010-03-07
-
Kevin: Rusty Coats is a giant in terms of digital and US newpapers, and he has steered digital strategy at Media General and EW Scripps as part of his 15 years on the interactive side of newspapers. He's leaving the newspaper industry. "I would like to explore the broader interactive world. There is a lot of innovation happening in the interactive space — some in newspapers, some outside. I want to see what's outside without viewing it through a familiar lens," he says.
links for 2010-03-06
-
Kevin: paidContent reports that B2B publisher Informa's 2009 profits were down by 4%, which isn't bad considering the deep recession. It still managed an operating profit. What is more interesting is that 72% of its publishing revenues now come from digital, and they say that this is driven by customer demand. B2B more than newspaper publishing has made a strong and successful transition to being a digital-based business.
-
Kevin: Really interesting comments from Alex Barza, a "New York-based mobile ad sales lead at Google. “Mobile will soon have more reach than TV, radio or the Internet,” Mr. Barza said. “Mobile is the access point to the Internet in the developing world.
“Search has been our core business for many years now, and we actually receive many more searches on mobile than we do on desktops in developing markets,” he said.
-
Kevin: Location awareness is one of those fundamental technologies that is powering a range of new applications and provides many opportunities for forward looking content businesses. Google has now added support the W3C's geolocation API. At the moment, it is available only in developer releases. Apple has this built into OS X and the iPhone OS. Mozilla has a built-in location API, and Windows has 'Geosense' in Windows 7. Very interesting, and the possibilities are huge.
Journalism: What next?
For many news and media businesses to survive the recession and thrive after it has ended, they will have to adapt to the economics of abundance. It’s something that I’ve written about before, and Clay Shirky continues to make some of the most cogent comments about the economics of abundance and what many have been calling the attention economy for the last few years. From a keynote at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services, Clay says:
Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity.
Ann Michael at Scholarly Kitchen blog (which is now in my RSS feeds) for the Society of Scholarly Publishing also quotes Clay as saying:
It’s easy to say “preserve the best of the old and combine it with the best of the new,” but in revolution, the best of the new is incompatible with the best of the old. It’s about doing things a whole new way.
I have struggled with this tension ever since I became a digital journalist in 1996. I knew that the internet would radically disrupt journalism the first time I first used a web browser at a student computer lab at the University of Illinois in August 1993.
However, I have always, always advocated and hoped for a transition that would wed the best of the old with the opportunities provided by the new. As I often say, I’m a very traditional journalist in terms of standards and ethics who uses cutting edge tools. However, it’s clear that many news organisations don’t have the resources anymore even to make strategic decisions about keeping the best of the old and combining it with the best of the new. Tough decisions will need to be made about what they stop doing. It’s sadly, no longer an option to continue doing everything they did in the past.
What is rare in a ‘world of cheap perfect copies’?
As Adam Tinworth said recently, publishers don’t have a great track record of adapting to this disruptive development:
We, as an industry, botched the transition online. We treated the internet as, at best, the poor cousin of the print title, to be filled with the left-overs from the established product and, at worst, a mere marketing device. Then, when the invention of the single most efficient information distribution mechanism mankind has yet come up with transformed our industry and its economics, we descended into panic.
How did print botch the transition online? It wasn’t for lack of trying. Steve Yelvington, someone I consider both a friend and mentor, was one of the few people who can say he was there at the beginning in terms of the internet and print, working on digital projects in the early 1990s. In his post, “Early to the game but late to learn how to play“, he makes a key observation:
The future gets created by individuals full of fire and passion, not institutions.
Clay supports Steve’s view and experience. It wasn’t that print publishers didn’t see this coming. They tried a number of plans. Clay said:
The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”
The focus on preserving the legacy institution continues, and if you look at most of the paid content strategies, they are largely based on monetising current activities and content. About the only exception to this is recent attempts to sell iPhone apps and apps and content for the iPad, Kindle and new media slates. However, in terms of the web, most of the talk is about different ways to get people to pay for existing content created using existing forms of organisation and existing methods of newsgathering.
The problem that Clay is pointing out is that the economics of content have shifted. What will people pay for? Journalists will instantly say distinctive writing. Most journalists think their writing distinctive, but let’s be honest and even slightly logical here. If everything is distinctive, it’s no longer distinctive is it? Distinctive writing will only work for a very small group of writers. Thinking we can all be distinctive writers is like every 5-a-side footie player thinking he or she can play in the World Cup.
To pay for great reporting and great writing and the social mission of journalism, we’re going to have to think beyond the story in the digital age. We’re going to have to think about services that deliver value to audiences. In a world of content with “more alternatives than the human brain can process” as Steve puts it, suddenly intelligent, social filters become important and useful. People now pay for ‘filters’ that distill the vast amount of information produced everyday or every week into something human scale, for instance magazines like The Week. Smart, social filters can do better.
As I was writing this, I have found an example of people ready to pay for a deeper connection to those they trust. I grew up west of Chicago, and I grew up watching the At the Movies, hosted by Chicago film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. They were famous for their thumbs up or thumbs down movie reviews. Roger Ebert has just launched a club in which he offers some extras to his loyal fans, including special private discussions, advance ticket sales to his Ebertfest and a meet-and-greet at the festival with club members. They are only charging $5 a year. Read the comments. For everyone who thinks the web is full of nothing but venom, read those comments. Granted, he is a cancer survivor who lost his voice four years ago and just had an emotional appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, but here is someone who has created a community.
Distilled insight, intelligence and connection. Content may not be rare in a ‘world of cheap perfect copies’, but these things still are. People will support organisations that deliver this. That’s where I see my future in journalism.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?w=585)
links for 2010-03-05
-
Kevin: Foundation-funded investigative journalism group ProPublica in the US is giving away its 'reporting recipe'. They explain why they are doing this: "Now we are taking this principle a step further, giving away the recipe for what has been one of our most powerful reporting efforts to date. We are doing this because we believe there are many ways to prompt change through journalism."
-
Kevin: Nathan Yau at the incredibly wonderful visualisation blog, FlowingData, gives some simple tips on how to think like a statistician. It really does depress me the innumeracy shown in a lot of journalism. What's even more galling is when this innumeracy allows journalists to be duped by spin. Nathan has some good tips, but it's probably no substitute for a good grounding in basic maths and statistics.
-
Kevin: An interesting look by Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics, writes about the time spent on Facebook versus the average time spent on news sites. The figures to take away is that the average spends 20 minutes a month on the New York Times and only 8-12 minuts on most local newspaper sites. That's for an entire month. Nielsen said that in January, users spent seven hours a month on Facebook alone.
-
Kevin: I've had the pleasure of working with Aleks at the Guardian, and she brings a great thoughtfulness to tech coverage that is often obsessed with gadgets and treated like not much more than entertainment. I really like this write up on creating the four part BBC2 documentary The Virtual Revolution. She writes about the tension between creating a traditional, linear television documentary and the online community and conversation that she tried to create. She writes about the "conflict between the linear and multiplatform aspects". Well worth a read.
-
Kevin: Peter Kafka writes about the Huffington Post's growth and strategy. On the strategic side, their growth in depth, their focus on building tight verticals is a simple startegy that seems to have been lost on most newspapers. The internet rewards depth in content. Kafka also points out another secret to the site's success: "Huffpo has mastered the art of turning other people’s work into its own stories and eyeballs."
-
Kevin: Malcolm Coles at Econsultancy has written a valuable summary on what the BBC's strategic review says about the British public broadcaster's online vision for the future. Being a former BBC News website employee, I have been reading a lot of this with great interest. In terms of halving the number of BBC websites, that is actually quite easy. At one point time in the early part of the century, there were 1800 different sites under bbc.co.uk. What that means, is quite a bit murkier.
-
Kevin: McKinsey defines that 'Internet of Things' as "sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects […] linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet." The mega-consultancy sees huge opportunities, and I'd agree. This new network of sensors will also provide opportunities to generate a lot of data and information. I would expect government agencies to invest in such sensors, and if the governments are open about their data, I think there are huge opportunities for journalism organisations.
Information flow and attention
danah boyd writes an insightful essay for UX Magazine, Streams of Content, Limited Attention, which examines the change from a broadcast information landscape to a networked one and its implications. She identifies four core issues:
- Democratization
- Stimulation
- Homophily
- Power
About democratisation, for example, she says:
Switching from a model of distribution to a model of attention is disruptive, but it is not inherently democratizing. This is a mistake we often make when talking about this shift. We may be democratizing certain types of access, but we’re not democratizing attention. Just because we’re moving towards a state where anyone has the ability to get information into the stream does not mean that attention will be divided equally. Opening up access to the structures of distribution is not democratizing when distribution is no longer the organizing function.
This is a really important essay, full of thought provoking nuggets. I don’t really want to boil it down to a soundbite, because this is a complex subject and to give you a two sentence summary would be to do it and danah a disservice. I think, though, this is going to be one of those essays I’m going to have to read and reread until its implications – which are not always obvious – have fully sunken in.
links for 2010-03-04
-
Kevin: Todd Ziegler of The Bivings Group in Washington flagged up this great video by Jess3 with a number of very interesting internet statistics.
-
Kevin: Suw and I are in a huge transition right now. I'm transitioning from having a stable job in major, world-class journalism institutions to something quite different. Dan Blank has a great post on some friends who have seized this transition. That's what Suw and I are doing. It's great to read other people's stories.
-
Kevin: A good look at how engagement metrics. The real take away which is something you'll see almost everywhere. "Very few stations define success with concrete metrics. Most examples are anecdotal. ("I just have a sense.") What they consider to be "successful" is very subjective. Those that do have an idea of what success means to them include metrics such as page views, unique users, and calls into station when online offerings fail to work."
-
Kevin: Paul Bradshaw flags up a University of Chicago study looking at bias in newspapers. "Interestingly, ownership is found to be statistically insignificant once those other factors are accounted for." What they did find was journalists probably aren't aware of the reinforcing effect on their coverage based on the similiarity in information and beliefs from their sources. "The result is social networks that don’t recognize that they have developed a groupthink that is not centered on the truth.” As Paul points out, this is the echo chamber effect in traditional news coverage.
-
Kevin: Read this post by Ty Ahmad-Taylor. "The rise of prestige as a new form of currency has ramifications for businesses facing decline like print or broadcast." News and journalism are difficult places to apply this model. "But associated verticals such as finance and sports are, by their nature, inclined to offer game dynamics around outcomes."
-
Kevin: Caroline McCarthy at CNET writes: "The demise of Streamy is one more sign of something that was already evident: Facebook–and to a lesser extent, Twitter–has completely won this game."
Quick guide to open innovation
David Simoes-Brown takes a look at open innovation over on the NESTA blog, and outlines five “traits of open innovation which often pass people by”: Reading his post, I just kept thinking, “Yes. Yes. Of course.” It’s very easy when the open mindset is embedded in the way you prefer to work to forget that for many people, these tips are really quite counter-intuitive.
Many of these tips also fit social media too, with just a little tweaking:
1. Start at the end
Know what you want/need to achieve with your social media project, don’t just chuck it up and hope for the best.
2. Listen to your customers
David had “Buy from your customers”, on the basis that your customers know your brand better than you do. In a social media context, this morphs into listening rather than buying, but the main point still stands. You may think you know what your brand experience is, but it’s your customers who actually have to live through it!
3. Show not tell
This tip from the writing fraternity is as important in social media project as it is in innovation. Pilots are a great way not just of testing the water but also of creating an experience for a small group that others will look at and (hopefully) want!
4. You will never spot a winner
Social media is changing all the time and whilst the basic tenets stay the same, tools come and go and tactics that work brilliantly for one company at one point in time may not work so well for another. Focus on your business needs, your employees’ needs and your customers’ needs, and don’t try to predict the next big social media craze.
5. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you
This is ‘word of mouth’ in a nutshell. You can spend a lot of time going broad with your social media strategy, trying to reach as many people as possible, but you can be much, much more effective if you let your fans carry your message for you. Quality over quantity every time.
links for 2010-03-03
-
Kevin: Martin Langeveld at the Nieman Journalism Lab has an excellent roundup of US newspaper group quarterly filings and dives into what the figures means.
-
Kevin: Karl Schneider, the head of editorial development at B2B publisher RBI, has some excellent comments to make about "conversational journalism" and UGC. In terms of UGC, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. In terms of "conversational journalism", he said that "that journalists need to move away from producing and distributing content to engaging in conversations with users and working off the back of their ideas/thoughts to create content that is useful and interesting to that ’community’ around a subject". Excellent points.
-
Kevin: Robert Andrews of paidContent.co.uk gives an excellent quick breakdown of the proposed cuts at the BBC websites. I used to work at the BBC News website, and it's unclear whether the 25% cuts will affect it or if this is just a cull of the wide ranging web properties that the BBC has. About the only specific change I can find for the News website is "BBC News Online focusing its specialist analysis and interpretation on a generalist, not specialist, audience".
-
Kevin: An excellent post by Joel Spolsky about blogging at businesses. He talks about one of the biggest mistakes that businesses make when they blog, which is talking solely about their business. Instead of blogging about the minutiae of your business, he suggests that you follow the advice of Kathy Sierra. "To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur's blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn't. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company."
-
Kevin: There has recently been a lot of quite heated discussion about smartphone market share. Nokia still holds the lead by far in terms of handset volume when compared to Apple's iPhone. However, as this graphic shows, in terms of the mobile browser market share, handset volume only tells part of that story. The iPhone dominates in North America, grabbing an 86% mobile browser share in Canada home to RIM of Blackberry fame. Another surprise for me is how the iPhone dominates mobile browsing in Japan. This is the home of NTT Docomo which was miles ahead in terms of mobile data. The iPhone/iPod touch has 75% of the mobile browser market with Docomo trailing with only 6%. In the developing world, Opera and Nokia dominate. Fascinating bit of research.
-
Kevin: This is the question that all news sites are asking in 2010: Will people pay? And if so, what will they pay for? You can see the strategy of my soon-to-be former day job, The Guardian. Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger says that he believes that as some news sites charge for content that readers will flock to free sites. He's not ready to "risk damaging his paper's "journalistic potential'" .
