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Lou

Of course we’re fascinating!

What do the two prime Emmy winning shows have in common? Mad Men and 30 Rock are both shows about the media, with managers as their main characters. Not the news media, but the media environment in advertising and sketch comedy, where off-balance creative people pour their genius into satisfying the demands of the marketplace.

Everyone who has worked in media has known colleagues as troubled and brilliant as agency creative director Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm, above left) and as daffy and endearing as show runner Liz Lemon (played by Tina Fey). In both cases, their personal lives are a mess, but they’re completely devoted to professional excellence.

A newspaper editor I used to work for, Stewart Spencer,  told me we’d chosen our careers because neither of us was normal enough to function in a “regular” office. A “regular” office wouldn’t be nearly as interesting, of course.

Citizen journalism for the corporate set

I’m intrigued by the possibilities presented by the just announced deal between CNBC and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has the potential to be Facebook for people with a paycheck. As CEO Dan Nye describes the facets:

1. On LinkedIn: LinkedIn’s rapidly growing user base of over 27 million professionals now have an opportunity to both consume as well as share with their professional network, breaking business news & content from CNBC that ranges from articles and blogs to financial data and video content.

2. On CNBC.com: As a regular CNBC.com user, you’ll start seeing LinkedIn’s community and networking functionality integrated on CNBC.com (for e.g. sharing CNBC articles with your professional network on LinkedIn or finding out who in your network connects you to the companies you read about).

3. On CNBC: Community-generated content from LinkedIn will also be broadcast on CNBC programs. These include survey results and on-air Q&A with CNBC anchors, reporters and guests.

It’s the third item, user-generated content, I think has the most potential for CNBC journalism. 

 If CNBC handles its end well, it can be like having news sources deeply embedded at every white collar level in virtually every company in America. The same people who would be scared speechless if they got a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter will be far more comfortable sharing what they know through LinkedIn.

The social media hurricane

Here’s how old I am: When I wanted to make a strong impression in accepting my first full time job, in 1972, I sent a telegram. To me, the means of communication symbolized urgency and importance. Today urgency and importance are increasingly signaled through social media, as the convergence of social and news media speed along.

My teenaged children have never sent nor received a telegram. They rarely talk on the phone or send emails, preferring to text friends’ cell phones or, in my son’s case, through game communications in World of Warcraft. He knows many of his friends will be there, just as my daughter knows a lot of dialogue among her classmates is going on through Facebook.

I now check Twitter a couple of times a day, LinkedIn every day or two and Facebook when it alerts me, for signs of what my friends and colleagues are up to.

The widespread adoption of social media in personal and business communication is now working its way into the news ecosystem, with Hurricane Gustav being the latest example.

I picked three news organizations (formerly known as newspapers) with good track records I knew were well-positioned to follow developments, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Biloxi Sun Herald and Austin American-Statesman. In addition to print and online coverage, each fielded a Twitter presence. New Orleans used its ongoing Twitter account, NOLAnews; Biloxi established FollowGustav and Austin created TrackingGustav.

The advantage of Twitter over the Web is that virtually everyone with a cellphone purchased in the past few years has the technology to receive instant Twitter updates, 140-character bursts  of information sometimes, but not always, linked to a longer Web entry. 

Even the Red Cross provided hurricane information through Twitter. The advantages lay in the instant and portable nature of Twitter and its near universal availability.

Check out the the great interview on Poynter about NPR’s efforts to use social media in Gustav coverage  http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=2&aid=149732

At the intersection of news media and social media

Media intellectuals Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Howard Owens and Howard Weaver sold me on Twitter because of their skills putting it to serious purpose. They’re masters of blogging and longer forms, but I found them just as provocative in 140 characters. 

Then The Wichita Eagle’s Ron Sylvester demonstrated the news value of the form, with his adroit Kansas.com Twitter reports on trials in progress.

It all came together for me last night in a blessedly smoke-free barroom in downtown Wichita, where folks whose employers include newspapers, branding agencies, non-profits, a church and a university came together for a Wichita Tweetup. It evolved organically around a long, noisy table as we got acquainted and exchanged tales of the D life, as L. Kelly reports here.

Ron Sylvester courtroom tweet

 I said Twittering from the courtroom would get even more interesting when five or six people — not all of them professional journalists — are covering the same trial and you can read their posts as one continuous stream. Ron Sylvester, who has been getting national attention for his Tweets, said it will get even more interesting when family members of the defendant and victim join the Twitterers.

I don’t fear the day when Ron and other professional journalists are fully part of a democratic stream of information, reporting on the same events. I think the journalists work will continue to be closely followed by those who search for the truth; I think the journalists will benefit from access to multiple contemporaneous perspectives on what’s unfolding in front of them.

Bring it on!

My guilty secret: A baker’s dozen books I’ve been meaning to get back to all summer

 

A collection of good intentions

Help! I think the Web has zapped my concentration. I’ve spent so much time online this summer reading about social media, citizen journalism, technology and day-to-day media business developments that I’m way behind on the books I meant to thoroughly comb for my class. Some I’ve read before, others I’ve started, some just stare at me above my computer, like puppies who need a home.

Please let me know if you have strong feelings about any of these for use in my Fall semester seminar, Strategic Issues in Media Management:

• Groundswell, Li & Bernoff
• Advertising and New Media, Christina Spurgeon
• Media Product Portfolios, Robert Picard
• The Technology of Journalism, Patricia Dooley
• Autumn of the Moguls, Michael Woolf
• Handbook of New Media, Lievrow & Livingstone
• Living in the Information Age, Eric Bucy
• Media Debates, Dennis & Merrill
• Journalism and New Media, John Pavlik
• All the News That’s Fit to Sell, James Hamilton
• Internet Advertising, Schumann & Thompson
• Handbook of Media Management and Economics, Abarran, Chan-Olmsted & Wirth
• Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida

Two updated books we’ll be using for sure:

• The World is Flat (Release 3.0), Thomas Friedman
• The Elements of Journalism, Kovach & Rosenstiel

The sickening plunge in newspaper stocks; the human toll

I’m finding it hard to concentrate this morning, so riveted am I by the death spiral of newspaper-related stocks and the carnage in newsrooms.

The day started with a terrible earnings report from Gannett, the largest publishing company. Earnings down 36% on a 14% drop in second quarter newspaper advertising revenue. USA Today ad revenue was down 17%. 

Alan Mutter, my blogging hero, reports that newspaper stocks have lost $4 billion in value since the beginning of the month. That’s his chart at right.

Meanwhile, the bodies stack up, day by day. the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported this morning it will eliminate 8 percent of its employeees, 189 jobs. It will also eliminate its geographically targeted sections, including a Gwinnett County section it has published for 20 years. I remember when it started, with great resolve and fanfare, to beat back a frightening challenge from a New York Times suburban newspaper, the Gwinnett Daily News.

That was a great time for readers, with two formidable competitors fighting for their loyalty with strong, locally-focused news and advertising products. The AJC destroyed the NYT entry. But even with a strong web presence of its own, it can’t compete toe-to-toe with all of the social, economic and technological forces making it more and more difficult for newspapers to prosper.

Will social media someday seem as quaint as fax machines?

I had a couple of invigorating conversations today with Wichita State graduate students about the future of media. Cindy Stanford, a PhD Human Factors student, was telling me about her fascinating interest in Human-Computer Interaction, HCI. She introduced me to Friendfeed.com, rheingold.com and quotably.com in the interest of expanding my understanding of social media.

Later in the day I talked with Bobby Rozzell, a former minister who is one of the impressive grad students in the Elliott School of Communication. Bobby recommended a book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. That led to a medium-or-message discussion that reminded me of a long-ago Knight Ridder committee called, tongue-in-cheek, The Edge of Knight.

The idea of the Edge group, circa 1984, was that the people who ran Knight Ridder knew that good ideas were dying because they couldn’t get through the bureaucracy and the budget process. In theory, anyone with a good idea could come to us with a proposal that might be funded independently of the normal process. It didn’t end up working, but I remember one particular discussion about the then hot delivery system — fax machines!

Our wise technical adviser, Steve Landers, urged us to shift our business focus from the whiz-bang platform (we were sure everyone would have one at home someday soon) to the content. He was right, of course. We’re probably at a point where about as many college students will have used a fax machine at home as will have used a typewriter — virtually none.

As journalism jobs disappear by the thousands, at least from newspapers, it’s time to keep a sharp focus on content. What will the audience want, and who will produce it, remain more important questions than how they will get it.

Your choice of magazines

Mass customization appears ready to take another step with Time Inc.’s Maghound, a planned September 2008 rollout of a Netflix-type service for magazines. You pay a monthly fee and choose the magazines you want, for as long as you want them, switching as often as you like.

The report on Foliomag.com says: The pricing for a membership is tiered—three titles for $3.95 per month, five titles for $7.95, seven titles for $9.95, and $1 per title for eight titles or more. Titles that have a non-discounted traditional sub rate of around $19 or more per year are considered “premium” titles and will have an extra $2 fee per month (10-15 percent of titles fall in this category). First-time users will also be eligible for a free one month trial.

In a recent presentation, a Maghound executive said he hopes to have 300 magazines participating by launch. Some major challenges would seem to be:

* Rising paper and postal costs.

* The magazine industry’s traditionally slow execution starting new subscriptions.

* More and more magazine content being accessed on the Web.

Even so, it’s a bold move. I’m going to try it. How about you? The Maghound.com site isn’t yet active, but you can click on a customer service link and they promise to email you know when it’s live.

 

Saving the classifieds business

Steve Outing and Chris Ryan have a great new website, ReinventingClassifieds.com. Steve asked me for a piece. Here’s what I sent him.

Second thoughts of a publisher turned professor

In nine months since I was carried from the bloody arena of the newspaper business and ascended to the ivory tower, I’ve gained this perspective: Most newspapers don’t need the best new idea to grow their classifieds business. They mostly need to get better at executing what they already know.

I’m not an expert on classified advertising, so I can’t offer advice to anyone else. Here are a half dozen things I wish I’d done about classifieds and what I would do today:

·      Stop obsessing about the national trends.  Here in flyover country, there was no real estate boom and there’s no bust. Employment numbers remain healthy. Wichita Craigslist has been around for a few years, but hasn’t become an established marketplace in any vertical. It isn’t too late to save the business in Wichita or lots of other places in America.

·      Invest in technology.  We dithered endlessly over how to get our advertising and accounting systems to talk to each other. We found a hundred barriers to having our customers place and price their own ads. I should have been more insistently impatient about finding and financing solutions.

·      Invest in people. Newspaper/internet outside salespeople should be the most qualified and the best paid in the market. They should have the technical and clerical support they need to focus their time on selling to auto dealers, Realtors, employers and employment agencies. That wasn’t true at any of the newspapers I worked at over a span of 35 years.

·      Get rid of the newspaper/internet pricing silos. Advertisers should be sold eyeballs, not platforms. Companies allocate revenue to make their web operations look better at the expense of their newspapers. No wonder people think newspapers are failing. The truth is, the local newspaper and its website are a dynamite combination. Sell them that way.

·      Stop tinkering with in-paper presentation. If the type is readable and the classifications are clear, readers will find and act on the ads. No amount of tweaking the color and headers and unpaid content will make a material difference in profitability.

·      Promote. Promote. Promote. God should strike us down for cutting the classifieds promotion budget year after year. We got the results we paid for.