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.

Why we have no time to think

Just came across this wonderful explanation of lack of attention span in our increasingly connected world. That’s why it’s ever more difficult for static media, such as newspapers, TV, parents and employers, to command attention.

BTW, the easiest explanation of asymptotic is that the curve line never quite touches the base line.

The Knight Foundation’s transformational mission

I’ve always been impressed with the Knight Foundation’s dedication to journalism, but never more so than in the past few years under the leadership of former Miami Herald Publisher Alberto Ibaurguen. Alberto and the board set transformation as the mission, and they’ve walked their talk with a series of thoughtful grants, both large and small. Lately they’ve been focusing on digitial delivery of news and information.

Two sets of Knight-funded grants were announced this week. A lot of the attention went to the second round of News Challenge grants, because they’re big ($5.5 million worth), they’re international and because one went to the inventor of the Internet (no, not Al Gore). But I’m just as interested in the small grants funded by knight through the New Voices program at the University of Maryland. Worth a look for some very cool citizen media ideas.

Saved from Google by a good editor

In preparing the item below for the blog and the op-ed page of The Wichita Eagle, I wanted to use the familiar quotation: “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” 

I wasn’t sure who said it, but when the first Google item I clicked on said H.L. Mencken, I thought, “of course, Mencken,” and went on my merry way.

This morning I got this message from Rhonda Holman, one of the editors on the page:

In your commentary, you wrote: “In pre-television days, the renowned American cynic, H.L. Mencken, said, ‘Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.’”

A bit of Internet searching indicates this is often misattributed to
Mencken and should be attributed to A.J. Liebling. 

I called Rhonda and promised to get to the bottom of this. I looked at Google again and found 80,200 items attributed the quote to Mencken and 23,700 to Liebling.

I was shaken enough by the disparity to call the Reference Desk at the Wichita State University Library. There I got help from Angela Paul, who confirmed Rhonda’s catch of my mistake, using The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

So, thanks Rhonda, thanks Angela.

I sure hope it was Liebling! 

Citizens as gatekeepers

Inexpensive technology has put the tools of mass communication in the hands of the masses, diluting the power of traditional news media. We are in the early days of a rapidly expanding movement of do-it-yourself news, often called citizen journalism. I think it has great potential for serving democracy.

The renowned American cynic, H.L. Mencken, said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

Now everyone with a computer and Internet connection is a potential publisher; everyone with a video-enabled cell phone is a potential broadcaster.

 This unprecedented power shift is not without risk.

In two recent columns in The Wichita Eagle, Davis “Buzz” Merritt, my colleague at the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State, raised alarm about the potential dangers of iReport.com. It’s a site owned by and run by CNN as a sort of YouTube for news. It allows anyone to post news video with none of the accuracy, fairness and taste filters provided by traditional news organizations.

Professor Merritt raises the excellent point that current law protecting Internet activity gives no ready legal recourse to those who may be harmed by false reports. That should be corrected. 

But we should never go back to the days, just now coming to an end, when a small number of professional journalists, known as gatekeepers, got to decide what everyone should read, hear and see.

Merritt paints an ugly picture of iReport.com’s potential content as “stuff posted directly by any idiot or criminal with a camera and a computer.” That’s not what I see when I actually look at the site.

This week’s most viewed story subjects included the 2008 Presidential election and natural disasters in China and Myanmar. There were also silly videos about bridesmaid dresses, but no content fluffier than you’d find in the features portions of most newscasts.

Merritt finds CNN irresponsible for posting amateur video that hasn’t gone through a professional vetting process. I think CNN and other news organizations are smart to encourage citizen journalism.  Pushing back a frontier always involves danger, but the harm is usually offset by the resulting progress.

On a national level, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is encouraging community foundations to develop local experiments in citizen journalism.

I’m working with the Wichita Community Foundation to put together a local group to brainstorm ideas for Sedgwick County. If you want to be involved, send me an email. Or a video!