Random Mumblings

Michael Wolff says: Just Do it!

2010-03-19T21:13:15Z

For all of us in the actually Internet news business (as opposed to people in the business of putting up stuff from another news medium on the Internet), the other guys charging for content is what we're waiting for. It'll define the market. You can pay for that version of the news. Or take our version for free. Two models, two different forms. Let the market decide (and quite a surprising decision it will be).

-- Michael Wolff

The next logical step to FOIA: POIA

2010-03-18T18:24:18Z

There's new open data, government transparency effort. Find out more about POIA in this Sunlight Foundation video.

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While other media shrink, video grows, particularly on the small screen

2010-03-16T16:01:26Z

Jeff Cole, director of USC's Center for the Digital Future:

In 1975, the average American spent 16 hours a week in front of a screen. Last year, that figure hit 34 hours and should grow to 50 hours in a few years. Much of that growth will come from mobile video, as consumers watch more TV and more video on mobile screens in general.

-- Beet.TV

Emphasis added on the part of about "mobile video," which is another reason, you should be at "Smart Phones for Smart Journalists" in Nashville on April 9.

AOL's Seed and "bionic journalism" explained

2010-03-15T09:33:05Z

AOL has built a three legged stool to create content: part professional, part freelance, and part aggregated . . . but its model is far more hand-crafted than the other new players in the mass content creation space. "The essence of journalism has always been separating signal from noise," says (Saul) Hansell. "It's all judgment. It's all selecting the best bits." What AOL hopes to create with Seed is an editorial machine which automates the assignment process as much as possible, but keeps the final selection part in human hands.

"I call it Bionic Journalism," says Hansell. "Left brain, right brain. We are trying to take the best of a machine, which does lots of things over and over again, and a person." It's a tall order, and will take a lot more than a couple thousand band interviews to prove it works.

-- TechCrunch

Whew, Saul Hassell, the former New York Times writer Saul Hansell who is now the Programming Director of Seed, is intense in the video describing the "tough luck' of content creators.

Seed is an interesting large-scale effort of combining computers, community and professional content creators to create news content. But somehow it me thinking of Digital Cities.

Run the marathon; not the sprint

2010-03-14T17:31:45Z

Spot on predictions so far.

Engel Stadium: Down in the last inning

2010-03-13T00:12:37Z

It is great to see a group of people are trying to save Chattanooga's historic Engel Stadium, the second oldest minor league baseball stadiums in America and one that is on the National Register of Historic Places.

It's an 80-year-old, 5,997-seat monument to baseball history that seems to be locked in a "Twilight Zone" episode of ownership.

I was there in 2008 and took the above HRD photos. It was in bad shape then; I can only imagine what it's like with two more years of no maintenance and being a haunt of the homeless.

A story in the Chattanooga Times Free Press today offers a glimmer of hope of saving the park. Its supporters need to be wearing their rally caps.

Gabe's gaze into media

2010-03-12T20:45:07Z

Image by Thomas Hawk
via Flickr

I'm finding mediagazer really useful. It launched March 8 from Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera.

Thoughts?

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Knoxville video has gone viral

2010-03-12T00:39:51Z

TV reporter Gordon Boyd's unfortunate "technical difficulties" have gone "randomly viral" on YouTube.

The big social media blog Mashable linked to it today and the YouTube video has topped 137,000 views since being posted on March 5, 2010. Here is the take of the News Sentinel's Terry Morrow and also of Metro Pulse.

Make it a talker

2010-03-10T09:55:38Z

I want to give you more, not less. I don't think McDonalds will assume that as long as you keep it in a yellow box, people will buy a smaller, drier Big Mac. Yet our industry seems to think people are so obligated to buy it, we can make something smaller and drier and people will still buy it. It's crazy. You have to create something that, whatever's in it, people in town are all going to be talking about. That's the edge that we've lost.
Newspapers used to be seen as a utility. People used to ask, "Do you take the newspaper?" What we have to produce now is a product backed by marketing strategies that compels people to buy the product. It has to be of great value.

-- E.W. Scripps CEO Rich Boehne

That's from an interview in a Northern Kentucky University publication (hat tip to David Oatney). Boehne, who runs the company I work for, also talks about journalism stenography vs. storytelling and says that the traditional media of newspapers, radio and television were just the warm up for the connected electronic grid of information that is really just at its beginnings.

To those who have been listening to what Boehne has been saying, his emphasis on journalism that creates compelling content and embracing multiple platforms to deliver that information is not a new message, but it bears noting. To extend his fast food restaurant analogy a bit further, he's asking publishers and editors to upsize their committment to serving communities.

If we could only get you to screw off more at work

2010-03-10T02:29:28Z

... and at home, too, for that matter.

However, visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day. Not surprisingly, advertisers are willing to pay more for their share of readers' attention during that 25 minutes of offline reading than during the 70 seconds of online reading. So even though online advertising has grown rapidly in the last five years, it appears that somewhat less than 5% of newspapers' ad revenue comes from their internet editions, according to the most recent Newspaper Association of America data.

There's a reason for the relatively short time readers spend on online news: a disproportionate amount of online news reading occurs during working hours. The good news is that newspapers can now reach readers at work, which was difficult prior to the internet. The bad news is that readers don't have a lot of time to devote to news when they are supposed to be working. Online news reading is predominately a labor time activity while offline news reading is primarily a leisure time activity. One of the big challenges facing the news industry is increasing involvement with the news during leisure hours, when readers have more time to look at both news content and ads.

-- Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist

What to do next

2010-03-09T16:43:10Z

Just got a copy of Mark Briggs' latest book Journalism Next: A Practical Guide to Digital Reporting and Publishing.

Some of efforts we have been doing at the Knoxville News Sentinel are highlighted.

He visited Knoxville during his research for the book. In fact, the book has a bit of a Knoxville flavor. In addition to some people at the News Sentinel, Briggs recognizes Patrick Beeson of the Knoxville-based E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group (SING) and Jim Stovall of the University of Tennessee in the acknowledgments.

Briggs is a frequent presenter at journalism and media conferences and previously wrote "Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive."

In this book, a cookbook of sorts of journalism and technology, Briggs tries to help readers connect the dots between technology and digital concepts and tools to the core principles of good journalism.

He does a good job. Give it a read.

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Burn the boats?

2010-03-08T14:55:14Z

Here are some excerpts from an Eric Schonfeld post on TechCrunch about an interview with Marc Andreessen.

Andreessen is the guy who co-authored the early Web browser, Mosaic, which later became the Netscape browser. He co-founded Ning.com and is investor in a slew of other Internet companies, including Digg and Twitter.

The "burn the boats" reference refers to an action Hernando Cortes ordered when he came to the New World. Andreessen's advice to traditional media companies, ironically, comes at a time when their boats are floating higher. The stocks of several have been on the rise, a few are at 52-week highs, driven by cost-cutting and an improvement in what had been anticipated in the ad market. But the view isn't particularly new for him; he's said as much a year ago.

From Schonfeld:

We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. "You gotta burn the boats," he told me, "you gotta commit." His point is that if traditional media companies don't burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he's an investor in the Business Insider) are either. ""All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about."

Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, "We know where the market is and we are not going to go there." Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats--billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. "At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount," Andreessen acknowledges, "but shift happens." You'd have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.

I'm thinking Andreessen doesn't have a large investment position in any traditional media company.

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The Social Media thing

2010-03-07T18:50:35Z

I have done this post in awhile!

Be sociable:

Yahoo! at 15

2010-03-07T14:45:11Z

Image via CrunchBase

Missed the company's birthday by a few days, but Yahoo! was incorporated on March 1, 1995.

If you had bought in at the opening $24.50 back then and kept the stock through the 5 splits you would have 24 shares for each initial one. So you would have $377.52 as of close of trading today (3/2/2010) - given the current value of $15.73. Interestingly this would be a little over 15 times your initial investment. (Search Engine Land)

The years other Internet companies were started.

Amazon was founded in 1994.
Yahoo! was founded in 1995.
eBay was founded in 1995.
Craigslist was started in 1995 and incorporated in 1999.
Google was founded in 1998.
Flickr was founded in 2002.
MySpace was founded in 2003.
Skype was founded in 2003
Facebook was founded in 2004.
YouTube was founded in 2005.
Twitter was founded in 2006.
Fourquare.com was founded in 2009

I seem to enjoy marking Yahoo's birthdays. Here is what its home page looked like in 1996 from the WayBackMachine archive.

.

Letter from the epicenter

2010-03-06T16:39:16Z

Editor & Publisher Editor Mark Fitzgerald notes that with the departure of Rusty Coats from E.W. Scripps and the newspaper industry, "that's two Internet thinkers gone from the business in this young year. E&P's current Editor of the Year departed Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for a digital startup in D.C."

The Editor of the Year, of course, is Steve Buttry, whose wife, Mimi Johnson, perhaps, wrote the best account of his journey to the exit door.

If you add just more weeks to Fritzgerald's timeline, you also get to Rusty Coats' spouse, Janet Coats, who left her job as executive editor of the Tampa Tribune in December to move to Knoxville to be with her husband. She was an innovative and forward-thinking editor who guided the newspaper through a brutal reorganization.

The departures of these three and those that came before them may be a clue of the upheaval and human stress at the epicenters of change in the newspaper business, those stress points where the traditional business print model and what must be the future digital-based business model most forcibly collide.

The three are part of a growing list of people I've drawn inspiration and copied "best dish" recipes from for years who have exited the newspaper business. Most have retained their love of the news business or journalism, but have moved on from "the paper." They were the pioneers pushing, pulling, cajoling their organizations and the entire industry to move into the uncharteed future. For example, Rusty Coats' colleagues in the Newspaper Association of America's Digital Media Federation voted him their "Online Innovator" in 2005.

These, like those before them, began as print journalists and who became leading digital news thinkers and leaders and doers before moving on. They will be missed from an industry that badly needs them. Yes, there are young people in the newspaper industry with energy and drive and ideas and optimism for its future. There are a handful I could name in my own newsroom and several more scattered about the building, which houses both the Knoxville News Sentinel and the E.W. Scripps' newspaper division's corporate interactive group. Smart, talented, and committed people seeing a future.

But there's a grim reality as well. In a recent NewsU.org seminar Mark Briggs, who himself left newspapers for a news related startup, noted "culture eats strategy for lunch" and "when you bring change back to an organization, the organization's first instinct is to crush the change."

Many interesting things are happening at newspapers and they are evolving, but the incubators for the news forms of the future seem to be occurring outside the walls of traditional media companies. The really interesting things in digital news and information are happening everywhere from behemoth Google to small startups like Dave Cohn's Spot.Us or Michael van Poppel's BNOnews. It's harder to find truly innovative efforts at traditional media companies, particularly their flagship nameplates.

Among the start-ups, some of the innovation is ironically being nurtured from fortunes made in traditional media, like the Knight Foundation's initiatives. Janet Coats' new role is developing a program to fund innovative New Media journalism for the Patterson Foundation in Sarasota, Fla., which recently received a fresh $200 million in an estate settlement.

It will be interesting to see where these pioneers cut new trails. Best of luck to them. All us journalists need it.

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