Oct 25th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Paul Bradshaw, a former journalist and lecturer from the UK, has a long-ish post on his blog (which is called Online Journalism Blog) about the future of online media and the relaunch of ZDNet’s UK website. One of the things the editor of ZDNet UK says he plans is to make the site more social and allow people to contribute:
At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss this as another organisation jumping on the MySpace bandwagon, but look a bit deeper and we may be seeing a window into the future of magazines.
To begin with, ZDNet plans to create a new post of community editor: “a hybrid marketing/editorial job - to moderate discussions, grow the community and create a dialogue with the readership.”
This role is not a new idea, but it’s an indication of where the ‘Editor’ role in magazines may be heading: not managing the publication, but managing the community.
In that kind of model, Bradshaw says, the readers become part of the editing and selection process, and their discussions help to determine where coverage goes.
Oct 24th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote recently about the cost cuts at newspapers like the Los Angeles Times — where the editor was recently fired for not agreeing to cut staff — and how this could impact investigative journalism. He describes a 2004 investigation in which three L.A. Times reporters revealed how a U.S. congressman was helping several Russian firms that were funneling money to his daughter’s lobbying firm. Then he says:
Real investigative reporting, as opposed to the what-happened-yesterday stuff, is time-consuming, risky and expensive. And as one news organization after another sheds staff in this tough financial climate, it’s worth considering what aggressive journalism has produced lately.
As Kurtz notes, there has been a wave of cutbacks at major newspapers, including a 19-per-cent cut at the Dallas Morning News, 17 per cent at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, more cuts at the Philadelphia Inquirer despite a cut of 15 per cent last year, an 8-per-cent cut at the Washington Post, and so on. All of which, as he put it, “means fewer bodies to pore over records at City Hall, the statehouse or federal agencies.” Will we pay for these cutbacks later?
Meanwhile, media consultant Juan Antonio Giner asks whether it’s really cuts that are the problem or the way that newspapers are allocating the resources they have. As he puts its:
Of course that you need journalists, but for what? To re-package the same news from the same sources? To attend the same boring press conferences? To publish today the same news that our readers knew YESTERDAY? To produce pages and pages of commodity information with no value added? To edit pages and pages of listings that could go directly to our web site? To attend long and badly planned news meetings?
Who is right? Jeff Jarvis (in a post called — in typical Jarvis fashion — “Killing the crap to save the news”) agrees with Giner that it’s about allocation rather than raw numbers, and Roy Greenslade of the Guardian says that British papers get by on much smaller numbers of reporters, thank you very much. And Jack Shafer at Slate magazine notes that journalists love to talk about the services they provide to society whenever the word cutbacks gets mentioned.
Oct 23rd, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
(crossposted from my blog at www.mathewingram.com/work)
In this era of YouTube and Revver and video “mashups,” it seems like remixing media is the order of the day, and now there are half a dozen online video-editing tools like Jumpcut, Eyespot, MotionBox and VideoEgg that allow users to upload and edit video quickly and easily. It would be easy to dismiss this kind of thing as a goofy fad that appeals only to teenagers and people with a webcam and too much time on their hands, but I think things like this appeal to a real human desire to create and share, and the Zimmer Twins is a perfect example.
I’d never heard of the Zimmer Twins until this afternoon, but I happened to be watching my eight-year-old daughter Zoe playing on the computer next to mine, and she was doing something on a website, and laughing away to herself. Then she said: “Dad, do you want to watch my movie?” So I went over to her PC and she was at the Zimmer Twins website, where you can mix and match short clips from the animated show on the Teletoon network — using a storyboard strip with drag and drop features — and write captions right into the panel.
I have to say I was blown away. In just a few minutes, Zoe had created her own little animated short, complete with soundtrack and storyline (and some spelling mistakes too, of course, altough I pretended not to notice those). Pretty amazing. The YouTube of the future had better watch out.
Oct 22nd, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
As Jeff Jarvis notes in a post on Buzzmachine, it has been a pretty bad week for newspapers — just part of what has been a pretty bad year or two for the paper-based media business. Among the bad omens:
- According to Editor & Publisher, newspaper circulation continues to decrease.
- The WSJ says that print advertising is in decline.
- Even family-owned newspapers are laying off staff.
- The Chicago Sun-Times appears to be for sale.
- The Toronto Star fired its editor-in-chief and publisher.
Oct 22nd, 2006 | Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
FastCompany magazine has a great profile of Rob Curley, the young editor from a small-town newspaper who has become one of the go-to guys when it comes to rethinking what newspapers do and how they do it. His particular solution is what he calls “hyper-local” journalism, where a newspaper such as the one in Naples, Florida tries to own every aspect of the news in its area — from paper to Web to broadcast.
“Most people still think of a newspaper Web site as a digital version of what went on the press last night, but that’s a small part of what we do,” Curley says. “I want a site to be so cool and important to people that they talk about it the way you talk about having a great park where you live. It’s a local amenity.”
My friend and former National Post journalist Mark Evans has some of his own thoughts about how to reinvent the newspaper business, having spent the past couple of decades (give or take a few years) working for one. A few of his suggestions: experiment, focus on context rather than the quick hit, and hire younger staff who are willing to take more risks. Good advice.
