Dec 11th, 2006 | Social Media | 1 Comment
The New York Times has rolled out some social-networking and/or social-bookmarking features, with a small widget that appears next to stories and allows readers to submit them to Digg and Newsvine, or bookmark them with Facebook and delicious.
For some reason, TechCrunch has chosen to call this “surrendering” to social news. “This seems like a begrudging move for The Times, a paper with an elitist reputation and a crossword puzzle that you need a PhD to solve. A social networking site like Facebook doesn’t seem the type of company that The Times would consort with,” writes Natali del Conte.
Maybe so, but I think it’s a pretty smart tie-in to those social tools. Not to blow the Globe and Mail horn, but as I mentioned to George Scriban over at Global Nerdy, the Globe has had similar links to Digg, Newsvine, Magnolia and Technorati for several months now. If you click on the words “share this” at the top of a story, you get a little Ajaxified menu of social tools.
As Greg Sterling at Screenwerk notes, “These days you can’t survive with only a “destination” strategy. You have to have some sort of viral and/or other distribution strategies to get your content in front of users.” The Times is also creating a permalink URL for all stories, which makes it easier to link to them. Om Malik says it’s all about the page views — and Seamus McCauley of Virtual Economics notes that unless the NYT has more of a strategy than they are letting on, these deals are just giving away the store.
Dec 10th, 2006 | Citizen Media | No Comments
From Muhammad Saleem at The Mu Life (who noticed the item on HTMKSteve’s blog), comes news of a paper in Connecticut that is looking to hire an editor to bring together “user-generated content” from the community. The classified ad at Journalism Jobs says:
The News-Times seeks someone with print and online skills to solicit, gather, assemble and strategically publish user-generated content on our Web site and in our niche publications… You will gather and compile everything from Little League pictures to prom photo galleries to audio/video narrations from veterans of war and undercover cops. Some writing will be required but that’s a minor part of the job.
As Muhammad — a top contributor to Digg and a paid contributor at Netscape — points out in his blog post, this is very similar to the kind of thing that “anchors” and editors at Netscape get paid ($1,000 a month) to do. And what is the pay scale for the News-Times job? It says just that it’s “negotiable.”
I wonder how long before the users who generate all that “user-generated content” are going to start asking the paper for their cut of the proceeds.
Dec 7th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
If nothing else, Jason Calacanis did one thing while he was running the revamped Netscape.com: By hiring away some of the top users at Digg, he ignited a debate about whether to compensate the top submitters to a “social media” site. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose said that he would never pay top Diggers because it would ruin the open and social nature of the site, and I tend to agree with him (I wrote about it here and here).
But now, according to Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, some of the top Diggers have found other ways of getting compensated — including getting paid by companies under the table for submitting their pages to the site. Several top submitters have reportedly been approached by companies to submit pages for money, and have done so. Some have been paid per submission, others on a kind of retainer, and some have received bonuses if a submission makes it to the front page.
This kind of thing is even more underhanded than PayPerPost, the company that pays bloggers to write about clients, but doesn’t require them to disclose it. But Tony says that some of the Diggers justify their illicit salaries by saying “If Kevin Rose isn’t going to pay me for my time, maybe someone else will.” Tony says that this reminds him of Third World countries where government officials take bribes in part because they are paid so little to do their jobs.
All of this tends (although I hate to admit it) to support my friend Rob Hyndman’s contention that top Diggers should be compensated because what they do is effectively work, and that Jason Calacanis recognized that and rewarded it (Rob’s thoughts can be found in the comments here, and in his post here). My argument has always been that Diggers get rewarded in other ways that are non-financial — they get bragging rights, for example, and the admiration of their peers, which in some cases is worth more than money.
But Rob’s point is that this shouldn’t preclude them getting paid as well. And obviously, some top Diggers agree, to the point where they are willing to take what amount to bribes to submit things. To some extent, this is probably inevitable — if there is a system, someone will find a way to game it.
Update:
Steve O’Hear, who writes a blog on social media for ZDNet, wrote something asking whether Digg users should be compensated, and then submitted his piece to Digg. It got about 90 Diggs and 40 comments, and made it to the front page — but then it suddenly disappeared.
Dec 7th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
A website called What’s Next: Innovations in Newspapers (part of a media consulting agency) has some photos of newsrooms at different media companies including CNN, Reuters and the Toronto Star — as well as some shots of Al Jazeera’s new TV studio/newsroom and one of the new London Telegraph newsroom, which incorporates newspaper and Website.
The Telegraph
The Toronto Star
Dec 7th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
I’ve been a very bad media blogger lately — lots of things happening that are worth blogging about, but not enough time to mention them all. So here are some short bits, courtesy of my del.icio.us bookmarks (I’m user mathewi if you want to tag something for me) and my Google Reader shared items:
– From TV Week and the New York Times come virtually identical comments from TV executives and newspaper executives about how they don’t know where things are going: “What we’re trying to do is be very clear about something that is not clear. We really don’t know what the consumer really wants,” said the head of Fox Networks Group. And Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Co., told a conference when asked what the future held for his industry: “the only honest answer to that question is, I don’t know.”
– Michael Tippett, who runs Vancouver-based social media site NowPublic.com, wrote something about how he dislikes the term “citizen journalism” (I found this on J.D. Lasica’s site but haven’t been able to find on Michael’s blog):
When you build a bookshelf you don’t think of yourself as a citizen carpenter - you just need a place to put your books. The same is true for news. When I tell a friend about something I saw while walking to work I don’t imagine myself sitting in front of a teleprompter. I am telling a story because I want to express myself… Sharing your photos, videos, stories and reading lists are natural impulses. Journalism has nothing to do with it.
– High Road Communications and iStudio in Toronto (sister companies that are part of PR agency Fleishman-Hillard) recently released what some are calling a “social news release” (more from Tony Hung on that idea here). It’s for Weblo, the virtual world where you can buy virtual versions of real places, and it includes links to save the release on delicious, to submit it to Digg, to subscribe to a feed, and some additional links to related video clips and other info. Brandy Fleming from iStudio wrote about it here and Ed Lee wrote about it here.
– from journalism instructor Mark Hamilton’s blog comes a couple of interesting links: Alan Mutter, who writes a blog called Newsosaur, has a long but worthwhile piece about why a 24-hour news desk is a very bad idea for newspapers (contrary opinions here and here), and Leonard Witt of PJNet has a post about how news organizations that are trying to adapt and survive have to decide whether they are going to use the Internet to “smarten up or dumb down” their coverage.
– Scoopt, a service that sells photos taken by “citizen journalists,” wants people who use Flickr to share their photos to tag them with the keyword “Scoopt” and let the agency try to sell some of their shots. This comes just days after Yahoo and Reuters announced an arrangement to let individuals submit newsworthy photos through a service called YouWitnessNews.
– Online journalism veteran Steve Yelvington says that it’s not about the journalism, but the conversation:
I think the real problem is that journalists (and journalism professors) keep pounding a square peg into a round hole and then complaining about the fit. People in general are not clamoring to become amateur journalists… People want to participate in a community conversation. We can build a separate and new business model around facilitation of that online conversation.
