Mar 29th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post is working on a “citizen media” venture with NewAssignment.net (which I wrote about in an earlier post), has an interesting perspective on the future of newspapers in a recent post. She describes how she and her friends are Web junkies, but still like to read a printed paper — although they print out different versions of papers from around the world, using NewspaperDirect.com.
Then she describes what she sees as the future:
“Those papers that wake up in time will become a journalistic hybrid combining the best aspects of traditional print newspapers with the best of what the Web brings to the table.”
“Chomping down on a story and refusing to let go is what bloggers do best. And while the vast majority of material that ends up being blogged about still originates with a mainstream news source, more and more stories are being broken by online news sources.”
“So stop writing teary-eyed eulogies for newspapers. The only thing dead is the either/or nature of the musty print vs online debate. The hybrid future is kicking down the door. It’s time to let it in and fully embrace it.”
Hat tip to Roy Greenslade of the Guardian for spotting that one — he has his own take on it here. For whatever it’s worth, I think Arianna nails it pretty well.
In other Huffington news, Rachel Sklar of Eat The Press has a great overview of a panel she was on at the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ conference, along with Katherine Graham of the Washington Post and Barry Diller of IAC. Thanks to Rob Hyndman for that link.
Mar 29th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
According to something called the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCooper, spending internet ads in the UK jumped in 2006 and overtook newspaper advertising for the first time, this story at the BBC website says. Online ad spending rose by 41.2 per cent to £2.01-billion during the year, the report said. In contrast, spending on national newspaper ads grew just 0.2 per cent to £1.9-billion, taking a 10.7-per-cent share of the market.
Mar 29th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Jay Rosen, the online journalism veteran behind NewAssigment.net — an experiment in “crowdsourcing” journalism, or “citizen reporting” or whatever you want to call it — announced earlier this week that NewAssignment and the Huffington Post are collaborating on a new journalism venture aimed at covering the upcoming U.S. elections.
Jay posted about it on his own blog, but has also written about it in a guest-post on Marc Glaser’s blog at PBS. As he describes it:
“Our idea is not complicated: it’s campaign reporting by a great many more people than would ever fit on the bus that the boys (and girls) of the press have famously gotten on and off every four years, as they try to cover the race for president.”
In other words, instead of just one or two reporters trailing John Edwards or Rudy Giuliani or whoever, the idea is to have dozens of people tracking different parts of each campaign, filing to blogs and stories and other formats, and then aggregating all of that and editing it and posting the best of it somewhere like Huffington Post.
Arianna Huffington’s post on the new venture is here. As she describes it:
“We are recruiting large groups of citizen journalists from around the country to cover the major presidential candidates. Each of these volunteer reporter/bloggers will contribute to a candidate-specific group blog — offering written updates, campaign tidbits, on-the-scene observations, photos, or original video.”
Ms. Huffington says that this is “the wisdom of crowds hits the campaign trail,” and that hopefully such a venture will avoid the kind of group-think reporting that the mainstream media can become guilty of at times, adding that “Exhibit A is, and will always be, the press’ shameful lack of questioning during the run-up to the war in Iraq.”
Mar 28th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Yahoo is teaming up with the McClatchy newspaper chain to offer international news coverage from the chain’s journalists, according to this press release, in a project to be called “Trusted Voices.”
Foreign correspondents based in select regions, including Iraq, the Middle East, China and Latin America, will provide everything from traditional news stories to exclusive blog reports, the release says. The project is expected to launch in the next couple of months, and one of the first initiatives will be the “Inside Iraq” blog written by native Iraqi staffers in McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau.
Media blogger Howard Owens has some thoughts on the arrangement here. In other news, McClatchy lost $280-million in the fourth quarter after taking a writedown on the sale of its largest paper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Mar 28th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
The relationship between a reporter and a company he (or she) is trying to write about is… well, complicated. In some cases, it’s like two hostile nations trying to meet at Camp David, with each side compiling as much information — secret and otherwise — about their adversary, and each side trying to read between the lines to find out what the other party really meant. And sometimes those files get leaked, as they did in the case of Wired writer Fred Vogelstein.
In a classic case of mis-communication, Fred got sent the file that Microsoft PR firm Waggener Edstrom had compiled on him. The PDF, which Fred has helpfully made available here, contains 13 pages of notes from interviews, commentary about his reporting abilities, and so on. Nothing earth-shattering, mind you, but still somewhat embarrassing — including comments such as “It takes him a bit to get his point across so try to be patient” and “We’re pushing Fred to finish reporting and start writing.” Ironically, the story was part of a Wired cover package on transparency, as editor Chris Anderson describes here.
As Mike Arrington notes at TechCrunch, the fact that Microsoft’s PR firm compiled a dossier on Fred is not surprising. Somewhere, there is an underground server farm the size of the Pentagon filled with minutiae about anyone who has made it past the Microsoft reception desk (I’m only partly joking). That’s how Microsoft — and many other large companies — work.
Frank Shaw, president of Waggener Edstrom — whose blog, fittingly enough, is called “Glass House” — has responded with a post about the event. For the most part, he plays it cool, although he seems (perhaps not surprisingly) a little on the defensive at certain points. Towards the end, he says that in most cases “the interests of a journalist and PR are totally aligned – a great interview is always the best possible outcome.”
Mr. Shaw is right, of course. But what he doesn’t say is that the definition of what constitutes a “good” interview can differ radically depending on whether you are a PR firm or a reporter trying to get a story. Sometimes that relationship is a pitched battle, sometimes it’s an arranged marriage, and sometimes it’s a dance. A PR firm has to be equal parts marriage broker, dating service, DJ and (in some cases) spook. ‘Twas always thus.
