Mar 27th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
The Knight Foundation has launched a website aimed at helping “citizen journalism” or community media operations find resources and best practices. Called the Knight Citizen News Network, it’s managed by J-Lab — the Institute for Interactive Journalism — with content created in part by Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media and by Amy Gahran of I, Reporter (as well as Right Conversations and the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits).
There’s a press release with more info here. The resources at KCNN.org include:
And (gratuitous Canadian reference) the site was designed by Hop Studios out of Vancouver.
Mar 26th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
From the Press Gazette comes word that the Glasgow Evening Times newspaper recently used a picture snapped by a reader’s cameraphone as its front-page photo for the first time. According to the story in the Gazette, Times reader Paul O’Brien used his phone to take a shot of a woman as she was rescued from the river by a military helicopter.
Not only that, but according to the Gazette story O’Brien’s photo was just one of six that were emailed from the cameraphones of observers at the rescue (there were no official Evening Times photographers at the scene).
“This is a first for us. It was used with the London bombs, but we’ve never done it,” said picture editor John Young. “It’s not that great quality as a picture, it’s acceptable and it gets the message across. With a news picture it’s sometimes content rather than quality that matters.”
(link via Editors’ Weblog).
Mar 26th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 4 Comments
Many bloggers and journalists alike are busy debating the “death” of newspapers and the online evolution that media organizations of all kinds are being forced to consider (see my previous post), but it seems that some are still wondering what the fuss is all about — witness the latest commentary from Tim Luckhurst, a former editor of The Scotsman, in the Independent, a paper whose editor is a well-known skeptic when it comes to online.
Mr. Luckhurst appears to think that the whole blogging, online-media thing is overrated. Despite the fact that the Telegraph has spent “millions” on things like blogs and video, he suggests, the payoff has been meagre. How does he know this? Unnamed “senior editors” and “analysts” say so. One of the most damning things seems to be the lack of comments on the Telegraph blogs, which Luckhurst says only get a few remarks in some cases. In summary, he says that the Telegraph’s experience “does not prove that rushing to embrace each new item of technology makes editorial or commercial sense. Waiting and watching has often been the astute response to revolutionary technology. Those who pioneer multimedia may not be the ones to do it best.”
It’s probably not surprising that Shane Richmond, the online editor for The Telegraph, might take issue with Mr. Luckhurst’s view on things, but I think he makes some worthwhile points anyway in his response. Among other things, he notes that comments on blogs are a fairly poor indicator of whether an online strategy is working on not (Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian has some thoughts about Luckhurst’s piece as well, as does Martin Stabe).
But Shane Richmond’s most powerful argument comes at the end, when he talks about Luckhurst’s recommendation to wait it out, and says:
“If only it were that easy. You don’t just flick a switch and turn this stuff on. It requires learning, training and a shift in culture. It requires planning, investment and, most of all, time.”
In that, I think the Telegraph editor is exactly right. It isn’t just a change in appearance, such as going with the Berliner format or trimming the page size. It’s part of a change in thinking — and you can’t just wave a wand and make that kind of thing happen. As Shane says near the end of his post, the Independent had better start that shift now or it won’t have any readers left to talk to.
Contrast the Independent’s view with that of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who said in a meeting with staff about the move to 24/7 reporting (described in a post by Roy Greenslade) that:
“The print-on-paper model [for newspapers] isn’t making money and isn’t going to make money. It’s no longer sustainable. Though the future is unknowable, we are taking an educated guess about what we should be doing and where we should be going.”
Mar 25th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Rumours of trouble at the San Francisco Chronicle (which came from Tim O’Reilly originally) have sparked much commentary, some of it insightful — and here I have to mention Dave Winer, whom I have had differences with in the past but who makes some worthwhile points about what papers need to do — and some of it, well, not so much. Like my friend Mark Evans, who has a long post here, I think Robert Scoble falls into the not-so-much category with his post about how newspapers are dead.
Are newspapers in trouble? Sure they are. And I would definitely agree that there hasn’t been enough thinking about (or investment in) the future from many newspapers, although I would argue that the Globe and Mail has been doing more than some of its competitors. But I don’t think it advances the debate any to throw around apocalyptic pronouncements — and I say that knowing full well that many people will discount what I’m saying because I work for a provider of dead-tree media.
Obviously, more people like Robert Scoble are getting their news from the Web — as am I, and other geek types. As Mark points out, however, plenty of people are also getting their news from free papers, which have been growing at an incredible rate. That definitely means trouble for the newspaper industry’s current business models, but not necessarily for print itself. But there are still hundreds of millions of people subscribing to newspapers, and likely will be for decades, even if that number decreases.
To me, part of the problem is that everyone focuses on the “paper” part of the word “newspaper,” which to me is the least important part of the term. There’s no question that the paper part of the business is decreasing in importance, and news may no longer be primarily distributed on smashed-up trees. Does that change the nature of the business? Definitely.
But it doesn’t mean newspaper companies have to die — it just means they need to evolve. Doc Searls has some ideas about how to do that. Karoli at Odd Time Signatures has a few thoughts about the evolution as well (love the new blog design, Karoli). And my friend Scott Karp has a long and typically insightful look at the paper business here.
Mar 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
From Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog comes word that MySpace — the 800-pound gorilla of social networking — will soon be launching a Digg-style news aggregation service of some kind. Is that a good thing? It’s certainly interesting, and I would expect Digg to be worried about the prospect. Whether it’s actually something worthwhile depends on how it is handled.
Mike Arrington at TechCrunch raises an interesting point, which is that having its own “social news” feature connected to the gazillions of people who belong to MySpace (even if those gazillions aren’t quite as large as the service would like us to believe, thanks to the multiple-account problem) could give News Corp. lots of ideas about pushing its news content into such an aggregator, giving it priority of some kind, etc. In my view, that would be bad. On the other hand, News Corp. could use the social aspect of such a service to get a read on what a large audience is interested in, and use that to inform the rest of its media operations, which would be smart.
Will News Corp. use its MySpace News as a kind of jungle drum, to pick up stories that might be under the radar? Or will it just be another Digg-style echo chamber where the uncouth hordes and flash crowds can congregate and spin stories into hysterical overkill? Should be interesting to watch. For more, see Pete Cashmore at Mashable and Seamus McCauley at Virtual Economics.
Update:
Joe Duck says that he expects MySpace to fail miserably. He says that “social news networks like Digg and Netscape are pretty bad for all but tech and quirky news because they generally fail to analyze or treat significant stories with much if any respect.” I would have to agree there, but then I’m a news junkie from the old school 
News Corp. is also trying to get other video content owners to bring their stuff to MySpace.
