Aug 24th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As plenty of others are reporting elsewhere, the New York Times has launched the public version of its MyTimes customizable home page, which has been in beta for almost a year now. I tried it out when it first launched and I confess my reaction was very similar to some of the other responses out there — in other words, the new offering has some not bad features, but nothing that’s going to alter the fabric of the Web or cause the earth to stop rotating.
I think one of the most interesting features is the ability to check out — and add the RSS feeds for — some of the sites that New York Times reporters and columnists like to go to. I confess I haven’t really spent much time on the site since I checked it out initially, but the last time I looked they hadn’t done much apart from letting you add feeds from NYT writers and add tabs specific to each of your favourite authors.
My friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt isn’t very impressed with the site, and I share his lack of enthusiasm. While it’s not a bad offering, I wonder why the Times bothered with MyTimes when there are others offering much the same features. I assume they’re hoping faithful readers will gravitate to the site because of their love for the brand, but I’m not sure that’s true. If I were them, I would have spent a bit more time trying to make it unique.
Aug 18th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
An editorial about Google in the Los Angeles Times has caused quite a kerfuffle (or perhaps a brouhaha) in the blogosphere — in part because the editorial said that for some newspapers, the search engine and its Google News aggregator are as bad as Osama bin Laden.
Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review says the paper “lit its credibility on fire” with that statement, and insulted its readers with a misunderstanding of how Google News operates and what the benefits are for online journalism. Jeff Jarvis says — and I would agree — that the editorial seems to be mocking newspapers that see Google as Osama.
In any case, there does seem to be a tone of righteous indignation to the editorial, at the idea that someone like Google could be so bold as to claim that a feature of theirs — in this case, the ability to add comments to a Google News story — might help to improve journalism. And that is where I think the LA Times misses the boat.
As my friend Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 points out, journalism is no longer (if it ever was) a thing that is crafted and polished and then delivered to newspaper readers for their enlightenment every morning. It is something that develops over time — a continuous process, and media outlets are only part of that process now.
I think smart newspapers know that, and are trying to make their readers, their community, and those affected by news events a part of that process. The not-so-smart ones are making fun of Google and hoping it goes away.
Aug 16th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
Update:
As Allen Stern of Centernetworks notes in the comments here, and Mike Arrington notes in this follow-up post on USAToday, the paper says that its traffic not only hasn’t fallen but is actually up by double digits. Maybe we need to file this one under the heading: “better traffic data urgently needed.”
Original post:
There’s a post up at TechCrunch in which Mike Arrington raises the question of whether the USAToday’s high-profile launch of “Web 2.0″-style features — including comments on news stories, blogs, voting on stories, and so on — is paying off or not. According to the stats Mike has from Compete and comScore, traffic to the USAToday.com site has fallen over the past several months by anywhere from 14 to 29 per cent.
At first, I assumed — like some commenters — that this might be explained by a normal summer decline in readers, a lack of compelling news, etc. But as Mike points out in his graph, the Washington Post and the New York Times haven’t seen any similar decline over the same period.
Of course, all the usual caveats about traffic measurement should be inserted here — neither Compete nor comScore (nor any of the other major measurement agencies, for that matter) have what you would call 100-per-cent reliable statistics. But the fact that both of them together show a similar trend at least leads me to believe they are on the right track.
So what can we learn from all this? Mike wonders whether it’s possible that “news and social networking just don’t mix.” But I think Tish Grier — who was involved with Jay Rosen’s Assignment Zero crowd-sourcing project, among other things — gets closer to the mark with her post, in which she argues (as I have in the past) that, well… social networking is hard.
You can’t just set up shop and expect people to suddenly show up and start contributing and interacting. For one thing, as Chris Heuer argues, online community doesn’t fit with everyone and everything. There also needs to be real interaction from the newspaper side as well, and encouragement and moderation and so on. It’s like gardening, not construction. And there has to be a reason for people to want to participate, as someone notes in the comments on Mike’s post.
Much like gardening, it also takes time for the fruits of your labours to become obvious — I’m not sure we should write USAToday’s experiment off just yet.
Aug 15th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Doc Searls has an excellent post up with some advice for newspapers trying to make their websites better. One quibble: he’s still trying to push the “charge for the new, give away the old” idea, which I gave him some grief for last time be brought it up (and he gracefully admitted that he might not be right about the “charge for the new” part).
In any case, the rest of his advice — including the “give away the old” part of the above statement — makes perfect sense and should be laminated and posted in every newsroom from sea to shining sea. Bon mots include the following:
Start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You’re not the only game in town anymore, and haven’t been for some time.
The whole “bloggers vs. journalism” thing is a red herring, and a rotten one at that. There’s a symbiosis that needs to happen, and it’s barely beginning. Get in front of it, and everybody will benefit.
Stop calling everything “content”. It’s a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the ’90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online… Your job is journalism, not container cargo.
There’s plenty more where those came from. Go read the whole thing — I’ll wait.
Aug 15th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
The question in the title of this post is meant to be facetious — sort of. I know that Kara works for the Wall Street Journal, or at least for Dow Jones (and ultimately for Rupert Murdoch now). The only reason I ask is that she broke a story about Facebook on her Boomtown blog, which is located at All Things D, the site that she and WSJ gadget guru Walt Mossberg run. That story appears nowhere at the Journal site, as far as I can tell.
All Things D started as an online adjunct to the similarly named tech conference, which Swisher and Mossberg have put on since 2003, and which regularly features geekosphere luminaries such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and a few other people you might have heard of. The website was recently relaunched as a news/blogging site with regular posts from Kara and John Paczkowski (and somewhat less frequent posts by Mossberg). The site is owned by Dow Jones but “run autonomously as a small online start-up,” according to the About page.
I guess what I’m driving at is that I think what All Things D is doing is an interesting experiment. Some of Kara’s video interviews show up at the Journal site, but her blog appears to only be at allthingsd.com — and the Facebook story is only there (at least for now), perhaps because it’s just a management shuffle at a non-public company, and therefore might not merit a full WSJ story.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens if Kara breaks more stories there rather than the WSJ site — it’s possible that the Journal won’t even care, since it apparently sells ads at All Things D as well.
Update:
Kara’s rather long disclosure statement (in which she also talks about the fact that her partner Megan Smith is the director of new business development at Google) notes that she is no longer on staff at the Journal but is employed as an independent contractor. I still think the model the Journal is experimenting with at All Things D is an interesting one.
