Dec 15th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | 5 Comments
Via David “DigiDave” Cohn (who got it from Dan Gillmor), I came across a mind-boggling piece of commentary from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in which former NBC correspondent and journalism instructor David Hazinski argues that “citizen journalism” needs to somehow be regulated by traditional media. As far as Hazinski is concerned, only “real” journalists can make sure that the citizen kind don’t go around making things up and not playing by the rules. As he puts it:
“While it has its place, the reality is it really isn’t journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong probability of fraud and abuse. The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.”
Did you get that last part? The news industry should find some way to “monitor and regulate” this new trend. With what, Dave? A central tribunal of some kind that can pass judgment on who has committed acts of journalism and who hasn’t? Seriously, you can’t make this kind of stuff up. As Dan points out, the news “industry” can barely seem to regulate or monitor itself, let alone everyone else.
Hazinski trots out the old “a guy with a scalpel isn’t a ‘citizen surgeon’” argument, which completely misses the point. Journalism is not surgery, for one thing — or presumably it would be regulated like medicine is, with licensing and testing requirements, and a professional body with the ability to remove a licence. If you go to Afghanistan and start writing about what’s happening, and your work is published somewhere, and you try your best to be fair and accurate, what are you? To Hazinski, you’re nobody.
For more detailed dismantling of Dave’s attempt at an argument, see Dan Gillmor’s post, and Mike Masnick has some thoughts at Techdirt too.
Dec 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Just came across something interesting from a few days ago that I somehow missed, but which could have serious implications for newspapers and their evolving relationship with Google: Search Engine Journal notes that Google News is tinkering with its algorithm and the way it ranks news stories. It wants to do a number of things, but one of the main ones is to promote the publication that first breaks a news story, rather than one of the follow-up pieces from newswires or larger papers.
That’s good for smaller local papers, since they will get more exposure and hence more traffic. It doesn’t say so in the Google News blog post, but I have to wonder if this is related to some of the criticism that Google got after they did the deal with Associated Press to host AP stories on Google servers and some people complained that local publications weren’t getting credit from Google News for the stories they were breaking.
Dec 12th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
The double entendres pretty much throw themselves at you when you come across news like this: that the media group behind Penthouse is buying the company that runs the Adult Friendfinder service (among other things) for half a billion dollars. Various Inc., which runs a wide variety of other websites — including BigChurch.com and GuanXi.com — has reportedly been shopping itself around for some time, but investors tend to shy away from the adult-entertainment market.
The company isn’t getting much of a premium for the deal either, since it has annual revenues of about $200-million, or about 5 times what Facebook had last year. There was a fascinating profile of the founder of Various, a guy named Andrew Conru, in Business 2.0 magazine earlier this year, which described the nondescript industrial mall the company operates out of and Conru’s unremarkable background.
Penthouse also has an interesting history — a Porn 1.0 company founded by legendary party animal Bob Guccione as a more crude competitor to Playboy, it became a media and entertainment giant. Like many of its non-porn counterparts in media, however, the company failed to adapt to the digital age and eventually filed for bankruptcy (there were apparently some other backroom shenanigans as well).
With the Adult Friendfinder purchase, new owner Mark Bell — a Florida real estate developer and former owner of an Internet hosting company — is obviously trying to create a Porn 2.0 empire in its place.
Dec 10th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
The data points continue to pile up in favour of the decision by the New York Times to drop its subscription service: according to a post over at TechCrunch, traffic to the NYT website has climbed by more than 60 per cent since the wall was removed at the beginning of September. ComScore’s latest survey apparently shows that the Times got 19.4 million visitors in October, compared with about 12 million in August — for an increase of 7.5 million or 64 per cent. There are issues with comScore, as there are with most of the major measurement firms, but when combined with the New York Times traffic numbers that I recently mentioned from Nielsen, it’s obvious where the overall trend is going.
Dec 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Matt Bai, who is starting a new political blog next week covering the U.S. election campaign, has a piece in the New York Times today about what might loosely be called Politics 2.0 — the use of blogs and Facebook and other social media as part of a campaign. He says the major parties have tried to adopt the tactics first used by the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, but have missed the point on a number of things:
“It seems clear that the candidates and their advisers absorbed the wrong lessons from Dean’s moment, or at least they failed to grasp an essential truth of it, which is that these things can’t really be orchestrated.
Dean’s campaign didn’t explode online because he somehow figured out a way to channel online politics; he managed this feat because his campaign, almost by accident, became channeled by people he had never met.”
Bai describes how Ron Paul supporters — who had nothing to do with the official campaign — organized their own online fundraiser for the candidate on Guy Fawkes Day and pulled in more than $4-million and over 20,000 contributors in a single day, which turns out to be the largest one-day haul of any Republican candidate to date. Even Ron Paul’s campaign probably doesn’t have a clue how or why it happened.
The point Matt Bai is trying to make is related to my point about online community: You can’t create one, just as you can’t create a “viral” hit, or in fact an online sensation of any kind. You can create what you think are the right conditions for such a thing to grow, and hope to encourage one that already exists to adopt you, but other than that you have very little control. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.
