Feb 17th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
I have to give VC blogger Fred Wilson some props for calling out what he calls “journabloggers” like Mashable, VentureBeat, GigaOm, TechCrunch and so on. Fred’s point — one that others have made as well — is that it’s easy for such sites to fall into the trap of posting salacious headlines that aren’t fully backed up, whether because they want to be first, or because they simply want to boost traffic.
The example Fred uses is a VentureBeat post about visual-search site Like.com (formerly known as Riya), which Matt Marshall says has seen its traffic climb to the point where it is beating competitor ThisNext — a claim that Fred takes issue with. He also mentions a recent post from TechCrunch, and his point seems to be that Matt and Erick Schonfeld could have done a bit more research to back up some of their claims.
Matt seems like a stand-up guy, and I know Fred didn’t bring it up to pick on him, or on anyone else for that matter. I think it’s good to point out when the bloggers we read aren’t thinking things through fully or are falling short (and that includes me), provided it is done in a constructive way. The great part about the blogosphere — which Fred didn’t really mention — is that it’s easy to flesh out a post when that happens.
VentureBeat, for example, responded to Fred’s concerns (which Matt commented on at Fred’s blog) and added them to the original post. That’s a substantially better response than Fred would have gotten from traditional media, I expect. Steven Hodson at WinExtra makes a good point: if the top “journabloggers” get too comfortable or lazy, all that does is open up opportunities for new ones, which is good.
Feb 14th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
It hasn’t gotten a lot of notice, but Richard MacManus has a post up at Read/Write Web that I thought was pretty interesting, about an email he got from Business Wire, in which the press release service brags about its ability to bypass the blogosphere and traditional media and go directly to the markets it is trying to reach, by showing up on Techmeme and other aggregators, as well as in search results.
This may sound like a lot of hot air from a PR service, but as Richard notes in the post, there is ample evidence of press releases showing up at the top of conversation threads on Techmeme. Richard also has some quotes from Gabe Rivera, in which he talks about how that isn’t necessarily a bad thing — provided they are well written — and how some blog posts amount to poorly rewritten press releases anyway.
It was that last point that really struck me. Why shouldn’t press releases get better play than some blog post that basically takes the key facts and repeats them? If a press release gets across the information and has it first, then it deserves to be there — and as Richard notes, as press releases get more “social” and add links and even video, they become more like blog posts, and are even more likely to hit Techmeme.
Memo to the blogosphere: You might want to keep all that in mind the next time you try to get some juice out of posting a rewritten press release. That kind of thing works in traditional media, but it’s probably not going to fly for very long in new media.
Feb 10th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has the news that author Neil Gaiman has gotten approval from his publisher to offer one of his books online for free — perhaps inspired by the story of Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, who started pirating his own books and noticed that sales of actual physical copies of his books began to take off as a result. Other authors who have experimented with a similar approach include Charles Sheehan-Miles and economist David Levine. Of course, Cory — who is also a science-fiction author — has also offered some of his own works online for free.
Feb 10th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
I was talking with a colleague recently about the Barack Obama tribute video made by Will.i.am from the Black-Eyed Peas and Bob Dylan’s son Jesse, and how fascinating it was to watch as it made its way through various media last week, from emails and Twitter feeds to blog posts and then into newspapers and media websites.
When I first came across the video, known as the “Yes We Can” video, people were describing it as compelling and passionate — many seemed impressed by the fact that it wasn’t official, and that it had young men and women of all colours in it, symbolizing the breadth of Obama’s reach and how people connect with his message.
Over time, however, you could see the tide starting to turn. Some people started to talk about how slick it was — filled with celebrities and very commercial, in a music-video kind of way. Then people started musing about how that was part of the problem with Obama’s campaign to begin with: style over substance, etc. The blog NewTeeVee called it an “appalling exercise in celebrity self-congratulation.”
Within a day or two, the video was being used as an example of how “user-generated” media isn’t always such a great thing for a campaign. The political site Hot Air called it “disturbingly cool,” while a blogger at The New Republic wondered whether it might not hurt Obama more than help him. One commenter on Twitter wondered when Obama campaign had started having his videos done by The Gap.
So the Obama video went from blockbuster media event and unadulterated success story to backlash in about 48 hours — less time than it would have taken for a typical campaign video to even be distributed to TV networks a few years ago, let alone watched by almost two million people, posted to blogs, commented on and analyzed. Fascinating.
Feb 7th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
There’s a piece in the New York Times today that takes a look at the newspaper industry in the United States and concludes — not surprisingly — that these are dark times indeed. That won’t come as news to anyone who has been following the industry over the past couple of years, as papers across the U.S. have been downsizing, selling assets, getting bought by “grave dancers” like Sam Zell, and so on.
Is this a national tragedy? Some would have you believe that it is. And I’m sure many of those being downsized at the newspapers in question would like to think that it is — not to mention many of those doing the downsizing and selling off assets. But just because newspapers aren’t doing well doesn’t mean that journalism or media or the news business itself isn’t doing well. If anything, people are searching for more and more news all the time. They’re just doing it online instead of on paper.
Amy Gahran has a great column putting things in perspective at the Poynter Institute site. As she puts it:
“Personally, I’d be surprised if many dailies are left standing after the next 7-10 years, if they don’t make fast, fundamental changes to their revenue strategies. I realize this is dire news to people who can’t envision doing anything but working for a traditional newspaper.
But on the bright side, for those with flexibility and a bit of business savvy, I think that right now there is more space than ever in the news market for entrepreneurial journalistic ventures.”
As Amy describes it, monolithic newspapers and paper chains may not do well in this new environment (although there’s no reason to think that they can’t, especially with advertisers looking for trusted brands to latch onto), but that doesn’t mean journalism or media is ailing. “Smaller, more numerous, entrepreneurial ventures with less overhead and inertia could be the future of journalism,” she says.
Dan Kennedy — whose post I found through Amy’s column, and she in turn found through the Wired Journalists network that Ryan Sholin set up — says the evolution that the media industry is going through feels like it’s the end of something, but it could turn out to be the beginning of something at the same time. As he puts it:
The news business has been through several paradigm shifts since taking on a form we’d recognize beginning in the 1830s. The current one may be unusually wrenching. But it only looks like the end of the world because it happens to be the one we’re living through.
Kennedy suggests that many newspapers will have to refocus on local markets instead of trying to get by on wire stories that everyone else has, and that maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
