May 12th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Like many others, I woke up this morning to Twitter messages about a disaster in China: a magnitude 7.8 (at last report) earthquake in the southwest, with thousands of people either dead or injured. Much like the forest fires in California last fall and other recent news events, Twitter became one of the main sources of on-the-ground reporting — even before CNN started picking up what was happening, and with more personal detail. During such times, Twitter seems like a crowd-sourced reporting tool, much like what NowPublic.com has created but with cellphones and 140 character messages as the medium.
In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?
Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone.
Obviously, 140-character messages don’t take the place of reported stories that check facts and determine what exactly happened, or pull together various reports into a coherent whole. But they are a compelling part of that story — and journalists who know how to take advantage can produce something much more complete with the help of all those Twitter reporters in the field. Journalism has been called “the first draft of history,” — and now the people putting together that draft have even more help in getting it right the first time.
Apr 17th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
There have been a number of threads floating around the blogosphere recently that have to do with traditional media vs. “new media,” and the differences between the two — something that this article in the New York Observer got me thinking about again. There was the TechCrunch post about ads in Twitter, which was somewhat lacking in facts; there was the idea that journalism online has become much more of a process or continuum rather than an end in itself; and then there was the whole concept of “if the news is that important, it will find me,” which I wrote about.
I wanted to try and pull a few of those together because, well… that’s how I roll. Plus, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit, and writing about it helps me think. So bear with me (or not). If you look at some of the comments on my post about the Twitter ads story, as well as on other posts about it, you can see people talking about how it “wasn’t a story,” and suggesting — as Nate Westheimer did — that traditional media, with editors and so on, would never run something like that. I’d like Nate to read the New York Observer piece and see if he still feels the same way.
Would a newspaper or TV station or magazine have run with a Twitter story like TechCrunch did? Maybe not. But the fact is that plenty of poorly-sourced or single-sourced or anonymous-sourced stories show up in newspapers all the time — and not just the Enquirer or People magazine, but in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. And it’s not only stories about nuclear weapons in Iraq either — it’s stories that are about celebrities, or wealthy Wall Street types, or politicians. Sometimes, a story is just too good to pass up, even if it’s shaky.
That’s why it’s actually a good thing that news is becoming more of a process (which it always has been). Instead of trying to pump rumours and innuendo into full-fledged stories that deserve a premier spot in the paper, journalists can toss things into the ether when they think there is more to a story, and then update the story as it develops, something Mike Arrington said at mesh 2007 that he sometimes does. This is frequently messy, which is why I like to adapt the old saying about “if you love the law or sausages, don’t watch either one being made” to apply to the media. It’s not pretty, but it is occasionally true.
And that brings me back to the idea of “news.” What do we mean when we use that word, or when we say something like “if the news is that important, it will find me?” Some people responded to my post on that concept by saying they weren’t confident that “real” news would find them, by which I think they meant news of the U.S. election, or war in Sudan. But that’s only one small part of the definition of “news” — something that every person is probably going to define differently, and may even define differently depending on what day it is.
Is the Web to blame for creating “news” out of nowhere, as the New York Observer article suggests? I don’t think so. Newspapers have been doing that for about a hundred years. The Web is probably accelerating and amplifying that phenomenon — but at the same time, a proliferation of sources is also helping to nip such stories in the bud a lot sooner.
Apr 14th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post up about the evolution of media online, and he must have taken some time with it because it has graphics and everything — just kidding, Jeff 
But seriously, Jeff’s general point I think is well-taken: that the way journalism occurs has changed, and is continuing to change. Like most other forms of content, instead of a one-way, production-line approach in which news is manufactured (metaphorically speaking) by mainstream media entities and then distributed to news consumers, the news — and I’m using that term broadly — occurs and is reported, then more details emerge, other sources join in, the story advances, and so on. In other words, a process.
This is not really new, in the sense that Jeff and others (including yours truly) have been saying it for some time now. But it bears repeating, if only because some media entities are only now coming to realize just how much their business is changing. As a friend of mine who used to work at the Washington Post’s website has said often, there is a whole generation of editors who need to realize that we are moving from the “report, write, edit, publish” model to something more like a “report, write, edit, publish, edit, write, report, publish” model. It never stops.
Let’s be clear about something: I’m not saying that journalists — whatever their background, whether it’s mainstream media or blogging — should stop caring whether something is right, or should rush to publish something because someone else will fix their mistakes. And it’s true that expensive investigative reporting is almost always going to be the province of the established media. This isn’t some kind of blogosphere triumphalism thing I’m pushing here. But I think only an idiot would argue that journalism hasn’t changed, or that the industry can continue to do things the way it has done for centuries. It has, and it can’t.
There’s more in Jeff’s post than I have dealt with here, so I encourage you to go and read the whole thing. And if you just can’t get enough of people writing about the future of newspapers and the media online, Britannica has an ongoing debate about whether newspapers are doomed.
Jan 25th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Is this really the best we can do for a Friday frenzy on Techmeme? Scoble decides to put ads on his blog — woop-de-frickin-doo. If someone wants to advertise on the Scobleizer’s blog, they can go right ahead. I certainly don’t think it’s going to affect anyone’s perceptions of whether what Robert does is actual journalism or not. Or maybe Scoble and other bloggers should receive some kind of government support, like the tall foreheads at Davos were apparently discussing when Mike Arrington was there.
Is the practice of journalism in danger? Hardly. If anything, there’s more of it going on all the time, depending on how you define the term (and no, I’m not including Digg). Sure the newspaper — and I emphasize the term *paper* — business might be having a rough time, although plenty of people have pointed out that Sam Zell and Rupert Murdoch seem to see the newspaper business as pretty appealing, even if they are probably going to fire a whole bunch of people in the process.
Columbia Journalism School dean Nick Leman makes a half-hearted case for government support of the media in a response to Forbes magazine’s piece from Davos, noting that the BBC is government funded (with the money coming from a TV tax), and that PBS and other public media play a role. But it’s one thing to point to the BBC and PBS as a success — which some might argue with — and another to argue that the government should actively get into financing the journalism business.
If people want long-form, investigative journalism then I assume they will indicate that desire in the traditional way: by reading it, and in some cases even paying for it. The idea that government support is required because some newspapers aren’t making 30-per-cent returns on invested capital the way they used to is ridiculous.
Jan 12th, 2008 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
It’s romantic in a way, the image of “citizen journalists” with their trusty cellphones, capturing news events around the world and allowing everyone to see instant photos or videos. But it can also be very dangerous, as a story out of China shows. As reported by CNN and at TechCrunch, a man who took pictures of a confrontation between townspeople and a company dumping waste was beaten to death by private security guards.
Although many stories describe Wei Wenhua, 41, as “a blogger,” he appears to have been a construction company official who merely started to record the fracas on his cellphone. A group of more than 15 “chengguan,” or private security contractors — sometimes referred to as “city inspectors” — reportedly attacked him and he was dead before he reached the hospital. In a press release, Reporters Without Borders calls Wei the first citizen journalist to die in China.
