Dec 4th, 2006 | Citizen Media | 4 Comments
The Washington Post has a great piece about the Gannett newspaper chain — the same one that Wired magazine wrote about recently in a feature on what it called “crowdsourcing” — experimenting with “mojos” or mobile journalists, who rarely come into the office and file reports about various local events from their cars, or the local Starbucks, or wherever they happen to be.
The story describes Chuck Myron, a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press, who “sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter.” Although they are reporters and have all sorts of high-tech tools, they have “no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office.” As the story describes it, they spend their time on the road looking for stories to file to the newspaper’s Web site and the print edition, with one principle:
A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content — regardless of its traditional news value — is key to building online and newspaper readership.
Papers are slashing national and foreign coverage and beefing up “hyper-local,” street-by-street news. They are creating reader-searchable databases on traffic flows and school class sizes.
The Fort Myers paper has 14 full and part-time “mojos,” and the editor says that she expects by the end of next year all 30 reporters will to some extent match the same profile. The paper also encourages input from citizens in the community on a host of different subjects, and is building databases of local events. There is a managing editor in charge of “audience building” who tracks website traffic. There are user forums on all sorts of different topics.
This strikes me as exactly the right thing to do, especially for a local newspaper (veteran online journalism consultant and teacher Mindy McAdams thinks likewise but Greg Sterling is more skeptical). Are the “mojos” really doing anything that good local reporters haven’t been doing for decades? No. Except they are using tablet PCs and cellphones and Wi-Fi to do it. The secret is to get close to your audience and talk about the things that matter to them, and they will get close to you. Blogger Dan Blank has some thoughts, and so does “recovering journalist” Mark Potts.
Nov 29th, 2006 | Social Media | 1 Comment
Over at the Online Journalism Review (published by USC Annenberg), Sandeep Junnarkar has an interview with Calvin Tang, the co-founder of social-news site Newsvine, which launched in March:
There were the three major things that we are going after. First, our aim was to set out to automate the collection, organization, and syndication of the exponentially growing pool of content available on the Web. With the rise of the blogosphere and personal publishing, it seems that there is becoming an ever-increasing amount of content out there.
The second thing we set out to do was to leverage the base of people in the world who had a story to tell but who also lacked an easy way to use publishing platforms and get an audience. Not everybody in the world is tech-savvy enough to set up his or her own blog. That’s why the first wave of citizen-generated content out there was very tech-heavy.
Our third aim was to give people a way to interact with each other in meaningful ways on topics of shared interest and to also be able to discover new material and authors as a result of this interaction.
Nov 28th, 2006 | Social Media | 4 Comments
Oprah, the billionaire “queen of all media,” reached out to the Internet for help with a recent show — or to stir up some publicity for a recent show, depending on how you look at it. She posted a question to Yahoo Answers, which is a kind of “wisdom of the crowds” site in which people ask questions and then others answer, and anyone can vote on which answers they like the best. The question was “What would you do with $1,000 to change the life of a perfect stranger?”
Here’s the intro that someone at the Oprah show wrote:
You may have heard about the concept of paying it forward — the idea of doing something meaningful to help someone else without asking for anything in return. So, if you were given $1,000 with the understanding that it had to be used to help others, how would you use the money and why? To see how others turned these endless possibilities into amazing results, watch Monday’s “Oprah.”
Just a cynical attempt at boosting ratings for a show, right? Except that Oprah’s question got more than 31,000 responses in just a few days, some of which were heartbreakingly personal. The number one response according to readers? “Give it to Christian Blind Mission International… for example, $33 will heal a father or mother of blindness from cataracts. $200 will do the same for a child.” Some details from the actual show are here.
Oprah’s question got the most responses Yahoo Answers has ever gotten on a question, beating the previous record set by another celebrity: Dr. Stephen Hawking — the author of “A Brief History of Time” and the man who holds the Lucasian chair in Mathematics at Cambridge, once held by Sir Isaac Newton — who asked how the human race could survive the next 100 years. He got about 25,000 responses.
Nov 28th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
There are a few different threads weaving through the blogosphere related to the evolution of media — not just TV but all different kinds of content. One thread is the Bear Stearns report by Spencer Wang, in which he looks at how the TV content business is changing, and the rise of “user-generated content.” You can tune into a conference call, or scroll through a PDF version of his presentation on what Om Malik calls the “fat belly” of the Long Tail.
One of the interesting points to me was that 75 per cent of the top 20 videos on YouTube on one particular day were “user-generated content” of some kind, which goes against the standard argument from people like Mark Cuban and Nick Carr that the majority of popular videos on YouTube and other sites are copyright violations. As Rafat Ali at PaidContent succinctly puts it, the point of the presentation is that “aggregation and context” are the key.
That leads to another thread, which came up while reading Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion, where he pointed to a new Christmas gadget-shopping hub put together by Federated Media and Best Buy. The site has gadget reviews written by bloggers for half a dozen different websites, including Uncrate, Oh Gizmo, Gadgetopia and PVR Blog. It’s not clear whether the reviews were written specifically for the site, or are taken from the participating blogs, but it’s a pretty smart idea.
Then there’s the New York Times story about Philips sponsoring the entire newscast of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Obviously that isn’t new media, but it’s an interesting move by Philips to cut through the clutter of TV advertising, as Techdirt notes — just as Best Buy is trying to cut through the clutter of Web advertising. In other words, aggregation and context.
Nov 27th, 2006 | Citizen Media, Social Media | No Comments
MyDD.com, a website whose bloggers write about grassroots democracy and fact-checking the government (the name stands for “My Direct Democracy”), asked its readers for donations last week to help the site and its blogger/writers continue their lobbying efforts and other work. By Monday, the site said it had raised more than $11,500 from over 140 people. I got the link from another exercise in “open-source” journalism, NewAssignment.net, Jay Rosen’s recent startup, where Kelly Nuxoll wrote an excellent overview of the citizen reporting phenomenon and gave a few examples of what some of the journalists out there are doing in that area.
