But News Corp isn’t the only one making the mistake here. I think the mistake that Google has made in this – and I’m an admirer of Google, I wrote a book to that effect – but I think that Google thought that they could become friends with the newspaper industry. And the newspaper industry isn’t looking for friends. They’re looking for enemies they can blame for the problems that are actually their own from the last fifteen years of inaction in the face of this dying light. And so it’s impossible for Google to become friends with the newspaper industry.

In Twitter today, one @rpaskin paraphrased something I’ve been saying – and said again in my talk at Web 2.0 Expo Tuesday (generously covered in that link by Aneta Hall). My line has been that in the link economy, value comes from the creator of the content and from the creator of a public (formerly known as an audience). That is, Rupert’s wrong with he says that Google takes content; it gives attention.

Anyway, @rpaskin tweeted this: “In a link economy, there are values from creating content and linking to content. There’s no value in just reproducing content (Jeff Jarvis).”

I didn’t say that exactly but I think it better expressed what I have been trying to say. Or at least it added a perspective and raised a fundamental and important question, namely:

Is there value anymore in reproducing content? Is the six-century-long reign of Guttenberg and the industries he created really over?

Wow. Maybe so. In my discussions of the link economy, I had been concentrating on explaining and defending the side of the value equation brought by Google, aggregators, blogger, Twitter, et al rather than on the loss of value brought to those who reproduced – rather than created – content. But in looking at the entire equation, what @rpaskin says stands to reason: There is no value left over for the copiers. Indeed, online, if one copies, one is considered a thief because it’s only the thieves who copy.

The problem is, of course, that it was through the making and selling of copies that monetary value was extracted and that is why it is so upsetting to those who did so that they can’t do it anymore. It’s upsetting that they don’t see other ways to recognize value. It’s what makes folks including Murdoch say silly things that betray ignorance about the workings of our new world.

I’m sure Rupert knows exactly how the scribes Guttenberg put out of business felt.

ALSO: Speaking of speaking of Murdoch, you can hear me doing so – along with Michael Wolf and Steven Brill – on Murdoch’s tilting against Google’s energy-efficient windmills.

** Once again, I’m experimenting with using tweets about posts as subheds summarizing those posts.

So when Techdirt points out that the various surveys saying people will (or alternatively won't) pay for content online are a lot less reliable than seeing what happens when someone actually starts charging*, I have to agree. Would I pay for content online? Yes, under one extremely hypothetical commercial model. Do I think that model will ever be made available to me? Almost certainly not. So what's the right answer to the very general question "will I pay for content online?" I guess it's a maybe or a probably not.  

*We already know this bit from long experimentation, of course - all the readers go away. Still, the last experiments in this field were carried out several years ago before everyone spent their time online playing on social networks, listening to music and watching streaming video, so it would be easy to argue that the circumstances have changed significantly. Got worse, specifically, from the point of view of charging for content. But getting worse is still a change.

I fear that Tribune Company – and other newspaper companies – will come out of bankruptcy having squandered the opportunity it presents to rebuild from the ground up.

At the New Business Models for (Local) News Summit at CUNY last week, my friend and mentor Jim Willse, late of the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, asked us to create a model for an existing news organization to morph into what we proposed as the new structure. That’d be painful and thus controversial, I said, to which Willse – never one to mince words – responded, “No shit.”

Can they get theah from heah? I’m not sure. A company that employed more than a thousand workers may end up employing just a hundred as it gets rid of printing and distribution infrastructure – the barrier to entry that became a barrier to change. Those shut-down costs are tremendous (that’s where bankruptcy helps, though). The cultural shift for people who remain is huge (I have spoken with many newspaper and magazine folks lately who – like me – held out hope that it was possible … until they gave up and quit). The need to reinvent business methods and models is urgent. And in the end, if it all works, the new company will be much smaller, a fraction of its former size, which is hard for executives, analysts, and shareholders to swallow – but it’s profitable and thus sustainable and that has to be the ultimate goal.

To make this volcanic transformation, I say a newspaper must start by getting out of the printing business (as Dave Morgan argued at our CUNY conference last year). Oh, it may still print a product as long as enough advertisers and readers stick with it to make it profitable and as long as it is valuable to promote the the digital brand of the future. But print can no longer drive the business; it’s just not sustainable.

When the Ann Arbor News folded this summer and was replaced by its owners with an online, community-based site, they chose to continue publishing twice a week to continue distributing coupons, circulars, and ads; it is printed by another paper in the company. [Disclosure: I consulted on the project.] Similarly, in the UK, the Birmingham Post went online and went weekly in print. My reputation aside, I’m not religiously opposed to paper. But maintaining a printing business is no longer an advantage; it’s a burden. So I say get out of the business and outsource whatever printing you do.

What about distribution? Well, as the circulation of the paper dwindles to naught, its value as a delivery platform also falls – to the point that coupon companies and stores like Best Buy will have to find alternative means of distribution. I think there’s a nice, if transitional business there for someone. Should it still be the newspaper company? Well, I’d give the same advice that is given to every startup: concentrate on one thing and do it well, get rid of the rest. So I’d say the paper should – as many pretty much do today – outsource its distribution.

Ad sales? That’s perhaps the toughest transition. Classifieds aside (they’re permanently lost anyway), newspapers are built to sell mass metro audiences to large advertisers. Sales staffs don’t drum up new business so much as they manage existing lists. Those folks aren’t likely to be able to sell entirely new kinds of advertising highly targeted marketing help for whole new populations of smaller merchants who couldn’t afford the newspaper before. Beside, such a staff doesn’t scale when you have to sell to so many new customers in networks. Build-it-and-they-will-come automated platforms don’t work; advertising still must be sold. This is why, in our models, we projected new sales forces – citizen sales – arising to sell at a local level. So for our transforming paper, I’d build networks of local sites and local sales and keep just enough of the old people to sell the big, old accounts that remain – if they can be re-educated.

Marketing is all but gone. If this newly constituted service isn’t sold by its public – if that public doesn’t collaborate with it and feel an ownership stake – then it will fail.

Now for editorial: I’ve written often about the new roles journalists will take on. As the marginal cost of information in a community falls to zero – as the internet and its tool enable communities to share much or most of what they know and need to know – then the question for journalists is how they add value and fill in gaps with reporting at the core as well as curation, community organization, and training. In our models, we forecast almost as many journalists as worked in the old paper newsroom, but they work for – and often own – more than a hundred companies. The core of journalists working at the new news organization is smaller.

Bankruptcy enables a newspaper company to shed its past. It can get out of contracts and leases for paper, printing plants, delivery, trucks. It can also get out of labor contracts, reducing severance costs. That is terribly painful but I fear it is as inevitable as the end of the ITU (the typesetters’ union). It offers a one-time chance to rethink, reinvent, and rebuild the company for the future. Is it better to stretch out the pain and never get anywhere? And if tough decisions and actions are not made, the likelihood that the company will die and all will be lost only increases.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has already come out of bankruptcy but without such a radical transformation. It, like other news companies, is taking out bricks a few at a time rather than building a new kind of company. That’s the opportunity I fear other bankrupt newspapers – Tribune Company, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Sun-Times – are squandering. The same can be said of other industries.

To take advantage of bankruptcy, a company has to have courage and bold visions of the future. Do newspaper companies? So far, we haven’t seen evidence of it. But it is possible.

** At Craig Newmark’s good suggestion, I am going to try to summarize posts – longer ones, at least – at the top. Old fart that I was, I at first thought of this as a UK-style subhed. But then I realize that the appropriate model is to put it in a tweet. So I’ll try that.

The problem with trying to re-silo content at tis stage in the game is threefold.

First, online consumers do not have a problem finding content or finding specific content. In fact, that's the opposite of the problem we face. Content is dyfunctionally abundant. There is so much of it that the problem is filtering through the billions of pages/articles/songs/photos/films/games/posts/tweets for something useful, entertaining or relevant. Take some of the content away and unless it is actually unique you've made searchers' lives a little bit easier (thanks!).

Second, and relatedly, if I'm looking for commentary on the latest NYTco quarterlies and some of the potentially useful information doesn't show up in my search because it has been deliberately withheld from the engine, I'll never know. People resopond to incentives. Hiding content from me when I search doesn't incentivise me to try any other particular alternative behaviour (I'm going to realise that the article which would have answered all my questions is on the New York Post website but since Google doesn't know about it I have to surf over there and look for it? Just how am I going to know that?).

Third, content in a silo will attract no new readers. Two years ago I didn't read Marginal Revolution, but I found it and now I do. Ditto Unqualified Reservations. Ditto...well, everything in my feedreader. It's an interesting idea to run a paid content business that no-one can find. I wouldn't fancy it myself. Newspapers have enough demographic problems without shutting themselves off to the main potential source of new readers.

Mike Arrington theorises that the end-game is for content-providers to cut deals with other (non-Google) search engines, leaving Google high and dry but the content catalogued and searchable somewhere. Fair enough. Assuming that different providers cut deals with different engines (otherwise it's not a market and we've just swapped the Googlopoly for the Bingopoly, whoop-de-doo) we'd be looking at a potentially massive inconvenience for users with no upside benefits at all as they jumped from engine to engine searching for different content. Happily such a deliberate fragmentation of search ignores the existence of adequate search aggregation tools that pre-emptively obviate the obstacles. Data that can be usefully brought together online generally is, because it can be, because that's how it's most useful (hence indeed, err, Google). Trying at this stage in the game to fragment it all again is no solution, it's just another cycle around while someone knocks up a better aggregator.

Digital channels fragment media. They fragmented music, so now we find songs by the track on iTunes and Spotify instead of buying albums. But where the music industry continues to enjoy inherent commercial upside from its fragmented content (iTunes cost money, Spotify has unskippable ads or subs to pay, ringtones are a goldmine) text content has no such inherent commercial upside as a distributed fragment. Read an article on a newspaper website and you see an ad. Read the same content on Google or in Bloglines and you don't. The problem to solve here is not to stop people finding the stuff and reading it on Google - it's to make money when they see it there, to embed some inherent commercial upside in that experience. RSS banners, universal IntelliTXT, anything that follows the content around and makes money from it wherever it's seen. Hell, even movies manage it with product placement and one day they'll work out how to charge extra for all the millions of times those placements are seen by BitTorrenters.

But take the content off Google and I no longer know it exists, and I'm not going to use three or four different search engines to check every time I have a query. Hide it and it simply isn't there.

At the Müncher Medientage, I spoke to 500 German executives from my home in New York and dared to give them some advice about their fate. I urged them to learn these lessons from watching American news companies shrivel and die: Protectionism is no strategy for the future. Every company in every industry (especially media) must be reinvented for the post-Guttenberg age—for the Google era. And the only sane response to change is to embrace it and find the opportunity in it.

I have been impressed with the innovation and openness to change I have seen in German media: Axel Springer shifted a large proportion of its revenue to digital; Bild equipped Germans with video cameras to report news; Burda invested in the networks Glam.com and Science Blogs; Holtzbrinck innovated in its incubator; WAZ created a world pioneer in DerWesten.

But when the times got tough in the financial crisis, I suddenly saw German media looking for an enemy to blame for their problems. The head of the Deutscher Journalisten-Verband called for legislation to condemn Google as a monopoly, an enemy of the press. Dr. Hubert Burda, a digital visionary I greatly admire, urged that copyright law should be expanded to protect publishers, whom he said deserve a share of search engines’ revenue. Chancellor Merkel is considering such changes in copyright. A group of publishers issued the Hamburg Declaration saying that all online content need not be free (though that has always been completely in their control).

Schade. In these pronouncements, I hear echoes of American media’s funeral hymns. I see companies resisting the new reality of the internet age by trying to preserve the old rules of their old industry. Take, for example, Rupert Murdoch vowing to put all his news properties behind pay walls just because that’s how media used to operate—when that will only reduce audience, traffic, influence, and advertising just at the moment when growth is needed most. He is even threatened to block Google. That is simply suicidal.

Though I sympathize with media’s economic nostalgia, I must say that swimming upstream against the internet is futile. The better idea is to go with the flow of the internet, to see and exploit its opportunities.

Rather than fighting Google, learn lessons from it. Google understands the new economics of media. That is why it is successful—not because it exploits old media companies. Those old companies still operate in the content economy, begun 570 years by Guttenberg, in which the owner of content profited by selling multiple copies. Online, there needs to be only one copy of content and it is the links to it that bring it value. Content without links has no value. So when search engines, aggregators, bloggers, and Twitterers link to content, they are not stealing; they are giving the gift of attention and audience. Indeed, publishers should be grateful that Google does not charge them for the value of its links.

This link economy brings three imperatives for publishers. First, it requires them to make their content public if they want to be found. That is their choice, but if they retreat behind pay walls, hidden from search and links, they will not be discovered and they only create opportunities for new, free competitors. Second, the link economy demands specialization: Do what you do best and link to the rest. This specialization also brings a new efficiency that can make publishers more profitable. Third, in the link economy, it is the recipient of links who must exploit their value. That is still the publisher’s job.

Google has earned an estimated 30 percent of online ad revenue because it serves advertisers differently—and better. Here, too, Google understands a new economy, one based on abundance rather than scarcity. Publishers, even online, still sell scarcity as if the internet were print: only so many ad positions for so many eyeballs—what the market will bear. Google instead charges for clicks; it sells performance. Thus Google takes a share of the risk and that is what motivates it to place advertising all over the internet, to create more relevant positions for ads that will perform better for both the marketer and Google. That is why advertising has shifted to Google—not because it is enemy of the media but because advertisers prefer it. We call that competition.

The most important lesson to learn from Google is that it grew huge not by trying to acquire and control content on the internet, as publishers do. Google doesn’t want to own the internet, only to organize it. So Google created a platform that enables others to succeed with technology, content, promotion, and advertising revenue. That is Glam’s model, too, creating networks of hundreds of independent sites and then helping them succeed. I believe that platforms and networks will form the basis of the future of media—and much of the next economy.

At the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach, I am running the New Business Models for News Project, envisioning a profitable future for news if regional newspapers covering cities die. Though national news brands—whether this publication or the Guardian or The New York Times—have a future, regional newspapers across America and Europe are in trouble and some will die. Yet I am confident that journalism in those cities will not die, because there is a market demand for news, which we believe the market can meet.

We believe that news will emerge from ecosystems made up of many players—journalists, citizen journalists, citizen salespeople, volunteers, technologists—operating under different motives and means. Today, in America, we see hyperlocal bloggers earning $100-200,000 a year in advertising; these are real businesses. We see an opportunity to help them make more money by creating local, regional, and national advertising networks. We see the opportunity for a new newsroom to continue beat and investigative reporting and to work collaboratively with these networks. Without the cost of print and distribution, these new news organizations become smaller but profitable.

If you are trying to protect old jobs in old structures of old companies in old industries, then you might see my vision of the future as a threat. But if you embrace change and innovation, then you will see opportunities to reimagine and remake journalism, to find new ways to gather and share news collaboratively, supported by new revenue, reaching profitability thanks to new efficiencies.

Publishers will not get to that bright future by urging government to protect them from innovators and competitors. No, if we want anything from government, it should be universal broadband to encourage society’s migration to a digital economy, and a lack of regulation to assure a level playing field for innovation.

I hope that once the desperation of the current economic crisis subsides, my German media friends will not try to retreat to their old models but will instead continue to invent new ways and to again become leaders in innovation. That is the only sensible path to survival and success.

LATER: I should add disclosures that are also on my disclosures page. I was paid to come speak to editors at Axel Springer (publishers of Welt Kompakt), Burda (I’ve also spoken for their DLD conference), and Holtzbrinck.

The putative war between mainstream media and bloggers has been declared over again and again (myself, I reported a truce three and a half years ago… oh, well). So I won’t act as there aren’t still the lone snipers in the mountains. Bloggers from medium-sized cities had plenty of complaints about the disrespect they see from their local medium-sized media outlets.

But importantly, I did see a shift in the balance of power yesterday. The big media guys on this reverse panel made it crystal clear that they not only respect but need the work of the bloggers/citizens/little-media-guys/whatever you choose to call them. The big guys acknowledged openly that they are shrinking and can no longer even pretend that they can do it all themselves.

For their part, the bloggers also made it clear that they respect and thus want attention – promotion and credit – from the big guys.

Group hug.

We are at various fulcrum points. The big, old media outlets can no longer act as if they have no problems; it’s obvious, they do. The upstarts are beginning to catch a glimmer of critical mass; we see blogs starting up all over and there are lots of new news organizations – most of them not-for-profit – rising in San Diego, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Austin; now they are joined by the for-profit local Politico. Even if you disagree with me that the future of news is entrepreneurial, there’s now no denying there is a future there.

And so the room was filled with people who were, each in his or her own way, building that future and they all recognized that they have to work together to do so. The future of news is also an ecosystem. That’s what became apparent yesterday and that, for me, was the highlight of the event.

We’re doing our post-mortems on the event at CUNY to figure out what to do better next time – and it’s clear there is a need for more of these gatherings here in New York and, we hope, across the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, bringing together builders. We heard a lot from the room about what they want next: More best practices from the kind of real experience that fed our models…. More practical advice for making money…. More education…. I’ll come back with additional thoughts after my thorough-going exhaustion wears off.

My personal thanks to the team at CUNY – led by Peter Hauck, Jennifer McFadden, and Matt Sollars – for doing great work in the models and the event and to the funders who made it possible: The MacArthur Foundation funded the events (and the prior summit led directly to a request to do the work we presented at this one); the Knight Foundation funded the work on our models and presentation of them at the Aspen Institute; the McCormick Foundation is funding ongoing work on new business models; and the Carnegie Corporation is funding work on hyperlocal labs. We’re also grateful to Mignon Media – Nancy Wang and Jeff Mignon – for their incredible work on the models; David Cohn for his tireless efforts helping us organize the events; Borrell Associates for their data and advice; and all the companies and individuals who participated yesterday. And we want to thank Ted Mann of inJersey/Gannett and Jim Schachter of The New York Times and their colleagues for helping to organize the event. Thanks.

At the Foursquare conference last week, I was struck by the miss-by-a-mile worldviews held by the chiefs of big, old conglomerates and the entrepreneurs starting new, nimble companies. The conference is off the record, so I won’t quote anyone by name. And in truth, these are the same conversations I hear often elsewhere. Having these different tribes conveniently in the same room merely focused the contrast for me.

In one moment, a very successful mogully man was slack-jawed in amazement at how little money – “$50,000!” – one of three entrepreneurs had used to start another fast-growing enterprise. The big man thinks big – that’s what made him big. The small guys think small and get big by using existing platforms and depending on their users to like and market them. To the new guys, it’s so obvious.

Here was the key moment for me last week: In a discussion about the importance of distribution, some start-up guys – each the creators of new enterprises that took off like gun shots – were asked by a representative of the big, old club which company they would most want to do distribution deals with. The start-up guys cocked their heads like confused puppies. Why would we want to do that? they asked. What was unsaid: Doing a deal with one company would be so limiting. We get our distribution through customers and developers, through embedding and APIs and social connections. That’s how we grew so big so fast for so little. Don’t you see that?

No, they don’t.

This week, we see this contrast, too, in Rupert Murdoch’s threat – he thinks it’s a threat – to cut off Google. Nose. Face. Cut. Spite. Murdoch – whodoesn’t use the internet – does not see how distribution works today. He does not understand that being open to the link economy brings him free distribution, free marketing, great benefit. That’s because he, like his fellow old machers, won by taking control rather than giving it up. This new world is utterly inside-out from the world they built. It breaks all their rules and makes new ones (which is what I tried to analyze in What Would Google Do?). That’s what makes it so damned hard for them to understand it.

In our New Business Models for News at CUNY, we saw quickly that a big, old newspaper company was not going to be replaced by a big, new newspaper company but that instead, news would come more and more from ecosystems made up of scores of companies operating under different means, motives, and models, each dependent on the others to optimize their success. That is why we built in networks that enable separate sites to join, creating critical mass they can sell to advertisers. That is also why we factored in the benefit of platforms, cutting their infrastructure costs to near-zero.

And there, I believe, is the structure of the future of business in the new, post-industrial, decentralized, opened economy. Oh, sure, every economy has always been an ecosystem made up of interdependent relationships. But they were based on zero-sum arithmetic: take and control so others cannot. They work at arm’s length. They negotiate every relationship.

Sure, even in the huggy ecosystem, companies fight and compete. But in an ecosystem-based economy, companies benefit – they find efficiency and growth – by working collaboratively. As I see it, the new economy and its opportunities will be built in three layers:

1. Platforms. There’s tremendous benefit in building a platform and the more people use to succeed, the more the platform succeeds. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay – you know all the examples.

2. Entrepreneurial enterprises. Thanks to the platforms, it’s incredibly inexpensive to start new companies. It’s also a helluva lot cheaper to fail (and try again). This is why I believe that the future of news – and many other industries – is entrepreneurial: because it can be. It’s not just media and its bits. It’s manufacturing (because you can use others’ factories and distribution channels and your own customers as your platforms).

3. Networks. It is still necessary to gather the smalls together into bigs: audience brought together so advertisers can buy access to them more easily; purchasing brought together to get better prices. So there is business in creating and serving these networks.

For the sake a PowerPoint, a diagram of the three layers of an ecosystem-based economy:

In our New Business Models for News Project, this is how I (crudely) drew the ecosystem for news.

How do you draw the conglomerate-based industry? With boxes, each separate, with arrows pointing to each other at a distance. Simplistic? Sure, but the change in the worldview of the new economy looks that basic when you hear the two tribes trying to understand each other.

And if you haven’t had enough of my silly charts, here’s another on video.

Paul starts with a straw man:

…after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.

The discussion about the impact of social media on people’s privacy, behaviour and ethics has been going on for years, and there have been many, many examples of people using social tools in ways that can only be described as foolish.

This is not, however, a reflection on social tools so much as it is a reflection of human nature: Some of what gets done with social media is good and some is bad. This is not news, nor new.

We do need some proper studies to see just what sort of effect these new social technologies are having, but going off on a moral panic about social tools is neither smart nor helpful.

Carr goes on to say:

And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq.

[...] In reality Ms Moore’s was tweeting minute-by-minute reports from inside the hospital where the wounded were being taken for treatment.

It’s no real surprise that people who use Twitter might use it during such an event. And most people who use Tweet have a relatively small community. Moore now has her Twitter stream set to private, but even now she has only 29 followers, so she most likely thought that she was speaking to a small number of people and it turns out that’s pretty much true: If you search for her Twitter ID, you can see that she was retweeted a little bit, but not massively. I know Twitter search isn’t the most reliable, but there are only 8 pages of search results for her ID, starting 8 days ago. That hardly speaks to a huge retweeting.

Furthermore, whilst Twitter lists were used by the media to collect Tweets related to Fort Hood, Moore is on six such lists, which between them have a grand total of 67 followers.

Carr goes on:

That last twitpic link was particularly amazing: it showed a cameraphone image – of a wounded soldier arriving at the hospital on a gurney – taken by Moore from inside the hospital. Unsurprisingly, Moore’s – [sic] coverage was quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike, something that she actively encouraged by tweeting to friends that they should pass her phone number to the press so she could tell them the truth, rather than the speculative bullshit that was hitting the wires.

Carr claims that the bloggers and mainstream media outlets picked up on her tweets, but I just can’t substantiate that. I have searched Google News and the only mentions of “Tearah Moore” are people reposting or quoting Paul Carr’s article. Searching for “MissTearah” brings up two articles, neither from a mainstream news outlet. One is from a German blog, the other from The Business Insider, which runs her photo.

Further digging does reveal that the Houston Chronicle in Texas ran her photo (no. 52) with the caption “MissTearah submitted this photo to Twitter purporting to be from the emergency room in Killee.” Australia’s Herald Sun does the same but uses the caption “This Twitter image from user misstearah, claims to be from inside a hospital near the shooting.”

Technorati and Icerocket show the same pattern amongst bloggers: A few people are talking about Carr’s post, not Moore’s original Tweets.

When I mentioned this on Twitter, Carr responded:

@Suw I linked the Independent in the post http://bit.ly/37HwCy Here’s NYT and AP trying to ctct: http://bit.ly/3IeG94 http://bit.ly/4DdsEY

The Independent post that Carr links to is actually a post by Jack Riley, a tech writer, that he’s written on his own Independent Minds Livejournal. Independent Minds is the Indie’s user generated content platform, it’s not a part of the Indie’s journalistic output. The other two are links to Tweets by the New York Times and the Associated Press trying to get in touch with Moore, which is what you would expect from journalists who think they may have an eye witness to talk to.

Let’s just look at Tweets from the MSM to Moore (oldest to newest):

@robertwood: @MissTearah give me a call if you can. I’m a reporter and wanted to do an interview. 512.474.5264

@DavidSchechter: @MissTearah Please call WFAA TV in Dallas 214-907-5964

@vietqle: @MissTearah I’m with National Public Radio in DC. We’d like 2 talk w/ people at Ft. Hd. Can you contact me? vle@npr.org or 202.513.3999. Tx.

@waldon_m: @MissTearah please call me at 2022157069 or email mwaldon@ap.org

@waldon_m: @MissTearah i am a reporter with The Associated Press. Please contact ASAP

@waldon_m: @MissTearah please contact the AP 202 641 9807

@waldon_m: @MissTearah please contact The Associated Press if you can 202 641 9807- thank you.

@BBC_HaveYourSay: @MissTearah Hello, it’s James at BBC News in London. I saw your picture from Fort Hood. It would be great to talk to you today. Are u free?

@BBC_HaveYourSay: @MissTearah Thanks for letting us know. We thought the email was suspicious. I’m glad we did not publish your pic. I’m sorry to trouble you.

@xocasgv: @misstearah http://twitpic.com/ohye0 - Hi, this is Xaquin G.V., Graphics Editor at The New York Times, read you witnessed the event. Any cha [sic]

So, six journalists get in touch, with Michael Waldon not appearing to have much luck in getting hold of Moore at all. The brief exchange with @BBC_HaveYourSay is also interesting - make of it what you will. As Moore’s account is private now, there’s no way to see what her response was and thus tricky to interpret that tweet.

But other than the three posts mentioned above that use Moore’s photo, I couldn’t find any other mainstream media news outlet that quotes from or mentions Moore by name, nor do any bloggers that Technorati or Icerocket can find. Equally, the number of retweets are negligible.

Carr’s assertion that her tweets were “quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike” just isn’t supported by the facts.

Now there is a discussion that could be had about the content of Moore’s Tweets. She did not have access to completely accurate information but from reading through some of the reTweets and the few Tweets that Riley archived, Moore seemed to feel that the information she was getting was coming from relatively reliable sources. She was also Tweeting what she was witnessing, which is information there’s no reason to doubt.

In the middle of a shooting, in a lock-down situation, is it really any wonder that your average eye witness actually isn’t all that well informed about the bigger picture? People caught up in events can tell us what they see and what they hear, but they can’t necessarily fact check right there and then and I feel it’s rather unfair to expect them to.

Carr also talks about a picture Moore took - a blurry image of someone on a gurney further down the corridor:

Rather than offering to help the wounded, or getting the hell out of the way of those trying to do their jobs, Moore actually pointed a cell-phone at a wounded soldier, uploaded it to twitpic and added a caption saying that the victim “got shot in the balls”.

In the caption to her Twitpic, Moore says that she was at the hospital for an appointment. She doesn’t appear to be a member of medical staff, so would have no role to play in that situation. Whether it is reportage or poor taste to take and upload such a picture — given that there is no way to identify anyone in the picture and you can barely see the wounded soldier — is a matter for debate.

(Carr mentions HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects patient confidentiality in the US. I’m not clear how HIPAA privacy provisions would apply in this case and would need an expert to advise.)

But to insinuate that it’s pure selfishness and that Moore should have been ‘doing something’ is misrepresenting Moore’s situation.

Carr himself, though, did appear to have a problem with Moore’s conduct, if his tweets are anything to go by:

@paulcarr: By the way, doesn’t @misstearah have a fucking job to do while all these people are dying? Just wondering.

@paulcarr: Looks like @misstearah’s twitter account has been taken down. Only took the army an hour to respond to that particular threat.

@paulcarr: Also, Twitpics from inside the hospital? From a cellphone? Really? Precisely how many moral and legal rules does that break?

Carr then goes on to talk about the Iranian elections:

For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really.

What is astonishing is Carr’s arrogance. Whilst the election wasn’t swayed, it is wrong to think that the social media action around the elections achieved nothing. I’d like to hear from Iranians on this, but I would imagine that just knowing the world was listening, that people out there cared, that normal Iranians could be heard outside of their own country would be an empowering experience. We might not know for some years what the full effect was, but to write it all off because the election wasn’t swayed is just shortsightedness.

Carr goes on:

And so it was at Fort Hood. For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.

Another straw man. Eye witness reports have never been focused on saving lives, but on reporting what someone’s experiences. And as for misinformation and breaching privacy, the mainstream media is just as good at spreading that as anyone else, if not better.

A further straw man is Carr’s complaint that social media is making “our humanity [...] leak[...] away”. It’s a meaningless statement, on a par with the anti-electricity rhetoric from the late 19th Century. Ethics are not tool-specific, they don’t change from technology to technology. If that were so, all the positive, constrictive, humanity-affirming actions that are taken through social media would simply not be possible.

Finally, Carr mentions the video of Neda Agha Soltan’s final moments:

Even if you’ve seen the footage before, you should watch it again. But this time bear in mind the following: the cameraman was not a professional reporter, but rather an ordinary person, just like the victim. And what did he do when he saw a young girl bleeding to death? Did he run for help, or try to assist in stemming the bleeding? No he didn’t.

Instead he pointed his camera at her and recorded her suffering, moving in closer to her face for her agonising final seconds. For all of our talk of citizen journalism, and getting the truth out, the last thing that terrified girl saw before she closed her eyes for the final time was some guy pointing a cameraphone at her. “Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.”

This is totally disingenuous. Neda was on her way to a protest in Tehran and was shot in the heart when she got out of the car to get some air (the car’s air conditioning wasn’t working well). Several people attended to Neda, including Dr Arash Hejazi, who said this about the incident:

A young woman who was standing aside with her father [sic, later identified as her music teacher] watching the protests was shot by a Basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight her heart. I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim’s chest, and she died in less than two minutes.

Carr’s assertion that the people who videoed Neda’s death should have been doing something is absurd. Others were already doing what they could and it doesn’t sound like there was anything more that could be done.

However harrowing it is to watch a young woman die, there are times when such scenes have to be captured and relayed to the world, to illustrate the appalling conditions and repression that people are suffering. Had she died unrecorded, it’s likely that no one outside of Iran, possibly outside of her immediate community, would have heard of her murder. Instead, she became seen as a symbol of the Iranian protests, even as a martyr.

I was at a panel discussion about social media in repressive regimes a while back with Kevin, and an Egyptian blogger told of how even his friends and family did not want to believe that the police were abusing prisoners until a video of such abuse ended up on YouTube. We might not like it, but unfortunately it can be an important not just in rallying protestors but also as documentary evidence to persuade others.

There is even now a graduate scholarship at the University of Oxford named after Neda so there is hope that, both in Iran and outside, her death was not meaningless.

The key thing that Carr forgets is that what is unacceptable in our relatively safe societies may be necessary in oppressive regimes. Tools we use for play here can be used for survival elsewhere.

More fundamental questions, about whether or not it is right for journalists to stand back and record events instead of intervening to try to save people’s lives is a discussion that has been ongoing for decades. I don’t think that it’s one that’s going to be solved any time soon, either, as there are compelling arguments for and against.

What we should do as individuals, though, when we are confronted by such events is a question worth examining, by each of us and in the frame of our own capabilities. I think most people would try to help and wouldn’t even think about taking photos or video; others would try to help and then think about recording events when the helping is done; and yet others simply won’t be able to help and will only be able to record. Should we criticise and demonise those who record the events around them in a way we don’t approve? Or is it a question for individuals to decide for themselves?

Paul Carr’s main point appears to be that citizen journalists can’t get stuff right, so they should shut up, and those that record events instead of helping to save lives should be ripped a new one. Yet his main assertions are unsupported by the facts, his interpretation riddled with holes and his straw men pathetically easy to demolish.

There are interesting debates to be had about technology, social media, citizen journalism and eye witness accounts, but sadly Carr’s post touches on none of them in any meaningful way. I am befuddled as to why people on Twitter are seizing on it as breaking new ground, as it simply doesn’t.

(To keep the discussion all in one place, please comment over here!)

Jeff Jarvis: “Google is not an enemy, Google is a model” from Carta on Vimeo.

The site, Threatened Voices, aims to raise awareness to the growing number of bloggers and other online journalists being persecuted across the world. While both traditional and new media reporters have faced recent danger, the site acknowledges the growing importance and number of online journalists in the global media.

“Online journalists and bloggers now represent 45% of all media workers in prison worldwide,” Global Voices says in a press release.

The captures of high profile journalists abducted in Iraq and North Korea have called attention to the dangers of the profession, while “the harshest consequence for many has been the politically motivated arrest of bloggers and online writers for their online and/or offline activities, in some tragic cases even leading to death,” Global Voices reports.

The site allows users to enter their own location and anecdotal details, drawing from the international community of journalists to fill the site’s map content.

Outside of the central map, other features of the site include statistics and analysis organized in a timeline or by country. The site lists China, Egypt and Iran as the top three countries, respectively, with the highest number of recorded cases of threatened or arrested bloggers.

Each case is tracked to record whether the blogger was threatened or arrested and if arrested, when and if they were released. Another aim of the site is to allow the online community to call attention to campaigns to free particular journalists.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the partners of the Threatened Voices project released a report in April on the 10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger.

Along with a thorough description of each country (at the time, Burma was listed at the top), the article quotes CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon, who emphasizes, “Freedom of expression groups, concerned governments, the online community, and technology companies need to come together to defend the rights of bloggers around the world.”

The site was also built in collaboration with the BBC, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others.

Someone recently was picking my brain about the future of in-car technology. I think that one of the knock-on effects of the iPhone is that people will expect apps and add-on services in a wider range of consumer electronics. Cars will not just have on-board computers to manage the engine but also on-board computers to navigate, entertain and inform much as we would expect in our home.

Hobbyists have already been adding these kind of systems to their cars for years, and Prius drivers love to hack their hybrid cars. High-end cars have complex environmental and entertainment systems, but we’re starting to glimpse how these activities will filter into the mainstream.

Satellite radio services in the US have been using some of their surplus bandwidth to provide information services, and with 4G data services such as WiMax and LTE service expanding in the next few years, mobile data will provide the kind of bandwidth that we’ve previously thought of as restricted to DSL and cable. Faster wireless connections will bring new forms of entertainment, expand the use of web services and provide new opportunities for information providers.

GigaOm has a great post on a prototype system in a Prius.

As a journalist, the question is whether news organisations will let another opportunity slip by them.

This month’s MediaTalkUSA for the Guardian is up with guests Jay Rosen of NYU and Michael Tomasky of the Guardian. We talk about Politico’s rear-guard action against the Washington Post with its new local service; the election; the White House and Fox; and government support of journalism.

(Curated with ease using Publish2, thanks especially to Social Journalism features.)

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]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AnilDash/~3/ykEDpe3KUMA/the-most-interesting-new-tech-startup-of-2009.html <p>I love seeing people start new companies, especially in the tech world. But I've probably gotten a little bit jaded about new startups, especially when the story seems to be more about who's funding the effort than about the product itself. To me the distinction that makes a startup interesting is not just whether their own product or service is cool, but whether it's broad and ambitious enough that others can build interesting things on top of it.</p> <div class="imgright"></div> <p>So, after taking a pretty careful look at the tech scene (and of course with a number of my recent posts being focused on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href=" http://dashes.com/anil/2009/06/the-future-of-facebook-usernames.html">Facebook</a>, <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/googles-microsoft-moment.html">Google</a>, <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/apple-secrecy-does-not-scale.html">Apple</a> and other giants of the tech industry), I think the most promising new startup of 2009 is one of the least likely: The executive branch of the federal government of the United States.</p> <p>Now, .gov websites have historically been backwaters at best, a bunch of awkwardly-designed, poorly defined sites that only met the bare requirements of a web presence. But of course the current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives, and it's remarkable how quickly they've remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.</p> <p><img alt=".gov Sites" src="http://dashes.com/anil/images/gov-sites.jpg" width="450" height="103" class="imgcenter"/></p> <p>Need proof? Well, let's take a look at some of the most compelling new sites that have launched in just the few short months since President Obama took office:</p> <ul> <li><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.data.gov/">Data.gov</a>, providing open access to feeds of valuable facts and figures generated by the executive branch.</li> <li><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://usaspending.gov/"><span class="caps">USA</span>spending.gov</a>, allowing any of us to drill down into the details of spending from various federal agencies.</li> <li><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.recovery.gov/">Recovery.gov</a>, perhaps one of the best-known of the new sites, offering up details of how resources from the Recovery Act are being allocated.</li> <li>And of course, there's <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/">WhiteHouse.gov</a>. You know about that one.</li> </ul> <p>What's remarkable about these sites is not merely that they exist; There had been some efforts to provide this kind of information in the past. Rather, what stands out is that they exhibit a lot of the traits of some of the best tech startups in Silicon Valley or New York City. Each site has remarkably <strong>consistent branding elements</strong>, leading to a predictable and trustworthy sense of place when you visit the sites. There is clear <strong>attention to design</strong>, both from the cosmetic elements of these pages, and from the thoughtfulness of the information architecture on each site. (The clear, focused promotional areas on each homepage feel just like the "Sign up now!" links on the site of most Web 2.0 companies.) And increasingly, these services are being accompanied by <strong>new <span class="caps">API</span>s and data sources</strong> that can be used by others to build interesting applications.</p> <p>That last point is perhaps most significant. We've seen the remarkable innovation that sprung up years ago around the <span class="caps">API </span>for services like Flickr, and that continues full-force today around apps like Twitter. But who could have predicted just a year or two ago that we might have something like <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://sunlightlabs.com/contests/appsforamerica2//">Apps for America</a>, the effort being led by the Sunlight Foundation, Google, <span class="caps">O'R</span>eilly Media and TechWeb to reward applications built around datasets provided by Data.gov. The tools that <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://sunlightlabs.com/contests/appsforamerica2/apps/">have already been built</a> are fascinating. And, frankly, they're a lot more compelling than most of the sample apps that a typical startup can wring out of its community with a developer contest.</p> <p>More importantly, there's a different attitude about the web and leveraging online communities to help make our government work more effectively. I learned a bit about this first hand when I saw <span class="caps">U.S. CIO</span> Vivek Kundra speak at Wired's "Disruptive By Design" conference a few weeks ago:</p> <p><iframe class="embeddedvideo" src="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/1813626064?isVid=1&amp;publisherID=1564549380" name="flashObj" width="404" height="436" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></iframe></p> <p>One of the highlights of that clip happens at just 1:45 into the video, where Kundra outlines a vision where the default setting for information created by the government should be public, not secret. This is the same kind of "default openness" that turned ordinary collecting behaviors on sites like Flickr and Delicious into the foundation for remarkable communities that display phenomenally valuable emergent behaviors. We're seeing this right now, with an organization like Twitter looking to build the feature of retweeting into their own platform, after it having been pioneered by their community.</p> <p>And it's just as essential to note the <em>way</em> in which these changes have happened. Something like the <span class="caps">USA</span> Spending dashboard would have taken half a year or more to deploy in any large-sized corporation; Our government got it done in just a few months. How did they do it? Well, the team in the <span class="caps">CIO'</span>s office was working nights and weekends, borrowing time and resources as they were able in order to get something useful shipping as quickly as possible. In short, they were working startup hours, with a startup's level of intensity, because they knew they were making something cool and useful.</p> <h3>So What's Next?</h3> <p>While it's exciting to see the remarkable embrace of new technologies that's coming from inside the beltway, there are still some serious challenges that face the new startup-minded tech community within our government. In many ways, they echo the classic challenges that all startups face, but with a unique twist:</p> <ul> <li>Defining a startup's culture is extraordinarily difficult, since there have to be clear values that are expressed in the way people act both in public and behind the scenes. In the case of the executive branch, this is doubly hard because it's <em>redefining</em> a culture which has been well-established for decades. Bringing organizational change and new technologies to an established way of working requires partners and suppliers to change the way they do business, as well. </li> <li>Acquiring and retaining talent is hard, especially in a city that doesn't have as deep a well of people with tech startup experience. And of course, nobody works in government for the salaries. Fortunately, all of us who are citizens already have equity in this startup.</li> <li>Marketing has never been the strong suit of those doing the most interesting work in the government sphere. Even some of the smarter folks I know in the tech world had never even heard of the sites I mentioned above, or had never bothered to check them out in much detail. It's going to take concerted effort to get the word out beyond the usual circle of those who were already interested in technology and government.</li> </ul> <p>Of course, these efforts just represent a small start towards the incredible amount of work that remains to be done in making an entity like the <span class="caps">U.S. </span>government as responsive and interactive as today's web demands. There will be mistakes, and worse, there will be those who try to politicize this good work, even though our government making smarter use of the web benefits us all whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the present administration.</p> <p>But I am hopeful, because I've seen a couple of cool applications come out, and more importantly I've seen every indication that, after literally decades of ignoring and neglecting the technology industry that defines so much of our culture, those in political power are eager to embrace those with technological ability. I personally can daydream about <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/the-pushbutton-web-realtime-becomes-real.html">Pushbutton</a>-enabling feeds from Data.gov to let us build realtime apps with government data, or deploying blogging tools at the <span class="caps">FCC </span>so that we find out about interesting filings from the organization that actually gets the filings. I can imagine all sorts of applications that could be built if we could find "all publicly-available government data on this neighborhood I'm considering moving to".</p> <p>And while I'm sure that all of these things will get built, as someone who's <em>paying</em> for this stuff with my tax dollars, I am fundamentally most happy about the fact that data generated by my government can be created in a format that fits the way I consume and share information, instead of merely being printed on paper and filed away in a warehouse somewhere. For the way I live, and the way that all of my peers and friends live, the executive branch's new embrace of a startup mentality and the promise of the web means that its work is, for the first time, <em>truly</em> public.</p> <p><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/LkQf861IXH3-wmzCKXNoKYBjauw/0/da"><img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/LkQf861IXH3-wmzCKXNoKYBjauw/0/di" border="0" ismap></a><br/> <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/LkQf861IXH3-wmzCKXNoKYBjauw/1/da"><img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/LkQf861IXH3-wmzCKXNoKYBjauw/1/di" border="0" ismap></a></p><div class="feedflare"> <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/AnilDash?a=ykEDpe3KUMA:UL5AcZiRZEs:D7DqB2pKExk"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/AnilDash?i=ykEDpe3KUMA:UL5AcZiRZEs:D7DqB2pKExk" border="0"></a> <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/AnilDash?a=ykEDpe3KUMA:UL5AcZiRZEs:V_sGLiPBpWU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/AnilDash?i=ykEDpe3KUMA:UL5AcZiRZEs:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"></a> <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/AnilDash?a=ykEDpe3KUMA:UL5AcZiRZEs:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/AnilDash?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></a> <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/AnilDash?a=ykEDpe3KUMA:UL5AcZiRZEs:F7zBnMyn0Lo"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/AnilDash?i=ykEDpe3KUMA:UL5AcZiRZEs:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AnilDash/~4/ykEDpe3KUMA" height="1" width="1"/> Anil tag:dashes.com,2009:/anil//1.7235 Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:45:58 -0700 http://publishing2.com/2009/08/10/what-i-read-today-facebook-buys-friendfeed-edition/ Why Facebook Wants FriendFeed GigaOm &#124; August 10, 2009 Scott Karp says: Om Malik calls it &#8220;the problem of plenty.&#8221; Facebook is trying to solve it by acquiring FriendFeed. Will news orgs compete? Facebook Takes FriendFeed To Take On Twitter TechCrunch &#124; August 10, 2009 Scott Karp says: M&#38;A, as always, is driven by startups building what incumbents should have [...] http://publishing2.com/?p=1511 Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:17:01 -0700 Why Facebook Wants FriendFeed
GigaOm | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: Om Malik calls it “the problem of plenty.” Facebook is trying to solve it by acquiring FriendFeed. Will news orgs compete?

Facebook Takes FriendFeed To Take On Twitter
TechCrunch | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: M&A, as always, is driven by startups building what incumbents should have but couldn’t.

karaswisher: Now That There’s FaceFeed, Does That Make Twoogle More Inevitable?: http://bit.ly/fET9I
Twitter | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: Winner – Best FF/Facbook Post Title

mathewi: Real-time reaction to FB/ @Friendfeed deal at http://friendfeed.com/bret [and at @scobleizer's page: @digiphile
Twitter | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: Meta FriendFeed acquisition.

mediatwit: Quick thought: What if Facebook is just buying FriendFeed to kill a potential competitor? Wonder if they’ll integrate it, kill FF site.
Twitter | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: Good question.

dangillmor: Facebook buys FriendFeed, combining two of the most popular social networking sites i rarely use
Twitter | August 10, 2009

BenLaMothe: Crap, crap, crap. My favourite URL shrinker, tr.im, is dead
Twitter | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: In a nutshell.

kleinmatic: tr.im’s collapse will have a more obvious and lasting effect than Facebook/Friendfeed.
Twitter | August 10, 2009

The Briefing: Who’s going to save your URL shortener from extinction?
Publishing 2.0 | August 10, 2009
Everything you need to know about the death of tr.im and the issue with URL shorteners but were afraid to ask. First draft of new Publishing 2.0 blog feature (this post is another first draft).

Bloglines On Life Support. This Story Needs An Ending
TechCrunch | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: Is RSS dead (re: Bloglines)? I don’t think it is, but who can resist “dead” memes?

Recession: Why Ad Industry Won’t Recover in Second Half
AdAge | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: Online and PR are “pockets” of strength in an otherwise bleak advertising forecast

USAA Bank Will Let Customers Deposit Checks by iPhone
New York Times | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: iPhone helping to kill another scourge of the paper-based world — physical check deposits.

ianbetteridge: The last company to try and control 3rd party software as Apple does on the iPhone was IBM with its mainframes. And we know how that ended.
Twitter | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: But the iPhone is just a wee bit cooler than the IBM mainframe. And it’s consumer hardware.

carr2n: wake up call. @BradStone writes that you probably didn’t have your coffee before you checked this tweet: http://bit.ly/e2qGt
Twitter | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: For more and more people, the web has replaced newspapers as the first media they consume in the morning.

(Curated with ease using Publish2, thanks especially to Social Journalism features.)

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]]> What I'm Reading http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/completetosh/~3/q4w3AOExsk4/ Azeem Azhar: New ways to save the newspaper Azeem has some ideas for the Observer. (tags: newspapers publishing observer) http://www.completetosh.com/weblog/2009/08/04/links-for-2009-08-04/ Tue, 04 Aug 2009 03:03:28 -0700

Azeem Azhar: New ways to save the newspaper

Azeem has some ideas for the Observer.

(tags: newspapers publishing observer)

]]> Links of the day http://publishing2.com/2009/07/30/journalists-are-news-companies-most-valuable-asset/ Journalists are news companies&#8217; most valuable assets. That&#8217;s what Mike Arrington asserts, and I think he&#8217;s right (disregard the &#8220;failing old media&#8221; rhetoric): And earlier today I got a glimpse at what AOL is up to &#8211; they are hiring all the journalists being fired and laid off by the newspapers and magazines. And they now have [...] http://publishing2.com/?p=1456 Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:24:29 -0700 Journalists are news companies’ most valuable assets.

That’s what Mike Arrington asserts, and I think he’s right (disregard the “failing old media” rhetoric):

And earlier today I got a glimpse at what AOL is up to – they are hiring all the journalists being fired and laid off by the newspapers and magazines. And they now have a news room 1,500 journalists and editors strong. Amazingly, failing old media is throwing away their most valuable assets. And AOL is eagerly picking those assets up for a song. Before anyone knows it, AOL may be the most powerful news outlet in the world.

Given that NYT has gone to great lengths to avoid newsroom layoffs, I suspect they know full well how valuable their journalists are.

Mike Arrington is TechCrunch’s most valuable asset, for his personal brand and for the quality of the post he writes.

As Arrington points out, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has also realized how valuable journalists are, and is aligning AOL’s new strategy with cornering the market for journalist talent.

But is Arrington right that media companies are blithely throwing away their most valuable asset? Why did newspapers make so many newsroom cuts on their path back to profitability? Is it because they don’t recognize the value of their journalists?

I think it’s because they are still wrestling with the declining value of their other major asset: industrial printing and distribution capacity, i.e. printing presses and delivery trucks and all their industrial staff. While some newspapers have made significant cuts to their industrial operation by not delivering or publishing everyday (and a few have taken the extreme step of ending their industrial operation entirely), most have protected this asset because it is not really variable — it’s mostly all or nothing.

But to say that the value of industrial printing and distribution capacity is declining is not to say it has no value — it of course still generates most of newspaper company revenues. But the decline, while exacerbated to a large degree by the recession, is still secular long-term. (And newspaper companies are surely using the breathing room they achieved through cost reduction-driven profitability to figure out their long-term strategies — and they are focused on digital.)

AOL, in contrast, has no industrial assets, so has the latitude to invest in journalists. They also have another huge asset that newspapers enjoyed in their geographic distribution areas that they entirely lack on the web: SCALE

A notable illustration of the shifting value of news company assets that sits between AOL and most newspaper companies is Politico.

Politico rose to prominence by showcasing its high profile journalists on its website.

Unlike most news sites, Politico has real profile pages for its journalists and showcases their bylines on every story (even the lead homepage story):

This doesn’t mean, however, that Politico derives no value from industrial printing and distribution. In fact, half of their $15 million in annual revenue comes from a print edition published three days a week when congress is in session, and once week otherwise (via Vanity Fair).

But Politico doesn’t own any printing presses or delivery trucks, i.e. no industrial assets. And the print publication is largely the product of content produced first for the web — and it is very much a “nichepaper,” i.e. it targets the highly valuable audience of Capitol Hill staffers and members of Congress.

The results is that Politico is able to invest in a talented newsroom staff of 100, paying nearly as much as The Washington Post. And Politico is profitable.

But does focusing on journalists as news companies’ most valuable asset mean that news companies should be exclusively in the content production business? That’s a significant shift from the industrial printing and distribution business.

In the digital media world, companies like Google and Apple have taken over, as Columbia J School Dean and former WSJ.com managing editor Bill Grueskin put it, the “profitable front end of the distribution chain,” leaving news companies with the much less profitable back end of the value chain (i.e. content creation).

But what if journalists could also be the key to news companies getting back into the distribution business, in digital media?

The greatest asset of Google, the most successful content distribution business on the web, is its ability to harness the judgment of every person who creates a hyperlink on the web, and to know which links from which sites represent more trusted judgment.

News companies still employ in their newsrooms arguably the greatest collective source of news judgment.

So how can news companies leverage the asset of their journalists’ news judgment?

Hint #1: Collaboration

Hint #2: Scale

News companies are notably trying to figure out how to get into the business of charging for content on the web. As Apple’s iTunes demonstrated, the key to charging for content is in effective and highly convenient packaging.

Could journalists be the key to not only creating the content but also packaging it?

Think about that for a while. More in another post.

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]]> http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/2009/07/yu-wan-mei.html Fellow Onion fans may be amused to see that the Onion has been sold to a Chinese "salvage fisheries and polymer injection" company. Finally I understand why all their articles in my RSS feed for the past couple of days... http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/2009/07/yu-wan-mei.html Tue, 21 Jul 2009 01:43:54 -0700 Fellow Onion fans may be amused to see that the Onion has been sold to a Chinese "salvage fisheries and polymer injection" company.

Finally I understand why all their articles in my RSS feed for the past couple of days have been written in broken pidgin and dealt almost exclusively with Chinese sports stars being awesome.

And, like all the best satires, it's basically true. Where next for debt-burdened, credit-crunched newspapers but a harvesting strategy that cashes in reputations built up over the last century? Some are going online-only, some are finding vanity purchasers and others...well, others are going to disappear, or find foreign buyers, and those buyers are going to be people who think that influencing opinion in the US and Europe is worth sinking a few million dollars.

]]> Newspapers http://publishing2.com/2009/07/16/best-practices-for-journalists-curating-the-web-new-york-times-bits-blog-what-were-reading/ The New York Times technology blog, Bits, which features original online reporting by all of the NYT technology journalists, has formally launched a new feature called &#8220;What We&#8217;re Reading.&#8221; This feature (powered by Publish2) illustrates a number of important best practices for how journalists and news orgs can create significant value for readers by curating [...] http://publishing2.com/?p=1417 Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:09:35 -0700 The New York Times technology blog, Bits, which features original online reporting by all of the NYT technology journalists, has formally launched a new feature called “What We’re Reading.” This feature (powered by Publish2) illustrates a number of important best practices for how journalists and news orgs can create significant value for readers by curating the web. I’ve got six of them for you.

But first, here’s what the feature looks like, in the blog’s right sidebar, under the ad at the top (click for larger image):

And here are the six best practices:

1. Make it a collaborative effort.

With all that journalists are being asked to do on the web, it’s not ideal from a workflow perspective for one reporter or editor to carry the burden of curating the web. Bit’s “What We’re Reading,” like the blog, is a collaborative effort of NYT technology journalists as a group:

Here are all of the NYT technology journalists contributing to What We’re Reading (via a Publish2 newsgroup, designed to enable this type of collaboration):

The Bits blog is “aiming to identify a dozen or so items every weekday,” which is much easier with a dozen contributors than with one.

2. Comment to explain why the link is worth clicking.

Next to search, the greatest driver of traffic on the web is social recommendations, i.e. person-to-person recommendations. TechCrunch, for example, now gets nearly 10% of its traffic from Twitter, which is simply people recommending links to each other.

When people recommend something to each other, they typically say something about what they are recommending. This distinguishes personal recommendations from machine recommendations — algorithms can automatically pull the lede, but they can’t tell you what they think or highlight what’s interesting about a story.

NYT tech journalists make the What We’re Reading feature much more valuable — and differentiated from headlines produced by algorithms — by adding a comment to every link:

As New York Times deputy technology editor Vindu Goel observes, “readers should know why you are recommending a certain item so they can decide whether it’s worth their time to check out.”

You can think of it as a mini-blog, since blogging grew out of sharing links along with what you think about what you’re linking to.

3. Attribute links to individual journalists.

This best practice follows from commenting on each link. People click on links in Twitter, in Facebook, or in email based on WHO recommended it to them. Blogs on news sites are a great way for journalists to build up their personal brands — sharing what they’re reading is an extension of that.

4. Share links on Twitter.

Speaking of Twitter, NYT Bits journalists also share what they’re reading with Bits’ 6,700 followers on Twitter (automatically through the Publish2 newsgroup). Sharing links was Bits’ first foray beyond what most news orgs do with a Twitter account, i.e. auto-post their own headlines, and it’s a significant enhancement to the value of their Twitter feed.

One of the easiest ways for a news org to enhance its Twitter feed — and be more like individuals with lots of Twitter followers — is to share links to interesting things. It’s a fundamentally social practice.

Following best practice #2 each link shared on Twitter has the journalist’s comment (rather than the link’s title), and following best practice #3, each has the journalist’s initials after the comment, e.g. ^SH is Saul Hansell (again, done automatically via Publish2 newsgroup).

5. Integrate into existing workflow.

The What We’re Reading feature is well named, both as a simple description for readers and as a literal description of the workflow behind it. As Vindu observed: “As journalists, we’re constantly looking at news coverage, blogs and Web sites. Why not share the most interesting stuff we find with our readers?”

And the time required?

Vindu: “Less than a minute, which was really important to us. Publish2 worked with us to configure the selection tool to automatically include a lot of the key information, such as our Twitter feed. So when I find an item I want to share, I click on a button in my Web browser, edit the headline of the linked article if necessary (sometimes they are really long or incomplete), add a public comment and hit “Save” to send it out to the world.”

The link is automatically added to What We’re Reading via Publish2. No need to log in to a CMS or even leave the page that they’re reading.

Previously, interesting items that NYT technology journalists came across that didn’t make it into a NYT print article or a Bits blog post ended up on the “cutting room floor.” The only change to workflow is they are now sharing those interesting items with their readers — on the blog and on Twitter in one step.

6. Complement original reporting.

What We’re Reading, positioned high in the right sidebar, serves as a perfect complement to the original reporting in the main blog on the left. Curating the web, like blogging, should be a fundamental skill of every journalist who wants to create value in a web media world.

Vindu: “There’s is a lot of great information out there on the Web that isn’t produced by The Times. Our overarching goal as a news institution is to inform our readers. Often that’s with outside content. So What We’re Reading is part of a broader effort by The Times to feature strong third-party content on our site. For example, we have modules on our Technology home page, www.nytimes.com/technology, that show stories from respected tech blogs such as ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM.”

Lastly: Should Bits fear “sending readers away”? No more than Google or Drudge Report should. Do a great job sending readers to interesting content on the web, and they’ll keep coming back for more.

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]]> Publishing 2.0 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/completetosh/~3/j6jB69v0h8g/ The Finance Press Becomes Ever More Willfully Obscure, Clubby And Unhelpful &#124; The Awl &#34;The consequence of all this insider chat is that fewer and fewer people can follow extremely important goings-on. People are tuning out what is the most important story of our lives, which is being delivered incrementally by a number of very smart [...] http://www.completetosh.com/weblog/2009/07/03/links-for-2009-07-03/ Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:03:14 -0700

The Finance Press Becomes Ever More Willfully Obscure, Clubby And Unhelpful | The Awl

"The consequence of all this insider chat is that fewer and fewer people can follow extremely important goings-on. People are tuning out what is the most important story of our lives, which is being delivered incrementally by a number of very smart people, nearly all of them working exclusively online, to a small audience of people who are financially educated enough to understand. So do your part and educate me, please."

(tags: economics financial_journalism journalism finance)

]]> Links of the day http://publishing2.com/2009/06/15/wordpress-socialvibe-blogging-gone-good/ New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson is one of the most prolific and renown bloggers on the web. And if you go his blog, avc.com, you&#8217;ll notice that (like most blogs) he runs advertising to generate revenues. But what many of you may not know is that all the proceeds Fred generates through his blog [...] http://publishing2.com/?p=1407 Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:05:21 -0700 New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson is one of the most prolific and renown bloggers on the web. And if you go his blog, avc.com, you’ll notice that (like most blogs) he runs advertising to generate revenues. But what many of you may not know is that all the proceeds Fred generates through his blog goes to charity. What a concept!! You blog for a few minutes each day, and presto! You’re supporting your favorite charity! Now, imagine if millions of people did this… imagine the impact we could have on the world.

Starting today, if you’re a blogger who uses Wordpress, (both hosted .com as well as .org) you can do precisely that. Through a newly-launched partnership, Wordpress and SocialVibe (disclosure: I am on the board) are introducing a widget that will enable millions of bloggers that use Wordpress to support their charities of choice.

With the SocialVibe widget, bloggers can donate real money to their charities without the need to dip into their own pockets. Instead, the money is generated from brand advertisers that the bloggers self-select as the sponsor (e.g. Showtime, Sprint, Colgate, Kraft Foods, etc.). To be more specific, once bloggers install the SocialVibe sidebar widget on their Wordpress blog, money will be earned for charities every time readers engage with the widget (e.g. rating a Showtime video clip). Bloggers can switch their cause and sponsor as often as they like, and receive regular updates from their charity about goal progress and impact.

Thus far, SocialVibe has enabled people to raise close to half a million dollars for charities in just over a year’s time. Everyday, members are sharing their brand sponsors with millions of friends on social platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, and now WordPress to benefit one of more than 30 non-profit organizations, such as World Food Program, Children’s Miracle Network and charity: water.

What makes this partnership especially interesting is that WordPress has, up to this point, restricted any advertising on hosted accounts (with the exception of VIP accounts). In the past they have expressed concern over advertising’s impact on spam and motivation for expression. While these concerns no doubt still exist, there are a few facets of the SocialVibe platform that may make the advertising program more palatable:

• The blogger can choose to engage with a brand partner or not.
• The benefit to the blogger comes not in $ dollars (or a check), but rather in the form of a donation to a charity.
• The ad unit, with charity graphics and links to relevant information, adds to the content of the site, rather than detracting from the experience as most advertising programs do.

So it is possible that the SocialVibe widget will motivate bloggers to create even better content and engage a larger audience, knowing that they now have a way to pool their individual influences to create positive change in the world. And it’s important to realize that the Wordpress-SocialVibe partnership is designed to align such altruistic desires with the many corporations and brands that increasingly value social responsibility. For the brands involved, this platform provides a golden opportunity to get unique endorsements in a highly engaging manner within social media. It’s a win for all parties involved.

For more information about the SocialVibe-WordPress widget, check out the WordPress blog post.

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]]> http://publishing2.com/2009/06/11/why-we-link-a-brief-rundown-of-the-reasons-your-news-organization-needs-to-tie-the-web-together/ Originally posted at BeatBlogging.org, a resource for journalists using social networks, blogs, and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. Whenever I talk with news organizations of any size about linking to sources, resources and journalism that originated outside the walls of their newsroom, two questions come up: How and Why. Well, conveniently enough, I work for [...] http://publishing2.com/?p=1397 Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:24:16 -0700 Originally posted at BeatBlogging.org, a resource for journalists using social networks, blogs, and other Web tools to improve beat reporting.

Whenever I talk with news organizations of any size about linking to sources, resources and journalism that originated outside the walls of their newsroom, two questions come up: How and Why.

Well, conveniently enough, I work for Publish2, and we build tools that help answer the question of How. If your problem is that systems make adding links directly in the text of your story a difficult task, let’s solve that by adding links in widgets, sidebars, scrolling across the bottom of the browser window, blinking in 96pt red Helvetica, pushed to Twitter — wherever and however you want them.

My standing offer on How is that if the question comes up, you can talk to me and I’ll help you out.

So back to the question of Why.

Why we link: Five reasons your news organization should tie the Web together

1. Because we owe it to our readers to give them as much information as we have at our fingertips.

Don’t we? Of course we do.

If you’re a journalist, a huge part of your job is to filter all the information relevant to your community or your beat and pass along the important parts to your readers. Think about all the press releases you get by fax or e-mail, all the phone calls, voicemail, and messages that land on your desk, and think about how you act as a filter for that flood of information. Do the same thing with the Web.

Bring your readers the best links related to your story, and they will thank you. How? By treating you like a first-class citizen of the Internet, and coming back to your news site, which is no longer a dead end backwater in the river of news, but a point of connection where they can find other interesting streams.

Chris Amico took it one step further in a tip he submitted via the Publish2 Collaborative Reporting form I used to gather some ideas for this post. “Humility is healthy,” Chris wrote. “The more we get out of this mindset that we are the sole producers of useful content, the better off we’ll be in the long run.”

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2. Because linking to sources and resources is the key gesture to being a citizen of the Web and not just a product on the Web.

You might think your news organization is super-duper-Web-savvy because you put your stories online, have RSS feeds and push links to your own content out via social networks, including Twitter.

That’s Step One. And it’s a good first step.

But, if all you provide your readers is flat content that doesn’t take them anywhere else on the Web, or back up statements with direct sources, or provide resources for those who want to explore a topic beyond what you’ve been able to provide with original reporting, you’re just shoveling text into another bucket, one labeled “Web.”

If, on the other hand, you want to embrace the traits that make blogs, Twitter, and so many other online communication tools a vital part of the daily life of your readers, your news site shouldn’t feel like an endpoint in the conversation. It should feel like the beginning.

Asteris Masouras put it this way in a Twitter reply to my query about why we link:

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3. Because it’s the best way to connect directly with the online community in our town.

If you’re writing about human beings, businesses, organizations, government institutions or any other life form with a presence on the Internet, linking to them in the stories you publish about them is the low-hanging fruit when it comes to participating in your local online community.

Skipping the link to the city council’s calendar when you mention the next meeting, leaving out the link to the Little League’s online scoreboard when you write a story about its resurgence or not bothering to link to the full database of restaurant inspections when you choose three to write about — these are all easy ways to miss an opportunity to connect with your community and your readers.

Start simple: If you mention a person or organization, link to them.

Many, many bonus points to be awarded if you dig deep enough into the local online community to link to relevant content created by the people in your story. Did that angry neighbor’s crusade for a new zoning law to govern branches that hang over someone else’s driveway start with an image posted to a photo-sharing site and a determined comment? Link to it.

There’s a huge upside to linking out to community members, of course. Sometimes they link back.

Wenatchee World Web Editor Brianne Pruitt dropped a tip in my form including the following statement: “The link economy is real, and important for anyone who wants to be a part of the Web ecology.” I’d translate that as: Give some, get some.

And here’s how Web developer Pete Karl answered the question of why news organizations should link to external sources:

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4. Because we absolutely do not know everything, but we know where to find out most of what we don’t know.

The days of your news organization existing as a monopolistic source of local information are over, and your readers know it. They browse local, national, international, and topical news and commentary in more places than you call “news.” And if they don’t, they hear it from their friends on any one of a dozen social networks. They know that you don’t know it all. And so do you.

But you’re the journalist.

You’re the filter. You’re the person in town who knows everyone who knows everyone. You’ve got the sources, whether they’re people you talk to at the community center, the city council meeting, the police station, or their Live Journal page. Bring what they know to your readers as directly as possible: Link to them.

David Cohn of Spot.Us offered up the now-classic Jeff Jarvis line in my tip form: “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

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5. Because it will make your job easier.

I know, I know. Everyone is asking you to do more with less. It’s extremely easy to tell people like me that you just don’t have time for another toy, another tool, another camera, another social network or another task.

I’m here to tell you that bringing your readers the best of the Web can save you work.

How? By opening a two-way channel to let your readers tell you what you should link to next, you’ll cut down on the time you spend looking for that next thing. By maintaining a real presence in the local link economy, you’ll make it easier for sources who know the answers to your questions to find you, and you won’t spend as much time trying to find them.

By sending your readers to the best information available on the Web, you’ll keep them coming back for more, drawing more traffic to your news site. Last time I checked, more traffic is one way to make more money, and with any luck, that’s still how you get paid.

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Bonus Links on Links:

• Josh Korr, my colleague at Publish2, explores what happens when a group of news organizations collaborate to curate links when regional news breaks
• David Cohn from Spot.Us asks whether bookmarking links using social news services is an act of journalism
• Jeff Jarvis explores the ethic of the link economy

Thanks to everyone who replied on Twitter or in the Publish2 Tip Form when I asked for some of the best reasons to link out from your news site.

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]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoyamiSearchEngineMarketingAndAffiliateMarketingIndustryNewsBlog/~3/_lC7YByumPo/automating_content_for_better_search_results.php <p>Is it possible to automate the deliver of content to you website in order to get better organic search results in the search engines?</p> <p>Honestly, I am skeptical that it's possible, but that doesn't stop creative developers, like Scott Trimble, creator of the <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.titanpay.com/affiliate.php?id=1913&amp;group=28">Affiliate Marketing PHD</a> and some very interesting tools like, <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.titanpay.com/affiliate.php?id=1913&amp;group=21">StoreStacker</a>, <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.titanpay.com/affiliate.php?id=1913&amp;group=11">The Content Club</a>, <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.titanpay.com/affiliate.php?id=1913&amp;group=1">BlogSolution</a>, <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.titanpay.com/affiliate.php?id=1913&amp;group=6">RSS Evolution</a>, <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.titanpay.com/affiliate.php?id=1913&amp;group=4">ContentSolution</a>, and <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.titanpay.com/affiliate.php?id=1913&amp;group=13">RSSMagician</a>, from creating a new tool that promises to promises to combine affiliate marketing and blogging to create an automated site around specific topics and themes.</p> <p>I took <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.titanpay.com/affiliate.php?id=1913&amp;group=29">BlogProfitz</a> for a test run, to create <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.shopping-today.com">Shopping-Today.com</a> you can read more about my experience on my <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.wiseaff.com/2009/06/blogprofitz-launches.html">Wiseaff.com post</a>.</p> <p>I'd love to hear your thoughts. Are these types of tools just content spam, and asking for search engines to penalize your sites, or are there ways that you have found to put them to good use?</p> <p><br /> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GoyamiSearchEngineMarketingAndAffiliateMarketingIndustryNewsBlog/~4/_lC7YByumPo" height="1" width="1"/> Adam http://goyami.corante.com/archives/2009/06/05/automating_content_for_better_search_results.php Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:04:27 -0700 Affiliate Marketing http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoyamiSearchEngineMarketingAndAffiliateMarketingIndustryNewsBlog/~3/13uri5jVVjk/shoemoney_tools.php <p>Has anyone tried the Shoemoney Tools? I would be interested in hearing your opinions on the new tools.</p> <p>If you haven't tried them, I found this $3.95 trial:</p> <p><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://tools.shoemoney.com/spoffer/">Shoemoney Tools 3.95 Trial</a></p> <p>What are your thoughts?</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GoyamiSearchEngineMarketingAndAffiliateMarketingIndustryNewsBlog/~4/13uri5jVVjk" height="1" width="1"/> Adam http://goyami.corante.com/archives/2009/05/27/shoemoney_tools.php Wed, 27 May 2009 07:45:01 -0700 Affiliate Marketing http://publishing2.com/2009/05/02/retraining-wire-and-feature-editors-to-be-web-curators/ If the wire editor and feature editor roles are becoming obsolete for print newspapers, as Steve Yelvington persuasively argues, then those editors should be retrained &#8212; or retrain themselves &#8212; as web curators. Rather than become obsolete, these editors could become essential to their news organization&#8217;s future on the web. Steve observes: On the Internet, we have [...] http://publishing2.com/?p=1378 Sat, 02 May 2009 10:22:24 -0700 If the wire editor and feature editor roles are becoming obsolete for print newspapers, as Steve Yelvington persuasively argues, then those editors should be retrained — or retrain themselves — as web curators. Rather than become obsolete, these editors could become essential to their news organization’s future on the web.

Steve observes:

On the Internet, we have no need of wire editors; if we wish to have wire content on our websites, we can plug in AP Hosted News, or run a full feed of AP Online or some similar product from another service. But with everything on the Internet just a click away, the value of such branded and hosted wire content is low (and measurable), and even that may go away before long, based on simple cost-benefit analysis. We may be better off sending users to CNN, MSNBC and NYtimes.

Feature editing faces the same problem:

But the job simply doesn’t transport to digital media. Again, everything on the planet is just a click away, much of it more interesting, entertaining and informative than can be found in the typical daily newspaper’s features.

Yet there is a HUGE opportunity in this shifting landscape. Just because there’s a wealth of content a click away doesn’t mean that news consumers know where to click in order to find it.

Instead, we have what Clay Shirky describes as “filter failure”:

Here’s what the Internet did: it introduced, for the first time, post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor. And so there’s no economic logic that says that you have to filter for quality before you publish…The filter for quality is now way downstream of the site of production.

What we’re dealing with now is not the problem of information overload, because we’re always dealing (and always have been dealing) with information overload…Thinking about information overload isn’t accurately describing the problem; thinking about filter failure is.

Local news sites may serve their readers much better by sending them to CNN, MSNBC, and NYT for non-local news, as Steve suggests. But they may also send them to local news sites in other regions for stories dealing with common issues. They may send them to local blogs and other non-MSM media sites.

There is a wealth of sources on the web. Helping readers find the best of the web could help local news sites remain daily destinations rather than just a host for content to be aggregated by someone else — which could help those news operations get back into the content distribution business, which is how they made money in print, and how they could make a lot more money on the web.

Wire and feature editors are already skilled content curators — they just need to adapt those skills to filtering the web. One challenge they can apply their news judgment to is discovering new sources of trusted information, something Google CEO Eric Schmidt admits alogirthms struggle with.

For general search, we’ve been careful not to bias it using our own judgment of trust because we’re never sure if we get it right. So we use complicated ranking signals, as they’re called, to determine rank and relevance. And we change them periodically, which drives everybody crazy, as or algorithms get better. There’s no question in my experience that the top brands represented in this room would, in fact, float to the top in our search ranking. The usual problem is you’ve got somebody who really is very trustworthy but they’re not as well-known and they compete against people who are better known, and they don’t, in their view, get high enough ranking. We have not come up with a way to algorithmically handle that in a coherent way.

Another skill that would help wire and feature editors take on the challenge of filtering the web, and make them hugely relevant in the web media era, is collaboration. They could learn a lot from the editors in Washington State who have been practicing collaborative curation, whether for a statewide flood or a flu outbreak.

Publish2’s Senior Editor Josh Korr wrote about this vision for re-inventing the wire function on the web in a recent Nieman Reports piece, “A 21st Century Newswire—Curating the Web With Links”

If I were a wire or feature editor in a newsroom, instead of waiting to become obsolete, I would start immediately learning how to be a top notch web curator. I’d ask myself — how can I become the Jim Romenesko or Matt Drudge for my community. I would start learning how to use the tools of web curation and learning how to collaborate with other web curators. I’d study how newsrooms like Chicago Tribune have created an editorial workflow for collaborating to curate the web (see Colonel Tribune Recommends on the Chicago Breaking News blog.)

And if I ran a newsroom, I’d look at how I could retrain and reassign talented to editors to be vital contributors to the web operation, even as their function becomes redundant for the print operation. (Or, I’d imagine a future where content from a diverse range of web sources could be licensed and curated for print — see this Josh Korr post.)

There’s still time for any journalist in the newsroom to become essential to the future of news, rather than being emblematic of the past.

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]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/completetosh/~3/TeO-kbJ3hqI/ Lloyd Shepherd: Messing about with local information Lloyd thinks about local information, and launches some experiments just a couple of postcodes away from me in South London&#8230; (tags: blogs location news) http://www.completetosh.com/weblog/2009/04/30/links-for-2009-04-30/ Thu, 30 Apr 2009 03:22:24 -0700

Lloyd Shepherd: Messing about with local information

Lloyd thinks about local information, and launches some experiments just a couple of postcodes away from me in South London…

(tags: blogs location news)

]]> Links of the day http://publishing2.com/2009/04/29/collaboration-cant-cure-swineflu-but-it-can-fight-filter-failure/ Perhaps you&#8217;ve noticed a bit of activity online the last few days related to a certain not-quite-pandemic bug that&#8217;s going around. Swine Flu. Or, to put it in microblogging terms, #swineflu. The wonderful thing about the ease of communication online is that anyone can start a discussion, carry it on, pass along information, retweet it, forward an e-mail, [...] http://publishing2.com/?p=1360 Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:41:05 -0700 Perhaps you’ve noticed a bit of activity online the last few days related to a certain not-quite-pandemic bug that’s going around.

Swine Flu.

Or, to put it in microblogging terms, #swineflu.

The wonderful thing about the ease of communication online is that anyone can start a discussion, carry it on, pass along information, retweet it, forward an e-mail, leave a comment on a blog post, or bookmark a page in a social way.

The problem, of course, is that when millions of people are desperately looking for solid, clear information, that’s when it can be the most difficult to find it.

The #swineflu hashtag on Twitter serves as a good point of reference for what Clay Shirky called “filter failure.” The problem is not that there’s a wild abundance of useful information, overloading us with detail, facts, and commentary; the problem is that we don’t have the proper filtering system set up to separate trusted sources and reliable resources from rumors, jokes, misinformation, and ephemera. If those seeking to provide links to reliable information started using a hashtag such as #therealswineflu, it would likely be overtaken — quickly — by tagged content with less value, whatever its source.

So how do we solve filter failure?

We depend on humans to serve as our filters. We do this all the time, when we ask a friend a question, or talk with someone we know who happens to be an expert on a given topic. (I imagine the world’s epidemeologists are fielding a huge number of Facebook messages from old friends this week.)

When it comes to reliable sources for news that breaks on a massive scale, our best sources are likely to be Wikipedia for facts, and journalists for explanation, clarification, context, and meaningful analysis.

+++

One way that journalists are bringing explanation, clarification, context, and meaningful analysis of the Swine Flu story to their readers today is through Publish2.

We’ve been actively encouraging journalists and news organizations using Publish2 to use the swineflu tag to mark the stories and resources they’re