Category Archives: Journalism

Dave Winer’s advice to Keith Olbermann

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This post doesn’t depend on knowing who Dave Winer or Keith Olbermann is (are?). It’s about media and brand. My favorite part of Mr. Winer’s advice:

“…the future of communication is not about the bottleneck that MSNBC and their competitors control. I don’t think you really need them. Unless of course you need to make $5 million a year, in which case you probably do need them. But if what you’re interested in is power to influence public opinion, and becoming more relevant over time, not more niched over time — if being influential is what you’re about, they really did you a favor.

So here’s what I recommend. Borrow a page from Conan O’Brien’s playbook, and use the social network to communicate with your fans.

Get a video camera and put it in your living room or den at home. Hit Record. Sit down in front of the camera and rant for 15 minutes. You can do that, I’m sure. Then without any production at all, upload it to YouTube and send the link around on Twitter. The first time you do it, it will be the most watched video of the day. Far more people will see it than used to see you on MSNBC, or O’Reilly or Beck or any of them. Depending on how fresh and interesting it is, and how real it is, and how compelling you really are (I know that’s a lot of “depends”) there won’t be much of a dropoff on Day 2 and 3 and so on. Now you’ve got your own network. And no one can shut you down. And you’ll have a lot more people watching you.”

Leo Laporte has done such an amazing job of this. Same for Arianna Huffington, and I’m sure there are others that don’t come to mind. Begs the question: Who owns the Keith Olbermann brand? MSNBC/Comcast? Or Keith Olbermann? Who owns your brand? Have you established a brand? What is it and where can I find it?

Esquire profiles Roger Ailes

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I knew Roger Ailes was THE man behind Fox News but I had forgotten –or didn’t know– some of the other facts that make this Esquire profile so interesting. I know, you’re thinking an elite, East Coast rag like Esquire won’t treat Roger in a fair and balanced manner. Who can say? I can tell you that the piece absolutely savages Mr. Ailes.

You have to be of a certain age to remember or care what a lying turd Dick Nixon turned out to be but it was Mr. Ailes who put him in the White House.

He disavows his political commitment to Nixon by saying that he never worked in the White House and was more interested in the political potential of TV than he was in politics itself — “I wasn’t worried about the message. I was worried about the backlighting.” And a year later Richard Nixon was still sweaty, still shifty-eyed, still petulant, still paranoid, and still instinctively mistrusted by most Americans. The only difference was that thanks to Roger Ailes, he was president.

Can he make that horrible lightening strike twice?

“What kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?”

If you love Fox News, you gotta love Roger Ailes because he IS the network.

What will 2011 bring for journalism?

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“…syndication makes little sense in a world with URLs. When news outlets were segmented by geography, having live human beings sitting around in ten thousand separate markets deciding which stories to pull off the wire was a service. Now it’s just a cost.”

“Giving credit where credit is due will reward original work, whether scoops, hot news, or unique analysis or perspective. This will be great for readers. It may not, however, be so great for newspapers, or at least not for their revenues, because most of what shows up in a newspaper isn’t original or unique. It’s the first four grafs of something ripped off the wire and lightly re-written, a process repeated countless times a day with no new value being added to the story.”

Full article by Clay Shirky

Just “get the bloody story”

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“Yet journalism’s stock-in-trade is disclosure. As we have seen this week with WikiLeaks, power loathes truth revealed. Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails, as it does in the case of most international bodies.”“The great American editor Oz Elliott once lectured graduates at the Columbia School of Journalism on their sacred duty to democracy as the unofficial legislators of mankind. He asked me what I thought of it. I said it was no good to me: I was trained as a reptile lurking in the gutter whose sole job was to “get the bloody story.”

via Simon Jenkins, guardian.co.uk

 

Journalism in the Age of Data

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I keep reading how data visualization is the future of journalism but it didn’t sink in very far. This documentary (?) turned on the light bulb in several ways.

I remember (sort of) the first time I inserted some audio into a story that aired on the radio station I worked at. Zowie! How cool is that? Well, better than no sound at all (maybe).

As I watched this, I realized how little understanding is communicated by the sound bite or some TV Ken/Barbie sticking a mic in someone’s face. Real depth, real insight and understanding will happen online (although we’ll soon stop making that distinction if we haven’t already).

I was also struck by the really smart men and women featured. They are not pretty faces. You don’t get on TV unless you look good. I sure hope J-Schools are paying attention to this.

The news organizations (if in fact it turns out to BE news organizations) the bring these skills to the party will win and we’ll all be better informed.

[via Cool Infographics]

“In future the only secrets will be spoken ones.”

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The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins argues the job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment. “It is for governments – not journalists – to guard public secrets, and there is no national jeopardy in WikiLeaks’ revelations”

“If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.”

“The money‑wasting is staggering. Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world’s superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.”

I particularly liked the line, “An electronic secred is a contradiction in terms.”

Spreadable Media

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Henry Jenkins the founder and former co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and author of Convergence Culture (what happens when,“old and new media collide.”) In an interview with NeimanLab.org, he talks about his new book, Spreadable Media, which will be out in 2011. A few snippets:

“For things to live online, people have to share it socially. They also have to make it their own — which can be as participatory as just passing a YouTube clip on as a link or making a copycat video themselves.”

“Spreadable media is media which travels across media platforms at least in part because the people take it in their own hands and share it with their social networks.”

“News sites which prevent the sharing of such content amongst readers may look like ways to protect the commercial interest of that content, but in fact, they kill it, destroying its value as a cultural resource within networked communities, and insuring that the public will look elsewhere for news that can be spread.”

And would you believe that within the past month, I had a client say he didn’t want to link to some association sites because he didn’t want to “send people away from my page.”

There are  a lot of old media types who would read this interview and say, “If it doesn’t make me any money… I don’t care how far my story spreads.”

Clay Shirky: The Shock of Inclusion

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“If you were in the news business in the 20th century, you worked in a kind of pipeline, where reporters and editors would gather facts and observations and turn them into stories, which were then committed to ink on paper or waves in the air, and finally consumed, at the far end of those various modes of transport, by the audience.

What’s going away, from the pipeline model, isn’t the importance of news, or the importance of dedicated professionals. What’s going away is the linearity of the process, and the passivity of the audience. What’s going away is a world where the news was only made by professionals, and consumed by amateurs who couldn’t do much to produce news on their own, or to distribute it, or to act on it en masse.

We are living through a shock of inclusion, where the former audience is becoming increasingly intertwined with all aspects of news, as sources who can go public on their own, as groups that can both create and comb through data in ways the professionals can’t, as disseminators and syndicators and users of the news.”

Covering election returns

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Election night was a big night for radio station news departments. Or, they were back in the 70’s in the little town where I worked.

The candidates would crowd into the county clerk’s office and watch as the votes were written on a big chalk board. The radio station news guy would setup a small transmitter and send back updates that were broadcast live. You were either there… listened to us… or heard the results the next morning at the local coffee shop.

When I started working with The Missourinet (a statewide radio network) in the mid-80’s, it wasn’t that different. One of our reporters would set up at the Secretary of State’s office with a dedicated land-line (before cell phones). Maybe they used one of the state’s phones, I don’t recall. But the reporter would phone in regular updates to the network newsroom where they’d go out to affiliate stations around the state.

Sometime in the 90’s technology improved to the point where we could Telnet into the the state computers (via very slow modem’s) and access the numbers directly. And then report them over the network.

Fast forward to the Web. No more Telnet but those early websites were very glitchy. And slow. But they got better every election. It was a wonderful thing. Anyone with internet access could see the returns as they were tabulated. But it was still easier for radio stations (and their listeners) to take our reports than produce their own.

Last week one of our news directors stopped by my office to talk about what we would do online for the upcoming election. Missouri’s Senate race is the Main Event and we’ll have reporters at both candidates venue. They’ll do interviews and feed those back to the network where reporters will be working the Secretary of State’s website.

One the other end of the information pipe, people will still be listening to the radio and watching TV but I expect Twitter and Facbook to be where many get their first information. (Does the Secretary of State have a Twitter feed?). And most of it will be mobile.

Eventually we’ll all vote electronically, without standing in line. And we’ll see the results in near real time.

Will this elections more susceptible to fraud? Girl, please! Is the TSA making flying safer?

Social media and news

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This morning Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill tweeted that it’s time to “fire the watchdog overseeing contracting in Afghanistan.” She included a link and invitation to her Facebook page where she posted a video explaining her positon and asking “what do you think?”

I’m sure this is happening hundreds of times a day but this still feels like something significant is happening. The senator has 40,000+ followers on twitter (not sure about Facebook). I’m sure elections have been won and lost by that many votes, but that’s not my point.

How would the senator have made her position known pre-twitter/facebook? Press release emailed to hundreds of media outlets? Radio interviews with big news stations in St Louis and Kansas City? Maybe a few seconds for a satellite interview with a couple of TV stations (or the networks)?

And for all I know she’s still doing this but in every instance, the media controls the experience. And there would be little or no opportunity for engagement with the people.

It’s not difficult for me to imagine a time in the very near future where Twitter replaces the emailed (faxed?!) news release. That’s probably already happening. And I am seeing more and more YouTube and Facebook video showing up in “newscasts.”

Real Journalists would insist that much is lost by them not having an opportunity to ask the senator “the hard questions.” But the’ll be hard pressed to find many viewers/listeners/readers who agree their questions add much. Not saying they’d be right, just that they don’t agree.

I’m going to go back to Senator McCaskill’s Facebook page and read some of the comments. And if anyone can put me in touch with her social media advisor(s), I’d really like to talk to them because they seem to know what they’re doing.