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Copyright 2008
What do you think are/should be the rules of Twitter journalism? A few folks have been using Twitter as a kind of live-blogging mechanism, so folks following a Twitter feed can read what a reporter has to say about an event or news scene as he/she types it in a handheld device. That can be perfectly valid, but it’s important -- as with any medium -- to consider the audience, and how they’re likely consuming what’s being provided. A lot of the Twittering I’ve seen reads as if you have to be at the event to understand what was said -- you have to be so much an insider that you’re already on the inside. If that’s the case, what’s the point? To be pedantic about it, some questions: Do your readers need more information? Should you give a full name of whom you’re talking about? Shouldn’t you say specifics rather than just allude? Can you sum up, or should you quote? Yes, it’s only 140 characters, but as Mark Twain might have said: I wrote a full article because I didn’t have time to Twitter. Writing intelligently in 140-character bursts is a hard thing to do. What else?

It doesn’t appear we are anywhere near the remaking of the newspaper business scene, if the headlines from the last couple of days are any indication. Consider this sampling:

Sun-Times draws attention, concerning the potential sale of parts of the flagging Sun-Times Media group, which has reported a first-quarter loss of $35.8 million.

Gannett offers 160 buyouts in NJ as ad revenue declines. The buyouts are being offered to those 55 and older, with at least 15 years service, at newspapers in New Jersey. If not enough are claimed, layoffs will follow.

Read the Fine Print: Smaller Newspapers Still Thriving, contains some good news, but overall circulation for the smaller-sized, locally-oriented newspapers is still down 2.7 per cent in the latest six-month period.

And, in Cablevision’s rosy vision for Newsday, Alan Mutter analyzes the “hyper-consolidation of local media by a single company” and suggests it may not work quite as well as the corporation hopes it will. (Alan’s earlier post, Why Tribune has to sell Newsday, spells out why Newsday had to go in the first place, and says the Tribune Company isn’t alone in being saddled with huge and hard-to-service debt.)

Now, this isn’t to suggest that newspaper companies are in such deep trouble that the industry

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Beau Fraser is co-author of the new business bestseller, "Death to All Sacred Cows: How Successful Business People Put the Old Rules Out to Pasture." Fraser is also managing director of the international advertising and corporate identity firm The Gate Worldwide. I spoke with him about the themes of the book, and what they mean for the radio industry.

Here is the full audio of our conversation. What follows is a heavily edited transcript


MP3 File

Beau, what is a “sacred cow” in the business world?

A “sacred cow” is a rule, a standard, a formula that we, in business, blindly follow because that's the way things have always been. At one time those rules, those standards, those formulas may have made sense, but unwittingly they became “sacred” over time even though the world, the consumer, the business, the industry has changed. And, unfortunately, a lot of businesses don't recognize that the rules have changed and the world has changed, yet they still use these outdated criteria.

One of your chapters is “Follow the

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From Seth Godin:

That bell curve [above left] represents acceptance by the focused/excited/tastemaking community. Those are the people who love microbeers and haute couture and Civil War memorabilia. Like all market curves, there's a sweet spot. Go too nutsy on us ($90,000 turntables, for example) and even the committed will flee. Go too pop, though, and we'll avoid you as well.

Simple example: Jazz. If you do atonal world jazz played in the dark underwater, few people will come. On the other hand, you won't get many jazz fans at a Spyrogyra concert either. Too pop.

The bell curve [above right], you'll notice, is bigger. This is a second market, a bigger market, the market of pop. These are the folks who go to the Olive Garden for a nice italian meal instead of the authentic place down the street. They too want something that's not too edgy and not too (in their opinion) trite.

The reason you need to care is that gap in the middle. Every day, millions of businesses get stuck in that gap. They either move to the right in search of the masses or move to the left in search of authenticity, but they compromise. And they get stuck with

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At the end of the week (I can’t say work week, because that, apparently, doesn’t end):

• CBS Digital Chief: Networks must embrace ‘user editors’. This video report from Advertising Age features a news exec speaking sense.
• Community is its own newspaper. Interesting development as a small Washington State town loses its newspaper and gets a citizen-driven online alternative that’s owned by an ad agency. Jerry Large’s column about The Orting Times includes this: “He’ll pay a pro or get one of his staffers to do important stories that haven’t been submitted by readers. But if readers have a disagreement, he’s not playing referee. Responses go directly to the writer. And The News won’t do the big stories and investigations traditional papers do. It’s a model that wouldn’t fly in a city. Maybe in a town small enough for most people to know each other there would be some natural checks and balances.” Hmmmm. It may also be a model that works well in a neighbourhood in a city. Discovered through Wired Journalists, via Twitter, because that’s the way the world works now.
• New Audacity beta. I’ve pretty much switched to Amadeus Pro for audio editing, but I’ll still give the latest beta from Audacity a shot. Via

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This headline drew my eye, particularly when combined with the dateline “Surrey.”

Bear attack prompts conservation officers to issue vigilance warning.

Surrey is a suburb of Vancouver. While bears are not that uncommon in the suburbs, attacks by bears are exceedingly rare. I can’t remember one, in fact.

It wasn’t until I got to the end of the fifth graf that I started to realize there was no apparent connection between the bear attack and the suburbs of Vancouver. And at the start of the sixth graf, the location of the attack was finally revealed as being near Bella Coola, which is almost 300 as-the-crow-flies miles north of the suburb of Surrey.

It isn’t clear from the article why the Surrey dateline is there at all, unless that’s where the son of the man who was mauled, who is quoted in the story, lives. That’s a guess: the article doesn’t say.

A long time ago someone said to me: "When the parent becomes threatened by the child, the stage is set for a Greek tragedy." If reports are to be believed, that's playing out right now in San Diego, where Karin Winner, the editor of the decaying and decrepit Union-Tribune, has engineered the exit of Chris Jennewein and Ron James, two of the best online guys in the newspaper business. Not the first time this has happened. And sadly, probably not the last. The newspaper's audience in-market penetration has sagged to 54%, while the website has added 17.2%, according to the latest ABC data. In addition, the website has built a separate national audience/revenue proposition (out-of-market usage is not measured by ABC) based on inbound tourism. So the response is for the newsroom to seize control and oust the growth guys. Dumb.

A successful day at a committee meeting with with a student interview, so let’s celebrate with a squib or nine:

• “If I Can Help A Reporter Out…” Cool idea that started as a Fcebook group and has grown to its own site: you sign up and get requests for help from reporters (or you sign up as a reporter and make requests for information). Nice, simple way for all of us to party together. It appears aimed at PR folks, but I signed up anyway.
• How Little Do Users Read? Jakob Nielsen has a new web users study that’s all about how few words people read on web pages. Kind of interesting in a theoretical way. My own web reading habit is this: I keep reading until I lose interest, no matter how long the piece. I suspect I’m not alone, regardless of what the graphs say.
• The future of investigative journalism… Adrian Monck points to one man’s answer: books. It makes some sense: as important as investigative journalism is, the number of people of who will read 17,000-word pieces is not huge, but there is a market for it.
• how portuguese news websites (don’t) use citizen journalism. Wondering about the state of new media initiatives in Portugal? Alexandre Gamela has it covered.
• Looking for the Mouse in Media: Clay Shirky on Deploying the Cognitive Surplus for Public

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If you follow this blog, you’ll know I’ve been trying to get the Seesmic video plugin working, so I can leave occasional video posts. Turns out the same problems I have here — the recording is fine but it plays back at half-speed — I also have at the Seesmic site. I just tried to leave a video comment for Paul Bradshaw, and again I’m playing back in slo-mo. Others seem to have no problem recording their videos, so there must be something on my set-up.

I feel almost silly going so far back to the marketing basics that I'm actually writing a post on positioning, but this graphic says so much in so few words, that I wanted to share it with you. So complete this sentence for your station. Your station is the only [blank] that [offers blank benefit]. If you can't complete the sentence, you don't have a position. More here. And remember, there's a VAST difference between "having a positioning statement" and having a position.

Jay Rosen points to a thought-provoking speech in which Clay Shirky likens American television to a gin bender that unfortunately has lasted half a century. All those hours wasted on mind-numbing trash. How many hours? He calculates "two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year," and projects that's enough to create the equivalent of 2,000 Wikipedia projects, assuming Wikipedia encapsulates "100 million hours of human thought." I certainly agree about the waste of human potential represented by the time we devote to television, which I also think is a major factor in corroding the social fabric of America by keeping us from talking to each other. I wish I could be so optimistic about our liberation and our future, but my straight-A girls have fallen under the spell of "America's Next Top Model," which my cable system seems intent on running nonstop until either Armageddon or we run out of electricity, whichever comes first. (I defend my BSG addiction on the grounds that it's artistic commentary on current events and human nature.)

From the RSS reader so far (I’m working on three longish posts; we’ll see how many I get to today):

• New daily starts up in Liberal, Kansas. When the town’s daily cut back to two days a week, the publisher, editor and a bunch of others left to start a new print daily. As they say, you go where the readers are and, in Liberal, it seems there are enough of them to justify the cost of print. Another way to read this: Lancaster Management, which owns the former daily, in cutting costs may be on the way to cutting itself out of the picture.
• I hate numbers. The short version of Zac Echola’s latest: it’s about the connections, not the numbers.
• The Declining Value Of Redundant News Content On The Web. Scott Karp uses the overkill on the Microsoft-Yahoo dust-up to make a pitch for originality and thoughtful journalism by both traditional and new media. This is a big challenge for media: they need to recognize that “their” news is available from dozens (hundreds) of sources to anyone with an internet connection; at the same time they need to serve the declining number of locals who rely on them for comprehensive coverage.
• Vincent Musi… is excited about the self-publishing possibilities made available to photojournalists by the ‘net. Hart van Dusen writes: “Hopefully the possibilities include money.”

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I’m still working with the good folks at Seesmic (who apparently keep late hours) to get the WP plugin operating properly. At the moment, it appears that although I can’t get video posts to record properly, you can leave video comments. Apparently you need to enter the reCaptcha code before adding the video.

Yes. New, from CBS Radio: CBS Radio Station unveils the Player.Play.It media player, which will offer a [way to] group stations together. The player will also feature large space for contextual ads that displays marketers’ slides. It will also feature new internet-only stations, such as archives from New York City classic rock station WNEW. As for the personalization function, users can type in an artists’ name and build a playlist based on automated recommendations. The player will also boast e-commerce links and synchronized banner and audio ads. Ever since CBS's acquisition of last.fm, this development has been coming. Look for CBS's competitors to step up to the plate.

I’m upgrading the blog to Wordpress 2.5.1 so if things go a little wonky, it’s only temporary. I hope.

Update: All done. Nothing appears broken. Score another one for WordPress.

If this blog suddenly doesn’t resemble itself anymore, that’s because I’m doing a quick theme change to see if there’s something in my template that’s interfering with the Seesmic plugin. Regular look should return soonish.

Through Geoffrey Hiller I have discovered the Bombay Flying Club, one of the new breed of online storytelling sites, and what storytellers its documentarians are.

Geoffrey, in an email that dropped into my box this morning, is no mean storyteller himself, so when he points to something, it’s worthwhile. Bucharest Below Ground is one of three stories currently up at BFC. It’s a full-screen web documentary that, through photos and sound, explores the lives of those left behind by the Romanian revolution and who now literally live below ground, along sewer lines in Bucharest.

Poul Madsen’s photography is stunning: harsh and beautiful at the same time. (Poul, with Henrik Kastenskov and Frederik Hoelge, make up the Bombay Flying Club.) The story is harrowing, and the full-screen Flash presentation is stunning in its impact. Above all, it is solid documentary storytelling, taking us into the lives of the people, if only briefly, and showing us a little more of the world.

While at the site, I also watched the other two pieces. Both are worth the time.

The tagline for the Bombay Flying Club (there’s nothing there about the origins of the name) is “Online journalism as it could be.” It’s reminder that the internet is not just threatening journalism, it is giving rise to news forms of documentary storytelling and delivery. We gain immeasurably from the eruption of such storytelling skill. We often hear of the “golden ages” of photojournalism, or the written word, and, as much as I distrust

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Still ailing; still surfing:

• Strib publisher tries to reassure the troops. The publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in a memo to employees, says yesterday’s New York Post report that the newspaper is on the verge of bankruptcy isn’t true.
• Charlotte Observer offers buyouts, halts telemarketing. Only telemarketing positions that deal with retention and collection are being saved. Out go those trying to sell new subscriptions, I presume. The Observer is also offering buyouts to “a limited number” of employees “in a number of workgroups” as they streamline and consolidate jobs.
• Creative clones the Flip? It appears there’s a new player on the $100, point-and-shoot video scene.
• Top news sites in Canada for March. Alfred Hermida provides the numbers, which show that the most-visited Canadian-operated site is number six on the list, with traffic almost one-third of the list-leading Google.
• The Wealthiest Colleges Should Acquire ‘The New York Times.’ From Lee Smith: “Higher-education institutions and newspapers have an essential bond — a dedication to the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge — that makes them mutually dependent. ~snip~ Now it’s time for higher education, specifically the nation’s wealthiest institutions, to come to the

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I’ve added the Seesmic plugin to the blog, which should allow for short video posts and video comments, but I’m having problems with it. Seesmic sees my web cam and appears to be recording fine, but playback is in super slo-mo, for both video and audio. Can’t seem to find a solution online, but I’ll keep hitting buttons until something works.

Now that Vin Crosbie's year of teaching at Syracuse is drawing to a close, he's talking about what he found in about a quarter of the faculty: "They're obstructionists because they either deny things are changing (for example, one still thinks the Internet is a fad that will disappear) or they've grown too comfortable teaching the same curricula year after year for 20 or more years. They are tenured and so can't be fired, and the doctrine of academic freedom allows them to teach whatever they see fit." I always thought the point of academic freedom had to do with research and ultimately the growth of human knowledge, not simply to teach whatever the hell you want. So I looked it up in Wikipedia to see the current consensus definition from people with a surplus of time on their hands. Interestingly, the article is flagged that it "may not represent a worldwide view of the subject," but it does use these words: "Academic Freedom is the belief that the freedom of inquiry by students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy. ... Academic tenure protects academic freedom by ensuring that teachers can be fired only for causes such as gross professional incompetence or behavior that evokes condemnation from the academic community itself." So: Are academic luddites practicing academic freedom? I don't mean to be unkind, but are they perhaps merely professionally incompetent? An academic position isn't a place to go hide from the storm. It's a great place to be a storm-chaser. It's sad to hear of people who've passed up that opportunity in favor of retiring on the job.