new media

Apparently we're legitimate now

Submitted by yelvington on November 28, 2006 - 1:39pm

I was just thinking that it's been awhile since I saw a news story that had people talking about how it had legitimized the Internet as a news medium. For years it seemed that every big story stirred that kind of talk. Two early ones that come to mind are the 1997 Heaven's Gate cult suicide (at the Star Tribune we copied the entire Heaven's Gate website as part of online news coverage) and the 1998 Starr report (hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the full text).

Perhaps that talk was blown away by Hurricane Katrina, which is the last time I recall hearing it. The Times-Picayune's use of the Web after its offices and presses were flooded was cited as one such transition point, although it was by no means the first such case. Grand Forks, ND, was devastated by flood and fire in 1997, and local media made extensive use of the Web, including lists and forums to help people contact families and friends scattered by the disaster.

What brought all this to mind is Erik Larson's latest book, Thunderstruck, in which he simultaneously traces the history of Guglielmo Marconi's invention of radio (wireless telegraphy) and the sensational murder drama of Hawley Harvey Crippen. The American-born doctor killed and dismembered his wife in their north London home in 1910. Eventually Scotland Yard tracked him down and arrested him on a steamer approaching Canada.

In Larson's analysis, the gushing press coverage of how the new Marconi wireless technology helped police find Crippen and his girlfriend as they fled to America saved Marconi's struggling company ... and legitimized the technology.

Anyone working in "new media" today will recognize Marconi's struggles. The book is not as compelling as Larson's previous dual-plot murder tale, The Devil in the White City, but it's a good read and well worth the time.

The New Media Establishment

Submitted by yelvington on November 13, 2006 - 1:59pm

UK's Press Gazette (trade journal for newspapers) has churned up a list of "The New Media Establishment - 50 people shaping online journalism."

In the comments, this anonymous flame:

"What a ludicrous list...more like 10 people shaping online journalism and 40 old MSM hacks who discovered the internet year before last. Newspapers boldly throwing themselves into....radio, and calling their 'reporters remainder bin' a 'blog' is not 'shaping online journalism'. This explains perfectly why the MSM (and those who report/comment on it) is in the bucket full of trouble it is in today, losing money, credibility and readership in equal measure.

"This has to win the Circle Jerk of the Year award."

Ouch. I guess that's what they meant by the title "Establishment."

The rehabilitation of amateurism

Submitted by yelvington on October 16, 2006 - 1:16pm

Writing for the Club of Amsterdam, a futurist society, Milverton Wallace describes the rise of the amateur, "someone or an activity motivated by love" and not by the profit motive.

"There's a big misconception among professional journalists that the new media is about news. Wrong. It's about self-expression, it's about participating in defining and shaping the information/communication environments in which we live. The various forms of digital media - blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking and networking etc - are merely the means and the channels for achieving this. An entire generation - call them the digital natives or the new Corinthians - is creating an open, collaborative, networked communications infrastructure in opposition to the closed, top down, hierarchical traditional media organisations which have dominated the media universe since the 19th century."

Hitting on all four cylinders

Submitted by yelvington on June 21, 2006 - 1:35pm

I'm in Reston, Va., waiting for my turn in front of the room at the American Press Institute. The seminar is "Internet strategies for community markets." Gordon Borrell is up right now and is pointing out the inherent weakness of one-note news sites, citing Pew research that says the "yesterday market" -- the people who went online yesterday seeking local news -- is 9 percent at best, while there are many other things to do online.

He's so right.

For years I've been citing four key concepts: timely, useful, interactive, entertaining. So many local news sites are none of that. You can't build success on the Internet by building an HTML version of your daily print product.

I've only been here fore a couple of hours but it seems that most of the seminar participants get that, and are eager to dig into new areas, especially participation/interaction.

48 million content creators

Submitted by yelvington on May 28, 2006 - 4:58pm

The latest from Pew: 48 million Americans have posted content to the Internet. The majority of them are broadband users, and broadband penetration jumped by 40 percent between March 2005 and March 2006. Significantly, broadband penetration in households with income between $40,000 and $50,000 grew by 68 percent.

Editors, please listen. If you're not rethinking your entire content strategy around participative principles, you're placing your future at risk.

Every newspaper's website can, and should, be the center of online community -- connections, sharing, conversation.

Few are.

Megatrends, megachallenges

Submitted by yelvington on May 17, 2006 - 9:49am

I've been noodling on a list of megatrends that present megachallenges for newspapers. What am I missing?

  • Fractured marketplace. We don't have an audience any more; we have lots of little audiences, and some of them are really different. You can see part of that in the generational media usage changes that are killing print circulation. But it's not just that. We have wired oldsters who have no use for the tree-killing stock listings, and unwired oldsters who go ballistic if we remove the stock listings. Many people have digital cable with sophisticated set-top boxes and/or Tivo; they have no use for TV listings in print. Early adopters vs. luddites. Political liberals vs. conservatives. Feminists vs. big hair. Not only can you not please everybody, it's becoming damned hard to please anybody.
  • Info-elite moves to the Web. People who actually care about the news (and that's a shrinking percentage of the total) are finding the Internet a rich source of satisfaction. They're not necessarily getting that satisfaction from newspaper websites. The best customers are finding other information sources.
  • Word of mouth becomes stronger than the press. The net has shifted the balance of power. Gatekeeping is dead. There's an adage that says you should never get in an argument with somebody who buys ink by the barrel, but the net has given everyone a publishing platform. When we make a mistake, we get our tails kicked, hard, in public, by the public (Dan Rather).
  • Backlash against authoritarianism. Traditional media have tried to be "authoritative" but it's come across as authoritarian, and many people have resented that for a long time. Now it's payback. And that feeling is being inflamed by crass manipulators -- sometimes politically motivated (the right-wing campaign against "liberal media") and sometimes personally motivated (bloggers campaigning against "big media").
  • An explosion of microcasting. Everybody's living out there in the long tail of the demand curve. One site indexes 30,000 podcasts. Icerocket indexes 10 million blogs; BlogHerald claims there are 100 million out there. Much of this is fed by personal passion and not by capitalism (see Creative Commons, open-source software, etc.) All of this subtracts time/attention from traditional media.
  • The end of local/life in Generica. It's getting so you can't tell one community from another; Wal-Mart, Best Buy, TGI Friday's and Chile's and all the same fast-food joints have crowded out what makes a place unique. That, and migration/mobility, are eroding the value of local news, which is the one remaining major asset of local newspapers.

There have to be more big ones; what am I missing? I suppose I could mention "ourselves."

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