My Life in the Cloud
I made a Tag Cloud of stuff on my site and blog today. Make your own at Wordle. Warning: it’s a little distracting.
War Game
If you haven’t read this article on the NY Times, you really should. It’s called Battle Plans for Newspapers, and a small but varied group (it includes Craig Newmark and Rick Rodriguez) weigh in on what may be lost and what can still be saved in journalism. If the article itself isn’t enough to keep you reading for awhile, the comments certainly will.
Incidentally, the part written by Edward Fouhy comes from a series of interviews he did as a consultant for J-Lab, while working on a very large video project we are getting ready to release.
Some of my favorite bits:
“With the current model of free online content, newspapers have essentially turned themselves into shoppers — but, ironically, still with great quality, created by the same culture and people whose work consumers used to pay for. This is complete suicide.” -Steven Brill
“I am confident that the next big thing on the Internet — Web 3.0 if you like — will be a layer of professionally curated information sitting on top of the amateur Web 2.0 layer. Rather than slithering into the democratic swamp of crowd-generated content, smart local publishers should focus on their core expertise — the organization and curation of information by professionals.” – Andrew Keen
“What’ll work? No one knows, but we need to experiment.” -Craig Newmark
Let’s lay it out.
These are basically my notes from David Johnson’s first Saturday interactive journalism class. Excuse the choppiness.
Why the turmoil?
- Anyone can publish.
The cost of entry of the newspaper business is very large. Just to buy a printing press you can expect to spend $50 million. The Washington Times only recently paid off their presses that they bought in the early 80s. However, with a computer, an Internet connection, a domain name and a hosting plan, anyone is able to publish their ideas/stories/photos/video for arguably a teensy fraction of what it would cost to break into the traditional publishing business.
But, that doesn’t mean that everyone knows how to publish effectively.
- Relevancy & Timeliness
The Web is an immediate form of information. We (the webbies) offer the immediacy of broadcast with the depth of print. The newspaper prints an article at 11 pm from a wire that came in at 5 pm that was edited for two hours after being written by someone at the wire service at 3 pm. You’ll see it tomorrow morning, but you could have seen it at 3, when the story was originally written.
- Advertising
The only thing that defines how long a newspaper can be is the amount of advertising sold for that issue.
The huge push right now is to create video content, which Johnson says is one of the most inefficient ways to bring content to your audience. It takes people to go out and gather the video, then time to edit, etc…
As if you haven’t seen this already: O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0 (yay 2005!)
Here’s the bottom line: The key job of an interactive journalist will be to tune out the static of all the voices of the Internet and tune in what’s relevant. Forever the gatekeepers, huh?
New Resolutions
Generally, I don’t make resolutions for the New Year. It just seems a little silly to wait for a certain day to roll around to start improving oneself, but this year I do have a few in mind.
As some of you may know, I am a graduate assistant at the J-Lab here in Washington. It’s a great organization, doing some really good stuff for citizen media across the country. However, I think they seriously lack a strong presence in popular social media, which is messed up considering the goal of the non-profit. It’s understandable, though. J-Lab has a really small staff and they just don’t have time to stay on top of everything. That’s what grad assistants are for. Ha.
This week we will have a mini-retreat for new ideas, and I’ll be pitching my thoughts on Twitter and Facebook. One of the things J-Lab does is find Cool Stuff and news articles for KCNN. However, I don’t think we do it often enough nor bring enough attention to it. I want to solve that problem this year.
Additionally, if you couldn’t tell, J-Lab is in desperate need of a site redesign. This has actually been a long, challenging process for the people who work there full time. We are hoping to launch everything in January, but along with that will come editing and formatting little things that can sometimes be overlooked when redesigning such a huge site.
On a personal note, I will turn 25 in May. I always told myself I need to have done something awesome by 25… call it a quarter-century goal or some such. Luckily, eight days after my birthday, I will have my MA. That’s a pretty decent accomplishment, I think.
My other personal goals include busting butt during this semester in order to land in a great internship over the summer and an even better job come August. Also, I want to focus a little more on fashion. I know, I know, geeky journalists aren’t expected to dress super well, but I like to think I have a decent eye for what like; I want to incorporate a little more of my eclectic tastes into my daily outfits.
Don’t worry. This won’t turn into a style blog. I couldn’t keep it going.
Deck Chairs
December 29, 2008 at 7:14 pm (journalism, net things) (commentary, internet, journalism)
Mark Briggs wrote up a good analysis of the recent Bivings Group report on the use of the Internet by America’s largest newspapers. Overall, things are looking up. The online side of American’s favorite papers are opening up to the idea of user-generated content and most are allowing comments on articles, a staple in the blogosphere.
Their final analysis, however, is an ice bath:
Briggs says it’s akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Yes, reinvention will likely be necessary, but in the meantime these figures show something else: that the dinosaurs are willing to learn and adapt. They are starting to listen.
Which really just makes them pliable enough for when the revolution really gets going.
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