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Archive for the ‘Broadcast media’ Category

Old question, new format

Posted in Broadcast media, Mobile media, Online media, Print media, Social media, Writing, tagged , on May 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Ben LaMothe poses a question on the 10,000 Words blog about engaging your audience on social-media channels, and I can’t help but notice it’s basically the same question that applies to any medium:

“Why people should follow you, read your updates, add you as a Fan or Friend, or care at all about your existence online? What’s in it for them?”

The key part: What’s in it for them?

What I always tell writers they need to answer up high in a story: Why should the reader care? It’s the same thing. If you don’t give people a reason to pay attention to you, they won’t pay attention. What do you have to offer that’s relevant to the people in your target audience? “News” is a category of answers to the question, not a sufficient answer in itself.

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Where people go when big news breaks

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on May 12, 2011)
Stats from the news of Osama bin Laden’s death illustrate that an old piece of wisdom favorable to TV news remains true:

“The lesson is clear: when big news breaks, people flock to TV. And when they’re online, they still flock to TV, or else they go to the main sites they think of for providing good fast web-native news. Other news sites, like NYT and WaPo, are lucky just to break into the top ten. They’re very good at what they do. But the broad population still doesn’t think of them as being real-time in the way that TV and the web are.”

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Some basically good advice

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on May 10, 2011)
Initially, the post “The Story So Far by J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer kind of ticked me off. She makes suggestions for news organizations to deal with their permanently diminished resources, and at least a few at first come off as quite glib. Example: “Identify the gaps in news coverage and find ways to fill them.” Oh. THAT’s all. Why didn’t I think of that? Just find a way to fill those gaps.

So just so you know, if you have/had that reaction to her post, I had it too, and I would guess it’s a pretty common one. On further reflection, however, I’m going to knock her instead for her phrasing and approach, not her ideas. The problem with her post is she is already over firmly in the territory of having gotten over the shock of what journalism has lost — staff, beats, travel budgets, the whole enchilada — and she’s writing as someone who has moved on to attempt confront the new reality. Many of us are not there yet, even if we think we are. I must not be, judging by my reaction. I think she was tone deaf to how her phrasing would strike this large segment of journalists. Or maybe she was aware of it but decided not to expend the energy to try to add some psychic cushions in her suggestions.

Put a few of those cushions in place yourself, if need be, and then read her suggestions. The premise of her post is that we will never get back the beats and jobs we have lost so far. Given that, how do her suggestions stack up, in your estimation?

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Own that hashtag

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on May 3, 2011)
The Lost Remote blog offers a reminder of why it’s a good idea, when you are using Twitter in your coverage of a big and/or ongoing news event, that you have a hashtag and to be sure your audience is aware of it. Also, an example of a use for hashtags I hadn’t seen before:

“Over on ABC News, they displayed a counter of #RoyalWedding mentions on air. But more interestingly, ABC used hashtags as a poll: #RoyalMess vs #RoyalSuccess, with 82% concluding that Kate’s dress was a #RoyalSuccess.”

UPDATE: Maybe it’s a coincidence of timing, but here’s more on the subject from Twitter Media:

“Many news organizations —ABC News, CNN, BBC, ITV, Sky— amongst others —used the royal wedding as an opportunity to launch new Twitter integrations and to experiment with novel reporting approaches.

“Here are some new best practices that have emerged:

“Tracking total Tweets and Tweets per minute about a major story has surfaced as a state-of-the-art news metric (@ABCRoyals’ Tweet tickers). A nod to MTV for first employing this for a pop culture event in their 2010 MTV VMA visualization.

“Hashtags as polls capture the audience’s opinion while also shaping and driving the conversation. (ABC News with #RoyalMess vs #RoyalSuccess and @SkyNews with #GoRoyals vs #NoRoyals.)

“For a shared story, using company-specific hashtags helps drive and identify your own audience’s tweets (#CNNTV, #BBCWedding).”

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A blip or the start of a trend

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on May 3, 2011)
The New York Times reports today, “For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the United States with television sets has dropped.” It’s not a gigantic drop — 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent — but the unanswered question cited in the story is whether this is the start of a trend because part of the drop is attributed to young adults doing without TV; whatever they watch, they get online. It may be a TV parallel to what has happened with phones, with many young people increasingly doing without landline phones, relying just on their cell phones. So why bring this up in a blog devoted to news? Together with the time-shifting already going on in TV watching due to DVRs, this obviously has implications for the TV ad revenue model, which has implications for everyone — just as changing consumer behaviors have socked newspapers’ advertising model, which in turn socked newsroom (along with every other department’s) budgets.

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It ought to be SOP

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on April 19, 2011)
Poynter.org has some interesting details about the Pulitzer Prize the L.A. Times won for its investigation of outrageous public salaries in Bell, Calif. (among the more interesting details to me, as an editor and former reporter, is that a story can’t get on A1 in L.A. if it’s not filed by 2:30 p.m., Pacific time — before most stories at almost any paper in the Eastern time zone are even filed), but one thing that stands out is a little function that the Times took on as a result of the reaction to the stories:

“Once the Bell city salaries became public, town activists began filing open records requests to learn more. The City of Bell was often slow to respond to public records requests so the Times created a tool to help citizens get the answers they deserve.

“’As part of our coverage, we created a public records request form, to help people to get information from their local governments. One of our city desk assistants still answers those calls and helps people with their public records filings,’ Gottlieb said.

“Then, the Times created a special online DocumentCloud section where readers can share public documents they discover. The section also teaches readers about their rights to read public information and explains what California law says about open records and open meetings. The special section includes public documents that Times reporters obtain on a wide range of topics.”

It’s great the the Times started doing that, but it seems like something that a major news organization — certainly one of that size and prominence — should have been doing already. Maybe every one should.

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Manifesto destinyo

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Jan. 20, 2011)
Some (a lot of) folks think newsrooms are full of pinkos, so I like to take advantage of that cultural prejudice to indulge myself by gorging a little on a manifesto here and there. In the 21st century, they’re a little scarce. Former Guardian science editor, letters editor, arts editor and literary editor Tim Radford has condensed his journalistic experience into a handy set of rules — a manifesto for the simple scribe. But you need not be a newspaper writer. The key to this manifesto is the conveying of information in the news, as described clearly in No. 5: “No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand.” And those of you who appear on TV could just as easily render No. 6, “Nobody has to read this crap,” as, “Nobody has to listen to this crap.” The news is the news, information is information, so if your job is the news, everything in this manifesto relates to what you do in one way or another.

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The trend continues

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Jan. 5, 2011)
The internet is now the main source of news for those in the 18-29 year-old bracket. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the internet has, for the first time, surpassed TV as the primary news source for the demo. And among those 30 to 49, the internet is on track to equal, or perhaps surpass, television as the main source of national and international news within the next few years. I point this out not because it’s a new thing but because it’s a continuation.

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Crossing the digital divide

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 21, 2010)
About a month ago, Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center wrote about three signs your newsroom isn’t ready to cross the digital divide. A great many new-media and journalism-innovation types heaped praise on it. I wanted to post something here about it but struggled to figure out what to say. Thankfully, there is now a followup that helps: a Q and A with John Robinson, the editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, about changes that Michele’s original post prompted him to make. The Greensboro paper’s weekday circulation is under 65,000, so reading about changes in that newsroom is not at all like reading about structural changes in a place like Orlando, Atlanta or Dallas.

Read the whole thing, but here’s what seems to me the biggest change: Starting Jan. 1, the News & Record’s digital editor essentially becomes the No. 2 editor in the room, answering to John and carrying “the authority to direct anyone in news to do what is needed digitally. … He also is charged with knowing what the reporters are working on and making sure that they file online reports when we need them to versus when they get to it.”

In his own blog post about why he decided to make the changes, John wrote that when he read McLellan’s post, “I realized that our newsroom isn’t ready. That embarrassed me and inspired me.”

On a related note, not quite three weeks ago the new CEO of the Journal Register Co. made a much-discussed presentation about efforts to get that company transformed to a digital-first news operation, and his remarks share a key element with what John is trying: If you truly want to make a change like that, the people in charge have to be primarily digital, not rooted in the traditional platform.

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Lists and predictions

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 20, 2010)
One of the standby features that come out at the end of a year is predictions for next year. The Nieman Journalism Lab has been rolling out predictions for journalism in 2011. Give them a read, but look for trends and broad agreement. The views expressed are all over the map. Notably, I haven’t seen anyone predict the closing of any big-city newspapers — which was a popular prediction to make a couple of years ago — but one guy predicted big trouble, if not the end, for the syndication model.

On a related note, a contributor to Mashable offered his own top 10 predictions for the news media. It being the tech-oriented Mashable, the predictions are heavier on the tech side of things than the ones at Nieman are.

UPDATE 12/22: On a related note, Ken Doctor on Newsonomics brings us his list of 11 conventional news wisdoms that will be tested in 2011.

UPDATE 1/3/11: Belatedly, David Carr of the New York Times chimes in with his own media predictions.

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