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Archive for the ‘Broadcast media’ Category

Pulling local together

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

(Originally posted on Nov. 15, 2010)
SaveTheNews.org has an interesting look behind an experimental hyperlocal news-aggregation site in Boulder, Colo., Slices of Boulder. Steve Outing, who oversees the site, describes it as, “It’s curation, and aggregation, and intelligent semantic filtering and processing, and text mining, and personalization offered down to a micro level.” Aggregation seems a natural addition to mainstream news sites, but so far not many seem to be doing it. As Outing says:

“If local news organizations are to survive and be relevant, they must learn to curate and aggregate links to the best local content being produced online for their communities. If they don’t take this on, someone else will.”

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More required reading

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

(Originally posted on Nov. 10, 2010)
Here’s some long-ish reading that’s well worth the time: a piece by Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief of The Guardian, on the value that linking and collaboration bring to journalism. You may be unfamiliar with The Guardian because it’s in England, but it’s a leader in the use of new media tools in service of Big J journalism. The post linked above includes several examples of that.

Here’s the important underlying philosophy of the approach:

“Openness is shorthand for the way in which the vast majority of information is, and will continue to be, part of a larger network, only a tiny proportion of which is created by journalists. Information may not want to be free, but it does want to be linked. It’s difficult to think of any information in the modern world which doesn’t acquire more meaning, power, richness, context, substance and impact by being intelligently linked to other information.

“Collaboration refers to the way we can take this openness one stage further. By collaborating with this vast network of linked information — and those who are generating and sharing it — we can be infinitely more powerful than if we believe we have to generate it all ourselves.”

One thing I would differ with Rusbridger on: He describes himself in the post as a utopian based on his own embrace of the changes and experimentation going on in journalism. I’d call him a realist.

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The missing piece

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

(Originally posted Oct. 29, 2010)
After several years of helping judge big projects with interactives and other online elements, you notice a pattern: Most of them involved a huge amount of work, and yet they almost always have the reader/user as an afterthought. It might be a pretty and impressive project, but it’s usually still a one-way communication: We, the news organization, have pulled this information together and present here in highly readable/viewable form for you, our audience. One project that didn’t is getting a lot of buzz at the Online News Association convention: the Roanoke Times’ I-81: Fear, Facts and the Future. As the Nieman Journalism lab notes, it’s not a particularly newsy topic, just one of lingering interest in the community. But the buzz is about the online presentation’s design as a hub that lets users interact with the data, read all the stories easily, and leave comments. It is a finalist for a Knight Public Service Award (and by the end of the day it may be the winner.) The site went up in May, and as of late September people were still leaving comments. The plan is to keep the site active and update the data on it.

11/1 UPDATE: It didn’t win.

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You can’t do everything

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 20, 2010)
The Knight Foundation announced a second round of traditional media (three newspapers, one public radio station) partnering with hyperlocal sites, essentially aggregating headlines from these small sites. In a post titled “Collaboration is the new competition,” Jan Schaffer of J-Lab gives details of how round one went. There’s not a monolithic model in it. Some of the partnerships called for links back and forth; some allowed the traditional media partners to republish material from the hyperlocal partners.

Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing. The resources traditional newsrooms have lost in recent years seem unlikely to return, certainly not soon, given the continuing sluggishness in the advertising market. These kind of partnerships can help fill the voids that the past years’ cuts have left. No, it won’t be the same. But if you pick your partners carefully, as The Daily Progress has done with Charlottesville Tomorrow — a local nonprofit group that focuses on development and planning issues — then what you get will help your site become the hub where people come first to find reliable local headlines.

10/22 UPDATE: One of the newspapers that participated in round one of the hyperlocal partnerships, The Seattle Times, won the Innovator of the Year award from APME, in part because of that partnership.

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Some news organizations use Facebook well

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 19, 2010)
And then there is The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. I don’t mean to pick on that paper, but the blog Journalistics posted a listing of the number of Facebook fans of the nation’s largest newspapers, and The Star-Ledger had just 372 (although today it’s up to 381, probably people who saw the list). You as an organization have got to be making a serious effort to avoid using Facebook to have numbers that low. For example, the Facebook page of The Weekly Observer in South Carolina shows 1,167 fans. (TBO.com, the site affiliated with both The Tampa Tribune and WFLA, ranks 17th on Journalistics’ list.) Examining these two actually shows a lot about what to do and what not to do.

On the not-to-do side there is just one, but it’s a biggie: The Star-Ledger simply does not post very often. Five times all year, as of the time I’m writing this. The only thing they are doing write is including links.

So what does The Weekly Observer do right? A lot of it is the opposite of The Star-Ledger: frequent posting. From 12:30 p.m. Monday to now, there have been four posts. The paper is a weekly, but this fan page gets daily attention. And everything has a link. As noted yesterday, posts carrying images and links not only get more clicks, they elevate your posts in the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine whether your fans even see what you posted.

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Like a foreign population

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 12, 2010)

The “Reflections of a Newsosaur” blog reflects today on a recent study of young media consumers by BVA, a French market research firm, and <a href=”http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/10/digital-natives-more-different-than-you.html” title=”the larger implications for the news industry”>the larger implications for the news industry</a> if the findings can be extrapolated to young people over here as well. Summary: Our existing products may be very poorly positioned to appeal to this group, which distrusts all authority, relies foremost on friends for information, talks back, and values speed, mobility and bite-size information.

“The research is important to anyone worried about the future of the newspaper business, because it demonstrates how profoundly next-generation consumers differ from the aging geezers (this writer included) who account for more than half of newspaper readership in the United States even though they represent barely 30% of the population.

“The French study found that young people have utterly different attitudes than their elders with respect to such seminal concepts as, say, institutional authority. Further, those attitudes are diametrically opposed to the values, expectations and economic underpinnings that suffuse the newspaper business.

“The almost complete disconnect between generations means editors and publishers have lots to learn – tout de suite – about modern consumers, if they hope to preserve the long-term sustainability and value of their franchises. But it won’t be easy. Because learning to think, speak and act in this new and alien paradigm is even harder than learning French.”

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Immediacy wins

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 8, 2010)

While helping the boss to gather material for a presentation that included examples of how Media General newsrooms increasingly are using new tools, one example drove home why reporters/photographers/videographers should have smartphones with not just photo but video capability. It was not at all an obvious case. The obvious ones are things like hurricanes, major fires, really big stuff that calls for having as many electronic eyes and ears in the field as possible. This one, though, was an everyday traffic accident. The above video from WNCT of a motorcycle-truck wreck seems, on the surface, to have not much going for it. But what made the hair on my neck stand up was how it differs from the traditional print or even TV coverage of such an event. The reporter moves around the scene. The camera pans slowly. If I were from there and drove that street, I could place it exactly in my mind. Still images can’t do that. A bigger, more expensive camera could do that too, but somehow the phone camera provides a sense of immediacy that is much stronger. Or maybe it’s seeing it on the computer screen, potentially minutes after the wreck, that makes it feel more immediate.

News staff without mobile news reporting ability is a waste of resources.

Coincidentally, while I was working on this post, Ryan Sholin — a frequent blogger on the subjects of new media and the future of news — had a post of his own making the same case but probably better. Certainly with more explanation. Summary: “Because we have inexpensive ways to gather and distribute video in larger numbers to our readers and viewers and users in a fragmented audience, equipping a larger number of reporters with easy-to-learn, easy-to-edit point-and-shoot cameras is a logical choice that makes sense for our readers.”

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Technologies that changed journalism

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

(Originally posted on Sept. 28, 2010)

The 10,000 Words blog has a post on key technologies that have aided in the transformation of news (the post’s title actually says they “changed journalism forever”). More accurately, they changed how we report and deliver the news. The oldest “technology” on the list is also the one that arguably is having the biggest effect on the business: Friendster is listed at No. 2 for being the grandaddy of social networking.

Does the list leave anything out?

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A fair definition of engagement

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

(Originally posted on Sept. 22, 2010)

Joy Mayer of the Reynolds Journalism Institute had a conversation with Steve Buttry, director of community engagement at TBD.com, about what engagement means since “engagement” is a word much in use in media circles today and is, after all, the focus of Steve’s job title. Highlights of the answer:

“He says engagement comes down to two-way communication, along with a feeling of affiliation. When a media company is engaged with its community, that’s a meaningful relationship — one that doesn’t involve a ‘we know what’s good for you’ gatekeeper’s attitude. It’s reciprocal, and valued.

“… Communities want to be engaged with each other, Steve says. They want to share a collective experience. TBD is experimenting with what the sharing of a collective experience looks like in the digital world, as a media company.”

When reading that post, some of you may stop cold at the fact that Steve has a staff of six doing all this engaging. Don’t let that stop you — they are trying to engage Washington, D.C., and a network of 167 bloggers. The important takeaway is the two-way communication part.

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Trends in news consumption

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

(Originally posted on Sept. 13, 2010)

The good news: Americans are spending more time with the news. People say they spend 70 minutes getting news from various sources, the Pew Research Center says, the highest amount of time reported since the mid-1990s. From there, though, the news is a little murky except that news seen on digital platforms is taking off.

And there is unambiguous bad news for printed newspapers: While 26 percent of all Americans say they read a print newspaper yesterday, that figure falls to just 8 percent among adults younger than 30. And, as you can see in the chart above, people spend less time with the newspaper than with the other media options they have.

And an interesting note: 33 percent regularly use search engines to get news on topics of interest, up from 19 percent in 2008. That points up the growing importance of making sure you are writing online headlines with search engines in mind — and making sure you understand how search engines work.

UPDATE: Related to the search engine note above, during a conference call of news directors today Jason Clough of WNCN pointed out the importance of adding tags to videos posted to YouTube. During coverage of Hurricane Earl, the first videos the station loaded to YouTube weren’t getting much traffic, but once staffers started adding every tag they could think of that people might use to find Earl video, the viewer stats shot way up. (WNCN posts its video to YouTube, by the way, because linking to the YouTube video from Facebook makes the video viewable on mobile devices, while sometimes video posted directly to Facebook is not viewable on some mobile devices. Good tip to remember.)

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