2 points
by Jim McBee, partner1 year agoon Smartnews1 child
Please check us out, a new way of marketing news and info content: a freelance journalism cooperative that provides income and access to markets for writers, photographers, artists and editors, and affordable content for publishers. Join our FB group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=69091714512
"Columbia presumably understands that this is its job when it comes to teaching traditional newspaper and broadcast reporting. But suddenly, when the skills involved are newfangled Webby things, that job becomes discounted, something anybody can learn from any old extension school, or any faculty member can pick up by cramming."
I disagree with this a bit. I think j-schools should provide students with access to the software/computers needed to do the sorts of multimedia stuff they need t learn and they should have people on staff who are darn good at it, but there shouldn't necessarily be classes devoted to it by name....because you have to teach yourself this stuff on your own.
If I was going to teach a multimedia class, the assignment for week one would be to learn HTML before next week's class. Instead, we spent 10 weeks learning it in piecemeal fashion via Dreamweaver, a g-d-awful program that's best use is for writing stories, not building web sites.
Also, while it's important for folks to understand how their Word document gets turned into a published story on the web, if someone's going to be a reporter, they would be best served by getting really, really good at that. There's always going to be someone with more technical skills. Being a jack-of-all-trades helps no one.
This is a really marvelous essay, positing that no one really knows what's going to work and come out ahead 20 years from now, but we should be trying lots of stuff.
Gems:
“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
This is so on the nose it's scary.
Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
And this is exactly what people have been pointing out here on JStartup since we launched the other week. All of these essays in Time, the NYTimes, the Atlantic etc, have all been proposing fundamentally backwards, conservative, keep-the-genie-in-the-bottle solutions to what's ailing advertising companies that publish news to market their advertising. None of them will work, Shirky says here, because they've been tried before, but also because they are on the wrong side of history itself.
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
More scary truth-telling.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
Newspapers are an advertising model that uses original news/reporting as a marketing tool to get people to look at their ads. That's all. The journalism itself can appear in many more contexts, they just have to be invented.
Michele, what can you tell us about how you priced your advertising, how you're going about selling it and how you're sourcing your news? What makes The Island a venture that will be successful?
Agreed, and it's important to realize that advertisers *are* irrationally fond of print advertising, which is why -- at least for now -- it makes some sort of business sense for publishers to think they should keep experimenting with ways to preserve their print editions. The disparity between print and online ad revenue at CJR is substantial, despite the fact that our site publishes about twelve articles per day, and the magazine comes out six times per year.
The only reason to print it is to take advantage of advertisers' irrational fondness for print advertising: their willingness to pay more for something whose effects they can't track or measure.
true. It's also inherently conservative. When your top priority shifts from "make something people want" to "cover your @$$ so you can go to work tomorrow" you're in a bad spot.
I swear I'm not quibbling here. This is important. But saying that the most important thing is to preserve the institution is simply either vacuous or ill-defined.
What I'm saying is that advice is worth virtually nothing because it doesn't help eliminate many possible courses of action.
Nieman's project doesn't extend Calais--just uses it well. They say they have some homegrown analysis happening too, though they unfortunately don't specify. You'd think Nieman would consider open-sourcing its good code.
As to what the very simple service does now, though, the summary on the post does well:
— How do specific stories evolve over time? What path do they take when they travel among blogs, newspapers, cable TV, or other sources?
— What specific story topics won’t you hear about in [News Source X], at least compared to its competitors?
— When [News Source Y] writes about Sarah Palin [or Pakistan, or school vouchers], what’s the context of their discussion? What are the words and phrases they surround that topic with?
So there are some very basic bar charts and maps that are the results of these queries. The data is pretty good, though far from perfect, which @EthanZ discusses in the interview. It doesn't really help, for instance, to include the tags "united states" and "america" in the same viz as separate descriptors. Also, although I'm sure they keep the labels on the x-axis of their bar charts to themselves because it's not terrible intuitive or human-readable, it's too bad Nieman doesn't offer some description. It's really hard to compare otherwise.
Can you give the cliff notes on this? I checked out the blog post and the actual media cloud site. I saw a swiss army knife-looking app with "Calais" emblazoned on it.
The Calais API is great, but I know what it does and what it's capable of. There are lots of apps using it. How does this extend it?
Well, I sure wish they had open approval. But this is where "business" meets "San Francisco thinking." The Guardian wants this to be awesome and they want to make money from running ads around the api stories people use. I don't begrudge them wanting to screen their initial users. I just wish they'd approve me!
That said, there's no note about how the number of applications compared to last year. is it safe to assume they had fewer then? That would seem unlikely considering all these other metrics went up.
Assuming there were fewer applicants, was it because they added the garage onto the process, raising the barrier for entry? Did that lead to better applications?
The numbers they scored from the social media approach are pretty impressive:
• Traffic to the Knight News Challenge site increased 47% compared to the same time the previous year. average of 2,930 visitors a day, during application timeframe.
• 17,000 visitors on contest day. Both these metrics were 50% higher than the previous year.
• 2,323 projects were submitted. 258 were invited to submit a full proposal, 70 became finalists for the funding are going through final review. Staff considers the quality extremely high.
• 224 independent blog posts about the Knight News Challenge, compared to 24 the previous year. Blog posts appeared in blogs published in European countries, the UK, Korea, China, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Canada and Latin America as well as the US
.
• Written up in Valleywag, Freakonomics.
• 1,600 people registered for the News Challenge Garage site (required to comment). 800 posted projects. 466 applied for a grant. Discussion of the Garage generated 10,000 links that Google indexed, 6,000 of which did not originate from the Garage site.
• The 8 meet ups had 400 attendees, many of whom blogged, shot video and pictures and shared about the program. Roughly 50% of the meet up attendees applied to the program. There are 700 links to mentions of the events indexed in Google, 30 photos on Flickr tagged Knight News Challenge meet up, and 4 videos).
• Google reported over 60,000 mentions of "Knight News Challenge" on non-Knight sites in 2008; this was a 110% increase from 2007.
Oof, I guess I'll admit here that I didn't apply to the 2008-9 round of the KNC because I never received feedback promised multiple times in the 2007-8 round, despite being told my project made it to the final round.
I think this is a good place to discuss the thoughtful article at CJR. Thing is, I've read it twice now, once yesterday and once today, and I'm not sure I get it as a coherent whole. It is sort of two parts introduction to the world, one part looking into the near future that looks like a pretty linear extension of the present, and one part looking a bit further into the future that represents a serious break from the present.
This isn't criticism, but if I had my druthers, though, I would have liked the piece to focus on its final part, which is really only discussed in the antepenultimate and penultimate grafs. They're the inspiration for the title of the thing, and they're the vaguest part of the article. While that vagueness is certainly understandable, I'm not sure it's necessary. It would have been awesome to see that vision more fully fleshed out and undergirded by some economic, political, or cultural logic.
"In turbulent times," Drucker wrote, "the first task of management is to make sure of the institution's capacity for survival."
You know, that doesn't really mean anything. Management probably won't have an avenue that guarantees survival. It will have a set of options, or maybe a continuum of options that are simply messy. There will be many moving parts, all interconnected, and that kind of system is terribly difficult to optimize. Some will be safer in the short-term but seem riskier in the long-term, while others will be riskier in the short-term but actually be safer in the long-term.
Please check us out, a new way of marketing news and info content: a freelance journalism cooperative that provides income and access to markets for writers, photographers, artists and editors, and affordable content for publishers. Join our FB group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=69091714512
Thanks for adding that in, and for finding this originally. I tried submitting it, only to find that you beat me to it!
"Columbia presumably understands that this is its job when it comes to teaching traditional newspaper and broadcast reporting. But suddenly, when the skills involved are newfangled Webby things, that job becomes discounted, something anybody can learn from any old extension school, or any faculty member can pick up by cramming."
I disagree with this a bit. I think j-schools should provide students with access to the software/computers needed to do the sorts of multimedia stuff they need t learn and they should have people on staff who are darn good at it, but there shouldn't necessarily be classes devoted to it by name....because you have to teach yourself this stuff on your own.
If I was going to teach a multimedia class, the assignment for week one would be to learn HTML before next week's class. Instead, we spent 10 weeks learning it in piecemeal fashion via Dreamweaver, a g-d-awful program that's best use is for writing stories, not building web sites.
Also, while it's important for folks to understand how their Word document gets turned into a published story on the web, if someone's going to be a reporter, they would be best served by getting really, really good at that. There's always going to be someone with more technical skills. Being a jack-of-all-trades helps no one.
Here's a discussion happening among technologists about this article at Hacker News
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515749
Also required reading for anyone doing social/community journalism as part of the future:
A group is its own worst enemy
This is a really marvelous essay, positing that no one really knows what's going to work and come out ahead 20 years from now, but we should be trying lots of stuff.
Gems:
“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
This is so on the nose it's scary.
Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
And this is exactly what people have been pointing out here on JStartup since we launched the other week. All of these essays in Time, the NYTimes, the Atlantic etc, have all been proposing fundamentally backwards, conservative, keep-the-genie-in-the-bottle solutions to what's ailing advertising companies that publish news to market their advertising. None of them will work, Shirky says here, because they've been tried before, but also because they are on the wrong side of history itself.
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
More scary truth-telling.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
Newspapers are an advertising model that uses original news/reporting as a marketing tool to get people to look at their ads. That's all. The journalism itself can appear in many more contexts, they just have to be invented.
This is great to see.
Alameda should be a perfect setting for this kind of site.
Good looking site. Thanks for sharing.
Michele, what can you tell us about how you priced your advertising, how you're going about selling it and how you're sourcing your news? What makes The Island a venture that will be successful?
Which is why the Printed Blog is so ridiculously clever.
He takes the best of the web, free content.
And pairs it with the best of print, complete lack of transparency.
Agreed, and it's important to realize that advertisers *are* irrationally fond of print advertising, which is why -- at least for now -- it makes some sort of business sense for publishers to think they should keep experimenting with ways to preserve their print editions. The disparity between print and online ad revenue at CJR is substantial, despite the fact that our site publishes about twelve articles per day, and the magazine comes out six times per year.
The only reason to print it is to take advantage of advertisers' irrational fondness for print advertising: their willingness to pay more for something whose effects they can't track or measure.
Customized news is great, but printing it is just boneheaded.
Smart analysis of media coverage patterns? very cool.
true. It's also inherently conservative. When your top priority shifts from "make something people want" to "cover your @$$ so you can go to work tomorrow" you're in a bad spot.
I swear I'm not quibbling here. This is important. But saying that the most important thing is to preserve the institution is simply either vacuous or ill-defined.
What I'm saying is that advice is worth virtually nothing because it doesn't help eliminate many possible courses of action.
Nieman's project doesn't extend Calais--just uses it well. They say they have some homegrown analysis happening too, though they unfortunately don't specify. You'd think Nieman would consider open-sourcing its good code.
As to what the very simple service does now, though, the summary on the post does well:
— How do specific stories evolve over time? What path do they take when they travel among blogs, newspapers, cable TV, or other sources?
— What specific story topics won’t you hear about in [News Source X], at least compared to its competitors?
— When [News Source Y] writes about Sarah Palin [or Pakistan, or school vouchers], what’s the context of their discussion? What are the words and phrases they surround that topic with?
So there are some very basic bar charts and maps that are the results of these queries. The data is pretty good, though far from perfect, which @EthanZ discusses in the interview. It doesn't really help, for instance, to include the tags "united states" and "america" in the same viz as separate descriptors. Also, although I'm sure they keep the labels on the x-axis of their bar charts to themselves because it's not terrible intuitive or human-readable, it's too bad Nieman doesn't offer some description. It's really hard to compare otherwise.
Well, maybe he's just trying to say that the most important thing is to preserve the institution when times are tough.
Can you give the cliff notes on this? I checked out the blog post and the actual media cloud site. I saw a swiss army knife-looking app with "Calais" emblazoned on it.
The Calais API is great, but I know what it does and what it's capable of. There are lots of apps using it. How does this extend it?
Well, I sure wish they had open approval. But this is where "business" meets "San Francisco thinking." The Guardian wants this to be awesome and they want to make money from running ads around the api stories people use. I don't begrudge them wanting to screen their initial users. I just wish they'd approve me!
That said, there's no note about how the number of applications compared to last year. is it safe to assume they had fewer then? That would seem unlikely considering all these other metrics went up.
Assuming there were fewer applicants, was it because they added the garage onto the process, raising the barrier for entry? Did that lead to better applications?
The numbers they scored from the social media approach are pretty impressive:
• Traffic to the Knight News Challenge site increased 47% compared to the same time the previous year. average of 2,930 visitors a day, during application timeframe.
• 17,000 visitors on contest day. Both these metrics were 50% higher than the previous year.
• 2,323 projects were submitted. 258 were invited to submit a full proposal, 70 became finalists for the funding are going through final review. Staff considers the quality extremely high.
• 224 independent blog posts about the Knight News Challenge, compared to 24 the previous year. Blog posts appeared in blogs published in European countries, the UK, Korea, China, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Canada and Latin America as well as the US
.
• Written up in Valleywag, Freakonomics.
• 1,600 people registered for the News Challenge Garage site (required to comment). 800 posted projects. 466 applied for a grant. Discussion of the Garage generated 10,000 links that Google indexed, 6,000 of which did not originate from the Garage site.
• The 8 meet ups had 400 attendees, many of whom blogged, shot video and pictures and shared about the program. Roughly 50% of the meet up attendees applied to the program. There are 700 links to mentions of the events indexed in Google, 30 photos on Flickr tagged Knight News Challenge meet up, and 4 videos).
• Google reported over 60,000 mentions of "Knight News Challenge" on non-Knight sites in 2008; this was a 110% increase from 2007.
What do you think of @davewiner's post that this API isn't really open for reason's having to do with slow approval?
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/10/folksThisIsInNoWayOpen.html
Oof, I guess I'll admit here that I didn't apply to the 2008-9 round of the KNC because I never received feedback promised multiple times in the 2007-8 round, despite being told my project made it to the final round.
I think this is a good place to discuss the thoughtful article at CJR. Thing is, I've read it twice now, once yesterday and once today, and I'm not sure I get it as a coherent whole. It is sort of two parts introduction to the world, one part looking into the near future that looks like a pretty linear extension of the present, and one part looking a bit further into the future that represents a serious break from the present.
This isn't criticism, but if I had my druthers, though, I would have liked the piece to focus on its final part, which is really only discussed in the antepenultimate and penultimate grafs. They're the inspiration for the title of the thing, and they're the vaguest part of the article. While that vagueness is certainly understandable, I'm not sure it's necessary. It would have been awesome to see that vision more fully fleshed out and undergirded by some economic, political, or cultural logic.
"In turbulent times," Drucker wrote, "the first task of management is to make sure of the institution's capacity for survival."
You know, that doesn't really mean anything. Management probably won't have an avenue that guarantees survival. It will have a set of options, or maybe a continuum of options that are simply messy. There will be many moving parts, all interconnected, and that kind of system is terribly difficult to optimize. Some will be safer in the short-term but seem riskier in the long-term, while others will be riskier in the short-term but actually be safer in the long-term.