Agrégateur de nouvelles

The great thing about Michael Hirschorn’s piece in the Atlantic about the death of the print New York Times is that it sees beyond the period of mourning and imagines what a post-paper Times could and should be. That’s what journalists should be doing - imagining a different - and perhaps even better - future.

“Ultimately, the death of The New York Times—or at least its print edition—would be a sentimental moment, and a severe blow to American journalism,” he says. “But a disaster? In the long run, maybe not.”

Hirschorn imagines many of the elements of the paperless paper that I also envision: more specializing, aggregation, collaboration. Individual brands - Friedman, Krugman, Sorkin - standing out on their own.
In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters—now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases—could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.

I also love that he presents the model for the new Times as Huffington Post. The Times would surely quibble with that. But they’re not as far apart as they might seem. Both respect good reporting. As Arianna told Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in London a few months ago, the reason she hires reporters is because their stories get more traffic. The public, too, respects good reporting. So maybe the Times should buy the Huffington Post - or vice versa - and they can start to learn from each other now. Naw, that’s going too far.

But having this discussion about life and journalism post-paper is valuable and I’m glad it’s happening.

I see that my baby, Entertainment Weekly, has a new editor, its fourth: Jess Cagle, who was part of the launch team at EW (when he was known as “young Jess”). My congratulations to him.

"One in five teen girls (22%), nearly as many teen boys (18%) and one-third (33%) of young adults say they have electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude photographic or video images of themselves."

That was the scary and raw research delivered by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com in a study entitled, Sex & Tech. You can expect this news to makes its way through the regular mass media channels as a call to arms on the dangers of the online channels, privacy, mobile devices, the Internet and the new reality that younger people are more connected than ever and may not understand the long term implications of being able to publish anything at anytime to one another (and the world).

If we move beyond the images and videos, the numbers get just as raw and unnerving. Here's what was reported today on Marketing Charts for the news item titled, One in Five Teens Sends Sexually Explicit Images:

"On the receiving end of the messages, 48% of teens and 64% of young adults (56% total) say they have gotten a sexually suggestive message from someone else. Among young teen girls (age 13-16), one-third have received such messages. The research also finds that sexually suggestive images are frequently passed around and shown to friends: One-third (33%) of teen boys and one-fourth(25%) of teen girls say they have had nude/semi-nude images–originally intended to be private–shared with them. What teens and young adults are doing electronically seems to have an effect on what they do in real life, the survey found. Nearly one-quarter of teens (22%) say that technology makes them personally more forward and aggressive. Moreover, more than one-third of teens (38%) say exchanging sexy content makes dating or hooking up with others more likely, and nearly one-third of teens (29%) believe those exchanging sexy content are 'expected' to date or hook up."

Even if this content is going from one person to another, we've seen enough hijacked Sidekicks to know that the general rule of thumb must be: if you email it, you have to expect that it will be made public. Which is sad.

One of the more fascinating areas of these new digital channels is privacy and how it is changing. Young people - who have never known a world where everything they say and do is not posted on a Wall or tweeted - are going to define privacy in a very different way than we do. Digital Natives see things dramatically different (for further proof of this, check out the article from New York Magazine, Say Everything). All of this is going to make do-not-call registries and the like seem very rudimentary.

The bigger question: is this going to make people recoil and seek a much higher level privacy, or are we going to continue down this path where all of our lives become open books in online social networks and the like? 

Tags: cosmogirl digital native internet culture marketing charts mass media national campaign to prevent teen and unplanned pregnancy new york magazine news privacy say everything sex sidekick tech technology young people

Have to love this: English atheists - upset over an inflammatory (in many senses of the word) ad campaign on buses to warn nonbelievers of the hellfire of damnation - used the internet to raise money to buy ads on those same buses to assure the public that there’s probably no God, so “now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” They used the Guardian’s Comment is Free to kick off the campaign and hoped to raise 5,500 pounds but ended up raising 135,000. It’s very MoveOn: using the web to organize and raise money and then use old media.

: LATER: Just as I posted this, I saw that the Times of New York covered the story, giving the atheists even more bang for their buck.

I ran out of time this morning before I had a chance to praise Jack Shaffer’s piece about newspapers’ failure to invent the web and reinvent themselves. Talk about burying the lead: His best lines came in his kicker:
From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.

As Adrian Monck points out, this is really just another chapter in the ongoing soap opera about the culpability of journalists for the state of journalism today.

Shafer is inspired by Pablo Boczkowski’s 2004 book Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers and I have in my hand his thick and thoughtful 2001 dissertation on the topic. He chronicles attempts by papers to figure out and adapt to new media as it (they) emerged, including the creation of NJ.com’s Community Connection, which I lead and which died soon after Pablo wrote his treatise. It was one attempt among many to figure out the internet. And it’s one of the indictments against my tenure in online newspapers, for it was an attempt to be too controlling over the creation of communities. In my book, I quote Clay Shirky and Mark Zuckerberg as I learned that newspapers don’t create communities but might be lucky enough to serve them.

So there were many attempts by papers to adapt. There were many mistakes. Mine were among them. And so - to address Shafer and Monck - the question remains whether newspapers tried hard enough. Shafer says they may have tried but they barked up wrong trees.

I am accused by some of dancing on the graves of journalists’ jobs, of being happy that papers are dying. That’s not true. It’s a willful misinterpretation. If I have an emotion associated with newspapers’ fall - and I’m not sure I do - it’s anger and disappointment at what Shafer describes as papers’ failure to think past a world seen in their own image, to bring news into the future and give it adequate stewardship.

For every honest attempt to change that Shafer and Boczkowski talk about, I saw many more efforts to avoid and even torpedo change: newspaper editors and executives who told me that it was not their job to help this internet thing, to share content with the internet, to link to anyone else on the internet, to interact with readers on the internet, to rethink their procedures because of the internet, to teach new skills because of the internet, to promote the internet, and on and on. I saw too many direct attempts to subvert the future. That’s where the fault lies.

So Shafer’s quite right that newspapers failed because they couldn’t think past seeing the web as an extension of their past - they insisted in seeing the internet in their own image. But there’s more to the story.

Whether you are creating any form of content online (text, audio, images or video) or are simply consuming it, there is a huge cost to all of this free goodness.

On December 23rd, 2008 I posted a Blog entry titled, Breaking News On The Internet, where the question came up:

"Who is going to pay for all of this content that we are all now consuming online?"

That question could well be the crux of the problem most Marketers have with trying to figure out either how to monetize the Social Media channels or how to connect with consumers within it. The business behind most content has always been:

1. Advertising supported to make the content free.
2. Advertising supported to subsidize the cost.
3. Advertising-free with a cost.

Free without any form of advertising is only a business model if you can either sell and profit from the content (like a book) or if the media is being supported in another way (like government funding or private support). It's the way it has always been, so exploring new business models (see: Trading Analog Dollars For Digital Pennies) is a huge challenge for most companies. The other side of the coin is forgoing the idea of getting into these channels via advertising, and engaging in the concept of creating your own content and building your own community. Nothing builds loyalty like providing high quality content in a constant flow. These digital channels (be it a Blog, Podcast or online community) enable people to publish for free, but there is a huge cost. It's not just from the design, implementation, maintenance and hosting of the online channels (after all, if you don't want full control over the final product, there are many places that will give you the tools and the space to do it for free), but it's the creation, ideation and ongoing curating that is expensive.

Anybody can Blog, doesn't mean anybody should Blog.

Yes, the best part of these tools is that they are free and easy to use, but we all know the saying, "just because you can, does not mean that you should." On the personal or hobby side of things, Blog away, post away, tweet away. From a professional perspective, you need to have the content creators and a semi-well thought out plan in place if you really want to use these channels and tools to create a viable media property surrounding your brand, products and services. It's not as simple as freelancing the video out and it's way harder than hiring a writer to be your in-house Blogger.

There's probably a decent argument here that being able to publish for free has made the value of great content that much more valuable.

If everyone is publishing content across all platforms, who stands out? Clearly, the ones who are really being different, unique, creative and relevant. Finding the right people who "get it" and understand how the conversations flow, and how to keep them going is priceless. Figuring out how to take that channel and make it work - in terms of pure ROI and alignment with your overall business strategy - can't be cheap (or free)... and it shouldn't be.

What do you think: is content really free?

Tags: advertising blog business model business strategy consumer behaviour content digital marketing marketing monetization online community podcast publishing social media

A lovely review of the Folger Shakespeare Library show on the birth of newspapers by Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post has some gems:
If you learn about the world primarily from newspapers, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition documenting the birth of journalism in the Renaissance will be a wistful affair. It’s like looking at baby pictures of a distinguished old relative who is now on life support. Look how vibrant, how youthful, how full of vinegar the old man was. Once upon a time, before the plummeting circulation, the shrinking ad revenue and the highly leveraged corporate owners.

But if you get your news primarily from the Internet, there’s nothing sad here at all. New media is new media, whether it’s scurrilous pamphlets distributed by hand, or partisan Web sites that spread their happy mischief through the wireless ether. The forms, the tone, the types of personalities who gravitated to journalism when it was new seem fantastically familiar in our own anarchic and newly democratized age of the World Wide Web.

Kennicott susses out these themes through the ages:
When John Taylor, a bargeman and alehouse keeper turned journalist, published an edition of his Mercurius Aquaticus in 1643, he included a complete reprint of a rival paper, the Mercurius Britanicus — followed by a point-by-point smackdown of its contents. This was “fisking,” 17th-century-style: a form of argument beloved by bloggers who cut-and-paste something that offends them and then interlard it with commentary.

The extra margin space included in a 1699 issue of Dawks’s Newsletter was meant to allow readers to write notes and commentary before passing the paper on to someone else. Web site designers may think that posting reader comments, which all too often devolve from sincerity to silliness to bigotry and ad hominem attacks, is a brave new invention of the interactive world. But interactivity is ancient. It’s at least as old as graffiti, and often just as useful.

There’s also a slick swipe at cable news, but I won’t ruin the punchline.

: I was going to buy a copy of the exhibit book until I saw that they charge $10 for shipping. Damned print.

I don’t intend to quote every review What Would Google Do? gets but I can’t resist this one from Michelle
Archer in USA Today, short and sweet:
Blogger/columnist Jeff Jarvis’ treatise on how — and why — companies should think and act like Google brings to mind several trite words from the world of literary criticism: eye-opening, thought-provoking and enlightening.

There’s something for everyone in What Would Google Do? For newbies still struggling to comprehend the Internet, Jarvis puts it in context. For floundering industries, Jarvis suggests reforms via Google’s philosophy or strategies employed by entities such as Facebook and About.com. And for people and groups hoping to launch the next big Google, Jarvis takes a page from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark: Make something useful, help people use it and then get out of the way.

: Craig Newmark, a humbler man than most, quotes the review but takes out the reference to himself.

Welcome to episode #137 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast. Podcasting is not dead. In fact, it can't be dead because it hasn't even developed its own two, full lungs yet. If you have had a hard time understanding what all of this audio and video content is and how it can be used in Marketing and Communications, this episode is exactly what you'll need. Actually, it's not really *my* Podcast at all. Joseph Jaffe, author of Life After The 30-Second Spot and Join The Conversation plus Blogger and Podcaster over at Jaffe Juice gathered a bunch of Podcasters to discuss the media channel. This is the conversation. Enjoy the conversation...

Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #137 - Host: Mitch Joel.

• Running time: 1:39.13.
• Audio comment line - please send in a comment and add your voice to the audio community: +1 206-666-6056.
• Please send in questions, comments, suggestions - mitch@twistimage.com.
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• The Road to Six Pixels of Separation – The Book – coming soon.
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• Live record of a conversation with almost 100 people on the topic of Podcasting.
• Is Podcasting Dead?
• Podcasting Is Not Even On Life Support.
• The conversation is almost 90 minutes, but well worth the listen.
• Guests include:
• Joseph Jaffe – Jaffe Juice.
• Adam Curry – Podfather – Daily Source Code – Mevio.
• Cliff Ravenscraft - GSPN.TV.
• Shel Holtz - For Immediate Release - The Hobson and Holtz Report.
• Mignon Fogarty - Grammar Girl.
• Terry Fallis - Inside PR.
• Lee Hopkins.
• Jay Berkowitz - Ten Golden Rules.
• Dave Guerra.
• Jay Moonah - Media Driving.
• ... and many more.

Please join the conversation by sending in questions, feedback and ways to improve Six Pixels Of Separation. Please let me know what you think or leave an audio comment at: +1 206-666-6056.

Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #137 - Host: Mitch Joel.

Tags: adam curry advertising blog blogging business cliff ravenscraft daily source code dave guerra digital marketing facebook facebook group for immediate release foreword thinking google grammar girl gspn inside pr is podcasting dead itunes jaffe juice jay berkowitz jay moonah joseph jaffe lee hopkins marketing media driving mevio mignon fogarty motivational books online social network podcast podcasting shel holtz six pixels of separation social media marketing ten golden rules terry fallis twist image twitter web 20

I was going to start a collection of the letters to readers that newspapers are publishing these days explaining every cutback and consolidation and where surviving features are moving to save paper and money because the times are tough, you know. But there are too many such letters.

Here’s one sample from the Advertiser in Louisiana. What’s scary about it is not what the paper says but what a customer says in the comments:
The article says “newspapers are not going away”, well The Daily Advertiser is. I’ve spent thousands advertising in The Advertiser over the the last eight years and have noticed a dramatic decline in returns from those ads. I quit advertising altogether last summer. People just don’t read the hard copy of The Advertiser any more.

Gulp.

Rather than telling readers what they’re not doing anymore and where they’re moving this and that - here’s where you’ll find that vital Sudoku and horoscope! - it might be better for papers to say what they are doing.

How about just saying: If it’s local, it’s here, if it’s not, it’s not.

And how about saying: If you want depth and currency and conversation and more, go online.

Among the great benefits - yes, benefits - of the internet for newspapers are opportunities to find new efficiencies. Do what you do best and link to the rest is one. Share is another. Newspapers have always been bad at sharing. That’s why they never managed to start a consortium to work together online (RIP NCN). That’s why they each spent a fortune buying custom computer systems even though they all did the same thing - because they thought they were special.

Now they’re learning to share because they have to. The AP has a roundup of what they’re doing with a sidebar I hadn’t seen before listing their efforts so far (to which I’d add the New York area newspaper consortium): There are content-sharing networks in Ohio among eight papers, Maine among five, Florida among four, Texas among two, the Washington area among to, in addition to the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times sharing a capital bureau and Mcclatchy and the Christian Science Monitor sharing international bureau stories.

I Twittered:
My son says his problem with Twitter is too much Twittering about Twitter. Judging by today, he’s right. And I just added to it.

Then David Weinberger, the Emeril of online thought, kicked it up a notch:
That used to be the case with blogging when it first started. Every other post (including mine) was about blogging. Blog blog blog blog.

If you want to get out ahead of the curve when the next new social writing phenomenon happens, be the one who never writes about it.

Herewith, I put myself behind the curve. And of course, now I’ll tweet about this blog post about twittering. Jane, stop this crazy thing.

LATER: Nice exchange in response to this on Facebook (which might as well be Twitter, so it’s still morally the same):
Eric Effron : It’s only natural, though. I suspect that when people first got telephones, they talked a lot about…telephones!
Steve Safran: Agreed. My parents still talk about how wonderful it is they can email.
Lamar Graham: My mother still calls to tell me she sent me an e-mail.
Steve Safran: I get that too, but I have a feeling it’s just a Jewish mother’s way of saying “why haven’t you answered it yet?”

The Guardian’s Anna Pickard issues a rousing endorsement of online friendships on Comment is Free:
The friends I’ve made online – from blogging in particular, be they other bloggers or commenters on this or my own site – are the best friends I now have. And yet, when I say this to people, many times they’ll look at me like I’m a social failure; and when surveys like this are reported, it’s always with a slight air of being the “It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy world!” item last thing on the news. Some portions of my family still refer to my partner of six years as my “Internet Boyfriend”.

Call me naive, but far from being the bottomless repository of oddballs and potential serial killers, the internet is full of lively minded, like-minded engaging people – for the first time in history we’re lucky enough to choose friends not by location or luck, but pinpoint perfect friends by rounding up people with amazingly similar interests, matching politics, senses of humour, passionate feelings about the most infinitesimally tiny hobby communities. The friends I have now might be spread wide, geographically, but I’m closer to them than anyone I went to school with, by about a million miles.

For me, and people like me who might be a little shy or socially awkward – and there are plenty of us about – moving conversations and friendships from the net to a coffee shop table or the bar stool is a much more organic, normal process than people who spend less time online might expect.

Depending on the root of the friendship, on where the conversation started, the benefit is clear – you cut out the tedium of small talk. What could be better?

See also Leisa Reichelt’s seminal post on ambient intimacy. And also my column in the Guardian on how constant connection will change the nature of friendship. And here’s what I said in the last chapter of my book on the larger impact of Google and the internet:
I believe young people today—Generation Google—will have an evolving understanding and experience of friendship as the internet will not let them lose touch with the people in their lives. Google will keep them connected. . . .

Thanks to our connection machine, they will stay linked, likely for the rest of their lives. With their blogs, MySpace pages, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Seesmic conversations, Twitter feeds, and all the means for sharing their lives yet to be invented, they will leave lifelong Google tracks that will make it easier to find them. Alloy, a marketing firm, reported in 2007 that 96 percent of teens and tweens used social networks—they are essentially universal—and so even if one tie is severed, young people will still be linked to friends of friends via Facebook, never more than a degree or two apart.

I believe this lasting connectedness can improve the nature of friendship and how we treat each other. It will no longer be easy to escape our pasts, to act like cads and run away. We will behave with this knowledge in the present. More threads will tie more of us together longer than in any time since the bygone days when we lived all our lives in small towns.

Today, our circles of friends will grow only larger. Does this abundance of friendship make each relationship shallower? I don’t think so. Friendship finds its natural water level—we know our capacity for relationships and stick closest to those we like best. The so-called Dunbar rule says we end up with 150 friends. I think that could grow. But remember the key insight that made Facebook such a success: It brought real names and real relationships to the internet. It’s about good friends.

I just asked Anna to be my Facebook friend.

There are many places online to speak your mind in a quick, off-the-cuff and immediate fashion. This makes it one of the most fascinating media channels to come along. With it comes many challenges, like the legacy you leave behind in the heat of the moment...

This is nothing new. We all know that Google has a very long tail. We all know that anything we say, can and will be accessible forever. When it was mostly Blogs and Podcasts, there were enough incidents where people would write and say stuff that they later regretted or was challenged by others. Sometimes things got ugly, sometimes these incidents just came and went. Whatever the case, they are indexed and accessible by doing a very simple search.

Twitter ranks high in Google.

Have you been paying attention to the type of language and tone of voice that certain people use when they are on Twitter? People who consider themselves Communications, Marketing and Public Relations "professionals" using some very bad language and acting more like a high school sophomore than someone whose opinion is to be revered and respected. One of the basic rules given at any etiquette course is to never discuss religion or politics at a dinner party. If we kept with that line of thought, there would be some very empty spaces online. While we may have evolved from that line of thinking, the sentiment still stands strong: be mindful of what you say as you never know who will be offended, but worse, you never really know who you are talking to and who is listening in on that conversation. In public forums, this is both amplified and multiplied. It's not just who you're talking to (or about), it's everybody else in the world that is able to see it, read it and make their own judgement call about it.

How would you feel if you didn't score that client you were working on because they discovered an online conversation that you did not deal with in the most professional manner?

Some have been bold enough to say that it doesn't bother them one bit because that potential client obviously would not be the right match personality-wise. Based on some of the content I have seen passing through these channels, it has little to do with personality and much more to do with how that client feels their company would be represented in terms of reputation and credibility.

Bottom line advice would be to watch your language. Consider the perception one would have of you if they had never met you and only had your Twitter feed as a point of personal and professional reference. Take a look back on your Digital Footprint. How would you feel if - in the future - your children looked back on these conversations to see what their parent was really all about?

Following through is also a part of this conversation.

Many people criticize and comment but when responded to, they do not take the time or check back to see how it ended. All too often, I've come across Blog postings where someone left a comment that was responded to, but they never returned or never bothered to finish the dialogue. Even though their point may have been made, the public perception of how that conversation ended is not in their favour. Don't just criticize, provide a solution or a different perspective that can stand on its own.

Sometimes being able to publish every whim that scans across your brain is the best thing in the world. Sometimes, it can become a real problem. The killer is this: when it is a problem, you're usually the last to know and the damage is done.

Tags: blog commenting communications conversations digital footprint google internet culture language listening long tail media online community podcast public perception public relations etiquette publishing twitter

The news cycle has changed so much in the past five years. This has had a direct effect on Marketing and Advertising. It's about to change again and - as usual - Marketers are not prepared. And, from the looks of it, the general mass population might not be ready either.

There's that old saying that you have to know where you have been to know where you are going. The news used to be controlled by the major news outlets. Companies would launch their press releases in the morning on any given weekday (preferably Monday to Thursday) in hopes that it would be picked up by the television stations for the six o'clock news and then it would hit the newspapers the following morning. A good piece of news had legs and could linger for two - three days (if it was able to make it to the magazines, you would be looking at weeks and months). Then, TV stations like CNN launched and the mass public's appetite for news was turned on its head. We suddenly ushered in the era of the twenty-four hour news cycle. News was available at any given moment, and in an effort to fill that air time, news makers had to up their game to ensure that they were the ones breaking exclusive stories and having the scoops.

The Internet changed everything.

As more and more people got interested in the Internet it also became a secondary channel for these news companies to get the word out. Very few of these companies saw the potential threat that it would become to their empires, but as the speed of communications shifted again, many individuals began using the Web to broadcast their own news, as it happened. There were even moments where traditional news companies were breaking the news on their websites first in order to not get scooped by he competition. From there, Blogging platforms took hold and now we have micro-blogging spaces (like Twitter and FriendFeed) and the ability to comment and create content from our mobile devices.

Die! 24 Hour News Cycle! Die! Die!

On May 23rd, 2007, there was this Blog post, TNN - Twitter News Network Or How I Found Out About The Google - Feedburner Acquisition, from Six Pixels of Separation:

"Traditional media outlets would spend huge budgets to have correspondents placed in different parts of the world to file stories and get 'on the ground' insights that the average individual would never have access to. Now, at any given time, my fairly small friends list (it's fewer than one hundred and fifty) spans the globe and constantly feeds personal, local, national and global insights at a non-stop pace... In a world where we trust what our peers say at a much higher multiple than anything pumped out by the media, Twitter is perhaps beginning to demonstrate her true power."

Fast forward to now and Twitter has matured. It's not uncommon to not only learn about late breaking news way before the major news outlets get the chance to update their websites from places like Twitter, but more and more of these major news outlets are now trolling Twitter and FriendFeed for information, perspective and insight.

What does this all mean?

We no longer have a twenty-four news cycle. Something happens in the world (Mumbai, Gaza, or that someone was involved in a plane crash) and somebody, somewhere is informing the world through text, images, audio and even video within sixty seconds. What does the news and media industry look like now? Media empires are going to look very different in the coming months and years as we quickly shift into this Sixty Second News Cycle. It's no longer about which outlet breaks the new or how fast, it's going to be about how well they can report on something that everybody has already seen. By the time it takes a news outlet to produce a TV news segment, record some audio for radio or draft up a newspaper article, that news item has not only moved on, but it has already been replaced - countless times - by more and more news. Publishing online is fast and free.

We are inches away from the real-time news cycle.

The flow of the news is only increasing. It is hyper-local and global at the same time. News from your backyard is at your fingertips at the exact same speed as news from across the globe. How advertising is bought, sold and displayed is going to have to adjust. The longer, more thought-out and verified stories are going to have to mingle with the 140 character blasts. It's not going to stop. It's only going to increase.

How ready are we - really - for the Sixty Second News Cycle?

Tags: advertising blog cnn content friendfeed gaza hyper-local internet culture marketing mass media media micro blogging mumbai news newspaper publishing radio real-time news cycle sixty second news cycle television twenty four hour news cycle twitter

Fred Wilson - bless his heart - blogs on my book, saying nice things (”It’s a good read, perfect for a flight. It’s not too dense, full of great quotes and insights. I’m enjoying it.”) and he pulls out one of the ideas that fascinates me most, one I’m thinking about writing on again: publicness.

It starts with Catarina Fake telling how she and Stewart Butterfield made a fateful and wise decision when they started Flickr and “defaulted to public.” Then Fred retells the story I have in the book of Mark Zuckerberg and his Tom Sawyer moment in an art class: how public interaction helped an entire class. Next, Fred quotes a commenter who had a similar story about a class working through problems in front of the entire class (though the school stupidly requiring killing the product of this work).

Here’s the lovely irony: Because Fred discusses this publicly and because he has wonderful discussions o his blog, there are more good ideas and viewpoints: a debate about whether Facebook is really public because we can control and restrict our publics here; discussion about competition and secrets; opinions about the foolishness of erasing knowledge; more talk about the value of secrecy vs. execution; a neat thought about the positive pressure of publicness; how publicness - being first to an idea shared in public - can lead to thought leadership.

The double irony for me is that the book itself isn’t public yet. Fred shared a bit of it in public and that is what lead to this discussion. I can’t wait for it to be public - though, of course, books are only so public since they are sold. We’ll be putting some of the book online - I need to talk with the publisher this week about what exactly that will be - and I hope we’ll test the limits of the benefits of publicness.

On the Dallas Morning News opinion blog today, the paper brags about what sets its letters apart from online discussion: identity. They quote a frequent letter writer named Chris (irony: no last name given) who says:
There was a statement in this guide whose importance is understood by far too few. Maybe it should have been entered in bigger and bolder lettering. The statement went as follows:

“There is no shortage of online forums where people can make up facts and throw bombs. But in our published letters to the editor, people sign their names and publicly stand behind their opinions.”

In a free society, opinions without sources reflect poorly on both writers and readers. This fact, along with the feedback that hard copy journalism has concerning government at all levels, constitute a valuable rationale for the necessity, existence and continuation of such journalism.

I’m not sure I can parse that last sentence into anything approaching clarity. But the point of the rest is clear: identity is good.

But then there’s a comment left by one PaulC (no last name, either), who argues:
Really?

“In an important case for privacy and free speech advocates, the
Supreme Court ruled recently that the First Amendment protects
anonymous political speech. In McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission,
decided April 19, 1995, the Court struck down an Ohio law that required
the disclosure of personal identity on political literature. . . .

Justice Steven’s opinion for the Court note that arguments favoring
the ratification of the Constitution advanced in the Federalist Papers
were published under fictitious names. Justice Stevens said “quite
apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her
ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her
identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be
personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her
message simply because they do not like its proponent.” Stevens
concluded “Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a
pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of
advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of
the majority. “

Each is right. I have long said here that I give more credence and value to the opinions of those who stand by those opinions with their names, as I do here. But there is a place for anonymity in political discourse (and in whistleblowing and under repressive regimes).

For a proposal I’m writing, I want to compile key stats that show the state of the news business (at least the incumbents, plus a view of demand). Here’s what I have. Do you have other stats that reveal the state?

Bad news…

• Newspaper stocks fell an average of 83.3% in 2008—twice the fall of the S&P 500—wiping out $64.5 billion in market value, according to Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog.

• Since 1994—and the release of the commercial web browser—newspaper audience penetration has fallen a third, from 23% to 16%. In that time, circulation fell 14% (59 million to 50 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America) while population rose 20%.

• Viewership for network evening news continues to decline, to 23.1 million in 2007, according to Nielsen. The median age of network evening news viewers is 61 in 2008, according to Magna Global USA.

• Since 1994, newspaper print advertising revenue fell on an inflation-adjusted basis by 10% (from $34,109 million in 1994 dollars to $42,209 million in 2007 dollars, says NAA).

• Since 1994, the number of newspapers in America fell from 1,548 to 1,422, according to NAA.

• In 2008 alone, 15,586 newspaper jobs were lost, according to the Papercuts blog.

• In 2008, the Pew Research Center found that the internet surpassed newspapers as a primary source of news for Americans (following TV). For young people, 18 to 29, the internet will soon surpass TV, at nearly double the rate for newspapers.

• 54% of Americans do not trust news media, according to a Harris survey. A Sacred Heart University survey says only 20% of Americans believe or trust most news media.

• Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future found in a 2007 survey that young people 12 to 25 will “never read a newspaper.” Never.

• In 2008, the American Society of Newspaper Editors took “paper” out of its name.

Good news…

• But newspaper online site audience has long since surpassed print circulation, reaching 69 million unique users in fall 2008, according to NAA.

• And the total online news audience is about 100 million—more than half total U.S. internet users—according to ComScore.

Newspaper Death Watch has a nice list of change and innovation in news last year. It’s there; you just have to look for it.

If you look at many of the profiles found on Blogs and people's ultra-short/sharp bios on Twitter, you will notice something very interesting: almost everybody says that they are either a New Media Strategist or a Social Media Strategist. What, exactly, does that mean and how can you better understand just how good they are at online strategy?

There is no doubt that when you get back to the office on Monday, everyone is going to be looking for areas to cut costs and get more efficient. Although we would like to think otherwise, Marketing is usually the first place to get hit... and hit hard. As part of whatever cost saving strategies will be implemented in your company, one question will be, "how can we better use some of these new media channels to gain efficiencies?" While this can be a slew of Blog posts on their own, most people will go online, do some generic searches or post a quick question on FriendFeed or Twitter asking their community who they should be speaking to. The reality is that when something is this new, everybody and anybody can claim to be an expert... or, at least, a "strategist."

Results speak louder than words.

Bios, Twitter feeds, Blog postings, etc... can all be great, interesting and meaty, but nothing will help you decide more than by looking at who they have worked for, what they have done and the results they have achieved. This is not about the size of the brands or the companies, sometimes the best Social Media and New Media stories are about how the local retailer was able to expand their business, create a global footprint, engage in a conversation with their customers and find some kind of fascinating business-to-business opportunity that was created specifically because they had engaged in these social channels. There's also something to be said for the individual who was able to take a not-for-profit or industry association and help them optimize the conversation between them and their constituents with little-to-no budget. If the Strategist can't show you real platforms and demonstrate how they changed, added value or affected the business goals of their clients directly, move on.

Do some snooping around on your own.

Doing simple searches on Technorati, Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, FriendFeed or creating a Google Alerts about the company that the Strategist has worked for is another very easy and simple way to see if the work they had done has had any effect. Without question, speaking directly to the client is an important part of deciding if you are going to move forward, but keep in mind that because these channels are so new, the clients may not even know (or be able to verbalize) exactly what the Strategist really did beyond regurgitating what they may have seen in a status report or heard anecdotally through someone else. One of the best ways to make the right decision on who you are going to work with is to empower yourself to use the many free tools available at your fingertips that will only take a few minutes to figure out, and pull results from them. Even doing a generic search on the client should pull some information to see if the needle has moved.

Go beyond the results to see the cross-channel effect.

It's not just about whether the Strategist helped the client start a Blog, get on Twitter or create a Facebook Fan Page. Telling someone what they should do is not understanding the client's business goals, seeing how these social channels fit into the mix, choosing the right channel, building the platform effectively and ensuring that there is ongoing nurturing to the community and beyond. On top of really developing and executing this New Media strategy, any great Strategist worth their weight should also have some kind of significant experience in Marketing, Communications, Advertising, Public Relations, etc... Because any strong New Media strategy needs to fit in perfectly with the overall Marketing and Communications strategy. Nothing works in a silo. Nor should it. Every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to build, share and grow the relationship. If all of these touchpoints are not connected, all is lost. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

How good is their own self-promotion?

One of the best parts of these social channels is that anyone can take part and be published. How great is the Strategist in using these same channels to build their own business and reputation? Adding friends on Twitter and Facebook is easy. It's just a simple click. Anyone can be following or friending anybody. The real question is this: who is following them and is a friend of theirs? But even that is superficial. Some of the biggest names out there will add anybody and everybody to build their own network, community and audience. The bigger question is this: how well respected, how much authority and who looks to this Strategist for insight and information? It's not enough to have the occasional Blog comment from an a-list Blogger. Dig deeper. Check out where the Strategist ranks on Technorati for their Blog and see who links to their spaces. Google never lies. In a world of transparency, it's pretty simple to see just how good someone really is. Some might argue this point by saying that the Strategist's platforms might still be very new or that you don't, necessarily, have to have your own, successful, Blog to help a client build one. Agreed, but in that case...

Nothing beats experience and history.

As new as these social media and new media channels are, a great Marketing and Communications professional with experience and a track record of helping to facilitate communications and build community is pretty easy to identify. In a world of over 130 million Blogs (according to Technorati), even the brand new ones get a ton of attention if they are, truly, remarkable by adding something new to the conversation or simply being published by someone who is respected because of the work they do. If a seasoned professional can't get their own insights and platforms any form of attention, how do you really think they will be able to perform for you?

Remember, anybody can create a Blog or say some pithy stuff on Twitter. All of these channels lack any formal process of ranking authority, so the amateur and the twenty-year veteran both have equal footing, This is the best (and worst) part of these social channels.

Tags: advertising blog business strategy communications consulting cross channel marketing facebook friendfeed google alert google blog search marketing new media new media strategist online community public relations self-promotion social channel social media social media strategist technorati twitter twitter search