Apiculture

The Death of Newspapers, Part 97 ...

David Carr of The New York Times writes a nuanced, sensitive piece on what will become of newspapers and the people who make them in an age where their major reason for being is the same as McDonald's and Wal-Mart's reason for being: to make investors happy. Carr's piece focuses on The Philadelphia Inquirer, a paper Knight Ridder built into one of the great institutions of U.S. journalism and just as quickly pulled down with its drive to extract a return from its property. But profit-hungry owners are not the only players in the great American newspaper crisis

Carr reports a conversation with a young Inquirer reporter, Michael Currie Schaffer, on the future of the newspaper business. Schaffer observes at one point:

"Something happened to our generation where we were not raised to do something that our parents did every day. I have friends here who are smart people, who are very well informed, but they don't feel the need to get a paper."

Yes, something has changed. But instead of probing further into that "something," which is really a galaxy of things, Carr backs off the subject with only Schaffer's vague statement that "I'm interested in what comes next, and some of those versions of the future are pretty unappealing to me."

Maybe a discussion of where journalism is going ought to be reserved for the pages of academic journals or for professional journalism savants who live and breathe the topic and blog it, too. But I think the papers that have a stake in the future ought to be raising the volume of the conversation in their own pages, and doing it in explicit terms that explains what's at stake not only for committed reporters and editors but to all readers and to our society as a whole. To do less -- to do what Carr does in his well-crafted column is to settle for atmospherics and pass on the substance. That's not good enough if some remnant of the public-service-oriented news business is to survive.

Technorati Tags: journalism, newspapers

Can Bloggers Make Money?

From the Wall Street Journal: Can Bloggers Make Money?

I guess you can't call it an age-old debate, but it's certainly the hottest debate of the Web 2.0 era: Will the economic shift in the media/journalism world support talented single practitioners who need to make a buck to support their individual enterprises  (as opposed, say, to a shift that transfers money and publishing clout from the old-line media companies to a bunch of new-agey ones). The Journal's piece yesterday pits traditional publisher Alan Meckler ("few people if any will ever make money from writing a blog") against Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calcanis ("many bloggers are already making money").

What Ever Happened to ...

English.

Not that it should be the lingua franca of the Web, but if you decide you're going to do business in it, then doesn't it behoove one to at least try to get it right?

This rant is prompted by a Mashable! post on a new service called Wikio. The service is supposed to be a social-news wonder -- a hybrid of Google News and Technorati and Digg. That remains to be seen. Unless you're one of those invited to test the French-language version of the site, right now the English version is good only for entertainment value. Right now, the home page simply offers a chance to register as a test user: "If you want to test drive and help us improve our beta version, enter your mail hereafter." Hereafter? Nice touch. It's even more fun when you register:

Hello,

You just subscribed to be part of the beta testers.
You should receive your login/password in a near future.

"In a near future" is a concept that simply wouldn't occur to most native English speakers this side of James Joyce. It is a delightful idea.

Beyond bashing these guys for their machine-translator English, there is a serious point. Turn the situation around, and imagine a U.S.-based site offered to a French or German or Japanese audience in what amounts to pidgin. The site would be laughed off as ridiculous, and deservedly so. So for Team Wikio: Don't go any further without finding someone who knows how to address your intended audience in its language.

Eye tracking Web usability | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Eye tracking Web usability | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com.

A writeup of a study be Jakob Nielsen, who is usually referred and deferred to in the same fashion as this story does, as a "user interface guru." What I find absorbing here is the attempt to figure out how people physically respond to what they see on their monitors.

"The real highlight [of the study] is that peoples' eyes flitter fast across pages. Very little time is allocated to each page element, so you have to be brief and concise in communicating online," Nielsen said. "They don't look in on, across the lines of a page, and often fixate on something, such as the first few words of a headline, for only a tenth of second. The right-hand side is often never in view of the eyes. People look down the pages in an 'F' pattern [see example on the left], with a few stripes at top–the first one longer than the second–and then down the long vertical stripe to see if is any else. Sometime the track turns into an 'E' pattern but it's usually an F."

Complexity

Ray Ozzie, quoted in The New York Times today on Microsoft's problems with its new Windows Vista operating system:

In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

Richard Edelman - 6 A.M.: CNN Interview

Richard Edelman - 6 A.M.: CNN Interview on Wal-Mart and Bloggers.

A good followup to last week's story from The New York Times on how Wal-Mart has begun to focus on friendly bloggers to get its story out. Richard Edelman, head of the firm that's doing the outreach, and Jeff Jarvis, late of the MSM and now a champion of all things beyond MSM it seems, appeared with CNN's Howard Kurtz. Jarvis's strident anti-established-media rhetoric aside -- gee, Jeff, where would you be without the Chicago Tribune and People in your resume? -- he's right that the Times's piece was just a little too pious. But for my money, Edelman had the more penetrating analysis of the importance of blogs and other new distribution forms vis a vis the traditional media:

Jarvis: ... We're seeing the death of the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers used to be those in power, then it was those in the press, and then -- yes, now it's P.R., who are gatekeepers to the powerful and the rich and the famous.

But now the people have the press. And I harp on this obnoxiously, I'll admit, but what it really means is that there's no scarcity anymore, and that we can push those in power to be transparent. And to not hold back information, which is what gatekeepers really do. So for reporters acting as a gatekeeper, they're doing the wrong thing.

Kurtz: If gatekeepers don't have this kind of influence anymore, Richard Edelman, does that benefit public relations companies like yours?

Edelman: We believe that there's incredible dispersion of authority in the world, and we think that in order to achieve belief today, you have to have a story communicated multiple times. It is very important that traditional media cover a story to get trust, but also, the echo chamber that is, in fact, the blogosphere is urgent for companies and government and others to recognize and participate in.

Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in P.R. Campaign

Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in P.R. Campaign.

The Times today runs a piece on how Wal-Mart over the last few months has become pro-active in seeking out friendly bloggers through whom they hope they can disseminate the company's good news about itself. The Times's big revelation is that some bloggers take the tips they get from a Wal-Mart PR account executive and run them nearly verbatim without disclosing where they're from. Thus, they turn themselves into unpaid corporate shills for the company.

Yeah, it's an issue. Everybody wants authoritative information. Objectivity is less important than knowing a story's provenance and being aware of a source's spin proclivities. But it's a little ironic that the Times is going out of its way to wring its hands over Wal-Mart's blogger campaign and the bloggers who swallow it without recognizing that all the same issues, which might together be grouped under the rubric of trust, are immediate and relevant for the traditional media, too. In fact, moreso: To the extent organizations like the Times hold themselves up as the standard bearers of journalistic correctness, they need to hold themselves to a higher standard.

Garbage In ...

Today's reading: Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal does a sort of Barbara Ehrenreich Lite turn and lives life as a lowly Web "content creator." Gomes solicited work writing content for online sites. He discovers that the work is laughably poorly paid and that the sites soliciting material are really only interested in reworked boilerplate:

"Understanding what's happening requires a lesson in modern Web economics. If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you've set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance.

"Then, to get your site ranked high in search engines, it's best to have "original content" about whatever the subject of your site happens to be. The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for. But it can't be just an outright copy of what's on some other site; you get penalized for that by search engines.

"Hence, there has been an explosion of demand for 'original content.' ... You'd think this would be a godsend for writers. Hah.

"Curious to learn more about the process, I bid on some writing jobs on the Web sites where these transactions occur. (I described myself quite honestly: as a Journal reporter interested in freelance work who might also write a Journal story about writing for Web sites.)

"I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as 'Whirlywinds.' I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything."

Yeah, 25,000 words for $100; that's .25 cents a word. Not surprisingly, Gomes approaches the job as an experienced, highly paid journalist would. The first article he turns in is the product of some actual research and reporting (even if the reporting consisted only of "interviewing" colleagues at the Journal). But spending a couple of working days on that reduces his pay to just 15 cents an hour, though, and reality sets in. The real "original content" game involves touching up material copied and pasted from other websites. Gomes begs off when he's asked to commit what amounts to plagiarism.

Gomes correctly points out that what lies at the bottom of this junk-content phenomenon is the widespread effort to game Google and the other search engines, which despite their relative sophistication are not smart enough by and large to distinguish between sites producing authoritative information and those that are merely ripping them off.

My colleague Ted says he thinks the proliferation of bad content is the search engines' fault: In essence, they've created a market for crummy content that imitates good content. Maybe so -- but no matter how smart search engines get, people will try to exploit them if they believe they can make a few bucks in the process. In the short run, anyway, this points up the importance of human intelligence as an extra filter in the content-analysis process.

Technorati Tags: journalism

A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It - New York Times

Link: A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It - New York Times.

Somewhere way, way back in the early days of the digital revolution, someone said "information wants to be free." Today, long after the revolution has turned into something that looks like Wal-Mart, where things can be cheap but never free, "content" substitutes for "information" in this formulation. Content as in: news and entertainment tidbits and financial data and music and videos and everything else you can think of.

Does content really want to be free? How do creators survive if the masses don't have to shell out for the privilege of listening to a song or watching a video clip? No, I don't have the definitive answers. But the Times piece above, on how NBC reacted to the wild popularity of a free clip from "Saturday Night Live," is a great example of the wrong way to react to the new realities, and possibilities, of the changing media environment.

Faced with a situation in which a clip from the show had escaped its control and become a major hit on the Web -- all by word of mouth, without the company spending a penny on promotion -- NBC jumped in to limit access to the clip, impose a fee on it, and threaten the service that had made it popular in the first place. That was a lousy PR move, but it was more than that.

No one's suggesting copyright issues aren't serious -- they are and must be one of the core considerations for every publisher and creator. But in this case, NBC let its long-term concern over how it's going to pay the bills destroy an opportunity to learn from and exploit a new mode of distribution.

RSS -- In 23 Simple Steps

A funny take from the Chicago Tribune columnist/blogger Eric Zorn introducing the masses to RSS. And yes -- he was just introduced to the Bloglines flavor of RSS himself.

23 real simple steps to making your Internet life much better

"...It’s time to take your relationship with the Internet to the next level, and I’m here to tell you how to do it in 23 short, easy steps (see below) with as little jargon as possible.

"Those who already use 'feed' technology should just move on along, as there’s nothing new for you here.

"The rest of you, who may have heard of “feeds” but been put off by those geeky letters people throw around when talking about it and felt confused about where and how to start, welcome.

"I was like you about a month ago. Then C. Max Magee, a former intern in our dot-com sweatshop, cajoled me into overcoming my reluctance, confusion and dread, and opening a free Bloglines account.

"I’m so satisfied with it that, today, I’m cajoling (and gently instructing) you. ..."