If you happen to be attending the event, I hope you’ll drop in to my presentation. I’ll be talking about how the transformation from industrial media to social media is changing career paths for editor, reporters, and other content creators, and outlining nine keys to a successful new-media career. I’ll also be giving away a few copies of the paperback edition of the New-Media Survival Guide to audience members hardy enough to stay with me through the entire talk.

If you can’t make it to SIPA, fear not. I expect there will be more than a few attendees reporting on the event. Look for the #SIPADC hashtag. My hectic schedule and a deplorable lack of ambition will probably limit my own efforts at live coverage, but I hope to manage at least an occasional tweet.

Related posts:

1. Introducing the New-Media Survival Guide
2. Six New-Media Principles: Introduction
3. Personal vs. Corporate: Six New-Media Principles, No. 3

Those are some of the questions being raised recently by a number of new-media observers, most notably GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram, who’s lately been rolling out one must-read blog post after another.

The problem with traditional news is that traditional journalists are increasingly unnecessary to produce it. Robot reporters are cornering the market on facts, as companies like Narrative Science and Automated Insights perfect the science of teaching software to turn data into news stories.

If basic news becomes a fungible commodity, one obvious alternative for journalists is what Ben Huh says great reporters already do: convey not simply the facts, but their subjective emotions about those facts.  But this, he says, is a “very, very dangerous” approach.

That’s one lesson that could be drawn from reporter Anne Sutherland’s recent suspension from the Montreal Gazette for remarks she made on Twitter. Covering a “nearly naked” protest by university students, she tweeted a number of photos of the protestors accompanied by “snarky” comments about their physiques. Neither her Twitter followers nor her employers found it amusing.

Writing about Ben Huh, GigaOm’s Ingram says that “in order to be effective, journalism needs to be personal.” But doesn’t Sutherland’s seemingly personal reaction to the protestors prove the opposite, and that the dangers of being personal outweigh the benefits?

I think not. I don’t know her, of course, but I’d guess the problem isn’t that she was being human or that she was being too personal. Rather, she was responding to the wrong instincts and emotions.  She was there as a journalist, but reacting as an average, and thoughtless, bystander.

In a post written before Sutherland’s misstep, Steve Buttry addressed a similar issue in explaining “how to respond to staff members who were using crude language and behaving unprofessionally on Twitter.” On social media, he says, journalists must be personable, yes, but also professional:

“A professional journalist using Twitter should behave professionally. Your profile should identify you as a journalist with your news organization. You should behave accordingly.”

I don’t disagree. But I wonder if professionalism is sufficient. The problem for me is that professionalism is more shield than guiding light. Too often, it is just a way of doing what won’t get you fired.

To succeed in a personal medium, you ultimately need a personal standard. The preeminent question to ask yourself now may not be Is this a professional and objective statement of the facts? but rather Is this my best, most honest, and most personally true assessment of those facts?

This might not seem like the appropriate corrective to the all-too-personal Sutherland. But I suspect her reactions were not truly personal. They sound, rather, like received views, the trite and formulaic reactions not of a person, but of a type of person. It is a behavioral response that could be easily programmed into a Narrative Science algorithm: If see hairy body, then tweet “Ewww.”

In gauging how to handle social media, maybe what journalists need is not so much a standard of professionalism as a kind of Turing test. That is, could what you’re writing be produced by a computer imitating a human reporter?

The test is not whether the content is dryly factual or snarkily silly, superbly impartial or grossly biased. Those traits are easy to replicate. Instead, the test should be whether the prose is truly personal. Does it reflect a real consciousness struggling to find the truth, or an automaton juggling ones and zeroes?

Such a test can never be very precise. But journalism, whether conducted in traditional or social media, would be the better for it.

Related posts:

1. Selling and Journalism
2. Is B2B Ready for Corporate Journalism?
3. Want to Twitter Better? Diversify Your Pronouns

Well, OK, I do know what DRM is. But the biggest problem in the fight against it is the term itself. Even if he or she knows that it stands for digital rights management, the average, intelligent, but non-digerati person on the street has no clue what it means.

There are plenty of signs that book publishers are losing their taste for putting locks on the media you buy, just as music publishers have mostly done. But the process could be speeded up, I believe, if we could just come up with a better term for DRM.

As with the similarly opaque term net neutrality, which more people would favor if they understood what it was, DRM—term and practice alike—is protected by its obscurity. I admit that most of the alternatives I can come up with—locked media, restricted use rights, captive e-books—don’t resonate. So here’s an opening for someone out there who has the killer term that will, in fact, kill DRM, once and for all.

In the meantime, why not visit the Day Against DRM website and learn more about why you too should be against DRM?

No related posts.

I’ve come to this conclusion over the past two years as a result of two studies I’ve conducted of 100 sites and more than 1,000 e-news articles. The studies focused on B2B e-news from well-known trade publishers and included totally staff-written content as well as mixes of aggregated and staff-written material.  Early results from my third 50-site study of e-news delivery confirm that high quality remains in short supply.

What accounts for this poor showing? Of the eight common factors I’ve identified, three in particular stand out:

1. Lack of enterprise.  Most industry bloggers insist that content generated should be exclusive—information unavailable elsewhere.  This distinction, which should seem obvious, is a key to way to score points in marketing presentations involving competitive match-ups. But in the 1,000 articles I reviewed, 65% of them showed no evidence of enterprise. That is, I found no indication in the article that an actual telephone or e-mail exchange occurred between editor and source.

2. Longwinded sentences. A key to readability, especially online, is to keep sentences short and to the point. But in many stories I’ve reviewed, the authors show a fondness for verbose and wandering sentences. In too many cases, parades of 35- and 40-word specimens were the rule rather than the exception.

3. Insufficient links. The internet is by its nature an interactive medium. That makes it all the more perplexing how rarely B2B e-news includes embedded links. The typical usage when links do appear is on the short side—three to five words.  Higher-scoring sites in my studies use longer links—sometimes full sentences—to reflect a value that encourages visitors to click through.

If you’re responsible for e-news, how does your site rate in these areas? And, perhaps more importantly, how does it compare with that of your competitors?

For a better-informed handle on whether your content is best of show, try a “Like-Item Analysis.” This exercise involves a comparison of articles posted by you and the opposition that cover the same or similar events. In many cases, the results may reveal that neither you nor your competitors can claim bragging rights.

You may not be pleased with this outcome. But an honest assessment of how your e-news ranks is the first step to improving it.

Howard Rauch is president of Editorial Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm serving B2B publishers.  He recently completed Get Serious About Competitive Editorial Analysis, a 50-page manual.  It offers a detailed, quantitative system for assessing the competitiveness of editorial content. Three hours of consulting are included in the purchase price. For more details, e-mail howard@editsol.com or call (201) 569-7714.

Related posts:

1. The Fix-It Alert: Eight Keys to Better Online News Writing

What caught my eye in this story, though, was a different kind of failure, one involving not reporters or editors, but the tools they use.

In an earlier article on Flock’s first corrected story last December, Pexton focused similarly on failures involving the human element. In this story, Flock incorrectly attributed to the Romney presidential campaign the use of an old Ku Klux Klan slogan. Although she tried to contact campaign representatives by e-mail, their reply correcting the story was lost in the WaPo spam filter. Quoting executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Pexton concluded that “‘We had a reporter failure and we had an editor failure.’”

But then he went on to raise a quite different kind of failure:

“Another problem here is that too many reporters see the computer as their main tool of the trade. I’m old-fashioned, and I think the telephone is still the first tool of the trade if you can’t do a personal interview. Fine to use the Internet for some basic research, or in a pinch to e-mail a source for a comment, but it’s faster and often better to call. You get more nuance, more spontaneity, and you usually get a real human being to answer a question. E-mail is too easily ignored; a person on the phone is harder to put off.”

My first reaction to this was an odd mixture of agreement and skepticism. I think it’s true that younger journalists tend to rely too much on online tools and not enough on old ones like the telephone. But Pexton’s suggestion that the Internet is only good for basic research or as a last resort is wrong too.

All of these tools are useful. But they all fail at times as well. The key is to use them all and to trust none.

Related posts:

1. Social Media and Ethics: An Interview with B2B Editor Maureen Alley
2. Jesse Noyes: Brand Journalist or Brand Reporter?
3. Why Aggregation Is Not Distasteful

There’s nothing particularly new or revolutionary about this sentiment, and I might have let it pass if not for something I came across last night. I’ve been reading the autobiography of the late novelist Mark Harris, Best Father Ever Invented. In it, he writes about the elation he felt in 1948 when he left journalism to enter college:

How impossible that I was now to spend a day at labor which never asked for the quick hook to catch the reader, never asked, “Is it news? Is it what the public wants?” but in the actual reading of books, in the actual discussion of text, in the actual pursuit of thoughts and conclusions not predetermined by newspaper policy or the interests of the advertising department.

Journalism has always been about selling things. That doesn’t invalidate it as an activity, any more than it invalidates marketing. But it does mean that journalists must acknowledge that limitation if they wish to overcome it.

Related posts:

1. Is B2B Ready for Corporate Journalism?
2. Journalism, Aggregation, and Doing Things with Words
3. Should Journalism Schools Rethink Magazines? (Or Even Journalism Itself?)

Nearly two years ago, I wrote that while the Web has a future, it may not have a past. Exhibit A in my argument was the lamentable state of Jeff Jarvis’s influential blog, BuzzMachine. Started in the aftermath of 9/11, its archives offer an invaluable chronicle of the development of new media in the 21st century. But as I noted, trying to dig through those archives was nearly as arduous as excavating Troy. Links to the first few years of posts were hard to find, and when you did, they were encrusted with spam advertisements.

A year and a half later, thanks to son Jake Jarvis, the archives have been restored. Though it means quite a few of the links in my article have been broken, I’m happy at how easy it now is to read through those early posts. True, they don’t have the original look and feel, and they have squirreled away somewhere the ominous old blog title, “WarLog: World War III.” But you can always find samples of the original on the Internet Archive.

In all, it’s a good day for the history of the Web, one I wasn’t sure was coming. Now if Filloux will just correct that typo….

Related posts:

1. What B2B Can Learn from Jeff Jarvis, Part 2
2. What B2B Can Learn from Jeff Jarvis
3. What B2B Can Learn from Jeff Jarvis, Part 4

Brooks played a small role in a post I wrote earlier today on the New-Media Survival Guide website suggesting that journalists should write a Firing Manifesto. The idea, basically, is to know when you should choose between saving your job and saving your career.

Though he didn’t have any say in it, getting fired may turn out to have been a positive development for Brooks’s career. In a piece in the Huffington Post, which I read after posting my article, he reports that in the aftermath, he’s received a number of job offers and other opportunities. We won’t know for a while, but it seems social media has done his career more good than harm.

Related posts:

1. Nine Keys to a Robust Editorial Career in Social Media
2. Does Danger Lurk in the Language of Social Media?
3. Be Yourself. Just Not Your Real Self: Scripps’ Muddled Social Media Policy

I believe I’m right, and I think it’s important to start the discussion. And my theory is very easy to disprove: just run your own analysis on your traffic and determine exactly how many people are scrolling down the page to read comments. Then figure out how much you’re spending to maintain comment communities that are civil, vibrant, and not an embarassment sitting just below your own work. I bet once you run all the numbers, you’d discover you’d be saving money simply by not having comments at all. (You’d probably save a bundle on therapy for authors alone.)

Johnson’s objections to comments are many. First, he says, most of them are worthless. Only 1 or 2 in 100 “actually provoke discussion or elucidate another’s argument,” he argues.

Next, he says, comments don’t make any money. (But then what does for most bloggers? Please let me know.)

Moreover, commenters are often rude to authors. Comments, he says, are a dinner party, and “if I’ve invited you to have a seat at my table, at least have the courtesy to not call me an idiot for serving you food slightly different than you preferred.”

Finally, and most damningly, almost no one actually reads the comments.

I’m sure all this is true for high-traffic, commercial blogs. But I’m willing to bet that for the vast majority of blogs, the problems Johnson and others experience at mainstream, consumer oriented blogs like Animal simply don’t exist.

One reason, of course, is that most blogs, like mine, alas, don’t get many comments to begin with (other than the spammy variety that Akismet so silently and effectively filters out).

But some are so clearly and consistently focused on a single community interest that they generate with almost every post a huge number of intelligent, interesting, and polite comments. For some of my favorite blogs, in fact, the comments are at least as good as the original post, and often better.

Though I haven’t asked them, I’d guess that Steve Buttry, Mark Schaefer, Mitch Joel, Porter Anderson, and others too numerous to mention here don’t just tolerate their comments, but live for them. Certainly the comments they approve and respond to all reflect a genuine and productive engagement with the topic.

In addition to a carefully targeted focus, there are probably a couple of other reasons these bloggers get such a wealth of thoughtful and useful comments.

First, they are all personal. These bloggers are heavily invested in their blogs, and take the responsibility for every word that appears in them.

Second, they are all genuinely good, thoughtful, and generous people. They attract like personalities that come to enhance the discussion, not to degrade it.

So, yes, if your aim as a blogger is first and foremost to make money, you may want to disable commenting. For the rest of us, though, comments, not cash, are the currency we seek.

Related posts:

1. 30 Lessons from 30 Blog Posts in 30 Days
2. Is a Blog Just a Container?
3. Improve Your Blog Posts with Nut Graphs

Today’s news that the mobile photo-sharing platform Instagram has been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion underscores a trend that’s been gnawing at me for the last few months. Mark Zuckerberg clearly understands that images are an increasingly important element in social discourse. So do the founders of the visually oriented Pinterest, which in less than a year has leapt from obscurity to become the third most popular social network on the web.

Why should this worry me? I’m a reasonably visual guy. I’ve been a serious photographer since my childhood, and my years as a magazine editor taught me the importance of balancing words with images.

I guess I fear that the emphasis now being given to the visual is upsetting that balance.  Increasingly, words alone are seen as inadequate or insufficiently appealing. As Joel Friedlander says, explaining why he plunks a large photo into the top of every post on his blog, “it’s a given: blog articles attract more interest with photographs and other images.” Pinterest only intensifies this need for images. In fact, as Tony Hallet pointed out last month, if a blog post has no images, it essentially doesn’t exist in Pinterest’s eyes.

Knowing this, any blogger that wants to be read will find an image to go with the words. That’s great when an image enhances or reinforces the meaning of the words. But all too often it doesn’t. Finding a picture that explains an abstract concept is difficult, especially if you limit yourself to images you have a clear-cut right to use. As a result, bloggers frequently face this choice: go without an image, or settle for one that looks good but has little to do with your topic.  Increasingly, they will have no reasonable option but the latter. It’s the tyranny of the image.

I agree, as Tony Hallet says, that “it’s arguably the photographer, the illustrator, the graphic designer, maybe even the infographic creator who will hold the key to much of what lies ahead.” It’s another question, though, whether the key opens the right door.

Related posts:

1. Should We Worry About Gobbledygook?
2. Schadenfreude Is Cheap: Don’t Worry About the Journalists of the Future
3. Writing, Photography, and the Art of Thinking Visually