Corante Media Hub

Monday squibs (holiday edition)

Mark — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:04:40 GMT

Some interesting bits and pieces from the web:

New twist on internships. The Philadelphia Inquirer to j-schools: we’ll give you an internship spot if you pay us. One of the effects of the decline of newspapers.
Liquidation unlikely as papers miss obligations. An AP report on newspapers and debts makes the point that it is unlikely that creditors will push newspaper companies into full bankruptcy, given that assets won’t cover debts and that no one is interested in buying them.
Newspapers Cope With Ad Slowdown: Hold Back On Inventory And Ad Nets. Strategies for dealing with slowing/levelling-of/falling online advertising include creating a little scarcity. Related: Alan Mutter’s latest, with no good news, $7.5B sales plunge forecast for newspapers.
The Hearst Awards for student journalists. In between preparations for today’s Thanksgiving turkey dinner, I want to spend some time looking at the winning entries in a competition that Mindy McAdams has likened to the Pulitzers for students.
Why a blog “seal of approval” is problematic….(from a blogger’s perspective). Tish Grier takes a thoughtful look at some of the issues raised by

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DA Says Town Broke Open Meeting Law

Robert Ambrogi — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:29:00 GMT

Worcester District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. has ruled that the Charlton, Mass., board of selectmen violated the open meeting law by meeting in private to evaluate the job performance of Town Administrator Robin Craver. The DA was acting on a complaint filed by the Telegram & Gazette, which reported the ruling in an Oct. 11 story, Town Manager Evaluation Ruled Illegal. In an Oct. 7 letter, the DA's office notified the selectmen that, in its opinion, the law requires performance evaluations of high-level public officials to be conducted in open session.

The case is interesting in that the selectmen sought to avoid an actual meeting. Instead, the chair sent out a summary evaluation and each board member reported back to the chair with comments. The chair compiled their feedback into a final evaluation, which he then discussed with the town administrator. Only after finishing the evaluation process did the chair read the summary evaluation at a public meeting.

The DA said that, even without a meeting, this process violated the law "by conducting the significant portion of the evaluation of the Town Administrator through a wholly written process that excluded the public." The letter continued: "The Legislature did not intend to allow Boards to shield their deliberations regarding performance evaluation of high-level employees from public disclosure by utilizing a process of written evaluations that are not made available to the public." In this sense, the case seems to parallel those involving "serial e-mails" or "serial meetings," where no single deliberative meeting is ever held but a violation is found nonetheless.

Get your Radio Station "Tuned In"

Mark Ramsey — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:19:12 GMT

David Meerman Scott is the co-author of one of my favorite books of the year so far, Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities that Lead to Business Breakthroughs. He’s also the author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. You can find out more about David here.

Check out the entire Q&A audio below. What follows is only a transcript of some highlights.

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Did You Give Money to Arthur?

Douglas — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:50:46 GMT

I just got this from Jay Babcock, editor of Arthur magazine, on whose behalf I posted an appeal for emergency funds this past Spring. In the spirit of community, he’s offering to pay back those in desperate need of cash now that the overall economy is skidding to a halt.

From Jay:

DID YOU LOAN US MONEY?
Thanks to all who donated cash to Arthur when we really needed it back in June. Arthur is doing better now, but times are getting scarier for many of us with each passing day. In the spirit of generosity that you showed to us, we would like to make this offer: if you gave to Arthur back in June and are now in real financial jeopardy, please let us know by sending a money request to us via the same PayPal account you used to send us money in June. We will get your money back to you as soon as possible. As Lewis Hyde says in his book The Gift, we’ve got to keep the money moving. Even if all we’ve got are credit cards…
Stay strong, generous and peaceful,
Jay Babcock
Arthur Magazine

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Retagging

Mark — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 06:12:14 GMT

I’m about 500-600 entries into the task of deleting Tchnorati tags and retagging all my posts with WordPress tags, which is a fair accomplishment, but still leaves me 2,500 or so posts short of completion.

One thing I’ve discovered in tagging posts from several years back: I’ve written some good stuff but I’ve also written utter tripe. I am resisting the urge to kill the tripe.

Read as we write

yelvington — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:24:06 GMT

Packt, a publishing company that specializes in books about computer programming, has begun selling electronic versions of its books that you can download before the writing is even finished. They call the program RAW -- for "Read As we Write." You get to download chapters as they are posted, even before the final publication edits. The benefit is easy to see: It cuts out the painfully long cycle of manufacturing and distribution that can make computer books out of date before they're shipped. The cost, of course, is that the consumer has to deal with a potentially higher error rate. Packt is setting up Google Groups for each RAW book and encouraging readers to post corrections, which may make it into the final printed edition. This isn't an isolated case; it's part of a broader pattern of "ship, then fix" that's touching everything from laptop computers to mainstream journalism. We blog, we make mistakes, we fix mistakes, and eventually we maybe print something that's more accurate and more thoroughly researched than it otherwise would have been. Such a process often is very uncomfortable for those raised in the closed-society model of journalism. I'm reminded that everything old is new again. Long before the Web and open Internet access revolutionized the online world, there was a closed online system called GEnie. One of GEnie's features was a very active discussion group for writers and wannabee novelists. One writer attracted a lot of attention by posting chapters of his novels as he wrote them, asking for feedback and discussion. His name was Tom Clancy. You may have heard of him.

Christmas Music on the Radio 2008

Mark Ramsey — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:23:00 GMT

With the extreme turbulance in our economy today, here's my prediction: This will be the biggest year for Christmas music on the radio EVER. I don't mean just the number of stations doing it. I mean the volume of listeners finding safe refuge in it. Christmas music on the radio will be HUGE this year.

Bottom?

Douglas — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:15:53 GMT

This week we witnessed the collapse of all the bubbles. This is really just the echo of the dot.com crash, and happens after the birth of any new technology. There’s a great book on this - I have to find it so I can tell you who wrote it.

In any case, if there’s a new bubble we have to think of it as the bubble of government itself.

Not that I’ve got money to back it up, but my prediction is that this is a medium-term bottom and that people who buy stocks of good depressed companies at the current levels will be very happy in a couple of years.

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Friday squibs

Mark — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:16:53 GMT

From the feedreader so far today:

Amid a deluge of criticism, Tampa Tribune increases to two sections of news content weekdays. The Tampa Tribune redesigned as a single-section newspaper, fired up the readers, and has decided to back a way a little. Seems people still care about their newspaper, but I wonder how many of the reported 300 subscription cancellations will come back.
Interview: Sam Abell And The Life Of A Photograph. Sam Abell is one of my favourite NatGeo photographers. This is a great, thoughtful interview that makes me want to pick up the camera and go for a walk. Via Rob Galbraith. Related: Gerik does a great job of ferreting out photo columns.
Mediashift at PBS. A very nice redesign of the site. Most of my surfing is feedreader and Twitter driven, so I don’t do portals. If I did, this would be one of them. Also getting interesting: Mahalo.
The newspapers that may survive - and why. Roy Greenslade makes no apologies for continuing to write that the journalistic sky is falling.
‘A significant challenge’ over at New Jersey’s Exploding Newsroom. This may be too

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Radio Tagging without HD

Mark Ramsey — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:31:01 GMT

It's RadioTAGr.

As their site says:

Now you know what you are hearing on the radio!
Now you can “TAG” songs and buy them later if you want. No more praying the DJ tells you the song or trying to remember it.

Now you don’t need a whole new radio to do “iTunes Tagging” !!!

Tag from your mobile phone. Buy from iTunes. No HD radio required.

The Granular Dangers of PPM

Mark Ramsey — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:01:07 GMT

While I think our industry is wrong to legislate against Arbitron and invite the Feds into our internal squabbles with PPM, there's no question that the PPM system has some significant fine-tuning to do. Slicing and dicing your PPM data reveals the trouble. Take Market X, where PPM is new (yeah, I know you can guess). This is a very difficult market to conduct research in, for the record. Station A is a Mainstream AC located out of the market which nevertheless ranks number two overall - among Men 35-44 - with a 7.6 share. Interestingly, that same station earns only a 1.7 share among Men 35-43. So what does it mean? It means one African American 44-year-old-Male listens pretty much around the clock and is single-handedly responsible for 37% of this station's total AQH audience. Station B is a Classic Rock station with a huge morning show in that same market. They're #1 by a mile among Adults 21-24, representing 46% of their total audience. 62% of their total audience is under 25, according to PPM (compared to 67% over 25 in the waning diary days). But here's the thing: Those 21-24 numbers were driven by two PPM panelists who lived in the same household. And because one of them was a Female this Classic Rock station has 42% more Female listeners than the Mainstream AC noted above. Finally, there's the out-of-market Urban station that doesn't throw a signal here and has listeners in this market only thanks to the outside chance of a long commute. It's tied for 6th in this market with Men 35-44. And all of that listening comes from one PPM, one of the four 39-year-olds lucky enough to carry PPM. But this one is the only African American. Working out the math, this one PPM panelist is responsible for more than 80% of this station's overall listening in the market. Are these bumps along the road to ...

Thursday squibs (how-to edition)

Mark — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:54:33 GMT

My, oh my, my browser is filled tonight with ideas and suggestions for moving journalism and newspapers forward. Here are a few of them:

A way to stay alive on weak ad days. Alan Mutter: What if newspapers didn’t kill editions on their ad-weak days and instead replaced them with themed, in-depth editions that appeal to sectors of the community and advertisers?
Will Algorithms Make Human Editors Obsolete? Not If Journalists Collaborate. Scott Karp: Instead of turning the task of sorting out all that data to algorithms, journalists need to get together and apply their skills to developing a powerful “linking voice.” With examples. (Scott is one of the sharpest pencils in the box; if you’re not subscribing to him, go do it right now.)
Newspaper of the future: Elite, free? Hmm. Kirk LaPointe: Isn’t the hybrid of advertising and subscription support for the newspaper still a worthwhile model?
Fire up the time machine - what would you do? Pat Thornton: What if you could go back 10 years and tell yourself about journalism. Interesting thought exercise that has drawn an excellent, detailed comment from Tim Windsor (scroll down).

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In the war room

yelvington — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:08:44 GMT

This week I'm in Jacksonville, Fla., where a team (right) is hard at work rebuilding Jacksonville.com on our new Drupal-based site management system. There are others up in Augusta and other locations, working as part of a larger virtual team, but even with instant messaging and regular conference calls there's no substitute for shoving a bunch of folks into one room with a sack full of junk food and not letting them out. The Florida Times-Union's site will be the first on the new platform, followed by the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Conway (Ark.) Log Cabin Democrat. Launch has been pushed back a couple of weeks because of the elections -- we have high confidence in the hardware and software, but people will be stressed out enough without the added complexity of new tools on Nov. 4. We're relying heavily on some Drupal contributed modules, especially Views (which lets you query the database and create various types of lists without writing SQL), the Content Construction Kit (arbitrarily structured special content types), FeedAPI (RSS and Atom acquisition), and Panels (arbitrary custom page layouts). The result should be a system that lets reporters report, writers write, and editors edit without having to know anything about HTML, scripting, FTP and other online technobabble. Nevertheless, there are going to be some interesting training challenges as we move from a world in which the Web was the exclusive concern of a small team of specialists, to a world in which every member of the news organization can directly play an appropriate role in Web operations.

Some sites I have not paid enough attention to….

Mark — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:15:14 GMT

…but intend to:

Now Public

Vewd

Michael Totten

Representative Journalism

Spot.us

BeatBlogging

Publish2

If there’s a theme here, it’s (mostly) new ways of doing and presenting journalism. My goal is to blog more about these over the coming days/weeks/months.

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Wednesday squibs

Mark — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:05:27 GMT

From my computer screen to yours:

The online ethics seal: together we can be more transparent. Interesting idea from Pat Thornton: website badges that spell out your stand on a variety of ethical issues (sourcing, copy editing, linking, etc.). A work in progress and a chance to join the discussion.
Stuff to teach the next journalists. Mindy McAdams is also launching a discussion as she helps compile a list of essential skills for the modern j-student.
MSM wins! Long live the MSM. I’m not sure how much irony is in Deb Jones’s post on some crowing about how it is mainstream media websites, not those pesky bloggers, that are drawing the traffic as folks try to sort out the financial mess. Being a little contrary, I can’t help but point out the most of the news about how it took earmarks and massive amounts of pork to have the U.S. bailout bill passed came from those pesky bloggers. Seriously: no one takes the MSM vs blogging debate very seriously any more.
Elite newspapers, free newspapers: the future lies somewhere here. Newspaper design guru Mario Garcia has a long, thoughtful post imagining what the future of newspapers may be.
Death Spiral Accelerates. Paul Gillin’s latest round-up of depressing industry news includes some

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