Journalism from Brendan

Because it isn't there

2009-11-15T08:16:53Z

I've commented before on the sense of taking news articles out of Google's index (there isn't any)...but since Murdoch is planning (or, according to some commentators, is pretending to plan) to take News Corp's content off Google by some time next year the idea is worth another look.

The problem with trying to re-silo content at tis stage in the game is threefold.

First, online consumers do not have a problem finding content or finding specific content. In fact, that's the opposite of the problem we face. Content is dyfunctionally abundant. There is so much of it that the problem is filtering through the billions of pages/articles/songs/photos/films/games/posts/tweets for something useful, entertaining or relevant. Take some of the content away and unless it is actually unique you've made searchers' lives a little bit easier (thanks!).

Second, and relatedly, if I'm looking for commentary on the latest NYTco quarterlies and some of the potentially useful information doesn't show up in my search because it has been deliberately withheld from the engine, I'll never know. People resopond to incentives. Hiding content from me when I search doesn't incentivise me to try any other particular alternative behaviour (I'm going to realise that the article which would have answered all my questions is on the New York Post website but since Google doesn't know about it I have to surf over there and look for it? Just how am I going to know that?).

Third, content in a silo will attract no new readers. Two years ago I didn't read Marginal Revolution, but I found it and now I do. Ditto Unqualified Reservations. Ditto...well, everything in my feedreader. It's an interesting idea to run a paid content business that no-one can find. I wouldn't fancy it myself. Newspapers have enough demographic problems without shutting themselves off to the main potential source of new readers.

Mike Arrington theorises that the end-game is for content-providers to cut deals with other (non-Google) search engines, leaving Google high and dry but the content catalogued and searchable somewhere. Fair enough. Assuming that different providers cut deals with different engines (otherwise it's not a market and we've just swapped the Googlopoly for the Bingopoly, whoop-de-doo) we'd be looking at a potentially massive inconvenience for users with no upside benefits at all as they jumped from engine to engine searching for different content. Happily such a deliberate fragmentation of search ignores the existence of adequate search aggregation tools that pre-emptively obviate the obstacles. Data that can be usefully brought together online generally is, because it can be, because that's how it's most useful (hence indeed, err, Google). Trying at this stage in the game to fragment it all again is no solution, it's just another cycle around while someone knocks up a better aggregator.

Digital channels fragment media. They fragmented music, so now we find songs by the track on iTunes and Spotify instead of buying albums. But where the music industry continues to enjoy inherent commercial upside from its fragmented content (iTunes cost money, Spotify has unskippable ads or subs to pay, ringtones are a goldmine) text content has no such inherent commercial upside as a distributed fragment. Read an article on a newspaper website and you see an ad. Read the same content on Google or in Bloglines and you don't. The problem to solve here is not to stop people finding the stuff and reading it on Google - it's to make money when they see it there, to embed some inherent commercial upside in that experience. RSS banners, universal IntelliTXT, anything that follows the content around and makes money from it wherever it's seen. Hell, even movies manage it with product placement and one day they'll work out how to charge extra for all the millions of times those placements are seen by BitTorrenters.

But take the content off Google and I no longer know it exists, and I'm not going to use three or four different search engines to check every time I have a query. Hide it and it simply isn't there.

The growing value of URLs you can easily spell out in dead bodies

2009-11-15T05:05:27Z

Probably the funniest bit of commercial ingenuity I've seen these past few months is the growth of corpse-spam in World of Warcraft.You see, it's quite hard, in-game, to spam people with commercial messages. If you send messages to people you get blocked and reported and your account shut down. If you just yell stuff in the city square people ignore you. But there's a huge market in selling gold to players (cos it's easier to buy 1000 gold from a Chinese sweat-shop than bother to earn it by playing the game) and so the gold-spammers have hit on an ingenious solution.

Go to any major city (Stormwind, Orgrimmar) and you'll see the name of some gold-selling website or other spelled out in dead bodies on the ground. Now, it's quite hard to spell out URLs in dead bodies (it takes several corpses, hence player accounts that you have to hack from somewhere - to spell out each one) so the big trick is to get a URL that is short, ideally memorable and above all easy to spell out in the dead bodies of WoW avatars.

There's another one for the list of jobs that it would have been hard to predict existing in the C21st - virtual corpse spammer. But there seems to be quite a lot of skill to it.

Live stream: “Journalism & the New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messengers?

2009-11-14T16:47:39Z

“Journalism & the New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messengers?” is a conference at Yale this weekend. You can follow the conference via live video stream here. The Twitter hashtag is #kmedia.

links for 2009-11-14

2009-11-14T08:07:22Z

A List of Social Media Marketing Examples (Being Peter Kim)

Totally awesome page, perfect for referencing

(tags: peterkim socialmedia examples)

Posted in socialmedia

Starting your news website: How to get the most promotional value from Twitter

2009-11-13T18:22:23Z

By Robert Niles: Thank you to everyone who sent along comments about my last piece, Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners. In response to a few comments, today I'm going more in-depth on how to most effectively use a promotional channel for a news website - specifically, how to get the most from Twitter. A Twitter feed provides one more forum for you to show the best of your site's work to an audience. Ideally, the Twitter feed should encourage people to click to your website, as well as to use their Twitter feeds to spread the word about your feed (and your website and brand), to other readers you haven't attracted yet. Again, these tips are designed for beginners to social media - journalism students or mid-career legacy media journalists who are making the switch to online publishing. If you are an online news veteran, well... click the comment button and share your best advice, too!

links for 2009-11-13

2009-11-13T08:05:32Z

TweetLevel

Interesting new tool from Edelman, developed by my mate Jonny Bentwood (whom I've never actually met but sort of know anyway).

(tags: twitter, tweetlevel, edelman, jonnybentwood)
AFP: New York teen proven innocent by Facebook

A New York teenager narrowly avoided a 25-year jail term for armed robbery thanks to a Facebook status update he posted about pancakes

(tags: facebook)
Twitter Analyzer – Main Statistics Page

I need to find out more about this but it looks quite cool

(tags: twitter, microblogging)

Posted in socialmedia

Top 50 Journalism Blogs

2009-11-13T02:32:54Z

Journalism Journeyman names the Top 50 Journalism Blogs. Thanks for including CyberJournalist.net!

Ellee Seymour - MCIPR, PRESS CONSULTANT, JOURNALIST, POLITICAL AND ...

2009-11-12T18:38:37Z

A school party who visited Infection 2009 today found themselves thrust in the media spotlight when BBC Newsround heart throb Ricky dropped in to interview them about bugs and sneezes. The pupils from the Arthur Terry School used a ...

A balanced approach to climate change

2009-11-12T17:20:03Z

Will the Copenhagen climate conference next month get a global deal on measures to control the rise in global temperatures?

That was one of the questions discussed this week when The World Tonight, co-hosted a conference at Chatham House with the journal International Affairs and the Royal Society looking at the challenges governments all over the world face with climate change and the potential scarcity of natural resources.

We also discussed how measures to deal with climate change could make food, energy and water shortages worse. You can listen to the programme we did from the conference here.

Most of the people at the conference were climate experts, technology specialists, politicians, lobbyists and activists, but there were also journalists ie us.

At one point, the discussion turned to concerns that many climate scientists have that public scepticism about climate change may be growing just as the models these scientists use to project the rise in global temperatures and the impact that will have on ice melt in places like the Himalayas, are suggesting a worse scenario in the next few decades.

They expressed surprise that this should be so.

One explanation offered was that the counter-message from climate change sceptics and lobby groups, especially in the US, that climate change is part of a natural cycle and nothing to worry about is a much simpler message to convey than the arguments for taking action which are based on a precautionary principle and complex climate modelling.

Others asked if the problem was a decline in public trust in scientists generally, because they are often asked to make projections which may not be subsequently borne out by experience.

Still others asked whether the media was responsible for the apparent rise in scepticism, arguing that the media in the interests of balance give airtime too much prominence to climate change sceptics, given the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree climate change is happening and it is man-made and measures need to be taken to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

From the BBC's perspective, the answer to this question is that our journalistic role is not to campaign for anything. Impartiality means not taking sides in a debate, while accurately representing the balance of argument.

So, in the case of climate change we need proportionately to reflect the sceptical view but also, for example, reflect the debate among climate scientists about the most effective way of dealing with global warming.

On our programme, for instance, one of our panellists argued an all-encompassing global conference like Copenhagen is not the way to make progress as it is trying to deal with too many issues at once.

Another of the panellists argued that capping emissions and developing a market to trade in carbon is too slow and uncertain a way of dealing with the problem and we should invest in technical solutions to reducing the amount of CO2.

On the wider issue of reporting risk which is often what reporting what scientists are saying involves, the BBC has specific guidelines which you may be interested in reading.

Anyway, take a listen to the programme and let us know what you think.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

Switching Sides – Former Journalist/Analyst Joins EASTWEST ...

2009-11-05T07:01:09Z

EASTWEST Public Relations has just announced that Kelvin Chen, previously a journalist and market research analyst, has just joined the agency as a new addition to its Beijing team. Kelvin will join EASTWEST as an Associate. ...

Fox News’ Online Video ‘Strategy’

2009-11-12T11:08:07Z

“Strategy Room,” Fox News’ Web video “network,” produces eight hours of live programming from New York each weekday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time, and attracts about 28,000 viewers, according to MediaWeek.

Politis PR Tip #36: Use Keyword Searches to Find the Best ...

2009-11-02T07:00:13Z

Even if you use Vocus or MediaSource, you can speed up the process of finding and identifying the best journalist for a particular story pitch by using keyword.

No revenue model for news? Labor steps up

2009-11-11T00:44:00Z

By David Westphal: At the recent Harvard session on new business models for news, I offered an off-the-beaten-path idea to the question of who will pay for the news. One answer, I said, was non-news organizations: NGOs, trade associations, businesses, governments and labor unions. Yes, labor unions. There are indications of a back-to-the-future trend in labor funding for the news. Just in the last several months, two labor unions in southern California have provided six-figure funding for very different kinds of operations - Voice of Orange County, an independent news site working toward a January launch, and Accountable California, a direct arm of Local 721, Service Employees International Union. The idea that legitimate journalism might flow from "special-interest" labor money would have seemed a non-starter to many of us not long ago. How could journalists provide fair and unfettered accounts when their paychecks were the product of an organization with a clear political agenda? In fact, though, Voice of Orange County and Accountable California are simply a revival of a kind of journalism that permeated American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - labor-backed newspapers.

Ellee Seymour - MCIPR, PRESS CONSULTANT, JOURNALIST, POLITICAL AND ...

2009-11-10T12:46:13Z

I find it quite shocking that the government has no idea how many people are dying from hospital infections. The publication today of a report on hospital infections highlights how the NHS's £12 billion IT system cannot even make a ...

New York Times publishes community-funded journalism

2009-11-10T04:15:55Z

The New York Times has published a story about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” by Lindsey Hoshaw that was funded in part through the “community funded journalism” site Spot.Us, which helped Hoshaw raise $10,000 from more than 100 people so she could report the story. She talks about the experience here:

Ellee Seymour - MCIPR, PRESS CONSULTANT, JOURNALIST, POLITICAL AND ...

2009-11-09T08:54:43Z

A generation ago, Conservatives ruled the roost in Cambridge, both in Westminster and on the city council. But support gradually declined until it lost its domination. Local Tories are now hoping that success is within reach again ...

Ellee Seymour - MCIPR, PRESS CONSULTANT, JOURNALIST, POLITICAL AND ...

2009-11-08T15:38:13Z

image Now Sir Christopher Kelly has made his far reaching recommendations on MPs' expenses, I hope he will turn his attention to the pay of interns who help grease the machinery of Westminster village. This is also a flawed system which ...

Ellee Seymour - MCIPR, PRESS CONSULTANT, JOURNALIST, POLITICAL AND ...

2009-11-07T08:28:53Z

It's more like September than November today. There is no thick morning mist across the flat Fenland landscape, and no need to wrap up in scarves and gloves. People are still going out in tee-shirts, and even shorts. image ...

Time for newspapers choose between the DEC or IBM model

2009-11-06T18:12:00Z

By Dave Chase: It is painful to watch the steady decline of newspapers. For some, I expect we're about to see the dead cat bounce as the economy turns around. This will only delay the inevitable. The challenge they face at this late date is immense but surmountable. Their near death experience is similar to what Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) and IBM faced. Only IBM remains a blue chip market leader. However, IBM completely reinvented itself from a "big iron" mainframe and minicomputer driven company to the market leader in I.T. related services. There were some valuable assets that they were able to leverage but it took an outsider like Lou Gerstner to make that wholesale change happen. Meanwhile, the vanguard company of the minicomputer era (DEC) wasn't able to make that shift and sold at a deep discount to Compaq (who in turn was bought by HP). It's important to recognize that IBM and DEC were in highly competitive markets. DEC along with countless other mainframe and minicomputer companies were unable to transform themselves and are mere footnotes of history. In contrast, the newspapers have largely operated in non-competitive markets by comparison. It will take a true newspaper leader and visionary to make this happen as opposed to someone just milking the cash cow until it withers and dies.

New site ‘Netted’ by the Webbys

2009-11-06T03:51:09Z

Netted is a new daily email produced by the folks behind the Webbys, “a free daily newsletter where they’ll share the latest, coolest, and most useful things they’ve discovered online”