loose wire blog

Ritual: The Forgotten Sweet Spot of Old Media

Lifehacker just pointed to a four-year old entry on how to fold a newspaper:

Real Simple magazine has an old but good step-by-step guide to folding an unwieldy broadsheet newspaper for easy reading on the go. It's really just a matter of a few well placed folds, but if you don't already have a good folding strategy, this post is a great starting point. On the other hand, if you're a newspaper-folding pro and your methods differ from Real Simple's guide, let's hear all about how you make it work in the comments.

Of course, my first reaction was the same as some of the commenters: “What?? Next we’ll be taught how to blow our nose!” But actually it’s quite informative, and I notice that it’s exactly how my dad would read the paper.

Of course, he never taught me how to do that, and I’ll probably never need to teach my kids how to do it. “Fold a newspaper? Are you insane, Dad?” Instead, they’ll be reading on their Readius:

And that’s the point: My use of the newspaper is bound up in my memory of my father reading the newspaper. We as children mimic adults, so it was a sign of maturity for me to read the newspaper—or rather, for me to master the newspaper. That didn’t mean just reading it, but handling it—folding it, creasing it, carrying it under my arm, swishing it in the air when I turned a page, tut-tutting at the goings-on of the world.

Another moment yesterday elicited the same thought: Banished to the kitchen I was listening to the Wimbledon Men’s Final on the radio while my wife watched it on the TV. Of course, it’s vastly preferable to watch it rather than listen to it, but still the atmosphere created by the commentator on the radio was so powerful, his descriptions so flawless and compelling, that I found myself preferring it to the easy visuals of the TV.

What’s more, it took me back to those schooldays clustered around the radio listening to the second-half commentary of soccer matches on Saturday afternoon, or, radio under pillow after lights-out with the volume on 1, following an evening UEFA Cup tie between my team and some exotic-sounding team from behind the Iron Curtain. It was so magical, so dramatic, the inflexions of the commentator so perfect, I am forever transported back to those moments whenever I hear sport being described in real time on radio.

Of course my wife thought me absurd for prefering audio over visual. And I readily accept it is. But it’s like newspapers: beyond the obvious argument that some formats trump others in certain situations (newspapers over computers in the bath; cellphones over newspapers on crowded transport), there’s also the fact that we connect emotionally to the formats, not just because of habit, but because they evoke deeper feelings—to the past, to familiarity, to a sense of habit and ritual.

Most debates about newspapers nowadays are about when they’ll die out. I don’t believe this will happen, because they represent a format that still trumps others in certain situations. But beyond the practical there’s an emotional element too, and perhaps the challenge of ‘old’ media is to capture some of these emotional connections—newspapers strewn around in Starbucks, free, throwaway radios for listening to commentary at big games—in order to inject fresh life into the medium.

After all, it’s not just about reading yourself up-to-date. It’s about the physical pleasure of reading, of feeling at peace and in the security of a familiar habit.

Reading: How to Fold a Broadsheet Newspaper

Technorati Tags: newspapers,radio,media,web 2.0

How to Get Your Pitch Read Part XIV

One way to try to get the journalist to read beyond the headline/subject is the EMBARGOED tag:

Although it does sound somewhat pompous, and can backfire if it's not a story worth breaking an embargo for.

Likewise a subject line prefaced by BREAKING NEWS:

As you can see, MySpace's PR seems to think anything to do with their client is BREAKING NEWS, and deserves CAPS all the way.

Both of these are in danger of Cry Wolf Syndrome. Use them too many times and they wear out.

Another, better way to get your press release read than to send it and then recall it:

I have no idea whether these were all intentional but they certainly had me trawling through my trash for the originals. The fact that no explanation is given for the recall just makes it more intriguing.

This reminds me of an ex-colleague who used to put tiny mistakes in his Reuters features so they'd have to be corrected and run again. Doubled his chances of getting them in print.

Of course, overused, both endanger the credibility of the author: the journalist looking like an error-prone hack, the PR flak looking like someone who says something and then promptly takes it back.

The Freshness. and T-Shirt Worthiness, of News

(cross-posted from a Loose Wire sister site, ConvergedMedia.net)

CNN.com has a good way of informing readers of the 'freshness' of news by adding notes in red to indicate when the story was added or updated. (In the example above it also adds a 'developing story' label.)

This kind of thing is helpful in that the site can still order stories by their importance, but also flag those that are being updated:

(It also adds a rather cute touch to its whacky stories, allowing readers to order a T-shirt with the headline on it:)

Click on the T-shirt logo and you're taken to a page where you can order the shirt:

Technorati Tags: cnn,news,presentation,visualization,monetisation

Burma's Firewall Fighters

Another good report on Burma's failed efforts to stop information getting out, from the Commitee to Protect Journalists:

Those fears are driving Burma’s undercover reporters to become more innovative. DVB’s Moe Aye said his in-country reporters now check in with editors by pay phone at predetermined times to mitigate the risk of communicating on lines that may be tapped by authorities.

In-country journalists have their own clandestine procedures. One undercover DVB reporter secretly reported on the trial of a popular political prisoner by using his mobile telephone to record the detainee entering the courthouse. Later that day, he used the Internet to transmit the footage in time to meet DVB’s production deadline.

“They say, ‘Don’t ask me how, just wait and it will be there.’” Moe Aye said. “I don’t ask, so I can’t tell you how they do it. They have their own ways.”  

Although I still believe it's important not to overstate the influence of the Internet in opening up a country and placing a brake on the brutality of regimes (Burma has shown no lack of appetite for repression, and can pull the plug on the Internet at will, firstly, and secondly information and images still found their way out even in the pre-Web uprising of 1988), it's great to read of how young Burmese are finding ways to report on what's going on there.

Burma's Firewall Fighters

Technorati Tags: burma,myanmar,censorship,repression,journalism,media

The History of an Article

The Guardian is adding some great features to its website. I'm not crazy about the betting stuff, coming from puritanical stock, and I'm not quite sure how the paper is making money from all this, but I do like the "article history" feature. It's below the byline and before the text. Click on the link and a window appears explaining where the article originally appeared offline and when it was last updated: 

There's a similar link at the bottom of each story although for now the link doesn't seem to work:

This stuff is good for several reasons:

• It helps to create a relationship between the offline and the online, especially where the paper has two distinct offline products (Observer and Guardian).
• Giving a 'last updated' time/date gives the reader a sense of how recently journalists/editors added to the story. I'm not quite sure whether this means the Guardian is going to update the story in the journalistic sense of adding a lead if the situation requires it. But it's helpful to the reader to know when the piece was last touched.
• This would also work well for corrections. Correcting a story and explaining what it was corrected from is an important part of journalistic transparency (this Wired story, for example, corrected Clueless Manifesto to Cluetrain Manifesto after BuzzMachine pointed out the error, but didn't indicate what the original error was; ironic, given the subject matter.)

Of course, this could go further. Perhaps the Guardian could share with readers when work started on the story, who edited it and for how long, as well as a history of comments on the piece (I never quite understand why comments are allowed on blog-type articles on the Guardian website, but not on stories.)

And a minor quibble: I'd like to see the time tagged as GMT, or British Summer Time, or whatever, given the Guardian's huge foreign readership. We're a big global family now, but we're not all in the same timezone.

Anyway, kudos to the Guardian/Observer for an impressive site.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, guardian, editing

Tibet and the Information War

From EastSouthWestNorth

Rebecca Mackinnon of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre in Hong Kong does a great job of looking at how Chinese are increasingly skeptical of Western news agencies' perceived bias about what has happened in Tibet:

Hopefully most of China's netizens will draw the obvious conclusion: that in the end you shouldn't trust any information source - Western or Chinese, professional or amateur, digital or analog - until and unless they have earned your trust.

She provides some great examples including the apparent cropping of photos on CNN.com to shape the story. It's well worth a read.

Ethan Zuckerman takes issue with one BBC reporter who, he says, take all the criticism of coverage he has received as coming from government stooges: "In other words, there may be angry Chinese citizens contacting BBC reporters to complain about their coverage, but they’re being controlled by Chinese state media." (There's no link for the report so I can't follow this up.)

This is a fascinating discussion, because it represents something of a watershed in different ways:

• What was originally perceived to be a crisis for China's image of itself in the world may end up being something else. Too early to say yet;
• The first big international story that may, in the final analysis, be defined not by the (Western) mass media but by an online debate (kind word)/'information war' (probably more accurate word);
• The extent to which a country/nation defines itself is drifting from an official function to an informal, online one. An online fightback, and one which is done by its passionate and angry citizen, has much more credibility than a state-sponsored one.

'Stories' are shaped early on and it's a brave journalist who defies preconceptions and refuses to pander to them. (Brave usually because their editors will yell at them to provide copy and content to match their competitors, but also because they face viewer/reader harrassment.)

The Tibet story, which has not yet played itself out and may have more twists to come, is one of those stories any media should be mature enough to cover in a nuanced and unbiased way.

RConversation: Anti-CNN and the Tibet information war

Technorati Tags: bridgeblogging, china, tibet, censorship, blogging, information, truth, hong kong, ethan zuckerman, rebecca mackinnon, kazakhstan, borat, cnn, bbc

Laptops Aren't the Problem: The Meetings Are

Some interesting discussions about whether laptops should be allowed in class or meetings. This from Cybernetnews (via Steve Rubel's shared Google Reader feed):

At the start of my last semester of school, I was taken back when I read the syllabus for one of my classes. It read something like: “laptops may not be brought to class because they distract both the student and the teacher.” For most of my college career I had gotten used to bringing my laptop to class to take notes because I could type much faster than I could write, and sorting and organizing notes was much easier. Here I was in my last semester and the teacher wasn’t going to allow a laptop. I was annoyed, but life went on without my laptop and I had to get used to writing my notes once again.

This is also happening in business meetings.

I definitely think it's distracting to a teacher or presenter to have people tapping away on laptops. And, perhaps more importantly, distracting for people around them. Speakers at tech conferences can feel themselves battling for attention in a room full of laptop users who rarely look up. I often bring a laptop to interviews and type directly into it; I can tell some interviewees find this distracting, and it's not good for the 'hold eye contact to make subject comfortable and stick to topic" routine I try to instill in students.

But laptops are part of our culture now in the same way that notepads and pens were. The truth is that laptops are part of our productivity, and removing them doesn't make sense since it punishes those people who have succeeded in meshing them into their lives. And besides, few of us have got so much to say, and are so good at saying it that members of the multitasking generation can't do a few other things while they're listening to us.

The downer is if the user is clearly not actually taking notes. Or not using the laptop to dig up useful information to contribute to the meeting (my favorite example of this is PersonalBrain demon Jerry Michalski, who can dig up interesting links related to what's being talked about in seconds). And there's another aspect to this: the flattening effect of the backchannel, where participants at a conference discuss what is going on onstage among themselves. In one sense this is good, since it gives a passive audience a tool to control the session, but in another it's simply another distraction.

But I think we presenters/meeting leaders/speakers need to think harder, and throw out the old rule book.

I've tried to analyse why I as a teacher find it distracting. One student has been tapping away almost incessantly in class when I've been talking. And until recently I've had no way of telling whether she's been writing a letter to Aunt Joan or IMing  or whether she's so impressed with what I'm saying that she's taking it down verbatim. But I've figured out the solution: just lob a few questions her way and see whether she's flummoxed or in the flow.

The truth is that while it's great to have everyone's eyes on you when you're talking, rapt fascination sculpting their features into a permanent O shape, those people are not taking notes. We don't assume that people writing longhand are goofing off (although in my students days that was exactly what I was doing, writing lyrics) so shouldn't we give laptop users the benefit of the doubt? I'd rather students had some record of what I was saying in class, even if it means they're also checking email.

The bigger solution, of course, is to ditch the whole 'presentation thing' in favor of participation. I know my class are more attentive if they know I'm going to ask random questions of them. An audience is going to be more attentive if the speaker is not merely droning on but offering a compelling performance and engaging them as much as possible. A meeting leader is going to have the attention of the room if s/he doesn't waste their valuable day giving some PR schtick but keeps it short and genuinely meets the other participant, rather than lectures them.

In short, the onus is always on the person who leads the meeting/class/conference to engage the participants. It's not rocket science to figure out that all the laptops will clamp tightly shut if the meeting is so absorbing and lively that participants don't want to miss a second of it, and feel their voice is being heard. And the teacher/presenter/meeting leader should make sure that there's a decent record of the meeting so those who participate aren't punished because they haven't had a chance to take notes.

Laptops have been around long enough for us to have figured out a better way of absorbing them into our workflow. Campuses now have power outlets and lots of tables where students can work on their laptops. This is great to see (and I find it a tad strange that some lecture rooms don't have the same deal.) These students are used to doing stuff on their laptops, and they'll enter the workforce with the same mentality. We should be encouraging this. We need to figure out ways to work with this, not against it.

No Laptops Allowed! A New Trend?

Technorati Tags: laptops, education, journalism, distraction, universities, campus, teaching

Why Reporters Hate PR Professionals

Peter Shankman recently told the story of how lazy/dumb/thoughtless PR types can be when he forwards a journalist request and gets mostly lame and irrelevant replies. His conclusion:

Is this what the agencies are teaching their employees to do?

If it is, reporters have every right to hate public relations professionals.

We're not doing our job.

At best, we're an industry that relies on hope, and not skill, on the off chance that we'll catch a break.

We've become an industry of posers, hoping that we'll get through another day without being exposed as a fraud.

Peter's response to this industry-wide problem was to set up a Facebook group. Now that's gotten too large he's set up a website and list, to which PR and industry types can subscribe. Peter will post journalist queries to the list. He tags on an excellent proviso: 

By joining this list, just promise me and yourself that you'll ask yourself before you send a response: Is this response really on target? Is this response really going to help the journalist, or is this just a BS way for me to get my client in front of the reporter? If you have to think for more than three seconds, chances are, you shouldn't send the response.

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Sadly, I suspect many PR types don't really care about relevance or blowing it with a reporter by making an irrelevant pitch; they just want to be able to add another number to their report. As Phil Gomes of Edelman points out, ProfNet owns this field but their usefulness has dropped off in recent years. There's plenty of room for more and better players. 

(Vaguely related vent: I got another one of those emails with a subject line "May I call you on this?" this morning. How useful is that? Does it give me any idea of whether it's relevant and interesting to me? That I now have to read the contents of the email to get a clue isn't going to endear me to you. That you are so keen to phone me tells me you're a high maintenance PR contact I don't want to waste time with. I take great joy in sending an empty email with the subject line "No" to these emails. And I add their domain to my "PR spam" filter. I know, it's harsh, but life's too short.) 

The home of Peter Shankman - Shankman.com

Technorati Tags: pitching, journalists, PR, pitches, shankman

Counting the Words

I've been looking recently at different ways that newspapers can add value to the news they produce, and one of them is using technology to better mine the information that's available to bring out themes and nuances that might otherwise be lost. But does it always work?

The post popular page on the WSJ.com website at the moment is Barack Obama's speech, which has dozens of comments added to it (not all them illuminating; but there's another story.) What intrigued me was the text analysis box in the text:

Click on that link and you see a sort of tag cloud of words and how frequently they appear in the text of the piece itself. Mouse over a word and a popup tells you how many times Obama used the word. "Black," for example, appears 38 times; "white" appears only 29. That's nearly 25% fewer times.

Interesting, but useful? My gut reaction is that it cheapens a remarkable speech--remarkable not because of its views, but remarkable because it's a piece of oratory that could have been uttered 10, 20, 50, maybe even 100 years ago and still be understood.

My point? Analyzing a speech using a simple counter is not only pretty pointless--does the fact he said 'black' more times than 'white' tell us anything? What about the words he didn't use?--but it paves the way to speechwriters running their own text analysis over speeches before they're spoken. "Hey, Bob! We need to put more 'whites' in there otherwise people are going to freak out!" "OK how about mentioning you were in White Plains a couple of times last year?"

Maybe this already happens. But oratory is an art form: it doesn't succumb to analysis, just as efforts to subject Shakespeare to text analysis don't really tell us very much about Shakespeare.

The Journal is just messing around, of course, experimenting with what it can to see what might work. We're merely watching a small episode in newspapers trying to be relevant. And it should be applauded for doing so. But I really hope that something more substantial and smart will come along, because this kind of thing not only misses the mark, but is in danger of quickly becoming absurd.

Perhaps more important, it fails to really add value to the data. Without any analysis of the frequency of words, there's not really much one can say to the exercise except, maybe, "hmmm." Compare that with a Canadian research project a couple of years back which developed algorithms to measure spin in the 2006 election there. They looked at politicians' use of particular words: "exception words" -- however, unless -- for example, and the decreased use of personal pronouns--I, we, me, us-- which might imply the speaker was distancing him- or herself from what was being said.

That sounds smart, but was it revealing? The New Scientist, writing in January 2006, said the results concluded that the incumbent, Prime Minister Paul Martin, of the Liberal Party, spun "dramatically more than Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, and the New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton." Harper, needless to say, won the election.

Oh, and in case you're interested, Shakespeare used the word "black" 174 times in his oeuvre, according to Open Source Shakespeare, and "white" only 148, 15% fewer occurrences. Clearly a story there.

Technorati Tags: text analysis,wsj.com,wsj,newspapers,future of media,online journalism,spin,politics,barack obama,race,u.s. election

People's Daily Most Read: Tibet

The annoying thing with social media is that you can't really control it. If you insist on having a section listing the most-read stories, say, you can't really fiddle with it without making it pretty meaningless.

The English-language version of the People's Daily website, for example, doesn't have any story on Tibet displayed prominently on its front page (at least now; it did before) but that doesn't mean it's not there. Just check out the Most Popular box near the bottom on the right hand side:

Three out of five stories on Tibet, two of them unpatriotically above a piece on the NPC:

• Tibet regional gov't: Sabotage in Lhasa masterminded by Dalai clique
• Death toll rises to 10 in Lhasa riot
• Dalai-backed violence scars Lhasa

Of course the stories themselves, let alone the headlines, aren't exactly paragons of journalistic objectivity, but I'm guessing you don't read the People's Daily for that.

It's kind of funny. I wonder whose idea it was to include a 'Most Read' box on the site. And how long it will be before the feature is quietly dropped, or some filters applied. 

People's Daily Online - Home Page

Technorati Tags: tibet, censorship, media, social media, journalism, china

The New Newswire: a Dutch Student Called Michael

Twitter is now a news service in its own right. ReadWrite Web, an excellent website dedicated to Web 2.0 stuff, points out that the recent earthquake in England–not that unusual in itself, apparently, but rarely actually strong enough to be felt by humans—was reported first by Twitterers and by a Twitter-only news service called BreakingNewsOn (www.twitter.com/BreakingNewsOn): 

This story broke over Twitter in the past half hour, and nothing is up yet on the BBC sites, the Guardian, or the Telegraph. This story is breaking live on Twitter.

Looking at the situation a few hours later, it’s certainly true that mainstream websites have been a bit slow with the story. From what I can gather, the timeline is something like this (all times are in GMT):

Quake hits south of Grimsby	00:56
First tweets	00:57
BreakingNewsOn	00:59	(“Unconfirmed reports of earthquake in London”)
BreakingNewsOn	01:01	(“Reports of earthquake, working to confirm”, followed by lots of tweets)
BreakingNewsOn	01:10	(confirmation from European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre)
Dow Jones Newswires	01:29	(quotes BBC report)
Associated Press	01:30	(garbled alert)
Reuters	01:36	(“Quake shakes Britain, no casualties reported”)
AFP	01:45	(“Moderate quake shakes Britain”)
BBC twitter feed	01:56	(“Tremors felt across England”)

There may be some holes in here: I don’t have the exact time when the BBC website first carried the story, but I’m guessing it’s a few minutes before the wires. And this is not the first BreakingNewsOn has been ahead: It was, according to some reports, first on the Benazir Bhutto assassination, although I’ve not been able to confirm that. 

So who or what is BreakingNewsOn, and how does it scoop the big guys on their own turf? The service is actually pretty much one guy, a 20-year old Dutch student called Michael van Poppel, according to this interview by Shashi Bellamkonda. He is a news junkie, and makes money from it too, doing something called web-trawling—searching the net for stuff he can sell to the big players. (He was the guy who last September dug up a videotape of Osama bin Laden, which he then sold to Reuters.) 

Van Poppel works with a couple of other people and is clearly experienced and voracious in hoovering up web content. But it’s also about citizen journalism, crowd sourcing, whatever you want to call it: in the case of the UK quake, the first alerts actually came from witnesses, who twittered about the jolts they felt; it was BreakingNewsOn’s skill in harvesting that information, and staying sufficiently close to its readers for them to think to share their experience, that led to the fast turnaround. 

Of course, there’s much about this that is new. Everyone is now a reporter, if they find themselves in the middle of news. And everyone can be a media publisher: In this case it’s one 20-year old student with a twitter feed and an Internet-connected computer. And, finally, everyone can now subscribe to that once holiest-of-holies: a newswire service that updates in real time. Only now it’s not called a Reuters terminal or a Bloomberg but Twitter. 

But behind that, not much has changed. I’ve covered a few quakes in my time, and it’s all about finding the stuff out quickly by getting it out quickly. Nothing much has changed. No one was injured or killed, and it sounds like there was no falling masonry or damage to buildings. But that’s no excuse: earthquakes are news, and especially if they’re the strongest in the country for more than two decades. 

Twitter is perfectly suited for breaking news, because it’s all about short pithy sentences and updates. As ReadWrite Web points out, during the California wildfires last year, Twitter and other citizen journalism tools were used by people on the ground, scooping the mainstream press. And all this offers some lessons for the mainstream press that it would be wise to absorb: 

• Mainstream media cannot afford to be slow off the mark on stories like this, since their value to high-paying subscribers is intimately tied to their speed;
• Alert streams are no longer the province of market traders;
• Traditional media needs to find a way to work with these new sources of news, or else find a way to add value that such services cannot. In this case it could have been finding a way to reflect in the headlines the unusual nature of this event;
• Traditional media has to both monitor these new sources of news–the tweets from ordinary folk surprised to be shaken awake by a tremor—and work with them to ensure that they, too, benefit.

Some might say that what van Poppel does isn't news. I'd contest that. He did everything right in reporting the story: it's big enough an event to merit an "unconfirmed" snap, a quick follow-up which contains what we old newshounds would call an advisory letting subscribers know what he's doing and to expect more. When he got confirmation he put out, all within 10 minutes. That's a time-tested, old-fashioned and reasonable news approach. He leveraged the new media, but he showed an understanding of news values and what his readers needed. 

Kudos to him. We all could learn a lesson.

(An extended version of this post is available for publication to newsprint media as part of the Loose Wire Service. More details here, or email Jeremy Wagstaff directly.)

Technorati Tags: twitter, news, journalism, breakingnewson, crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, newspapers

Beyond Information Delivery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Newspaper delivery guy, Jakarta 2007

Over at Loose Wire sister site ten minutes I just wrote a review of ShifD, a new Web 2.0 clippings service that works, in theory, between desktop and mobile. More interesting, I reckoned (quoting myself; sorry), is that

it’s developed by two guys from within The New York Times’ R&D Lab, so you can’t help wondering where something like this might fit into the world of newspapers.

I’d love to see, for example, a five-digit code at the end of each news story in my newspaper/magazine that I could key into my phone and which would then store a copy of that story on my desktop. Would save me carrying a  magic marker around and then forgetting to clip it when I got home. Forget reading the NYT on my handheld: That ain’t going to happen to an old fogey like me; but I’d love a way to store what I liked somewhere useful so that I wouldn’t forget it.

Maybe this is how newspapers need to think of themselves. The medium is not really the problem: I want my newspaper in traditional form, because it's tried and tested and works for me. But it doesn't me I don't want it in other forms too: For when I'm crushed on a subway, where flipping back the pages of the IHT might not be welcomed by my fellow sardines, or when I'm stuck without reading matter waiting for a friend (hi, Mark!)

And of course other people have their requirements too. The medium is going to always be different, depending on the individual. So it's the content that is the constant, the one element you want to ensure your readers/users are able to access whenever and wherever they want.

And that doesn't mean just reading it once. Nowadays, as information bombards us, we are more selective about what we read. Two points here: We get a lot of stuff thrown at us, so our ability to recall stuff is weaker. And, because our time is precious, when we do allocate it to something, we don't want to feel that time is wasted or lost.

Ergo, the value comes in being able to help us users store information we've already decided to commit some of our scarce resources to so we can maximise our benefit from it. Whatever article or piece of information it is, chances are that if we bothered to read it, or read most of it, we'll hope that we retain some of it for future usage.

That, I reckon is where something like ShifD comes into its own. But not if it's a standalone service. Then it will merely fight with all other services out there that offer something similar. Its power will come if it can be harnessed with NYT so that however, whenever and wherever I dedicate some of my time to reading that august rag, I can be sure of a simple way, via my phone or desktop, of storing anything I read that I consider to be valuable and worth keeping.

In this sense, if you want to get all grand about it, the future of media lies not so much in the format and medium of delivery to the consumer but in the format and delivery of retention by the consumer. I as a consumer want the media provider to provide a way for me to maximise my utility from reading it, by recognising that reading something is not the end of the relationship with that article.

For me, the consumer, it's the beginning: I'm hoping the piece will change my life sufficiently, from advice on buying new shoes to understanding the threat to my future from a Second Cold War. That, I suspect, is the challenge of today's media.

Technorati Tags: journalism, media, newspapers, delivery, web 2.0, nyt

Breaking Out of Those Silos

If you're looking for the future of news, a pretty good example of it is at UK startup silobreaker, which isn't a farm demolition service but a pretty cool news aggregation and visualization site. In other words, it lets you look at news in different ways. And it's caught the attention of Microsoft, who today announced it had select the company for its Startup Accelerator program.

The website itself looks pretty normal on first glance--news on the left, three columns of stuff. But look closer. Four boxes on the right offer different sorts of information: a trends chart showing "media attention" (presumably the number of mentions in the news) of different Windows products:

Another shows the relationships between Rio Tinto, other companies, topics and cities:

And my favorite, a map showing all the places where things are happening in the news. Move your mouse over them and details will pop up in a small box:

Drop down lists of topics along the top of the website allow you to select your area, and it's a satisfying range to choose from. Open the terroism page, for example, and you get a bunch of stories on terrorism, as well a map of hotspots (already zoomed in on the Middle East and Central/South Asia), and a trend map showing how media interest in terrorism in Afghanistan has risen markedly in recent weeks against that of Iraq and the U.S. Who knows how accurate this stuff is, and where it comes from, but it's still an interesting way to slice and dice the data:

Not everything works quite as it's supposed to but there's still lots of quality in here, and it puts pretty much every other news site to shame. And it's not even as if these elements are particularly new; I've long sung the praises of newsmaps and mindmaps as a way for online newspapers to get with the program, and it's frankly been disappointing that so few have tried these things out.

Technorati Tags: visualization, news, media, microsoft, startups, UK, newsmaps, mindmaps

The First Casualty

The discovery of three suitcases of negatives belonging to Robert Capa has raised hopes that, once and for all, the authenticity of his famous photograph of a falling Spanish Replubican soldier will be settled. Some believe the photo was staged (Philip Knightley, in particular, has made it an article of faith), as this piece from Reuters highlights:

Still unknown, however, is whether the famed 1936 photograph of "The Falling Soldier," which shows a Republican soldier at the moment a bullet strikes him down, is among those in the three battered cases, some now held together with black tape and known collectively as "the Mexican suitcase."

Lingering questions about whether the picture might have been staged could be answered by the negatives, which are said to be in very good condition.

In fact, the truth behind this picture has already been established with some degree of certainty, and actually offers some salutory lessons we could still absorb in this New Media age.

Robert Whelan, Capa's biographer, has written extensively of his search to authenticate the photo. His PBS version is here, in which he establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that the photo is real; the man's name, the place, and the way he died. But, intriguingly, some bits are left out of that account, perhaps for reasons of space, and appear only in this version [PDF], which I found on an Italian photographers' website. (It seems to be a revised version of a piece Whelan wrote for Aperture magazine.)

It turns out the truth is somewhat murkier. There seems little doubt the man had been shot, and that he was dead when the photo was taken. The semi-closed position of his left hand suggests this, since anyone intentionally falling would reflexively open it to catch his fall):

 

Whelan assembles other evidence to identify the place, the person and the actual incident.

The photo wasn't staged, but the fact that the man was standing on the hillside, with Capa about to photograph him, was. Hansel Mieth, another Life photographer, wrote to Whelan that Capa and the soldiers had been "fooling around. We felt good. There was no shooting. They came running down the slope. I ran too and knipsed.” And although Capa denied to Mieth that he had asked them to stage the attack, he had "implied that he felt at least partially responsible for the man’s death - a feeling that he naturally did not wish to make public, and so he altered various details in his several accounts of the circumstances in which he had made his photograph."

If shown in context with the other photographs in the batch, it's clear that Capa had been asking them to stage certain manoeuvers for him to take photographs, and that their activities and shooting had attracted the attention of an enemy machine gun.

In some ways the photo must have been agony for Capa. On the one hand it became not only his most famous shot (even more famous than his Normandy landing shot) but also the defining icon of war. But the truth is that it was of a man standing still on a hillside in good humour, obliging a photographer, unaware he was in enemy sights.

So what are the lessons?

• The truth matters. Some have suggested it doesn't matter whether the photo was staged. It does. This kind of thinking has always confused me; when I investigated a story about Internet photographs of rape victims from the Indonesian riots in 1998, a lot of those hosting the alleged photos said it didn't matter; what mattered, they said, was whether the rapes occurred. I couldn't disagree more; what matters is whether the reader/viewer can be sure that what they're seeing/reading is what it purports to be. This is even more important now with the Blurring of Branding, where we are as likely to get our information from individual-run blogs as we are from big media.
• The truth is always murkier than we imagine it is. I would have thought Philip Knightley, who wrote The First Casualty about war correspondents, might have dug deeper on this, given the book has gone through countless revisions. Whelan's work on Capa is by contrast a model of tireless investigation and I believe that he's gotten as close to the truth of this photograph as we could hope to get.
• Staging anything is dangerous. Capa may have felt partially responsible for his death although he may not have really been so. But anyone who has been in a situation where they've moved an ornament, asked someone to pose in a doorway, encouraged a guerrilla to check out the next hill against his better judgement, must know the feeling: any kind of interfering may lead to unforeseen consequences. The best, the only, course of action is never to interfere and never to suggest to a subject, whether as a journalist or photographer, to do anything they weren't about to do anyway. Capa carried that burden for the rest of his short life. Any journalist, citizen or otherwise, must be aware of that.

Technorati Tags: journalism, new media, citizen journalism, media, truth, robert capa, photography, photojournalism, accuracy

We're All Information Gatherers Now

When we talk about the future of newspapers, the future of education, the future of media, and the future of learning we tend to ignore the most important aspect. We tend to focus on information delivery and not on the nature of information seeking. We think, somehow, that we still need to get the same kind of information to people, but just in a different way. But the bigger shift is how the Internet has changed what kind of information we're looking for and how we go about finding it.

A British Library report on the future of libraries [PDF] hits the nail on the head:

Library users demand 24/7 access, instant gratification at a click, and are increasingly looking for "the answer" rather than for a particular format: a research monograph or a journal article for instance. So they scan, flick and "power browse" their way through digital content, developing new forms of online reading on the way that we do not yet fully understand (or, in many cases, even recognise.)

A page later, the report says:

In general terms, this new form of information seeking behaviour can be characterised as being horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile and it is clear that these behaviours represent a serious challenges for traditional information providers, nurtured in a hardcopy paradigm and, in many respects, still tied to it.

 John Naughton at The Observer helps put this in context:

What Marshall McLuhan called 'the Gutenberg galaxy' - that universe of linear exposition, quiet contemplation, disciplined reading and study - is imploding, and we don't know if what will replace it will be better or worse.

This is true, of course, not just of libraries and academia. It's true of newspapers and pretty much any medium that delivers information. The Internet has forced us, encouraged us, to develop scanning techniques way beyond the simple quick-reading skills of old. Now if I'm looking for information on the Gutenberg Galaxy I can do so quickly on Wikipedia simply by selecting the words on the page, right-clicking and selecting Search Google for... in the pop-up menu. Time taken: 2 seconds. (Indeed, Naughton and The Guardian/Observer could be considered somewhat backward by not providing the link in the piece itself.)

This ability to secure, and appetite for, quick access to snippets information (what I guess we used to call "gobbets") is part and parcel of the web and of the lives of those who spend any time on it. Why hunt for a dictionary if you can look it up on your cellphone/laptop/fridge display? The impact is still not properly understood or studied, however. If we satisfy our curiosity so easily, does our curiosity grow in all directions, both in breadth and depth, or does it flit from flower to flower like a bumble-bee in summer?

The British Library research seems to suggest the latter. Using words like horizontal, bouncing, checking, viewing, promiscuous, diverse and volatile seems to suggest we're entering a world where people are fickle and their attention spans short. Once the initial curiosity is satisfied ("What the hell is a gobbet?") the reader moves on, following the Serendipidity of the Hyperlink.

On the other hand, the word seems to suggest the readers have built-in safeguards against misinformation and inaccuracy. Our scanning skills are honed beyond merely being able to take in a page of information quickly. We -- or most of us; Facebook seems to presenting a challenge, if all the gullible messages my friends send me are representative -- are able to judge the source of information too, based on the layout, design and style of a web page and its contents.

This latter skill may be more important in the long run. Perhaps the shift is more about our understanding of what we need to know, and the time we can dedicate to knowing it, than to any shift in our attention span or ability to absorb deep columns of information.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, in fact, was bound to come to an end sometime. We simply have too much information to digest nowadays to be able, most of us, to take a leisurely stroll through the literature. And, frankly, in academic terms, much of the literature could be better and more tightly written. (I admit, I scanned the BT report and was mildly irritated it was a) in PDF format which slows digestion, b) didn't conform to usual layouts and c) lacked an executive summary and conclusion).

If there wasn't much information out there, and not much access to it, I would probably be quite happy dedicating my time to knowing a lot about Chaucer or the sex life of the fruitfly, and not much else. But the Internet has taught us a valuable lesson that we, as a race, seem to have forgotten: That there is so much stuff to learn out there we should be in a mad race to learn as much as we can about it as we can before we're run over by a Sat Nav-dependent truck.

Perhaps our generation will be the last to be stupid enough to think we know enough as individuals to be smart (or conversely, happy to wallow in our specialist expertise and general ignorance). Future generations may look back at us and ask why we were so incurious about all the things in front of us we didn't know anything about. Right now, I'd settle for knowing why the sky is blue, how many Grand Slam tournaments there are, what a grommet is and why there seem to be so many different types of plug to go on the end of a coaxial cable.

Thank God we're at last beginning to learn the skills necessary to find that stuff out before breakfast.

Reading:

John Naughton: Thanks, Gutenberg - but we're too pressed for time to read | Media | The Observer

Gutenberg and the changing nature of how we read and find information

'Google Generation' is a myth: pioneering research

Technorati Tags: printing, information, data, libraries, gutenberg, british library, research, web 2.0, future, guardian

Investigation Step #1: Google Suspect

Every journalist (and police officer, for that matter) should start their investigative work with a Google search. They may find it's all they need.

You've probably read by now of the disappearance, reappearance and arrest of the former British prison officer John Darwin, who turned up at a police station this month saying he'd lost his memory after a kayak incident in 2002. Everyone was relieved, including his wife, who had apparently reconciled herself to his passing and moved to Panama a week earlier. But one person was skeptical: an unnamed woman who turned to Google, as this Guardian story by Matthew Weaver reports:

A single mother put police and journalists to shame in their attempts to unravel the mysterious reappearance of the canoeist John Darwin by using a simple Google search, it emerged yesterday.

The woman found the picture that apparently shows Darwin with his wife, Anne, in Panama City in July last year.

When confronted with the picture, which was published in the Daily Mirror yesterday, Anne Darwin is reported to have admitted: "Yes, that's him. My sons will never forgive me."

The photograph was available on a website of the firm Move to Panama. It was found by the anonymous woman after she tapped in the words "John, Anne and Panama" into Google. She forwarded the picture to Cleveland police and the Mirror. She said that when she sent the picture to detectives, she was told: "You're joking."

I believe she actually did a Google image search, which, at the time of writing, still throws up the same image as the number one result, although the actual image has been removed from the site.

Police and journalists should share the shame and blame for not doing some basic Google sleuthing.

Caught in the web | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

Technorati Tags: police, journalism, google, incompetence, sleuthing, investigation, john darwin, panama, guardian

Strangled by the Grassroots

 Steve Outing writes a bittersweet eulogy to his failed startup, the Enthusiast Group, which tried to build a business around grassroots media. His conclusion: with the exception of one or two sites that make it big (YouTube, Flickr) user generated content is not strong enough to stand on its own.

In my view -- and based in part on my experience with the Enthusiast Group project -- user content when it stands on its own is weak. But it's powerful when appropriately combined with professional content, and properly targeted.

It's an important lesson to learn. Steve found that while quite a bit of content came in, it was of such varied quality that it just didn't hold users' attention. YouTube and Flickr made it big, and so while there's tons of rubbish on both, there's still enough to engage and entertain users. The fact that both make it easy to find the best stuff (usually because it's the stuff a lot of people are looking at) helps.

What Steve found is that on smaller sites, however good your good stuff is, if you've got bad or mediocre stuff for most of your content, you've got a mediocre publication. Unless it's highly targeted, hyperlocal content it just won't hold the reader's/viewer's interest.

Of course, the bigger lesson here is that quality matters. Which means good writing/photography/video/reporting/editing still matters. Which means that despite all our fears, journalists still matter. What we've yet to do is find out how best to merge citizen journalism with professional journalism. Or, as Steve concludes:

I depart my latest venture nevertheless convinced that grassroots or user content is immensely powerful. We just have to figure out how best to leverage it.

An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media

Enthusiast Group enters deadpool reflectively

Technorati Tags: citizen journalism, web 2.0, media, journalism, reporting

The "Have I Got a Story For You" Trick

I'm no fan of bad, sloppy PR, and to me there's nothing quite as sloppy as pitching a product to a journalist s/he has already written about. Do these people not have any records at all? Do they have no idea of what coverage their product has already received?

I've been pitched two products in the past week that I have written about already in my WSJ.com column. OK, not everyone reads the WSJ, and not everyone reads the column, but it's not exactly a backwater publication that would have not shown up in someone's records, had they been keeping any.

First there was the Unotron washable keyboard, which I pretty much dedicated a whole column to a couple of years back (it shows up on the CollegeJournal with a search unotron wsj). In response to a request to the PR/expert source clearing house ProfNet a few days back I received a pitch from a PR guy which began

If you are looking for the latest technological advancement in computer keyboards, I may have your answer.

What surprised me here was that my column was copiously cited on the company's own website.

Then there's something called the Loc8tor, a tracking device I wrote about a few months back in another WSJ.com column. I just now received a pitch with the breathless subject line: "STORY IDEA: New RFID Tracking Device Finds Valuables with Directional Capabilities":

I am contacting you regarding a new product story that will help your readers stay organized and find their valuables. 

The original column doesn't show up high in the search engines if you look for loc8tor wsj but a reference to it clearly shows up in a link to Peter Morville of findability.org, whom I interviewed for the piece. Seems the PR company could use the product themselves to keep track of previous coverage of their client's product.

(It's only "new", by the way, in the sense of newly available in the U.S.; the product's been around for at least a year in the UK and elsewhere. The PR person involved clearly doesn't have a particularly good database as my column has carried an Asian dateline for the past year, and my blog and webpage make clear I'm not U.S. based. Minor details, I grant you, but I feel sorry for the poor sap who's paying the agency if he's hoping for a well-targeted PR campaign.)

What's telling, to me, in both of these cases, is that I had originally dealt with the companies themselves, not with their PR companies. In fact, I'm not sure either had PR companies working with them when I dealt with them. In other words, these companies have hired PR companies to go get coverage, who then go undo the positive work the company itself had done by pitching to the self-same guys who have already given them coverage.

I can understand, I suppose, this kind of thing happening. But it's still sloppy, and clearly indicates that the PR company, when hired, does little or no research into what coverage the product has already received. Surely that would be the first thing you'd do, if only to see whether those publications or writers have already written about you might be worth cultivating for follow-up coverage down the track? At the very least, I guess I would assume you don't want to alienate those people by showing you have no idea what they've been writing about?

PR note #273: When you get a new client, Google them.

Technorati Tags: pr, pitches, unotron, loc8tor, journalism, media players

A Tip off the Old Block

Chris "Long Tail" Anderson fires off at PR with both barrels, blocking unsolicited press releases and naming-and-shaming those who sent them:

Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month's list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it--turnabout is fair play.

It's not a bad response, albeit a tad unfair to not give due warning: The list includes identifiable individuals, whose comments should be solicited prior to publication. But it is definitely a problem for us journos, and his list does reveal those PR agencies that are most egregious in this regards: 5wpr.com, webershandwick.com, techmarket.com (not heard of them) and sspr.com. I've had problems with