AR&D Reinventing Local Media

You’re going to get a LOT of angry callers on February 17th, DTV transition day. That’s just the way it is. And not everyone calls the switchboard – there will be plenty of calls to the newsroom, so be prepared. To be as efficient as possible handling these calls, I suggest having a script that everyone can work off. While you don’t want to sound scripted or “telemarket-er,” you do want to get through the calls quickly and accurately.

It’s possible one in six homes may be in the dark when the transition occurs. So get ready.

You want to hit the following points:

• This affects all channels.
• People need a converter box.
• Where they can get one.
• Why this was done.
• The Website where they can sign up for the coupon and get more information: DTVcoupon2009.gov

There will still be complainers and very angry people. Remind your staffers to be polite with them, but firm. Stick with the point, non-defensively, that this is a national decision that affects all channels.

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This is the best WordPress plugin I’ve seen so far. It reformats your blog so that it’s iPhone-friendly. People visiting your blog on their iPhones will see it specially formatted – in the way they are used to reading everything else on the iPhone. It makes reading your blog MUCH easier than having to zoom in and push around.

The program is called WP Touch iPhone Theme, and you can find it by searching the WordPress plugins, or by going to the developer’s site. It’s an easy install, especially with the latest version of WP. It reformats your front page, your inside pages, dates, headers – even comments. Another idea of mine for a paid service shot to hell…

Mind you – this does not give you an iApp. All it does it make your blog page iPhone friendly. But what a difference it makes. The folks at Brave New Code have put together a beaut:

WP-Touch Formatted Blog

Check it out and tell me what you think. The plugin can only be used if you have your own personal, hosted copy of WordPress, and aren’t using the freebie one hosted at WordPress.

The best way to get traffic to your site (especially if you have a small site) is to have links coming to you from a big site. The worst way to build traffic is to tell other sites they can’t engage in this practice. The worst, worst, worst way? Sue the linkers.

That’s what GateHouse Media did when it found out that Boston.com was posting headlines and sentences from its local Boston-area publications. Boston.com (the Website of the Boston Globe, owned by The New York Times) has launched three “Your Town” sites for Boston-area towns. Boston.com automatically uses headlines and leads from a number of sources, including some newspapers owned by GateHouse Media. This standard practice (RSS feeds, anyone?) should have flattered GateHouse. Getting The Globe to send you traffic? Gold. Instead, GateHouse decided it was theft. How, I still don’t know. The links went to the stories in the GateHouse publications.

GateHouse filed the suit last month, and a settlement has been reached. The company will set up technical barriers to prevent Boston.com from “scraping” its content, and Boston.com agrees it won’t try to subvert those barriers. However:

“Under the agreement, Boston.com will be able to refer to stories from GateHouse sites, as it has done in the past, and to manually “deep link” to individual articles without presenting the links with headlines or lead sentences.” (emphasis mine.)

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab looked into this interesting case. Zachary Seward spoke with GateHouse President and COO Kirk Davis, who said he was following the Web’s lively discussion of the case:

“In the spare time I had to follow public sentiment about this case,” Davis said, “you’d see comments like, ‘GateHouse is against linking.’ You’ve got to be kidding me. What do you think, we’re stupid? Of course we like linking and of course we support linking.’”

As long as it’s manual and not automatic? I don’t like to use words like “stupid,” but I will go with “short-sighted.” GateHouse has a few other problems on its hands. In July, 2007, its stock was trading on the NYSE at $18. Last October, the NYSE delisted the company. Now you can get a share of GateHouse on the OTC for seven cents. Is an automated Website link the company’s biggest problem?

GateHouse must have liked Davis’s move. About three weeks after the lawsuit was filed, the company promoted him from President and COO of the New England division to heading up the whole shooting match.

So, GateHouse will graciously allow Boston.com to link to its stories. It’s just that Boston.com has to do so manually. It can’t automate the process. Explain that one to me. That’s like telling your boss “I appreciate the direct deposit you’ve been sending to my bank, but from now on, I only want as much money as you can count into my right hand in singles.”

How does GateHouse win? They get fewer links, so their “Google Juice” is lower. They’ll get fewer page views. They look out of touch with the reality of the link economy. The sum total of the process is that Boston.com gets to do exactly what it was doing – just manually instead of automatically. And if I were them, I’d give GateHouse exactly what it wants: nothing.

Thanks to Dan Bradley for passing this one along. It’s funny and sad at once.

The excellent liveblogging software program CoverItLive is something we recommend everyone use on their news sites, especially during live events. CoverItLive is catching on, and  has some money behind it to stick around. In my inbox this morning:

As a startup in a problematic economy, we have been often asked, “Are you guys going to be around in 12 months?”  It’s a reasonable question that usually comes from users who have come to depend on our software as part of their core reporting.  I am pleased to provide some good news on that front today.

Flagstone Capital (our current investor) has agreed to significantly increase its financial commitment to CoveritLive as we continue to develop our customer base and business model.  This brings their total investment in CiL to $1.2M (CDN$).  We fully expect that this commitment will provide support to the company until we generate revenues to match our cost basis.  I am personally very grateful and feel fortunate that we have the right kind of investors behind us.

Good news for CiL and good news for those of us who use the product and want to see it flourish.

UPDATE 1/28: The House has rejected the delay. It’s not known if it will take up another vote on the matter.

On Monday night, the U.S. Senate  voted unanimously to delay the DTV switchover from Feb. 17 to June 12, the AP is reporting. The principal concern is the lack of funds to support the government’s coupon program that would underwrite the costs for consumers who want to buy converter boxes that would allow them to keep running their old analog TVs.

The Obama administration has been pushing for the delay, and Senators have been expressing concern that the public is simply unprepared for the switchover.

The numbers seem to agree: the National Telecommunications and Information Administraion (part of the Commerce Dept.) “had nearly 2.6 million coupon requests on a waiting list as of last Wednesday.” The Consumers Union (publishers of “Consumer Reports”) supports the delay.

The National Association of Broadcasters had opposed the delay, eager to see its members get on with the transition:

“NAB and broadcasters nationwide are committed to being ready by February 17 and strongly support a solution that would enable the government to continue making converter box coupons available to consumers who rely on free television,” said NAB’s Dennis Wharton. “We continue to urge Congress to act swiftly to ensure coupons are made available for those who need them.”

The House now needs to pass its version of the bill (which is expecteed to happen) before the President can sign the full bill into law.

There’s a little bit of a meme going around the Internet right now deriding “experts,” especially “social media experts.” This has become a new job description, and there’s some brushback, particularly among social media users. The nerve that some people have – calling themselves “experts” at using Facebook! That’s like calling yourself a “TV Expert” because you watch a lot of “The Simpsons.” Well, yes and no.

I’m not one for the word “expert” myself, only because it’s so vague. We all have areas of expertise, some of which pay and some of which don’t. But what makes for an official expert? (Or, as my friend Kirk Varner pointed out, what’s the difference between an “expert” and an “analyst?”)

Usually, this is lazy shorthand. “Expert” fits a lot easier into a banner than “Senior Director for Social Media Development” or the like. Sometimes, it’s true. Don’t believe me? Try skiing the expert trails at Killington, and you’ll see my point. Still, “expert” is a relative term. My family thinks I’m a computer expert. An IT manager would disagree. You don’t want me cracking open your laptop.

Often, the term is used in a derogatory sense, as in “self-appointed expert” or “so-called expert.” Usually the person has neither called nor appointed himself an expert. And if they call themselves expert – and you’re considering hiring them – all you need to do is check their credentials. Want a good list of 25 qualifications? Check out “25 Signs You’ve Got a Strong Social Media Consultant or Agency” at The Buzz Bin.

Over at Fanboy.com, Michael Pinto rightly takes to task people who collect Twitterers like baseball cards, all in an effort to seem like “social media experts.” He likens the phenomenon to a Zombie attack:

The zombies then seek each other: You’ll always notice that of the 5,000 followers that a social media expert has that all 5,000 of them are also social media “experts”. Their only form of conversation is to quote each other and live tweet conferences where they gather. Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.
But that’s where the problem starts with us civilians: The drone level zombies then start to stalk any innocent Twitter user they can find. They don’t care who it is or what that person is interested in because their first prize is the “auto-follow”. By finding enough folks who don’t have auto-follow turned off they artificially inflate their number of followers which inflates their “expertise” in the field.

This is one of the things I hate about sites that claim to tell you your Twitter site’s “popularity.” They have some phony-baloney calculation that adds up your followers, how many people you’re following and how often you update, divide it by some magical dust and – poof – you’re in the 90th percentile or whatever. The goal of Twitter is not to be the most popular. Quite the opposite: the goal is to be the most useful to the people who matter to you most. That may be 10 people or 10,000.

The fact remains that Social Media is an important part of our lives and our businesses right now, and there are many who need to be educated and converted. They can’t do it on their own, and they need help. To whom do they turn?

The “pretty well-versed?”

The “fairly proficient?”

The “not entirely incompetent?”

At the very least, you need someone who knows what they’re talking about. You need a teacher. You need someone whose expertise exceeds your own. Whether that person is an “expert” is all relative. In the early days of the Web, I used to do a segment on TV that showed the basics of computers and the Web. Inevitably, I’d get emails from computer folks who thought I was being too simple. “Why don’t you just show them that cool thing called ‘Google’?” they’d snark. “Good idea,” I’d think, and the next day I’d show five ways to use Google. Did that make me an expert? Hardly. But it did inform the audience.

So “expert” is a loaded word (as, I’ll be the first to admit, is “consultant”). It’s what you get from the person that matters. As long as you need the advice and education – and they have it – the investment in yourself is well worth whatever you want to call them.

- Steve Safran, Social Media Experts Expert

Brides.com is going to stream 14 different weddings on February 14th, from the top of the Empire State Building. (Thank you very much, An Affair to Remember and Sleepless in Seattle.) Brides.com will use Mogulus to power the streams. But this has me thinking – why aren’t we streaming all the major events in our lives ourselves? We certainly will be. All those out-of-town relatives who can’t make it to our weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduations, confirmations, etc., should be able to watch live. The services that aggregate these small audiences are becoming the YouTube of live.

The inauguration was an event that was truly worldwide, and the Web was seriously stressed with traffic. The broadband video traffic pushed the Web to its limits, and many people experienced slowdowns – or even outages – as they tried to watch video. Wrote James Klatell at CBSNews.com:

“We here at CBSNews.com experienced streaming difficulties due to an unusually high number of requests…Clicking around to some of the other major news outlets, they seemed to be having similar issues. CNN.com had a note posted for potential viewers who came to see the historic moment. “You made it!” the message read. “However, so did everyone else.” The only thing to do? Wait in a line online.”

Depending on where you were and when you tried to log in, you may have struck out entirely. Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press found trying to watch video a maddening experience:

“I tried them all – Freep.com, MSNBC, Fox, ABC, CNN, the New York Times, CSpan and others – and without exception, they all failed. After about eight minutes into the speech, I had sporadic luck with the Washington Post stream, which, despite hiccups, delivered the only available live stream I could find on my Comcast broadband connection. Judging by the running commentary on chat rooms form others who couldn’t get the video streams, my experience was the norm.”

But those who did get through set records. CNN heavily promoted its coverage on Facebook. It wound up with traffic triple its previous record. According to C|Net, as of 1 pm EST, 18.8 million viewers had tuned in to the live feed, with 1.3 million concurrent live streams watching President Obama’s inaugural address. The numbers stretched CNN to its limit. Many visiting the live feed were put into a digital queue and had to wait for a “space” to open up.

The CNN Facebook Application paid off in promotional value as well. As of 1:15 PM EST, 600,000 “status messages” had been set using the app. An average of 4,000 status updates were set every minute. Millions of Facebookers checked in during the inauguration. CNN got plenty of facetime on Facebook.

Mogulus broke a company record, with 105,000 concurrent users and more than 1 million total users. Twitter was running at four-five times its normal rate. I experienced slowness updating with it, and I wasn’t alone.

Akamai notes that Tuesday was not a record day for Web traffic. Election Day, 2008 holds that honor. In fact, Inauguration Day traffic barely makes the top five. But alas – all that video…

It’s not surprising that the inauguration put such a stress on the system. To use the cliche, this was a “perfect storm” of demand. It peaked at Noon ET – prime time for the Web. It was video-driven, and was an event with international interest. Remember that much of our audience was at work, and because we were providing so much information online, we were doing the first job of journalism: informing.

So does this mean that video doesn’t work online? That the Web will never support a big video-driven event? Hardly. It only proves two things:

1. The enormous demand for online video
2. The woeful state of broadband in the U.S.

The pipes will get bigger and faster. The demand will grow. The infrastructure will support the Big Events. In the meantime, “normal” Web video traffic is supported very well. In the meantime, it’s good to see media outlets embracing complimentary technologies like Twitter and CoverItLive to supplement their TV coverage.

I’m starting to get a sinking feeling about the 2009 NAB Show and the RTNDA@NAB. I’m guessing attendance is going to be down. In fact, in the Vegas parlance, I’m going to go so far as to say this is a sure thing. For one, there just aren’t as many people in our industry to attend. But beyond that, I’m getting hints from the RTNDA and NAB that they’re a little desperate for attendees.

Item one: the RTNDA is offering a two-for-one on attendance. Pay for one attendee, get one admission free.

Item two: this just arrived today from NAB Media Relations:

“Many of the NAB Show’s official partner hotels in Las Vegas have lowered rates by 20 to 40 percent below earlier offerings during peak show dates between April 19 – 22, according to Expovision, NAB’s official housing-management partner. Shoulder night rates are also deeply discounted.”

I know if I were in charge of a station’s budget, the NAB show would be among my first cuts. It’s a whole lot of fun and all, but it can run a few thousand bucks per person. What you learn from the RTNDA can be particularly useful, but there are regional RTNDA conferences and you can save money by attending those. As for seeing all the wonderful toys that the NAB show has on the massive floor? Again, nice, but at a time of budget cuts, is it a complete necessity? Do you sacrifice an employee so you can send your engineering bosses?

There has been talk for years about how conventions are dinosaurs. 2009 may not be the year the meteor hits, but it is going to be the start of the die-off. MacWorld is seeing it with Apple’s decision to pull out. I predict NAB and the RTNDA 2009 show will see it, too.