AR&D Reinventing Local Media

One of the best acts of journalism comes when an outlet can take a story and humanize it. We don’t relate well to abstracts. A thousand people laid off here, a thousand there… As one of its final acts of journalism, The Rocky Mountain News put together a video, “Final Edition,” telling of its last days. It is a fine work of journalism, and a sad, fitting obit that, if it treads lightly on why it went under, still puts a personal face on who is affected. I don’t believe the online reader in here who says that “five years ago” was too late for papers to change. It’s still not too late. Perhaps seeing these passionate journalists will give us a reason to keep trying new things.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
(Via Hal Danziger.)

Watch, and learn. Simple, brilliant, “now I get it” explainer. As Consumerist puts it: I know you’ve seen and heard a million of these by now, but this one is highly visually engaging and entertaining, enough so I could see it being used in the classroom and kids not getting (too) bored

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

HarvardBusiness.org writer John Quelch offers up the opportunities for marketing during the downturn. The column is nominally addressed toward Chief Marketing Officers, but the advice is good for everyone:

The best CMOs have both left brain and right brain proficiency. They must have both the analytical ability needed to focus on return for their spend, but also the creativity needed to position their brands in ways that are truly distinctive. In a recession, both skill sets are still needed but the first outweighs the second in importance.

For more on that left brain/right brain stuff, check out Terry’s essay: “Right Brain Renaissance.” I’ll admit it – this is where my partner opens my eyes most.

Steve Garfield, longtime Boston tech devotee, one of the first video bloggers, and all-around nice guy had a funny Twitter posting:

“stevegarfield: Heading out for a walk, then coffee at JP Licks. Note to reporters: Do not use this tweet to show how stupid twitter is. This is important.”

Love it. Steve’s point is that the media has been picking and choosing these seemingly banal tweets to somehow prove the uselessness of Twitter. No surprise. It happens with every new tech. Remember all the arguments about how YouTube is just a bunch of videos of people being hit in the groin? Or how all blogs are about people’s cats? The first reaction of established media to new media is always to mock it.

When the media picks up on the fact that these services are really hot (in the case of Twitter, five years after launch) the snarky, self-important stories do little to help the cause of the wounded media and more to advance the state of denial that hurts us so badly. Unfortunately, these are often the stories that also get forwarded around. There’s kind of a “See! I knew this stuff was crap!” tone about them.

The thinking is that “Twitter won’t last.” “Facebook won’t last.” And – this is really important – that may be true. But as long as Web services are important right now, we have to be a part of them. This is the moving target of the Web. There will never be one place for us. You can learn TV, but you can’t learn Web. It keeps changing. Predict something won’t last online and eventually you’ll probably be proven right. (I wouldn’t go there with Google, but some day it, too, will evolve into something else.)

The attitude of “we can’t do something just because it’s the flavor of the day?” Well, what if three million people are buying the flavor of the day? Better still, if the flavor of the day is changing – sell the scoopers.

With that in mind, here are five topics that keep popping up in articles these days on which you shouldn’t waste a minute. They will either bring an undeserved sense of comfort or will distract us from the real work at hand.

1. __________ : isn’t it so silly? Insert Twitter, Facebook, MySpace here.
2. How will ____________ make money? (Twitter, YouTube, Google products.) This is not your problem. Your problem is figuring out how to use these products effectively. We are not Twitter’s CFO.
3. Let’s charge for newspapers online. We’ve written about this. It’s a pipedream.
4. Democracy will fail without newspapers. Democracy will flourish, and there will be an abundance of news. The country was founded with pamphlets. Now we have more ways of distributing information in a day than you could get in a lifetime in 1776.
5. Startup _________ closes down. This is pure schadenfreude. “I knew it wouldn’t work!” So? They had 10 people who tried something different. Now those 10 people will go on and try again. I envy these people. They are daring and brave. And they will succeed.

By the way, I came up with a response to Steve Garfield’s excellent suggestion about not taking our Tweets to prove how silly Twitter is:

steviesaf: (this concept) should have its own hashmark. Maybe %. As in “% I like toast. It’s that good.”

(Originally published in the AR&D Media 2.0 INTEL newsletter.)

“If you ever start to feel too good about yourself,” said Tina Fey at the Golden Globes in January, “They have this thing call ‘The Internet.’” It was a funny moment, full of the self-depricating charm upon which Fey has built a career. At the same time, it was clear the people who were anonymously writing negative stuff about her really got to her. “I’d like to address some of them now. ‘BabsonLacrosse,” you can suck it. ‘DianeFan,’ you can suck it. ‘CougarLetter,’ you can really suck it because all year, you’ve been really after me all year.” This – in an acceptance speech. Again – funny. But it also had the ring of truth that the anonarati were stinging her.

One of the great fears of news Websites is that, by adopting comments sections, they will open themselves up to the kind of garbage attacks we see on so many boards. It’s tough to take. The comments can get personal. Even worse, they can attack others. And who wants to publish that?

But here’s the thing: the conversation goes on, with or without us. And just because someone writes it, doesn’t make it so. Double, for those who won’t put their names behind their words.

In fact, the debaters do us a great service. They keep the stories alive, the pageviews humming and the ads flowing. They share the stories on social networks. And if you don’t have comments available on your site, the comments will be made on those social networks where you can’t see them at all. “Fine,” you say, “better they should publish them than I.” OK. But isn’t that just abdicating yet one more opportunity?

Further, as a friend pointed out to me on a recent trip to his newspaper, the Internet doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the audience. We don’t mean that in some touchy-feely kind of way, either. You can be the facilitator of discussion, or you can be the topic of discussion elsewhere.

“But the discussion is stupid!” Again, that’s often the case. But let me share with you a verbatim conversation from one of the 24-hour news channels today. The topic was the fairness doctrine. The question was whether it mandates equal time:

ANCHOR: “No it doesn’t!”
GUEST: “Yes it does!”
ANCHOR: “No it doesn’t!”
GUEST: “Yes it does!”

I don’t recall much from debating class, but I’m pretty sure neither side would get many points. This is more like the Monty Python Argument Clinic. Where, exactly, is the journalistic value in this?

We have in our ranks, plenty of complainers. Not that there has ever been a good time for that, but now is an especially bad time for that. We have so much work to do that there’s just no time for coddling. Legitimate criticism, polite discussion, even positive debate – these all desperately need to happen now. We are all guilty of those days when we’ve bitched about the hand that feeds us. But the chronic cases? Time to go.

But it’s also time for management to understand that one bad posting on a site or one critical email does not a focus group make. Let’s stand behind our staff better. Allow the postings, answer the critics, but don’t make it personal. I’ve seen some pretty ugly professional responses reposted on blogs. Bad.

This is hard stuff, and it’s new to us. We can’t push it off to the PR department, we can’t use boilerplate and we can’t ignore it. (Want to start a blogstorm? Ignore a high-profile blogger’s email.) It is difficult to swallow – BUT, when we use these tools correctly, they are a miracle. We can instantly build our cred. It just takes one great response to gain someone’s trust. And trust is what will set us apart.

So, we can go online when we feel “too good about ourselves,” and see those ugly comments. We can decide we don’t even want to host the comments. Or we can join the conversation, be two-way streets and accept the reinvention.

WGRZ in Buffalo is using multiple online resources to cover the crash of Continental flight 3407. It is streaming live using Mogulus, and it is using CoverItLive to have a live chat with its viewers:

and its early pictures came from witnesses on the ground:

Also, a Facebook group has been set up

… and the links go to WGRZ stories:

Charles Darwin

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. I set out to write an entry about “survival of the fittest” and how it pertains to companies today. But, doing a little research, I began to find something even more interesting.

First, here are two famous Darwin quotes:

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

and

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

Famous. Legendary. The former is literally etched in stone. It’s written in marble at the California Academy of Arts and sciences. And we use these quotes to further our arguments about businesses rising and falling. There is one small flaw in these citations:

Darwin never wrote either.

The AFP has an article that debunks some of Darwin’s best known sayings.

“These sentences do not appear anywhere in Darwin’s work,” says Patrick Tort, a Darwin expert at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris who said he has spent the last decade “combating the endless distortions of Darwin’s ideas.”

What has, apparently happened, is that Darwin has become a game of telephone. His original writings are complex and don’t lend themselves well to pithy excerpts. So, over the years, he has been edited.

It is not the species that are most responsive to change that are likely to survive, (Tort) explained. “It is the ones that are lucky, or already have the right features that can be passed on to the next generation.”

So it is not Darwin’s words that have become famous. It’s the summaries of his words that have.

The Website, The Complete Works of Charles Darwin seems to bear this out. Search for those famous quotes, and you won’t get a satisfactory result.

None of this is to say he didn’t mean much of what we’ve come to know as Darwinism. But it is fascinating how these quotes have come to be known as Darwin’s words. Just do a search online, and you’ll see the quotes attributed to Charles Darwin, but the attribution goes no further. From which writing of Darwin did it come? (And there’s a lesson here for all of us – check the facts, even those you think you’ve known your whole life.)

We’ve seen plenty of “strong” companies die out. Adaptation is important. But Darwin’s message – the one that resounds is this: do we have the right tools to pass our business on to the next generation? That, it seems, is why media companies are failing. Not because they weren’t strong or fit, but because the traits they passed to the “new generation” of media weren’t helpful in its survival.

Here are ten things you can implement in your newsroom right now, cheap or free, that will improve workflow, Website performance or both.

1. Twitter. You’ve read it before. Get several staffers on this. A Twitter DON’T: Do not hook up your RSS feed to it. You’ll “overtweet” and people will drop you, fast. Twittering shouldn’t take up more than a minute — if that.

2. Submit your best stuff to Digg, FARK, Newsvine and other sites where people vote on the best stories. Make sure you’re transparent: tell people these stories are coming from the station. Also, be sure to do this sparingly. Only submit stories you’d pass along to a friend — the “Oh My God” stories.

3. Pick up a whole bunch of cheap digital cameras and video cameras. Choose your poison — Flip video cameras start at $150, list price. You’ll find them cheaper if you hunt around. Give them to staffers and tell them to leave the cameras in their cars. You never know when they’ll find video.

4. Have a reporter live stream from an event. Try it once. You’ll love it. Here are 20 live streaming tools.

5. Facebook. At the risk of being repetitive — do this. One station in a group AR&D consults with started a Facebook page in January and Facebook instantly became a top five referral URL. Now note – it was a low four-figure number for its first three weeks in total. So don’t expect a land rush. But it beat AOL.com as a referral. You want to get the conversation going. Speaking of…

6. Make your stories shareable on as many social networks and sites as possible. Check out ShareThis.com for the free tool.

7. Get WordPress MU. The MU stands for “Multiple Users.” You can build out, manage and launch multiple blogs. It’s free. There are tons of free plug-ins — and you can host ads on it.

8. Link out. You have to have lots and lots of links to other sites. It’s good for your Google ranking and it’s good for the audience. You’re not a walled garden. Send ‘em away to get ‘em back.

9. Aggregate. Take in RSS feeds from other sites in your community. See above re: sending ‘em away.

10. Don’t sweat the “J.” We’ve been held back for too long worrying about whether something is or isn’t “journalism.” Meanwhile, other sites are kicking butt. The Web is a moving target. We can’t afford to spend months sweating the J. Try it. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, move on to the next thing.

(This article originally appeared in the AR&D Media 2.0 INTEL Newsletter. Want to subscribe? Drop me a note at ssafran (at) ar-d.com)

Walter Isaacson talks more about the notion of micropayments for newspapers online, with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show:

Key exchange:
ISAACSON: If we had been getting our news for the past 400 years from guys sort of talking on some sort of electronic box, or on some computer, and somebody finally said “Hey, I can take all of that, I can put it on paper, I can deliver it to your doorstep, you can bring it to the backyard or the bathtub or the bus,” you’d say “Wow! This paper — it’s a great technology! It’s going to replace TV and the Internet!”

STEWART: I think you’re really wrong about that one. That’s like saying “If you took films, and you made them into sort of a novelization…”

ISAACSON: (Finishing the punchline.) Right – books would replace movies someday.

STEWART:

I’m just going over my own stats and see that Facebook is in my top five for referral URLs. I’m hearing more anecdotal evidence that it’s becoming a solid referral platform (as is Twitter) and I’m wondering if anyone has any experiences with this they’d like to share. While we don’t believe the top value of social media is in the page view alone, it’s certainly rising near the top.