AR&D Reinventing Local Media

I give Nielsen a lot of credit on this. On Wednesday, I wrote about a study Nielsen had released about Twitter Users. What the study found was that Twitter has a pretty low return rate. They reported that only 30 – 40% of people who signed up for the service returned to twitter.com within the following month.

The report raised a big question in my mind and, indeed, among many Twitter users: did Nielsen account for the people who use Twitter “client” apps, such as Tweetdeck and other third-party ways of posting and receiving “tweets?” You can use Twitter without visiting twitter.com, once you’ve signed up. I interviewed David Martin at Nielsen, who said the study had, indeed, only focused on Twitter.com. He agreed that studying the third-party apps would be useful, and surmized they wouldn’t make an overall difference on the usage rates. Martin told me he thought such a study would be interesting “in the future.”

On Thursday, “the future” arrived. Nielsen crunched the numbers.

… as an update, we went beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 websites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including: TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets, Tumblr, and many others.

The results verified our initial findings: about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month. The year-long retention curve looks very much the same as the one for just Twitter.com.

Good for Nielsen for responding so quickly to the concerns. The Twitterati are passionate about their service, and will stand up for it ferociously at times. The study of this topic isn’t going to end, either. In an email today, Martin wrote “we will monitor data from the coming months to see if recent exposure will change  (the retention rate).”

Best of all, Martin wasn’t afraid to look people in the eye, as it were. Here’s his explanation which he posted on YouTube, in which he thanks the audience for its feedback. This is how business is done in the 2.0 world. You listen, you act, you respond immediately.

I blog a lot less than I used to. For years, I posted at least four entries a day at Lost Remote. I felt compelled to do so, and felt I’d be letting the community down if I didn’t. Now, I blog less. What I do more is engage in social media. And I’m starting to feel that social media is to 2009 what blogging was to 1999. It’s an act of rebellion, in the sense that it mystifies those who don’t do it. Social Networking causes endless debate, just as blogging used to. You hear all the same negativity about it that you used to hear about blogs: “It’s for egomaniacs who want to detail the minutia of their lives.” And it causes debate about that old red herring: “Is this journalism?”

Twitter, for example, is freeing. You’re limited to 140 characters. And no matter how much you want to expound, you can’t. One or two lines is all you really need anyway. It’s great practice for TV journos who need to keep things tight. In TV, every word matters. On Twitter, every letter does. Facebook is where you can expand a little, but not much, on the articles that interest you. And only those who are interested enough in you to follow you get the updates. So you try like hell to find stories that you think will interest your friends. This is the micro vs macro world, and I love micro audiences.

A few people may share your blog entry. But a larger percent will share your Tweets and FB entries. And there’s something that feels wonderful when people “RT” you.

I also realize that not everyone is interested in reading 500 words from me every day. So a quick one-liner along with a good article is a great filter. It’s what blogging aims to be – meta-reporting.

So I blog less and use social media more now. While we encourage everyone at stations to blog, we equally (if not more so) encourage the use of social media. Blogging is a gathering, but social media is a cocktail party.

I’ve found your staff for you. They’re graduating from college, and they’re ready to go. You only need to reach out and you’ll have a bunch of talented multi-media journalists who will blow you away.

I mean it. This is not a group that is going to go the usual “start at market 200 and work your way up” route. You may want them to – because that’s the way it’s always been done – but if you’re smart, you’ll look more at what they can do, rather than where they’ve done it.

I spoke with a number of graduating students at the RTNDA@NAB conference this past week, and I have to tell you – they’re good. Very good, in fact. So good, that one of them impressed a group president with her chops. So good, that if I were starting a local media outlet today, I’d hire the lot of them. They can shoot, edit, write, produce and direct. They are more media-savvy than any generation before them. They want – hell, expect – to produce stories for TV and the Web on the same day. You know how it used to be that we needed to teach newbies the system at our station? They will teach us. And man, do we need their knowledge.

And they’re also getting some pretty bad advice from their journalism professors, from what I could tell.

Their professors (not all of them – just a few) are still preparing them for a market that doesn’t exist anymore. The professors are there quoting chapter and verse from the RTNDA Ethics Guide instead of telling the kids what the rest of us were telling them. And that is this:

For the first time in memory, you are in the drivers’ seat.

If I were one of these seriously talented grads, I wouldn’t take the first station that offered me a job. I’d wait until I found one that met my needs. I’d wait until a News Director saw all my online work and said “Come. Teach us. We need you.” And if you’re a ND or GM you have to recognize the value in these remarkably well-trained young journalists.

Do I expect that a top-ten station would hire the entire bunch? No. (Although I would.) I do expect a smart station would start with one. First – what can it hurt? Worst case is that you have a reporter that needs a little seasoning, but has the skills to work and teach while he/she is learning from your team. (Welcome back, mentoring!)

As we have written in our book Live. Local. BROKEN News., the business of having “paid your dues” is now over. It’s still important to have dues-payers’ experience, mind you. But using “paid my dues” as an excuse not to do more than shoot or write? That entitlement program is over. It’s killing stations. As a manager, don’t accept one bit of it.
The kids are excited about news and information. Their professors are talking doom and gloom at them. What on Earth is that about? I wouldn’t pay a penny for advice like “Take a $14,000 job and hope you don’t get fired.” In what other industry would that advice be acceptable? I want my professor to tell the rising reporters this is their time. They are in the drivers’ seat. Not every news station will recognize the true value of hiring them. But some will – and the other stations will take notice. Yes, it doesn’t hurt that they will be affordable. But no, don’t hire them for that reason.

Hire them. Don’t put them on-air at first if you’re nervous about it. There will still be plenty for them to do. I’d hire one just to train everyone else on the staff for the first six months.

Hire them because they can do it all. They are leaders. They are the Tampa Bay Rays of 2008 and the Florida Marlins of this year. Just because they’re rookies doesn’t mean they can’t beat the pants off the veterans.

I used CoverItLive to liveblog from RTNDA Tuesday afternoon. Chip Mahaney hosted “Ten Tech Tools You Can Use Right Now.” Great stuff. Watch the replay right here.

I am livetweeting from the NAB and RTNDA annual convention in Las Vegas. Go to twitter.com/steviesaf if you are so inclined. There are, sadly, many open seats at the opening session. The floor is practically empty. Still, I am hopeful that the sessions will provoke leaders to take charge and affect real change. Meantime, the opening session – as impressive as any concert – must have cost a fortune. Wrong message this year.

“Two people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby: one of them is superfluous.”

George Bernard Shaw

The quote is mostly attributed to George Bernard Shaw, although Evelyn Waugh, Gertrude Stein, and Dorothy Parker get the credit in various citations. (It sounds Shavian to me, and he’s the earliest reference.) Regardless of the source of the quote, I’ve always liked it. I’ve written several pieces with a co-author and have often had the same sentiment. (As did, I’m sure, my co-author.) So what was it like writing Live. Local. BROKEN News with seven other writers? Surprisingly less difficult than getting three people together to have a baby.

I’ll be honest.  I wasn’t sure how this would work. Certainly, a division of labor was in order. But it’s not as simple as “you write this, you write that and we’ll mash it together.” That book would have taken a couple of months, max. But we wanted a co-authored book to be truly co-authored. We had project managers and editors. Someone has to lead and organize. We all contributed, and reading the end result shows that – the book isn’t eight pieces of advice from eight people. It’s one roadmap from one voice. And I have to say that surprised and delighted me.

Here’s the book we didn’t write: “News is falling down, journalism sucks, here’s what we should do to go back to the old ways, here are a few gimmicks to hold off the inevitable.”

The book we wrote is by people who love journalism and are optimistic about its future. We wanted to give a little history, yes, but we focus on re-inventing. That re-invention goes beyond the newsroom. Each and every journalism has to reinvent his/her self. So we include lots of ways to do so. And we hope you’ll share your thoughts with us. The book, like the Web, has ideas which will continue to evolve. You can’t “learn the Web.” But you can understand it.

One of the people in the baby-making process (modern technology aside) may be superfluous. But writing with seven people who are all passionate about our craft? A breeze. We know there are problems in our industry, but we don’t dwell on them.

Or, to quote George Bernard Shaw (probably) again: “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”

Will WHDH, the NBC affiliate in Boston, back down from its plan to air local news at 10 pm ET and bump the new Jay Leno weeknight show? That would be a shame, because doing so is exactly the kind of freedom the affiliates need to have. How is it fair, exactly, that the nets can send their programming around the affiliates via the Web, but the affiliates can’t touch the sacred Prime Time (whatever that is anymore) of network programming?

It’s easy to see why, short term, the network demands this kind of control. Boston’s a big market and NBC sure doesn’t want it setting any sort of precedent. WHDH is not an O&O, and NBC is threatening to pull the station’s affiliation and go with a different channel.

The Boston Globe interviewed me on this one, and I thank them for asking my thoughts.