AR&D Reinventing Local Media

The Austin American-Statesman has started as a dedicated feed just for stories about the Fort Hood tragedy, and it’s a good move. The paper has recognized the enormity of the story, and by grabbing the Twitter URL quickly, the paper is showing a real dedication to giving people streams of information around topics and not just brands.

Why dedicate a separate feed to one story? Because of the audience. I’m following the Fort Hood story, but I’m not especially interested in the other stories coming from the paper/website. To get information about the story that interests me, I’d like to see the local reporting on the story. It’s a big plus for me to be able to opt-in to this one story. I can’t speak for locals in Austin, but I’ll bet they appreciate being able to break out this one story from the others the paper may cover in a given day.

Poynter’s Craig Kanelley talked with Robert Quigley, the social media editor at the Statesman:

“When we heard (the first news about the shootings), we knew we had to get moving and sent out a breaking news alert,” Quigley said in an interview conducted by phone and e-mail. “Within a few minutes, we had a reporter on the phone with Fort Hood and got confirmation. And we turned it around really fast, setting up the Twitter account.” Statesman Editor Fred Zipp first proposed the idea of creating a separate Twitter account to cover the event, according to Quigley. Quigley said he liked the idea and immediately jumped on it, trying different name combinations on Twitter, including “FortHood,” before deciding on “FtHoodShootings” to fit Twitter’s character limit for an account name.

Smart stuff. The instinct was to Think Social. The updates on Twitter are not all about driving traffic to the main site. Some updates have links, others don’t. As of this writing, the paper had sent out 265 Tweets and had garnered 3,300 followers just of this one stream. That’s huge. The paper’s “master” Twitter feed, twitter.com/statesman, has 15,000 followers. To pick up 3,500 just for the one Fort Hood stream – in the space of a week – is an enormous success.

It so happens that the story broke as Twitter introduced a new feature – Twitter Lists. (See next article.) These allow you to curate lists of your favorite feeds, and your friends can decide if they want to follow your lists. Statesman’s Fort Hood Twitter page made it onto 154 lists. This improves the chances that the page and stream will go viral. That, in turn, helps the Statesman become the authority on the story. This is where we want to be.

The not-for-profit Texas Tribune launched this week, with the mission “to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern…”

However, it has a disclaimer that seems a little odd:

Should I read you instead of my local paper?

No, you should read us in addition to your local paper. We’ve always believed it’s both/and, not either/or. The reason we started the Trib is not because your local paper doesn’t believe in journalism in the public interest. It does, and it produces as much as it can. But in this severely depressed economy, human and financial resources are not as plentiful as they once were.

It’s my feeling that this is something of a sop to the local press. The idea behind a native news organization is that it should be a standalone. We’re not in this so people will read our work as an adjunct.

Further, The Austin Chronicle reports, the site raised $3.5 million in capital and is paying its execs handsomely. And the site seems to have a strange attitude about whom it hires:

Texas Tribune is paying (Editor Evan) Smith $315,000 a year. (Managing Editor Ross) Ramsey is making $165,000; technology director Higinio Maycotte, $120,000; and general manager Alisha Ring, $115,000; (Brian Thevenot) is the top-paid reporter at $90,000. “You don’t want clowns who can’t get a job working for public media; you want the best you can find,” Thornton said. “Did I ask Evan to take a pay cut? No.”

Clowns? Is that any way to begin a news organization? By, effectively, calling potential contributors from your audience “clowns?” Those are some handsome salaries for an unproven model. I’ve run the numbers before on not-for-profit news, and you have to have an absolute fundraising machine to make it work. (Or those sugar daddys need to keep giving you $3 million per year.) A staff of 16 will burn through that money in no time.

Cities could benefit from an online, multi-platform news source. I’m just not sure this approach – or attitude – is the way.

WMUR-TV, the ABC affiliate in Manchester, New Hampshire, is publishing a book that came about as a direct call to action to its users and viewers. Our friend Cory Bergman at Lost Remote spotted this, and it’s a great example of thinking beyond the immediate use of contributed content and finding new ways to use it (and, it is hoped, generate some bucks). The pictures are gorgeous:

The book came about as a call to the audience for one specific task:

On Wednesday, September 9, WMUR Channel 9 asked everyone in the state of New Hampshire to grab their camera and take great shots of one day in the life of New Hampshire. The only rule was that the photos be taken on 9/9/09 between midnight and 11:59 pm. The result was amazing. More than 9,000 photos were submitted. And now we are publishing the best of those images in a beautiful coffee-table book that will be available in time for the holiday season! Plus, the book comes with a companion DVD which includes thousands of extra photos from this unique project.

The result is the book “9-9-09: A Day In The Life of New Hampshire.” It’s for sale online for $29.95. Is this a terrific idea or what?

You can see some of the many wonderful pictures people contributed by going to the WMUR site.

We’re finally past the point where people have (largely) stopped arguing over whether Twitter is journalism, and we’re now Tweeting in big numbers. I’ve said for some time that Twitter is an excellent marketing tool, but that we can’t look at it strictly as a device for driving traffic. We can also learn a few more things about how people consume information — and even how we write.

Twitter forces us to use an extreme economy of writing. Now, we’re not about to switch to 140-character scripts, but we can think of script-writing in terms of Twitter in this respect: is every word necessary?

Writes Josh Catone at Mashable:

These limits can be seen as a burden, or they can force you to think creatively about your content. If you only have 140 characters to work with, for example, you have to work extra hard to pack as much information as you can into each tweet while maintaining a voice consistent with your brand’s other copy.

Right on. We have to ask ourselves: Does each word add to the understanding of the story? Have we chosen our words carefully? With Twitter, we have no choice. It’s an excellent cure for logorrhea.

Twitter reminds us that people talk about the news in real time. I strongly recommend visiting twitpipe to get a view of just how much conversation about news is happening. Twitter is not all about “what I had for lunch.” Go to twitpipe, enter a keyword from the news, and watch the river flow. What do we learn? That we need to be a part of this river. The continuous news model that we preach feeds this desire. Tweeters (and webbies in general) don’t wait for the whole story. As I watch twitpipe today, I see a blast of tweets about the various Apple announcements.

There’s another good reason to use twitpipe (or the many sites and programs that do similar things). We constantly wonder what people are talking about in our community. Enter some search terms and you’ll see whether your guess is on the mark. This is real-time eavesdropping.

Josh also points out that Twitter is an excellent case of the importance of knowing your audience. My tweets are aimed at the people I think are following me (mostly TV and tech types). I try to offer helpful links and advice, mixed with my own strange sense of humor. My feed would be unsuccessful if I were to post my favorite recipes. If I were a chef, on the other hand, that’s exactly what I’d do because my followers would expect that. Know your audience, and use your expertise.

My other takeaway from years of using Twitter is the importance of links. The most helpful tweets are those that both summarize a story and link to it. That way I have a choice. We don’t link out enough. We need to. TV news websites are designed to be “sticky,” but the web doesn’t care about “stickiness.” What matters is being the right place to start. People will opt in to your Twitter feed when they believe you’re a trusted source of continuous, multi-platform information.

I am more than my brain now. That is – my operating system requires more than my grey matter will provide. I need help. I need my operating system. I’ve occasionally come across this idea from various bloggers, most recently Sam Harrelson(via Steve Rubel). And I think it’s a great exercise to see just how much I’ve come to depend on computing.

I don’t think this is scary, mind you. Steve 2.0 can do a lot more than the previous iteration. The biggest upgrades are to my memory (now backed up in more than one place) and to my communications abilities. Still there are flaws in the system. This past week, we saw outages at Facebook and Twitter. Both of these are tied to my OS. The outages didn’t crash my system, but they sure slowed it down.

Here’s the exercise: imagine yourself as a computer. At the source is your brain – it’s the processor and (hopefully) the memory. Others do this as a “My OS” outline, but I think the computer analogy is more apt. Your brain has part of your OS. Leaving it out is like saying “my OS doesn’t need a kernel.”

Now, draw. Here is Steve 2.0:

At the center is my brain. It’s the processor and the traffic cop for the rest of the information. There was a time when the map would end there. (OK, maybe there would be a straight line to my TV.) Now, I’ve outsourced much of the brain’s responsibility.

I have my head in the clouds; MobileMe, Google, Facebook and Twitter are all part of “cloud computing.” (I argue that Facebook and Twitter are 1/2 cloud, hence the circle and cloud in the schematic.) They are my memory, my search and recall and my communications cores. They also have the nice benefit of backing up my grey matter memory. If I forget a phone number, MobileMe has it and feeds it to me. Mac Mail and GMail (A cloud) contribute to the communications schematic, but they are less important in this iteration than they were before.

Part of my visual memory, pictures, is also in the clouds as well as stored locally. For visual recall, iPhoto keeps track of the images – not just the pictures themselves, but also data about the pictures, including who is in them and where and when they were taken.

My eyes are critical to see the world and take in data. Online, browsers provide windows for the eyes. (Although not always – Tweetdeck, for example, is its own program and requires no browser.) As for presenting information to others, talking won’t always do. That’s why I have MS Office.

I’m pretty Open Source (MS Office aside). People can change me with their input and, hopefully, do so for the better. I can’t get a full rewrite (nor, sadly, upgrade the hardware) but I can learn better now.

I rely on lots of other programs, but none are at my core. Photoshop is great, but its primary task is to manipulate images. That’s a secondary function. I can run plenty of fun, secondary programs and routines; they’re just not mission-critical.

Try this out for yourself. No rules. I’m sure I’ve left out stuff you could argue should be there. Embrace your inner android.

A report from BIA’s The Kelsey Group should be a kick in the rear for local media to get its mobile plan in order.  At the same time, another report from the same group empahsizes the importance of having a strong mobile ad plan in place — it projects the local online ad spend to start dropping.  InternetNews.com writes:

Local mobile ad revenue will grow to $3.1 billion in 2013, up from $160 million last year, while mobile search will reach $2.3 billion, according to the firm’s forecasts. Local searches made up 27.8 percent of all searches in 2008, but are expected to hit 35.1 percent in 2013, according to the report, “Going Mobile: The Mobile Local Media Opportunity.”

In another recent study, “U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast (2008-2013),” BIA/Kelsey forecast U.S. local advertising revenues to decline from $155.3 billion in 2008 to $144.4 billion in 2013, representing a negative 1.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Only the local interactive segment will show growth throughout the forecast period. All other local media will experience marginal to rapid declines in the next 18 to 36 months. A small number of traditional media will rebound with a revived economy beginning in 2011, though most traditional media will continue to decline, albeit at a slower pace, according to the report.

We have had plenty of opportunities before to shift our efforts to where the money is going, but as an industry we’ve simply been too slow to change. Here, again, is an opportunity. Terry Heaton is right when he writes that our local news applications will need to be free downloads because  “There may be hard-core fans willing to pay for access to special applications, but as a general brand-extension play, paid mobile applications are just wishful thinking.”

No more wishful thinking. Follow the money.

Advertorials have always been on the dark side of shady. But, thanks to some product called “Reservatrol,” we now have a new low: an advertorial made up to look like a (non-existent, thank God) TV news website:

Fake TV Station Ad Used to Sell "Health" Product

The links at the top (Weather, Entertainment, etc.) all go to an order page for their “miracle product.” It claims to be rich in antioxidants, blah blah blah. Does this stuff work? Who knows? The Better Business Bureau says beware of the company’s misleading sales practices.

The site is at news 3 news (dot) com (which I write intentionally so as not to give them the Google Juice power of an actual hyperlink. In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, they can Cramitol.

Where was this appalling piece of work linked from? NewsBlues says it found it on Drudge.

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.

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.

VIDEO: “Fast Draw” on CBS This Morning explains how today’s newspaper situation has a history that goes back to the 18th century. Humorous – but insightful. Another example of how unconventional storytelling can help understanding.

Watch CBS Videos Online