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  • Thursday, July 02, 2009 10:31 AM

    Boy, sometimes it takes a long time to say “I told you so.” But here in the NYT, a story that says Google has dropped that barn burner of a feature nobody needed, the ability for a news source to leap through hoops and comment. So, here’s the official “I told you so.” The key point in my post is as relevant today as it was two plus years ago:

    Finally, the big lesson for PR is that we need to be looking at ALL the tools and ALL the ways people receive information, and find ways to have our clients voice there, via comments, blogs, traditional PR etc. There is no single silver bullet to solve communications problems, as always the trick is having the right communication method for the right audiences.

     
  • Wednesday, June 24, 2009 9:07 AM

    From today’s Slate blog on human nature, a cogent analysis of the emerging competition between the real and virtual worlds, this time epitomized by the growing use of smarthphones during meetings. Heck, as someone who routinely uses a laptop to take notes in meetings, this is an old, old trend. Key nuggets from Slate:

    The Times headlined this article, "At Meetings, It's Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners." But the story is much bigger than manners. It's the ascent of the virtual world as a rival to the physical world. We've talked about this trend before in the context of cell phones and driving. When phone calls draw your eyes off the road, and when electronic messages pull your attention out of business meetings, it's time to think about what's happening to the relationship between your mind and your body. You're drifting out of physical space. Not just you but the millions of others who are doing the same thing.

    That point about "the etiquette debate ... tilting in the favor of smartphone use"? That's the virtual world gaining parity and vying for supremacy. That guy who speeds up his presentation when most of his listeners disappear into their BlackBerrys? That's the physical world struggling to keep up. That observation from Clinton's adviser about "half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting"? That's no joke. They really are having a meeting. It just happens to be in the virtual world. If your body is in the room but your brain is offline, you're missing that meeting. You're absent.

    The virtual world has many advantages in the fight for your attention. It can connect you to people and places far away. It can tell you almost instantly what you need to know. It lets you flip through incoming messages at your own pace, unlike the boring presentation you're enduring in the physical world. And it lets you communicate privately, even in public. That's what many of those "submeetings" are, an executive tells Williams. They're exchanges of "things that you might not say out loud."

    There's the real story: People are migrating from the old world to the new one. That's why you're here, reading and exchanging ideas with people you've never met offline. "Manners" is just the old world's way of protesting this migration. But protestation is weak. The old world has no inherent claim to your attention. It will have to earn it.

    The bold is mine in the last graf above. What i like about it is that it frames the debate in context, and not in an either or modality. We have more choices for communication today; we have more choices for how we interact; we have more choices for providing input. Living in a technology rich world, I’ve seen this dynamic developing for years now – texting/emailing/blogging during speeches and so on – this does make it critical to engage and drive activity that can *only* happen in the real world if you want to be successful. And hint to Kara Swisher – turning off wi-fi and limiting the number of power outlets available doesn’t really help….

     
  • Tuesday, June 23, 2009 8:03 AM

    Coming a bit late to this discussion of The Economist – I’ll leave the heavy lifting to Jeremy at the loose wire blog. His point:

    There’s a lesson in here for all mainstream media. Well, several, actually:

    • Don’t focus on eyeballs. Concentrate on attention. Your readers won’t thank you for wasting their time with more stuff to read. They want the digest.
    • Don’t try to be trendy. The Economist looks little different than it did in the 1970s. That, actually, is the selling point.
    • Online has lots of different opportunities. I don’t think they’ve made full use of them yet, but at least they haven’t thrown out the baby with the bathwater. That may prove the smartest thing they’ve done so far. As Hirschorn says in the TV clip, when you can get a subscription to a magazine for virtually nothing, what kind of commitment does that demonstrate (on either side?)

    I’ve been more or less spectacularly wrong thus far on the economics of long form journalism – my optimism  clearly exceeded the business reality. Still, I believe the form and format are and will remain important. In an age of 140 character thoughts, depth remains valued.

     
  • Tuesday, June 16, 2009 9:50 AM

    Julia Angwin at the WSJ has a short story up looking at the disconnect between status updates from friends via social networking sites and the reality she discovered when she talked to them. Not surprisingly (I don’t think), there was little emotional correlation between tweets and FB updates and what people were actually experiencing.

    There are a couple of good points to make about this. First, communicators should not be confused about the difference between what happens online in a growing but still relatively small and techy echochamber. Twitter does NOT equal consumer, FB does NOT equal a mirror of the broader world. As denizens of online, it’s easy for many of us to mistakenly believe there is something close to a 1:1 map. So, ignore the real world at your own peril, and don’t assume that because you tweeted your customers care/heard.

    Second, I will bet that this gap between real/virtual will continue to shrink. To some extent, it’s a generational thing – digital natives are much more likely to lay it out online more readily than digital immigrants.

     
  • Monday, June 15, 2009 7:47 AM

    For the past week or so, there’s been a pretty good debate going on (maybe “debate” is too civilized a word) regarding the concept of process journalism. Vocal on one side is Mike Arrington, reacting quite strongly to a piece in the NYT by Damon Darlin. Jeff Jarvis provides the naming/concept.At its core, the question being discussed is simple: what is the best way to break news. Specifically, what is the best way to break news that is changing, not verified, or lightly sourced. Note that this does not apply to large swaths of what we generally consider news – the stuff that breaks and is pretty apparent what happened – elections, sporting events, etc. Process journalism in this usage really refers to investigative pieces, tips, rumors, deals, acquisitions – stuff that is  much harder to confirm. Here is the nut of the dispute (from Mike’s first blog on the topic):

    Damon was laser focused in the article on a post we ran talking partially about Apple/Twitter acquisition rumors. Here’s that post: Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple Rumors Heat Up. Damon says:

    Hours later, TechCrunch, a popular Silicon Valley tech news site, was reporting the very same thing. The posts generated a good deal of traffic for both sites. They were picked up by numerous reputable sites and retweeted endlessly on Twitter. The TechCrunch post yielded 405 comments from readers, an unusually large response. Within 12 hours the Gawker post had been viewed 22,000 times, enough to earn it the orange flame that Gawker editors use to designate a post as hot news.

    Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, “The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.”

    But they reported it anyway. “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post. (Owen Thomas, the writer of the Gawker post, has since taken a job at NBC and did not want to comment on the record.)

    Damon is suggesting that I reported the rumor as if it were real, and waited until deep into the post to say anything about it being unlikely. 133 words into it!

    The fact is we didn’t talk about the rumor until the third paragraph of that story, and the statement about it being unlikely to be true came immediately after the sentence that stated the rumor:

    Today, though, rumors popped up that Apple may be looking to buy Twitter. “Apple is in late stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June,” said a normally reliable source this evening, adding that the purchase price would be $700 million in cash. The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations. If these discussions are happening, Twitter is keeping them very quiet indeed. We would have passed on reporting this rumor at all, but other press is now picking it up.

    There’s just no way to interpret this paragraph as a cheap way to get traffic by misleading readers. We say exactly what we were hearing, and what we believe to be true. And by the way, it shouldn’t matter, but we’ve subsequently confirmed that Apple and Twitter were in fact in acquisition discussions, and the original source for our story was correct.

    The other money quote from Damon is also misleading and was taken out of context:

    That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”

    Note the break between “Getting it right is expensive” and “Getting it first is cheap.” The break is there because there were paragraphs of dialog between them. Damon saw a way to slap them together to make us look bad. He did that because it fit his original thesis, which he had formed prior to talking to us.

    Mike’s point is that editing a story in real time – posting it when there is sufficient detail and then adding more and updating over time provides a valued service, and that readers are smart enough to make up their own minds. Jarvis notes that there is nowhere near as much difference between the MSM and the bloggers as some of the journalists might think, saying:

    The pity is that there are Timesmen who already are using these new methods. I see bloggers there asking readers to help them with stories, admitting they don’t know everything yet - which means they are publishing incomplete news. I wish one of those people had been assigned to this story (if it needed to be written at all) and that such an open-minded, curious journalist could have seen and explained these different worldviews and how they are clashing as they also merge. But that, apparently, was not the assignment.

    I disagree with Jeff here – asking for input online about a story is not really the issue here, nor is tweeting and asking for sources to contact them.

    But the core of the debate (again from Jarvis) is this:

    Online, we often publish first and edit later. We do that on blogs. One could say that 24-hour TV news does that, though I rarely see the editing. Even a division of The New York Times Company - About.com (where I used to consult) - does its work in that order. (That is why About had dozens of writers for every editor [I don't know the mix today], while The Times has three editors for every writer. That level of editing before publication is what makes The Times The Times - both from a journalistic perspective and, today, from an economic perspective; it may be what makes a newsroom like that unsustainable.)

    Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfection, as is the implication of The Times’ story - that we have no standards. It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can. We have our standards, too, and they include collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish - as caveats - rather than afterward - as corrections.

    On its own, this seems noncontroversial. On the other hand, it represents a real challenge which is this: People continue to believe most strongly that the first thing they see is accurate, regardless of subsequent corrections and amplifications. This is why speed of response to inaccurate coverage is so critical in the communications field, if you we can’t correct quickly the damage is very hard to undo.

    Mike sets the standard thusly:

    We don’t believe that readers need to be presented with a sausage all the time. Sometimes it’s both entertaining and informative to see that sausage being made, too. The key is to be transparent at all times. If we post something we think is rough, we say so. If we think it’s absolutely true, we signal that, too, while protecting our sources.

    I’m of two minds here. Firstly, Mike has essentially hewed to this standard for some years. Readers are familiar with it and apply the appropriate set of mental weighting they feel fit. A reader of gawker will not make a stock purchase based on a rumor item. :) But the same standard applied by the WSJ or NYT or any other “mainstream” media, which to be fair have had a higher standard (if they reach it consistently is another topic) is much more problematic.

    So in the end, I come down on the side of transparency AND accuracy. I believe it is possible to practice journalism in the public eye, with updates in real time. This is a service. But we should also expect very clear caveats upfront, deeply sourced reporting and a high bias for getting it both right and first.

     
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