This is the Internet

Twitter. I’ve been doing it for awhile now, and it’s what’s been taking up a lot of my blog-related mindspace the past few months. The great/terrible thing about it is that it’s so easy to just post a tweet. I think I have Twitter apps on every computer I use and my phone and my clock radio, so anywhere I am I can say whatever it is I’m compelled to share, with ease that leaves little time for self-censorship. It’s a strange phenomenon.

Media has really taken to Twitter, covering and participating in it. While the rehashed RSS feed accounts have their place, the best media twitterers are the real people, talking about what they cover in their own voices. This is how I wish the media had taken to blogs five years ago. If they had jumped on the blog-wagon like they are twitter, they’d be much further along as far as audience penetration, authority, and depth. Ah well, progress is slow (and Twitter’s a lot less work than a blog).

I recently tweeted my 1000th tweet (I hate writing tweet, I really wish we would call it something else), and here are a few of my favorites of mine. My favorites of other people are here. You can follow me if you’d like to get the inside scoop.

“hey, want to read an essay about john cage?” sure, that sounds cool. “hey, want to go to a john cage performance?” no, that sounds horrible 3:57 AM Mar 30th

seth calls this “THE GREATEST story of all time” and i can’t disagree: http://bit.ly/P1o3Y 4:14 AM Feb 23rd

seriously, what has Iran ever done for me? other than the Contra series and that Flock of Seagulls song, of course 3:09 AM Feb 17th

Q: why is that money staring at me? A: it’s stalker money 6:55 PM Jan 30th

i thought “i want a dr. to take your picture,” was the vapours being romantic, but it’s actually part of the japanese naturalization process 10:39 AM Dec 20th, 2008

I woke up about ten minutes ago, have already used the phrase ‘lou dobbs bubble bath slumber party.’. So yeah, things are going ok so far 3:14 PM Dec 5th, 2008

i’ve always wanted to adopt a highway, but i’m afraid i wouldn’t love it as much as my biological highways 11:17 PM Dec 3rd, 2008

When I die I want those faux bullet hole stickers on my casket 11:44 AM Oct 26th, 2008

saw tila tequila for the first time yesterday. haven’t seen it? imagine the most terrible show possible, now take out flavor flav 9:30 AM Jun 6th, 2008

And here’s what my roommate says should be my number one, had I ranked them:

Wizards vs magic. If this were anything other than basketball, I’d be all over it 8:40 PM Jan 6th

All the focus on the campaign led to record numbers of viewers/readers for print and television news, with websites seeing some of the largest gains.

Which is to say the larger media outlets loved the election. It got people to read, to watch, to debate and to be involved with their news sources.

Also, though, the election showed the weaknesses of the mainstream media. As they got hooked, news consumers looked first to the large media for their news. There they found slow, tentative coverage with little of the analysis they craved. So they branched out, found political blogs, rumor sites, and even to a greater degree began watching the speeches and debates first hand in order to form their own opinions.

We’ve been told that new media is weakening the old guard, but during this election cycle we saw just how new media would finally break the press.

From early in the primaries, the candidates saw this happening to differing degrees, and responded in kind. From the WSJ:

“This year’s campaign…has marked a change in the role the press plays. The prominence, readership and influence of online political sites has mushroomed, taking away some of the prominence of the mainstream media — traditional television networks, newspapers and news services. Campaigns have taken to getting out word of pending shifts in strategy by leaking them to political websites, and both parties catered to bloggers at their conventions.

“For example, when word first circulated that the McCain campaign was about to launch its first TV ad linking Sen. Obama with former Weathermen radical William Ayers, the Obama campaign promptly told the political website Politico.com…that it intended to counter with an ad calling Sen. McCain ‘erratic in a crisis.’ … [W]ord of the Obama team’s planned countermove was circulating among politicians and journalists before they had even seen the McCain ad that prompted it.”

After years of getting scooped by the Internet, large media outlets now found themselves being routinely scooped in political coverage, a market they were supposed to have cornered. How did this happen? After all, it was the big guys who had the credentials, who were there on the campaign planes flying from stump to stump with the candidates.

In the Internet, candidates saw something hard to control and impossible to predict, but something where the plurality of voices lead to stories rising to the top based on the strength of the message. The candidates also saw a place that, if they hit first and well, might be won over.

Mainstream news outlets began to respond. From Time:

“As politics has expanded to more platforms–blogs, YouTube, comedy shows–the old press has followed, raising its metabolism and sharpening its tone to compete. And following it all has been by turns thrilling and exhausting.

“This is not to say that the souped-up cycle has rendered the election trivial. In a way, just the opposite. This election and its stakes are so significant that people’s appetites are insatiable. They want their voices heard, their issues resolved, their lives bettered.

…

“The traditional press, then, had more competition for scoops, influence and audience as the election became the biggest pop-culture event of the year. So the news media — all chasing the same ad dollars in a bad economy — learned the value of putting on a show. Formerly straitlaced outlets gave themselves an attitude makeover to keep up with the blogs and Comedy Central. CNN hired comic D.L. Hughley to do a late-night show, and even the stodgy Associated Press started injecting bloggy potshots and analysis into its wire stories. If you didn’t snark, you didn’t exist.”

From the Washington Post:

“Just as the Internet is changing newspapers, so it is also changing the AP. In its efforts to survive the tectonic shifts destabilizing most daily newspapers and to brand itself online…the wire service is evolving into the world’s largest virtual newspaper and a direct competitor to the papers that own it.”

Later:

“‘It’s enough that we’re expected to always be first, this incredible pressure to break the news,’ one AP political reporter told me. ‘But now we also have to magically find a brilliant and nifty lead, the unique angle, while still beating everyone else. I feel like I’m competing with Politico, the New York Times and Reuters simultaneously.’ And, indeed, they are.”

The media splintered. Analysis came quicker and reporters found their voices; instead of pretending reporters are robots transcribing events verbatim, we read them knowing they may be wrong (sometimes expecting them to be so). The robot work we’ve passed on to the video streams, the transcripts, we can compare. And in this election many did.

The media became less about trust, and more about depth. It was great.

Was great, as it turned out. TV networks pulled back on election night. For all the streamlining and sharpening they mustered in the months leading up to the election, they pussyfooted at the last second.

The NYT admits:

“It was clear long before 11 p.m. that Mr. Obama had won, but anchors were skittish about saying too much too soon.”

In fact, “Barack Obama’s victory was told tentatively, elliptically, less with numbers than with a pan of the camera as his supporters, crammed into Grant Park in Chicago, exploded with joy. Throughout the night, the obvious was hinted at with gauzy video clips filling the screen. As states toppled in Mr. Obama’s favor, news programs ran lyrical pictures of the Obama family that looked as iconic as a Kennedy scrapbook.”

But they wouldn’t say it. After Ohio came in they wouldn’t just say that Obama was the winner, was pretty much the winner, that it the chances of McCain winning Virginia, Florida, and California (one of the only ways he could have won after that) were between slim and none.

Watching CNN, I remember two anchors coloring in states, showing how many electoral votes McCain would have if he won various remaining states.

“I’m not going to be dishonest and say it’s possible McCain could win California, Washington, or Oregon,” one anchor said, leaving McCain woefully under 270 votes. “So?…” the other anchor led. “Yeah,” he replied.

Obama’s victory was only a formality of tallying votes and closing polls, but no one on the networks would go so far to even say Obama had a pretty good chance of winning at that point.

This pulling back is going to continue. Newspapers will take a break and a deep breath before bemoaning the inevitable decline of print again, and cable news will begin throwing scandal after scandal up on the screen, seeing which kinda sticks before beating it to the ground.

But the next time something captures the culture’s interest and imagination like this election did, those news agencies that took the lessons of the last two years to heart and those that change the way they cater to the journalistic needs of their audience will have the advantage.

The blogs and rumormills and social media sites aren’t going to go away, but the news sources that can provide the most timely analysis, with updates and changes and refinements, they’re the ones that’ll get through this alright.

The way journalism is made changed in this long election cycle, and people loved it. As we pared the candidates to one, they became real people with flaws just like us. Their supporters also became real people, as we saw beyond them as symbols and discovered they had motives, morals, insecurities, and virtues. But best of all, reporters began showing us their sense of humor, their opinions, and at times their fallibility, and they began to become people to.

Let’s keep that going.

Though, I doubt anyone is reading this from RSS.  I think I broke it when I moved the site to the root directory. So! For those looking for the feed, follow this.

Another group that recently redesigned its page (last night it was revealed) is the Wall Street Journal. I only had a few hours to use it last night, but I haven’t found anything I dislike about it so far. It’s sharp.

And last night they had a cool interactive graphic right at the top showing the decline of the bank stocks. Good use of interactive media.

No interactive flash graphics for me (yet). Some innovations in my new design include the news feed in the middle of the mainpage. Here I don’t pressure myself to write gold all the time (the features still have that). Also there’s an expanded twitter feed on the side, and more pictures/flashyness in general.

Tech-wise, I used the Mimbo 2.2 Wordpress Theme by Darren Hoyt as a basis for the design. I also tweaked some of the SEO problems after I found I was not the first google hit for my name (since corrected (hopefully)).

There are still a few SEO things I need to get to (meta tags, for instance), but that will be done.

Let’s begin the adventure anew!

While recent controversy over the Miley Cyrus photos has been palpable, how’d it do for the magazine’s bottom line? Silicon Alley Insider has the details:

“The floodgates opened on Monday, when the site also threw up a photo shoot video it had been planning on saving for later in the week. By the end of the day the VF.com had racked up 1.8 million unique visitors (it normally gets between 20,000 and 40,000) and a staggering 17 million page views.”

Somewhere in between the 34 million pageviews of the Lohan photos and the 2.3 million pageviews of the Cruise video I talked about here, the Cyrus photos seem to have made an impression. But I wonder how much money that means?

Anyway, SAI has a pretty funny photo from the shoot. I like the dour dude doing Miley’s hair.

Also, Portfolio’s Mixed Media has a neat post today on a related subject: as a magazine editor, should you be trying to find the next big thing, or just reinforce the major celebrity? The post also touches on the Cyrus photoshoot.

“…but what’d I’d like to read is a comparison of the biggest, most successful of these blogs, Gizmodo and Kotaku, with their Weblogs Inc. equivalents Engadget and Joystiq and maybe some of the other popular tech blogs like Slashdot or something. How have these blogs, which get upwards of 4 million pageviews per week, changed the technology/computing industry? Have they actually broken any ground or are they just mouthpieces for endless PR departments? … I understand it’s a totally different article, but it seems more relevant.”

Well, I kinda got my wish in Wired this month with a throwdown on the rivalry between Engadget and Gizmodo, even better, staged at the 2008 International CES.

Carlye Adler’s article nicely characterizes the rivalry and is a great read for anyone who reads techblogs Engadget or Gizmodo or is just interested in how these two behemoths of blogging conduct themselves. It doesn’t have all the discussion of the implications to traditional media I was looking for, but it does have a good section where it recounts Gizmodo’s TV-B-Gone stunt:

“Jeremy Dale, Motorola’s vice president of global marketing, was demonstrating two new mobile phones to a preshow crowd at CES when his teleprompter suddenly clicked off. Seconds later, the display screen behind him went black. When he moved to another screen, it clicked off as well. Throughout the course of the week, similar things kept happening to other companies. TVs went dark at Intel, more went out at Dish Network, and a whole wall of monitors went dead, one by one, at Panasonic. (The 150-incher stayed on.)

At the time, no one knew that Richard Blakeley, a cameraman for Gawker Media and Gizmodo, was the puppeteer behind the prank. Armed with a little device called TV-B-Gone, he prowled the floor, extinguishing the demos and displays that are CES’ lifeblood.”

Later:

“…some argued that with TV-B-Gone, the Gizmodo gang had crossed the line from irreverence to hostility.

…

Other bloggers were similarly unamused. For years, they had struggled to earn the respect accorded to members of the traditional media. Now one of the most prominent bloggers — one of the few to win a broadcast media pass! — was squandering that hard-earned credibility.”

Gizmodo editor Brian Lam defended the actions (it’s “an important part of the tech culture that isn’t sold in a can.”), but the videographer responsible for the deed was banned from CES.

Gizmodo’s joke (crappy, unprofessional is how I’d describe it) illustrates how blogs are separating themselves from traditional media, as they in some ways supercede it and out-report print. Even Engadget, with its “cool and straightlaced” style, isn’t above posting a bit of badly-sourced news.

“Last May, Engadget published news that the release of Apple’s iPhone and Leopard operating system would be delayed. Apple stock plunged, causing a $4 billion drop in the company’s market cap. But Engadget’s only source, an email purportedly sent to Apple employees, turned out to be a fraud.”

Despite their faults, “Lam, 30, and [Engadget Editor Ryan] Block, 25, are influential forces in the $161 billion consumer electronics industry, more powerful than most of the mainstream media outlets they compete against,” according to Wired.

There’s still a strong sense, however, that now that these blogs have found success, they’ve found the formula, how do they fit into the media industry? Some bloggers don’t feel they’re bound by the same rules as traditional media, whereas others are trying to play by the rules without sacrificing what makes blogging great: the immediacy.

The fact that most tech-heads use one of these blogs (or both) as their primary source of news might prove that that question is moot. Readers don’t care about the relatively infrequent mistakes (as long as they’re corrected quickly), they don’t care about the stunts, they just want the news, and fast.

As great as that is, there’s still a sense that blogs as a whole and these blogs in particular haven’t established a place for themselves in the media industry. I just want to ask them, “Are you going to destroy the industry or become a part of it? Which ever it is, do it already!”

David Pouge, tech reviewer for the New York Times, seems to have a pretty balanced view of the whole thing, “They have to figure out what they want to be when they grow up,” he says. “And they are going to continue to stub their toes along the way.”

David Samuels has a pretty expansive article in this month’s Atlantic where he follows a team of the paparazzi that keep the Britney beat and recounts how modern entertainment news came to be.

While I don’t agree that the paparazzi have become “one of the most powerful and lucrative forces driving the American news-gathering industry,” Samuels points

“…back to March 2002, when a women’s magazine editor named Bonnie Fuller took over a Wenner Media property called Us Weekly, which had drifted along since its founding in 1977 as a rival to the fantastically successful People magazine franchise. What Fuller brought to Us was a keen understanding of her audience. ‘Every day, we’d look at tons of pictures that came in and lay them all out on a conference table,’ Fuller remembers. ‘And what was interesting to me was to look at celebrities going to the dry cleaners and pumping gas. I loved looking at these pictures of celebrities who were just like us.’”

Now celebrity photographers bring in tons of money, but with the focus on celebrities in their normal lives rather than in salacious situations, the paparazzi teams have become larger and more ubiquitous. Also, however, more news agencies have begun buying the pictures. Photo agency X17 rode this trend to the top.

“X17 licenses its pictures to celebrity skin magazines like Us Weekly, People, Life & Style, and In Touch and their associated websites; to celebrity-oriented television programs like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, and Extra; as well as to newspapers and magazines in England, Australia, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Israel, Dubai, and dozens of other countries; to major television news networks like CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and nearly everyone else in the media business who needs pictures and video clips of Paris Hilton’s arrest or Brad and Angelina’s kids or Britney’s latest courtroom drama, which is to say nearly every major news outlet on the planet.”

This has happened in part because exclusives got too expensive:

“The front-of-the-book snapshots in People and Us cost $50,000 to $75,000 per issue, to say nothing of the attention-grabbing exclusive photo-features on Brad and Jen’s divorce or the latest Friends wedding, which averaged in the low-to-mid six figures. When the spending became impossible to sustain, the magazines slashed their photo budgets and stopped buying exclusives. The larger photo agencies like X17 and Bauer-Griffin then found that they could make even more money by selling a single set of pictures 15 or 20 times over, to eight or 10 magazines, five or six television programs, and websites. And so the industrial phase of paparazzi production was born.”

This reminds me of the industrial phase of news production that there’s been some discussion of lately. With local, and even national papers running more and more wire stories, papers are losing their identities. Part of this is because of budget constraints, but also it seems that news has gotten so fast that if you don’t get the story first, it’s not worth getting at all.

TMZ.com editor Harvey Levin has a different opinion, though. From the Atlantic story:

“[TMZ.com] is owned by the giant media conglomerate Time Warner and edited by a pixieish attorney and former TV producer named Harvey Levin. ‘It’s old-fashioned journalism,’ Levin says of the way that celebrity websites gather news. He suggests that the kind of aggressive Web-based coverage that TMZ and other prominent sites have pioneered has obvious applications beyond the world of celebrity, in areas like politics and sports. ‘I see lots of opportunities,’ he says.”

Maybe this divide highlights the difference between photojournalism and reporting. With photos you only get one shot. If you miss it as it happens, you miss the story and you never get a second chance. Writers, however, can go back, find more sources, ask more questions, and get deeper into the story.

The celebrity photojournalism industry has become industrial, with “gangs of immigrant kids with digital cameras purchased on credit from Best Buy [doing] the work of the heroic lone photographers who once lay in wait with telephoto lenses, stalking Jackie O,” according to “traditional Hollywood paparazzi.” But are we ready to have print journalism do the same?

Will our demand for fresh news become so immediate that once an event is over it’s considered old news? I hope not. Having time to reflect before publishing a story can do nothing but improve the story.

Photographers envy writers for the time (however short) they have to polish a story, but now those on the front lines are finding that sometimes you do get a second chance:

“X17’s photographers say that Britney Spears frequently comments on the pictures they post on their website. They also suggest that the pop star sometimes goes out a day or two later and restages unflattering shots. ‘Forever, she has been in on the joke,’ says Harvey Levin of TMZ. ‘She has also been severely mentally ill for a while.’”

Anyway, to more important things:

Do you read the World Editors Forum’s Editors Weblog? If not, you should. It’s wonderful.

Except I’m pretty sure they misused the phrase “begs the question” yesterday. Things like that make me physically sick.

Other things they’ve been covering lately include the breaking of the media embargo on Prince Harry’s time in Afghanistan

Meanwhile, two-thirds of Americans view journalism as “out of touch,” but 9 in 10 people in Ireland read a daily newspaper.

Also, the weblog is running a series of interviews with editors from around the world, discussing the future of journalism. One of the questions reprises something I’ve talked about before:

“At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn’t exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?”

“Statements that broad are bound to be wrong,” says WashingtonPost.com’s executive editor Jim Brady. Ed Greenspon of Canada’s Globe & Mail agrees with it “not a whole lot,” and Azu Ishiekwene or the Nigerian newspaper Punch also doesn’t agree.

The weekly series has about 14 more people to interview, so I’m looking forward to those.

But the best thing about the Editors Weblog is that it pointed out to me (again) that the Washington Post is redesigning its website! Other than Usher’s new album, this is what I’m most looking forward to this year.

Hrmm, I may have revealed too much.

This cool story in Forbes tells the business repercussions:

“For a site that’s averaged around a million page views a day lately, the results were stunning. NYmag.com recorded a total of more than 40 million page views Monday and Tuesday, more than 34 million of which came from the Lohan portfolio, [NY Mag spokesman Lauren] Starke said.”

That translated into about $500,000 over two days from banner advertisements, or “about as much revenue per day from its online slideshow as it would from four $64,500 full-page color ads in its print edition.”

That’s pretty amazing. Shows just how out-of-control popular celebrity news nowadays.

Reminds me of Gawker bravely hosting the Tom Cruise Scientology video in the face of litigation, clocking an easy 2.3 million pageviews. From NY Times:

“Some former Gawker bloggers have criticized a new compensation system that on top of a base rate pays $7.50 for every 1,000 views that posts generate. If one of [Gawker editor Nick] Denton’s bloggers had posted the Tom Cruise video, his or her haul thus far would be more than $17,000.”

These are all impressive numbers, but where does the journalism fit in?

Well, as you may have heard, newspapers have been on the downs recently, as circulation has been falling along with advertising revenue. These big paydays have surely caught the eyes of some editors looking to get their websites making money.

Will newspapers be able to break these sensational stories before TMZ? Who knows, but it’ll be interesting to see how these big paydays entice editors.

Personally? I think they should be focusing on the long tail, but we’ll see how that works out.

Forbes ends with a disturbing thought:
“Hmm. Makes one wonder: What’s Britney up to these days?”

According to the Editor’s Weblog:

A futurist panel at the World Economic Forum has suggested that print newspapers will disappear by 2014. This type of prediction has been repeatedly heard in past years though.

I think that’s pretty soon. I hope newspapers are pretty far along in their progression by then, but I think they’ll still sell the damn things in six years.

In other news, I’ve been watching the development of WiredJournalists.com recently. It’s a social networking site for journalists.

Though it’s gained over 400 members in three days, I’m hesitant to join for a few reasons.

• Firstly, another social network to check?
• Also, I’m no longer a reporter by trade (I’ve moved to other parts of the news industry), and it’s unclear whether the site is for trading ideas on your beat (like ReportingOn) or just a place for people in the news industry to hang out and meet each other.
• Most importantly, none of my friends/colleagues are on it!

These are small reservations, of course, so you’ll probably see me on there by the end of next week.

But! The guys who made this thing, Ryan Sholin, Howard Owens and Zac Echola, all have wonderful blogs. Check them out.

The latest doom-sayer is David Simon, producer for “The Wire” and former newspaperman. From the Washington Post this Sunday:

Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

He points to the shrinking coverage of local papers, the rise of celebrity and soft news, and declining circulations as evidence no one from the newsroom to the news reader cares about news anymore.

Really, though, people are more news-savvy than ever before. Sure, newspapers are going through a tough time, but that’s because their mindset’s all wrong.

Simon admits that “Newsprint itself is an anachronism,” but then suggests that newspapers could have fought the rise of the Internet:

But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have — as one, industry-wide — declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their websites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

The Internet isn’t something newspapers should be fighting, or something they missed their chance to quash. Also, however, a newspaper’s website is not equal to the print edition. A newspaper’s website is the newspaper. The print edition is a luxury. Why doesn’t anyone understand this?

Yes, there are still questions concerning how to monetize the website, but technology will help us there. There are no lack of companies trying to figure out easier and more lucrative ways to get money from web surfers.

I give it 30 years before the New York Times goes web-only. By 2018 the print edition will be a quaint artifact mainly for old people and Luddites, like rotary phones or Polaroid cameras. After all, why buy a paper newspaper when I can just read the paper from my cellphone? Also, aren’t those things made from trees?

P.S.: I hear “The Wire” is awesome, I really want to start watching it.