MediaSavvy

Steve Yelvington is right about the five sad reasons the America press is outraged by Wikileaks.

I’d add another:

American journalists are fundamentally conservative –they hate change. The conventions of American journalism are as ritualistic and metaphorical as a Japanese tea ceremony or diplomatic protocol. Wikileaks is outside their taxonomy and it makes their brains itch.

Daniel Ellsberg’s endorsement notwithstanding, the diplomatic cables are not the Pentagon Papers. And the Pentagon Papers currently define the outer edge of acceptable journalistic behavior.

Traditional American journalism has almost always been about telling the least objectionable story. Usually it serves the powerful, sometimes it serves the public at the expense of the powerful. It is seldom willing to alienate both the powerful and the public when both are on the same page.

This is an interesting description of how Outside.in is delivering local headlines to CNN. It’s from Mashery’s Business of API conference in New York last month.

I’ve never thought too highly of local aggregators like Outside.in. but they’re doing the right thing and linking those headlines on CNN not to themselves, but to the originating sites.

As a community news publisher I appreciate it.

Sidebar: I can also appreciate the irony of embedding this video after proudly declaring myself to be (mostly) Flash-free. Flash is still an important part of the Internet’s plumbing, but I can tell you my Macbook Pro runs better when it’s not in my browser.

I removed Flash from my Mac. I couldn’t be happier.

As a user, Flash sucks up my resources, drains batteries, enables indelible cookies, and bypasses popup blocking.

With a lot of tabs open — which is how I work — Safari would become sluggish and intermittently unresponsive. Since I removed Flash, these problems have gone away because I no longer have a dozen Flash animations running in the background. The improved privacy and reduced interruptions are side benefits. If I absolutely need Flash, I can open Chrome, which has Flash built in. But I have FlashBlock installed there by default as well.

I’ve gone back and forth on Flash. For years, I said it was junking up the web. It never really stopped junking up the Web, but in the last five years Flash made it Web video a practical, so I cut it some slack. Before Flash, Web video was a nightmare of proprietary players, constant updates, tiresome visits to the RealPlayer’s home page for yet another attempt to trick you into buying their worthless merch.

As a publisher, Flash is a ticket to misery. I wasted countless hours producing Flash videos for Coastsider, trying to get Flash players to work on my site, and attempting to embed videos from other sites.

I’m done with all that. I recommend you be done with it to.

Get ready for the post-Flash world. Millions of iPhone, iPad, Android and other mobile users are already surfing Flash-free. The thought leaders in Web and software development are beginning to see the light as well. Expect uninstalling Flash to be a trend in 2011.

Resistance is likely to come from three sources:

• Editorial personnel who confuse Flash development with Web development: Do them a favor and get them trained in something more future-proof.
• Advertisers (agencies, actually) love Flash: It makes them feel like artisans. The best you can do with them it to make sure they provide ads in alternative formats for serving to non-Flash users of your site.
• Web producers who see Flash as an easy way to create fancy user experiences: This is already less common in media than it is in the production of commercial sites for restaurants and hotels.

Those who are complaining the loudest about this trend have big investments in Flash development and technology. If that describes your situation, now might be a good time to think about what you’re willing to sacrifice to keep Adobe’s Flash relevant.

You’ll need to continue to use Flash for video as long as a reasonable number of users need it, but you should be preparing now to produce video that works with HTML 5. This will mean multiple formats in the short term. You can ease this by finding a video host that can deliver modern Web video to your users, and Flash when they demand it. I’ve moved all my videos to Vimeo and I’m not looking back.

A friend who runs a local mailing list on Yahoo Groups just got the following email. We live in interesting times.

From: “localwriters@associatedcontent.com”

Hello,

Yahoo! is creating an exciting new opportunity for San Francisco and San Jose area residents. We’re looking for neighbors who want to participate in their communities by getting out the word on what’s happening around them. Because you have led locally focused Yahoo! Groups, we thought our new initiative might be another way for you to communicate what you care about with others.

You can be among the first to contribute to this soon-to-launch neighborhood content destination by joining the conversation today. Depending on where you live, signup at either http://www.associatedcontent.com/join/sanfrancisco or http://www.associatedcontent.com/join/sanjose. After you sign up (which is free and carries no obligations) on Associated Content by Yahoo!, you’ll be given $10 writing assignments that will explain more about this project and how you can get involved!

To put this in perspective, $10 per story, for a Patch editor producing 2.5 stories/day, 6 days/wk, would yield an annual income of $7,800 — no benefits.

I came into this thinking Bob Cox needed to get a life.

Bob has now convinced me that his local Patch editor’s reuse of some mug shots from his site was plagiarism. I wouldn’t (and he didn’t) call it copyright infringement. But he added value to the photos, and the local Patch editor used them and didn’t credit him.

Looks like a goof by a newbie blogger, but it should have been acknowledged by that editor’s chain of command.

Bob has made some other claims that Ms. O’Connor has refuted, but he has also proven (at least to me) that the following statement by Patch regional editor Kathleen O’Connor is simply false:

any similarity to Mr. Cox’s presentation of those public images is purely coincidental. Linking mug shots together in Photoshop (in this case, apparently doing nothing more than placing three similar sized objects in a row) is standard operating procedure for news organizations everywhere.

Patch is a large, new, decentralized operation. Everyone in it is already working too hard. There will be mistakes. But how Patch deals with those mistakes will be critical to its reputation as a news organization.

Full disclosure: I reused a mug shot from the SF Examiner just last week.  I had no problem with reusing the image, which is public property, but I made sure to credit the Examiner as the source and link to the story. After all, who wouldn’t do that?

Newsday has put all their news behind a pay wall. Subscribers to the paper and the owner CableVision’s Internet services (75% of Long Island residents) can still get free access.

This has resulted in no increase in revenue.   The only way this can make money is by slowing the decline in readership of Newsday in print. That seems improbable.

They’ve cut their audience in half and opened the market to news bloggers in the dozens of communities that Newsday serves.

How can I get Media News to do this in the Bay Area?

MediaSavvy is back after a pretty long hiatus: six months since my my last Forrester post, and a few years since my last post as an independent blogger.

I don’t have any illusions about the size of the audience for the site’s RSS feed. This site is mostly read by spiders and spambots these days, but I plan to change that.

So, after posting again for the first time in months the other day, I started piping my RSS feed to Twitter this afternoon.

I’ve been using Twitterfeed for a few months to tweet Coastsider’s headlines to a special Twitter account. Now I’m using it to send MediaSavvy headlines to my personal Twitter feed. And those tweets wind up on my Facebook and FriendFeed pages in reasonably short order via plumbing I’d put in place last year.

Within an hour, I could see a noticeable increase in traffic on MediaSavvy.

I love RSS for a host of reasons: manifesting headlines from other sites on Coastsider, putting together aggregated pages from database searches, reviewing classified ads without visiting the original site, getting data into Yahoo pipes to create even more RSS feeds, and other geeky nonsense.

But I seldom fire up NetNewswire or Google Reader any more just to see what’s going on. And most folks never, ever did.

Twitter is a great way to get your headlines in front of your fans where they’re actually going to get read them. If you don’t already have a Twitter feed for your site, or aren’t already piping your headlines to your personal feed, now is a good time to start.

Twitter didn’t kill RSS as a consumer technology, but it may have buried the body.

Ian Shapira, reporter for the Washington Post, thinks Gawker ripped off his tiresome trend story about a tiresome trendwatcher.

He may be right, but that’s not what the Post is worried about right now.

Sure, Gawker copied key quotes from Shapira’s Speaking to Generation Nexus
Guru Explains Gens X, Y, Boomer To One Another, which is smeared across three slow-loading pages on the Post’s site. Gawker’s ‘Generational Consultant’ Holds America’s Fakest Job is shorter, funnier, has a better hed, and fits on a single page.

“Generational consultant” Anne Loehr’s “generational cheat sheet”, which should have been a single-page table, takes up another heavily-monetized five pages of the Post’s site. Shapira makes no apologies for that, presumably because he knows the publicity is good for her. After all, if someone gives a generational seminar and the Post doesn’t show up, has it made a sound?

Current law basically allows the Gawkers of the world to appropriate others’ work, repurpose it and sell ads against it with no payment to or legal recourse for the company that paid me while I sat through two hours of a generational seminar.

Maybe Shapira and his editors should consider whether that time might have been better spent on a different story. I hear things are a little tight in the Post newsroom these days.

They want to amend the copyright law so that it restores “unfair competition rights” — which once gave us the power to sue rivals if our stories were being pirated. That change would give news organizations rights that they could enforce in court if “parasitic” free-rider Web sites (the heavy excerpters) refused to bargain with them for a fee or a contract. Marburger said media outlets could seek an order requiring the free-rider to postpone its commercial use or even hand over some advertising revenue linked to the free-riding.

No one objects to copyright protection. OK, almost no one. But the Post already has that. They want something bigger.

What’s on the minds of the traditional media is not plagiarizers and “parasites”. They have Google in their sights. And they need a extension/reification of the “hot news” doctrine that will allow them to have a monopoly on the facts for a period of time greater than zero.

I’m not interested in rewriting copyright and antitrust law to save the occasional baby in all the bathwater the major metros print every day.

How can the Gawker article be considered “unfair competition” when it increased the audience for Shapira’s article on the Post’s site? Because Gawker’s very existence is unfair competition.

The Post just completed its fourth round of buyouts since 2003; and although the company reported on Friday that it had returned to profitability in the second quarter, the newspaper division, which is pretty much us, continues losing money. Standard & Poor’s expects that the company’s gross earnings will drop by 30 percent this year. Gawker Media, on the other hand, reported last week that its revenues in the first two quarters of 2009 were up 45 percent from the first two quarters of last year. …

After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?

We’re seeing a lot of talk lately about taking newspapers nonprofit.

I’ve been saying for a year now that all media organizations need to separate creation from distribution. Newpspaper are a good place to start because their distribution model is so broken, the industry is so troubled, the savings potential is huge, and the opportunity is vast.

Creation, especially of quality journalism, is a very small part of the total budget of the newspaper business. Once you take out presses, trucks, paper, rewriting wire copy, rewriting press releases, soft features, laying out pages, and overhead, the actual cost of gathering, writing and editing the news that matters to the continuing function of our democracy is a pretty small part of the total cost of journalism. And it’s the part that is most worth preserving.

Modern national and international news organizations already are beginning to look more like wire services than newspapers. It may be time to move that model down to the regional and metropolitan level, as well as up from the ultralocal level to neighborhoods and communities.

By separating creation from distribution, we can create newsgathering organizations that are efficient, worth preserving, and very cheap compared to the cost of supporting them. Matt Yglesias gets this, although I’m not certain I’d endow all the organizations he’s considering. I’d prefer to endow entirely new newsgathering operations whose primary purpose is informing the public.

The bigger news is the implications for all media properties of separating content from distribution.

Cross-posted from my Forrester blog for Consumer Product Strategy professionals.

It’s easy to forget as we watch penetration numbers rise for social services, what these numbers look like when they hit small communities of connected people. I was reminded of this last night.

Every year, my wife takes photos of the kids in the Half Moon Bay High School musical. The pictures are used in the play program, become headshots for the handful who act in other venues, and are shared with friends and family. She takes a lot of care to produce great-looking shots and it shows.

This year is the first time anyone asked her for a copy to put on Facebook, and everybody asked for her to email them a copy for Facebook.

Cross-posted from my Forrester blog for Consumer Product Strategy professionals.