We're always on the look out for ways that good ol school media are catching up with the times. Today, it's the times (New York Times that is) catching up with social media in the form of an election day tag cloud where readers can express their emotions on this monumentous voting day.
Any one who has seen Brand Tags or Brand Advocacy will recognize the inspiration for what the NYT calls a "word cloud."
- Matthew
We've seen lots of journalists quoting from Facebook pages but here is the Guardian conducting an interview via the social network with the sister of murdered French student Gabriel Ferez.
"Nothing can change what's happened, but I want to know who did this, and why. I will do absolutely anything to find the person or persons who did it," she told the Guardian in a Facebook message yesterday."
Over the last year the growth of video content on media sites has been astounding. For corporations like the BBC the emphasis on video elements was obvious but to see publications like the Wall Street Journal embrace video when for decades its print edition had eschewed photographs in favor of illustrated sketches was a bit of an eye-opener.
Still as media companies morph their various Balkanised print, online and TV arms into one multi-platform newsgathering operation, video journalism will become increasingly prevalent on web pages and mobile devices.
Which is why today's report in the Guardian that "Times Online is seeking a tie-up with Sky News to boost its online video content," seems part of what will be a fast-growing trend.
Companies won't be far behind. As Matt Rhodes from Freshnetworks pointed out in a blog post, our YouTube Top 10 Brand list showed that brands who are "actively controlling their image through social media are broadly speaking allowing a positive image of themselves to spread. The most popular videos on YouTube of them are by them and are positive. Those not as active in social media suffer from a more negative brand image."
We'll be chatting more about the role that video is playing in online story telling in our Video Killed the Blogging Star discussion at next month's Social Media Influence conference.
You've got the comments section. And the RSS feed (possibly with advertising). And the Digg/Stumbleupon/Newsvine/del.icio.us/Twitter-it capability. Check, check, check. What about ?:
Birmingham Post journalist Joanna Geary has put together a thorough report on the interactive-ness of UK newspapers on her blog. It makes for some very revealing reading about what it takes to truly call your site interactive. She counts 22 interactive features that appear on some or all UK news sites and ranks the sites based on how many of these tools they utilise. BBC, Reuters UK and Sky top the list with the Telegraph, The Times Online, Economist and The Guardian fall in behind -- and all the way down to the Midlands Business Insider that has one lonely feature - email alerts.
How does your site stack up?
Any time you tread into the area of accountability and free speech online, you're just asking for trouble. I couldn't resist today. Jim Brady,the executive director of Washington Post's online division, is advocating a radical approach to introduce a level of accountability into the public message boards that trail below the Post's online articles. Brady would like to see those who abuse his site's terms of use, and those who violate its editorial standards to be barred from commenting on the site for good.
As Brady tells News.com's Greg Sandoval:
"I think part of the problem is that people aren't held accountable on
the Web...People say things online they would never say
when disagreeing with someone at the dinner table. I think heated
debate is fine, but when there are (flame wars), many people won't take
part for fear they will be attacked and bashed over the head with the
(Internet-equivalent) of a steel pipe."
Of course, this draws protests from free speech advocates. But, there is really a greater issue involved here. It's the need to bring a level of accountability to online public forums, primarily to eradicate some of the obnoxious, racist, xenophobic, unapologetic spam marketing or destructive spin that ends up in these forums. That's my view, which I tackle at greater length in my Times column today.
Many of you may disagree...
Continue reading "When is it okay to muzzle your readers?" »
Bernhard has beaten me to the bar with his Brew Blog post which covers most of what I was going to say.
There's one more thing that interests me though and that's how Miller is using it "power to publish" to get ahead of the competition.
Increasingly the point of differentiation for brands online is going to be the original stories they can tell and content they can produce. That might take the form of conversational microsites or fully-blow online contract publishing.
The Miller model is different as this paragraph from the WSJ makes clear:
Brew Blog is the brainchild of Paul Pendergrass and Pete Marino, communications consultants for Miller who wanted the brewer to have more influence over what's covered in the industry. In 2006, they recruited Mr. Arndorfer from Advertising Age and told him to cover the sector like a beat reporter would.
Except a beat reporter would normally profess some level of objectivity or at the very least no outright allegiance to one major brand. Brew Blog model, owned by Miller, surely can't make those claims and while it does break news about the competition it also creates further problems for anyone hoping to find transparency in "news" online.
- Matthew
After some 17 years as a journalist I've worked both as an editor and a freelance writer.
So it was with some amusement that I read Michael Kinsley's tongue-in-cheek rant (or is it) on Time.com about the eternal battle between writer and editor.
After some 800 words of describing a, the hell of having to tolerate prima donna freelance writers and b, the torture of being a freelance writer dependent on the whim of an editor (normally a decade younger than yourself) in order to be paid a pittance and protect your fine prose, Kinsley ends his story thus:
"On the Internet, they don't have editors. Or they don't have many. Writers rule, and a thought can go straight from your head onto the Net. That used to sound hellish. Now it sounds like heaven."
You know what? That's just how I felt some two years ago when I turned my back on full-time freelancing and decided to launch Custom Communication. Long may that spontaneity continue.
- Matthew
Think young people don't care anymore about politics? Think again.
Here's a chunk from a New York Times story this morning that shows how the YouTube generation are finding, digesting and sharing political information with friends and contacts. Essentially, they are making news that interests and stimulates them part of their social web and hence one story - that could have been buried in the fishwrap of yesteryear - can now take on the same linked import of even the silliest online meme.
The NYT writes:
Senator Barack Obama’s videotaped response to President Bush’s final State of the Union address — almost five minutes of Mr. Obama’s talking directly to the camera — elicited little attention from newspaper and television reporters in January.
But on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire. Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social networking sites like Facebook.
In the same way that some journalists surprised to discover that stories they wrote six or seven years' ago are suddenly being read and shared all over again (I like to think of this as the half-life of information online), so today's news (and often stories that Generation Y thinks the mainstream media underplays) are being given new importance and exposure by the social web.
- Matthew
We talk to clients a lot about the new online trade press - independent blog news operations that are creaming the so-called mainstream media because they are more fleet of foot and often more passionate about the niche topics they cover.
Case in point - Joshua Micah Marshall and his Talking Points Memo. Talking Points has been one of the best-read blogs in the U.S. for a number of years and has a loyal, liberal-leaning readership that has helped the site thrive in the Bush years.
Well today the New York Times reports that Marshall and his team of political muckrakers have been awarded a prestigious George Polk award for legal reporting.
Who said blogging couldn't be journalism?
