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A day with Northwestern in Evanston

Friday, March 12th, 2010

So it has been a month since I last surfaced here, during which time my current graduate class, “How 21st Century Media Work,” has been driving steadily toward its conclusion: a discussion this coming Monday of Ken Auletta’s Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. Along the way, a clear highlight was the Monday where we held two moot court sessions, with teams of students assigned to argue different points of view on editorial outsourcing and on so-called* “paid content” strategies.

Schedule, A Day with Northwestern in Evanston 2010

Schedule, A Day with Northwestern in Evanston 2010

We pause in this rapidly concluding winter term to mention that I was asked to deliver a lecture at the annual “Day with Northwestern in Evanston” in April. Looks like, even if (especially if) you don’t want to listen to me, it’s a really interesting lineup of presenters, with keynotes by NU President Morton Schapiro and the jazz musician / NU professor Victor Goines.

The brochure says the committee looks for presenters with a “proven track record in the world at large, teaching ability, and relevance to today’s audience.”  Hope I can live up to that.

We now return to our regularly scheduled academic pursuits.

*All uses of “so-called” in The next miracle are dedicated to Jerome Holtzman, longtime dean of the nation’s baseball writers and legendary portable-computer student of mine, who used the so-called hyphenated adjective in 484 different Tribune stories between 1981 and 1999.

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Life at the confluence

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
The prototypical confluence

The prototypical confluence

It was a regular, and solemn, invocation for Monday Night Football in the years when the Pittsburgh Steelers turned up there as often as ABC and the NFL could manage it: Howard Cosell, in his fullest declamatory splendor, telling America that he and we would spend the next several hours “at the confluence of the Al-le-ghe-ny and Mo-non-ga-he-la Rivers” – the origin of the Ohio River, and therefore the very eponym of Three Rivers Stadium.

There are a couple of football games this weekend that don’t include the Steelers, but we are spending the end of January at a confluence nonetheless.  Two mighty rivers of ink are flowing together, inexorably, even as we speak: that which has been spilled in anticipation of the Apple tablet, and that which has been spilled in anticipation of the emergence of a coherent strategy for paid news content on the World Wide Web. For a handy list o’ links that should satisfy your need to drown in either river, visit the Nieman Journalism Lab for Mark Coddington’s week in review.

Perhaps it was when Bill Keller, editor of the NYT, talked about an “impending Apple tablet” to his staff in October that the stories became inevitably linked.  But, once the Times sketchily sketched out the state of its sketchy plans on Wednesday morning, we had to wait less than 24 hours for the heartwarming Wall St. Journal headline, “Apple Sees New Money in Old Media.”

In between – actually, just a few minutes after the Times announcement on Wednesday – I was in front of a class of first-quarter Medill graduate students, introducing them to some of the ideas that I flesh out further in my current class, “How 21st Century Media Work.” The Q&A centered not on the Times, but on the larger question of finding the money to support the journalism they feel called to do.

As a matter of fact, my answers dipped a toe into each of the merging rivers.

  • I do expect to see models for paid content emerging, and this year; some will be for-profit (GlobalPost), some low-profit (Chicago News Cooperative), some nonprofit and intentionally so (Texas Tribune).  They will have in common a focus on what their users find valuable, not their managers.
  • I do expect that many new devices will carry with them ways to extract revenue in exchange for the convenience or other value they bring; the media’s battle for desktop revenue will be miserable, but the chance for different models to flourish in the palm of your hand seem high.

Meanwhile, it’s back to waiting – till 2011 for the debut of the Times pay wall; till next Wednesday for whatever it is that Apple wants to tell us. Hey, Vladimir!  Hey, Estragon! Can I wait alongside you?

cropgodot

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So Twitter ‘will endure’?

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

(Adapted from a post to the internal discussion board for my winter 2010 Medill course, “How 21st Century Media Work”)

“I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay,” David Carr writes in Sunday’s New York Times. “And I’m not alone.”

I’m thinking he’s probably right, and for the same reason: “the real value of the service is listening to a collective voice.”

It didn’t start that way for me any more than it did for Carr. It was July 16, 2007, when the Tribune’s Brad Moore told me about a new text-messaging service that RedEye had started to play with. He was reporting to me as its general manager then, and his folks were doing their best to stay on top of communication trends that its twentysomething readers were starting to embrace.

As it happened, I wouldn’t even join Facebook till August of that year, and FriendFeed, Fark, and Digg were even further in the future. Anyway, I signed up, though I didn’t get around to “tweeting” for another month. And it wasn’t until 2008, when the interns that I’d hired to build the Tribune’s social media profile started to show how Facebook + Twitter + Digg = Pageviews, that it dawned on me that those 140-character messages might be a big deal. So I opened a second account — @YoungOwen, the one I’m still using today, since I have been unsuccessful in getting Twitter to untether my first one from my extinct Tribune mobile phone.

And sure enough, I’ve learned enough from tweeting and reading other people’s tweets to see that, like fax machines and filing cabinets, this service is something that’s not going away. As Carr observes, it has become part of the infrastructure; he quotes Clay Shirky: “Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it.”

It goes (almost) without saying that the precise business model hasn’t quite emerged. But let me be the one millionth person to note that countless companies are piggybacking on it, mining the real-time “statusphere” or “Twitterstream” to keep track of their brands, promote themselves, or find potential customers. All of those uses are applicable to journalists and media companies as well as technologists and gossips.

It is a peculiar and arcane skill, tweeting something that might be of interest to people you don’t know (which can happen all the time with the right #hashtag). But since journalists need to do that nearly every day in their “real lives,” it seems also to be a useful one.

If you’re not on Twitter, you could do worse than to follow Carr (@carr2n) and the nine users he highlights. You might well wind up deciding to tweet what you learn.

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Was that a year? Well, it was 50 weeks of one.

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

There were still two weeks left to go until 2010, but on Dec. 17 I bravely joined Michael Miner of the Reader and Mark Fitzgerald of Editor & Publisher on Milt Rosenberg’s “Extension 720″ on WGN Radio to discuss the year in Chicago media.

If you are looking for two hours of background chatter as you organize gift receipts and packages for an afternoon of exchanging and refunding at the mall, you have come to the right place.

Extension 720 Uncut Podcast 12-17-09 Part 1 – WGN Radio.

Extension 720 Uncut Podcast 12-17-09 Part 2 – WGN Radio.

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Not dead yet, but for how much longer?

Monday, November 30th, 2009

As I have mentioned here a couple of times, the students of the fall Interactive Innovation Project at Medill have been studying the past, assessing the present, and projecting the future of obituaries as a form of journalism and as a source of audience and revenue for publishers. Today on its Web site, obitresearch.com, the class released a white paper, “The State of the American Obituary,” that contains their findings.

They report that the central position that newspapers have held in communicating the news of Americans’ deaths is substantially threatened by changes in technology and audience behavior. Unlike other categories of aggregated listings, this is an area where newspapers today still retain a dominant market share.  In fact, Legacy.com Inc. – the Evanston-based aggregator of newspaper death notices that sponsored the research project, and where (disclosure) I am an independent board member – hosts death notices for 7 of every 10 Americans who die each year.

The class found that new user- and family-driven forms of remembering the dead, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as standalone memorial sites and services, are attracting audience members who want not only to read about their friends and loved ones, but also to participate in their memorialization. While this began happening as soon as the first Web browsers appeared, the growth of social media, particularly among the Baby Boom generation, is causing an acceleration.

In preparing their report, the eight students who worked on this project conducted quantitative and qualitative surveys, reviewed scholarly and industry research, and conducted interviews with employees at newspapers nationwide. Based on their findings, they conclude with recommendations to media stakeholders on how to adapt to the many changes in the landscape of grieving, remembering and memorializing the dead.

You can download the report here. It was principally written and edited by Ashley Bates, Ian Monroe, and Ming Zhuang.  Contributing researchers were Jake Bressler, Alina Dain, Chris Deaton, Tiffany Glick, and Kate Goshorn.

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