Archive for the ‘Medill’ Category

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Not dead yet (add end)

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

During the fall, I wrote here several times about the fall Interactive Innovation Project at Medill, whose students studied obituaries both as a form of journalism and as a source of audience and revenue. The class was sponsored by Legacy.com, the Evanston-based company that partners with hundreds of newspapers to host their online death notices, and at the end of the term Legacy received specific recommendations that went beyond the class’s white paper, “The State of the American Obituary.”

This week, on its Web site, obitresearch.com, the class released those recommendations to the industry at large: a report entitled “Transforming the Obituary Landscape.” that contains their findings (use the previous link to download a copy).  Rich Gordon, with whom I led the project, published his assessment of the opportunity and challenges on Poynter.org.  And as detailed in this Medill press release, Legacy announced its reaction to and decisions on implementing the recommendations (these are also detailed on obitresearch.com).

Though I am on the Legacy board, I was not involved in any way with management’s decisions on which parts of the recommendations should be implemented.  On balance, switching back and forth between my board hat and professor hat, I can support the student rationales for why each recommendation was made, and the Legacy rationales for the choices it made.  Rich Gordon’s post is probably the best place to go for a nuanced overall point of view, so here is yet another link so you don’t have to scroll up to go there.

Obit geek that I am, I see plenty of upside in the obituary and death notice category – for all involved. Not dead yet, indeed.

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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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Why be a journalist?
Because ‘there is a difference’

Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Owen R. Youngman, Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy

New video from Medill

I recently sat for a brief video interview for the Medill Web site, in which I was asked to summarize my teaching goals and aspirations for our students (among other things).  Here is a link to my faculty bio page, just updated to include an edited version of the interview.

Owen Youngman, Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill

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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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Not dead yet (epilogue)

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

At the end of their well-received final presentation, the fall Interactive Innovation Project students shared this video with those in attendance. It successfully illustrates their progression through a quarter of studying death notices and obituaries. Indeed, it demonstrates the degree to which they embraced the topic…

Fall 2009 Interactive Innovation Project, Medill

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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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Winter: A season for a few good books

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Great Horned Owl

Great Horned Owl

Well, it was pretty exciting in Deerfield tonight, what with a Great Horned Owl calling from two blocks down the street at 8:45. Of course, the only reason I was outside to hear him was that I was straggling home from Northwestern at that hour, extracting my daily quota of catalogs from the mailbox.

And the reason I was straggling home was that I stayed in Evanston until I had more or less finalized a reading list for my winter class for graduate students. The winter term is almost as close as actual winter: It starts Jan. 4 at 9 a.m.

It’s the reading list work that has kept me away from blogging the last couple weeks:

  • The good news for me is that I worked my way through thousands of pages chock full of good ideas and trenchant observations, many of them published over just the past few weeks and months.
  • The good news for my students is that part of the exercise was identifying the absolutely most pertinent few pages in each of these books to assign to them.
  • And the even better news for me, my students, and the copyright holders is that my colleague Dr. Rachel Davis Mersey pointed me to a company, University Readers, that handles copyright clearances for book excerpts and then assembles them into a “course pack” that students can buy for a tiny fraction of the cost of that stack o’ books.

My nearly final draft of the syllabus begins this way:

The objectives of this course are

  • first, to reset the starting point from which students view both the craft and the business of journalism;
  • second, to familiarize students with the media industry and its rapidly changing practices in areas including business, operations, technology and content; and
  • third, to position students to capitalize on changes they encounter during their careers.

So, in order to accomplish that, what have I been reading?  After the jump, you will find a partial bibliography of my reading list.

41B7NrA03OL._SS500_Of course, some books are too interesting or important or trenchant or closely argued to be excerpted.  Such a book is the new Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. So alone among my recent readings, that’ll be one we peruse from beginning to end.

Owen's Wired collectionOne more observation:  Wired magazine remains tremendous.  Several recent pieces also made the cut, making me glad that I not only have maintained my subscription, but that I keep them handy on my office shelves.

At any rate, now it’s time to move on to the lectures and presentations.  But I sure have a lot of ideas in my head to play with.  Oh, and if you take the trouble to go to the jump and look at my recent reading, do me a favor:  If you see some recent book that I should be diving into, by all means let me know.

(more…)

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Not dead yet (cont.)

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Medill_logoAs I noted a month ago, this fall’s Interactive Innovation Project at Medill is an exploration of the state of the American obituary, and the eight graduate students with whom Rich Gordon and I are working are posting regularly on a blog at obitresearch.com.  There, I have recently learned

quite a bit more, including obituary practices at newspapers of different sizes.  And the class also has linked, each Friday, to a handful of interesting examples of obituaries and online memorials that run the gamut and then keep running.

The class’s final presentation isn’t till Dec. 10, so there is still lots more to learn.  Till then, I commend the site to your ongoing interest.

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