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
(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.
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
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.
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:
My nearly final draft of the syllabus begins this way:
The objectives of this course are
So, in order to accomplish that, what have I been reading? After the jump, you will find a partial bibliography of my reading list.
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.
One 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.