publishall 03/13/2010

• The NYT Needs to Learn the Value of the Link

  Matthew Ingram on the value of the link

  tags: Matthew Ingram, linking, Gigaom

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The alpha and the omega

Plagiarism has come up as a subject of discussion again recently, leading some critics to ponder the reasons why journalists lie, cheat and steal, purposefully or “accidentally.”

Matthew Ingram tackles plagiarism from another point of view, saying that if journalists thought more like bloggers and truly valued hyperlinking, then they wouldn’t get themselves into such messes.

I especially like what Ingram has to say about how print journalists tend to see themselves:

Traditional print media workers are used to thinking of themselves as the be-all and end-all of information, the only source that anyone could possibly need (despite the fact that many stories are based either wholly or in part on reporting by wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters), and are loathe to give anyone else credit. That has to change.

There are all sorts of reasons why journalists do and don’t link. Web tradition says they should. Business sense suggests they shouldn’t. Whatever. Allowing yourself to “accidentally” include someone else’s words in your work without crediting them is the result of lazy journalists with poor notation skills. Period.

Related posts:

1. Comment moderation: How far is too far?
2. Link: “Empty Justice: Crime on Montana’s Reservations”
3. Satellite Blues

The NYT Needs to Learn the Value of the Link

Matthew Ingram on the value of the link

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Tags: Matthew Ingram linking Gigaom

Posted by: superjaberwocky

Snatch Wars (Snatch Vs Star Wars)

Snatch Wars (Snatch Vs Star Wars)

Source: www.youtube.com

Meet Brick Vader, London’s Lord of the Sith. A pig obsessed, forever angry, foul mouthed cyborg who calls everyone Errol and dishes out dead body disposal tips to anyone who will listen. The world of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and Star Wars collide on the Eastend of the Death Star. …

The Web strategy hamster wheel

Today our company’s CEO paid us a visit. To mark the occasion, we had a meeting to talk about how much content our paper should be putting online.

Our corporate owners have a policy about how much content we and the other papers should be putting online for free. I won’t give a number, but suffice to say, it’s not much. It’s also a loose policy, it seems, since our paper puts almost all of our content online.

The purpose of holding back content is, of course, to make the printed version more valuable. If customers can’t get the news anywhere else, they’ll be forced to buy the printed paper or pay for a subscription to our PDF-based electronic edition.

This strategy would work if we were the only source of news in our community. We are not.News has come to us that our major competitor, a local TV station, is about to hire a couple more reporters and a second Web producer. Management sees this as an omen, a sign that TV is starting to take the Web seriously, a sign that they think they steal away some of our Web supremacy.

While we beat them consistently on traffic numbers — if the figures from Compete.com are to be believed — the TV news team consistent beats us to the Web. They are always minutes or, in some cases, hours ahead of us online. Their goal, I think, is to position themselves as the place people should turn to for news first.

I think they are making good progress toward that goal, despite our best efforts.

It is in this atmosphere that we met today to talk about how much content to put online. In reality, we talked about a much bigger subject: the uncertain balance between paper and electrons and how to invest in the future while keeping the doors open today.

The viewpoints:

• The advertising guy believes wholeheartedly that he can make the Web make money — someday. We just have to have a popular Web site he can sell high-value ads on.
• The IT guy thinks that we do too much mirroring of content between print and the Web. The products aren’t different enough to make either one of them special enough to “sell” to readers.
• The managing editor is worried that what we really need to do is put in more effort (somewhere), but we don’t have the time or people to do more.
• The circulation director is worried that putting too much effort into the Web site erodes demand for his printed product, meaning that we lose paying subscribers.
• I, the Web editor, worry that if we cut back on the Web, we lose traffic and eventually worth, a loss we might not be able to recover — thereby endangering my job and putting my family in risk of winding up on the street, begging for hamburgers and dancing for money.
• The publisher is chiefly concerned about the competition with the TV news and how that affects our current supremacy.
• The CEO wants the entire chain of papers to move forward as a unit, with a centralized policy, designed by committee and then tailored to each paper.

Solutions? None, of course, but a few ideas. Among them: paywalls, reducing the number of articles posted to the Web, metered access, making the Web and print versions distinct products and thinking ahead to other content platforms like the iPad and Kindle.

My favorite suggestion: an information wall. Keep the online content free, but require users to log in to see it all. That way, we gather information about our readers that we can use to sell targeted advertising — that is, more valuable advertising that people might actually want to see.

The only practical thing that came out of the meeting today was that we don’t know enough about what we’re talking about to make any rational decisions about it. We need a readership survey. We need to know about our market and our audience, how they’re getting our news and how they want it from us, how often they’re getting it from our competition, etc.

Maybe this will happen. I hope so because I don’t want us making business decisions blindly. That’s just bad business.

Related posts:

1. Langeveld: Newspaper downturn caused by shift in American interests, not by Web
2. New York Times plans to start charging its Web readers
3. Building a Twitter strategy

Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text

Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text

Source: www.theonion.com

Happy 70th birthday, Chuck Norris! – Pop Candy: Unwrapping pop culture’s hip and hidden treasures

Happy 70th birthday, Chuck Norris! – Pop Candy: Unwrapping pop culture’s hip and hidden treasures

Source: content.usatoday.com

Happy 70th birthday, Chuck Norris! – Pop Candy: Unwrapping pop culture’s hip and hidden treasures

    Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.    

publishall 03/09/2010

• Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: “Burn The Boats”

  Marc Andreessen says the difference between media companies and technology companies is that tech companies are constantly dealing with disruption. Media companies are just getting used to it, and they’re having a hard time letting go of the past.

  tags: Marc Andreessen, Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: “Burn The Boats”

Marc Andreessen says the difference between media companies and technology companies is that tech companies are constantly dealing with disruption. Media companies are just getting used to it, and they’re having a hard time letting go of the past.

Tags: Marc Andreessen Erick Schonfeld TechCrunch

Posted by: superjaberwocky

The perils of centralization

My paper’s Web site is down tonight. I don’t know if it’s scheduled maintenance or not. I assume if this is scheduled maintenance that I didn’t get the memo. As the Web editor, I should get those memos.

I think it likely that it’s not scheduled maintenance, and here’s why. The main Web site for the company that developed and built and maintains our Web site is down. Now, if it was scheduled maintenance, why would they take their own homepage down? Why take their support site down?

Maybe I don’t understand the details of how to maintain servers. Maybe.

Here’s the thing, though. The same company has managed to sell Web sites to almost every other major newspaper in Montana. That means that, by my count, these papers are down tonight:

• The Billings Gazette (largest in the state)
• The Missoulian
• The Montana Standard (Butte)
• The Helena Independent Record
• The Bozeman Daily Chronicle (my paper)

(And that’s just in Montana. This company operates across the country.)

It seems that the Great Falls Tribune and Flathead Beacon remain unaffiliated with our Web company, as their sites remain online tonight.

Let me just pose a hypothetical here. What if something major happened in one of those cities (or across the entire state) during this downtime? A significant portion of Montana would be without online news — from the newspapers, at least.

It would be a field day for the television stations, whose Web sites are not hosted by the same company. No, sir. They are online and functional tonight.

I understand the benefits of going with a big company for your Web site needs. It saves money, ultimately, because you’re paying for expertise in bulk. These sites are like the Sam’s Clubs and Costcos of tech. Budget constraints force papers to shop there because they can’t afford to buy the best — hand-crafted, artisan stuff.

But it’s a night like tonight, sitting in the middle of a black hole of news, that I wonder whether it might be a good idea to widen our gaze next time we redesign the site. Maybe we shouldn’t just choose from whoever happens to have a booth at the trade show. Maybe we should see if there’s something we can do for ourselves and keep things in-house.

Just a thought.