Archive for December, 2007
December 27, 2007 at 2:51 pm · Filed under brands, community, content, media, social networks
From Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture:
The specific content of gossip is often less important than the social ties created through the exchange of secrets between participants - and for that reason, the social functions of gossip hold when dealing with television content. It isn’t who you are talking about but who you are talking with that matters. Gossip builds common ground between participants, as those who exchange information assure one another of what they share. Gossip is finally a way of talking about yourself through critiquing the actions and values of others. As cyberspace broadens the sphere of our social interactions, it becomes even more important to be able to talk about peope we share in common via the media than people from our local community who will not be known by all of the participants in an online conversation. Into that space step the complex, often contradictory figures who appear on reality television.
Jenkins mentions this in relation to building community around reality TV. But really this applicable to all relationships and Jenkins brings it up after a discussion on building brand champions/agitators in the community.
So the questions arises, how can brands and media owners facilitate this gossip? Is this where they interact with the social networks or should they even be trying to own this or merely interact with it.
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December 27, 2007 at 2:39 pm · Filed under media, music
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/15-12/mf_morris
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December 5, 2007 at 3:21 pm · Filed under content, magazines, media
Roy Greenslade writes up some pointers on why the Economist, unlike the US magazines mentioned below, continues on an upward sales and revenue curve.
It’s free market economics are too much for my likings generallly but it’s hard to disagree with Greenslade’s well made point that it knows it’s audience really well and goes out and grabs them by the balls every Friday:
I often think that the magazine is a little like the BBC World Service,
dispensing well-informed reports about what is happening around the
globe to the people who need to know or, just possibly, those who think
they should know. The difference is that The Economist comes at matters
with a strong point a view. It is, genuinely, a viewspaper with a
strong commitment to the free market.
Technorati Tags: theeconomist, keepfakingit, greenslade, media, magazines
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December 3, 2007 at 4:59 pm · Filed under community, content, magazines, media, politics
Interesting piece from Jon Friedman of MarketWatch on the decline and fall of the magazine. And what the modern American editor is doing about it (not a lot in many cases).
Five easily bloggable points jump out:
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Take a page out of the playbook of what differentiated MSNBC.com from the pack. Have almost as many graphics and design experts as writers on staff.
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Provide a feature that you simply don’t have space for in your newsstand product:
namely, the back story. Readers love to know the Inside Story on a big event. Let your reporters explain HOW they covered big news, and give them an opportunity to tell their stories. Yes, some blogs do this, too, but not often or well enough.
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Make the sites as interactive as possible. Time took a good step in this direction by having its readers pick the questions it asks celebrities in its regular feature.
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Use the Web to explain the news as comprehensively as possible. Don’t simply report the story on the Internet — give such information as a chronology. The Wall Street Journal’s Web site routinely does this, and it pays off.
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Keep the staff nonbelievers as far away from the Web as possible. If editors or reporters are ambivalent about or hostile to the Web (like many have been at Time Inc., and you can’t fire them all), don’t let them corrupt
your site with their lethargy or disapproval. Listen, the Web is the most exciting part of a modern journalism enterprise for ambitious writers and editors. If they haven’t figured it out by now, to hell with them.
The point on graphics design vs extra copy writers I think is massive. It’s all too rare on news websites to see good illustration and it’s something that fits very well into the more protracted deadlines magazines allow.
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December 3, 2007 at 4:00 pm · Filed under community, content, media, politics
Vint Cerf comes over all Bono and guest edits the Guardian Media. Whatever that means. Anyways, the man who came second to Al Gore in inventing the internet gets to lay the smack down on what he feels is the state of the aforementioned internet. And he doesn’t mention his job not doing any evil once.
What Cerf does do though is take a good snapshot of what, after thirty or so years of bottom down development and growth, the internet is allowing us to do.
It takes decades if not generations to fully understand the impact of
such inventions. We are barely two decades into the commercial
availability of the internet, but it has already changed the world. It
has fostered self-expression and freed information from the constraints
of physical location, opening up the world’s information to people
everywhere.
He’s not wrong. But the next point is fascinating, particularly given his employers’ upcoming mobile spectrum bid(s):
And it still has a long way to go. Today, barely one in five people
around the world has access to the internet. Yet around three-quarters
of the world’s population lives within reach of a mobile network. In
the decade ahead, many people, especially in developing countries, will
have their first contact with the internet via a mobile phone.
This is a big point on a number of levels. Google are serious about being a big provider of what is looking like the planet’s primary platform for internet delivery. On top of that layer they are the undisputed heavyweight champ when it comes to organizing the information on that platform.
The second interesting point Cerf seeks to hightlight from what surely could have been a very long list is this:
Unlike previous communications technologies, the internet enables both
one-to-one and one-to-many communications, as well as many-to-many
(such as wikis or Digg). Distinguishing between these forms of
communication isn’t always easy. But the net is still a young medium,
and discerning where personal contact blends into public broadcast will
become easier as time passes.
Taking on Postman’s reading of McLuhan, message, medium and all the rest, this is a huge communications development we’re at the cusp of. How will true many-to-many communications for the masses transform the very nature of how we think and organize ourselves as a society. What sort of impact will this have on democracy as well as popular entertainment?
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December 3, 2007 at 3:41 pm · Filed under content, media, newspapers
This is going to keep running for a while and it looks like Jeff Jarvis has the powers of citation in his corner in his online fight against the New York Times’ Bill Keller.
Jarvis: In a speech in London for the Guardian, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller says this about bloggers and this blogger in particular:
“My friend Jeff Jarvis, a blogger of long-standing and
professor of journalism at the City University of New York, refers to
news bloggers as “citizen journalists”, which has a sweet, idealistic
ring to it. Jeff, like many of the most ardent true believers in the
blog revolution, suggests that the mainstream media can be largely
replaced by a self-regulating democracy of voices, the wisdom of the
crowd.“
Jarvis: First, I have never said that the crowd of bloggers would replace
mainstream media and professional journalism. That’s a red herring that
is too often attributed presumptively to bloggers and their advocates.
It’s never properly cited because it can’t be. Where’s the link to the
quote with me saying that? It’s fiction. I don’t say that. I don’t
believe that. Jay Rosen shot that fish in the barrel a year and a half ago when he responded to hearing it again from Keller’s deputy Jon Landman:
“Jay Rosen says that no one is saying that news will be
decided by poll. Nobody is saying that we don’t need reporters. Nobody
is saying that you should stop reporting and just listen. But these
things are being said: The audience knows a lot of stuff and if you
don’t tap that knowledge you’re not keeping up with your craft. And
journalism has become interactive and if you’re not interacting, you’re
not keeping up with your craft. And, he says, trust isn’t made the way
it was; the trust transaction is different.
Jarvis: So can we please can that talk and stop accusing bloggers of wishing to eliminate journalists?
Sure, Jarvis can lay it on thick about blogs from time to time, a blog hasn’t cured cancer yet I don’t think, but Keller’s barking up the wrong tree here in a big way. He’s coming off just the way the NUJ did in October when they put the boot in the new media practices alleged and assumed.
Not promising from the executive editor of the USA’s paper of record.
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