ReelChanges: viewer-funded documentaries
Big banner on the wall: "How can the intersection of journalism & technology serve democracy?" That's the overarching theme of NewsTools 2008, where 200 or so folks are gathered today (and tomorrow) at Yahoo! as well as Saturday at a Sunnyvale hotel for Innovations in Journalism Expo 2008. I'll post a few highlights from today:
ReelChanges
The most impressive new venture I've come across today is ReelChanges.org: viewer-funded documentaries, which launched shortly after midnight last night.
I knew of founder Hal Plotkin from his days as a tech reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Now he and his small team have been "working in a cave" for the past year to open the nonprofit Center for Media Change, which just launched the nonprofit ReelChanges.org and an upcoming site, ReelChanges.com.
ReelChanges is all about audience-funded media, particularly documentaries and investigative journalism. Films already on the site include Life on the Inside, a moving behind-bars look at a wrongful conviction and life inside the nation's largest women's prison. "Our goal is to democratize the media," said Plotkin, who contrasted ReelChanges' model with the agenda of the corporate media. The site's guidelines for filmmakers are here.
Plotkin said some of the site's functionality, such as its "transactional module" for donations, is still at least 10 days away. Plotkin and team have grand ambitions for ReelChanges, with an eye on becoming a major player in the transaction journalism space, suggesting a prospective "transformation of journalism." He cited one early user's willingness to pay for a video roundup of a scrapbook convention and he could see the day when people want to pony up for coverage of an event important to their niche interests. (Think of parallels to Eventful.com, which uses the power of the crowd to entice music acts or speakers to make an appearance. Here it would be stories you'd like to see covered, a la Christopher Allbritton's audience-funded trip to Iraq or Josh Marshall's coverage of the 2004 presidential race.)
I'll be watching ReelChanges' progress and pulling for it to succeed.
Other sites worth a look
Other urls that have come up today:
• Redwoodage.com, (Think. Share. Act. Live.), what used to be called a lifestyle portal -- a site that appeals to the over-40 crowd.
• MediaRights.org, a site that "maximizes the impact of social-issue documentaries and shorts. By engaging with the MediaRights community, filmmakers reach audiences, educators and librarians bring films into their classroom, and nonprofits and activists integrate media into their campaigns."
Good news
Best bit of news I heard today was that Geneva Overholser will become the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication this fall. Congrats, Geneva!
Other folks I spotted or chatted with today: Larry Pryor, Amy Gahran, Leonard Witt, Charlotte-Anne Lucas, Jon Garfunkel, Robert Niles, Mary Hodder, Dan Gillmor, Barry Parr and many others.
May 1, 2008 at 09:19 PM in Film, Media, New media | Permalink
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9 tips to improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Catching up with Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift blog:
9 Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Top tips:
1. Get inbound links and link out as well.
Terry Heaton, senior vice president of AR&D, notes that internally linking is also important, and is something the top newspaper sites do well. “The main reason Wikipedia links always appear near the top in Google is because their Google Juice is rich with links from and to themselves,” Heaton said. “The ‘weight’ of a link is measured, in part, by the source. Wikipedia gets a ton of traffic, so a link from them is ‘worth’ far more than a link from, say, any TV station in the country. Hence, Google ‘sees’ the links and values them accordingly, which raises Wikipedia’s search results…Internal linking, therefore, always reaps SEO rewards. ...
2. Headlines and title tags should have key words up front. ...
3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include key words.
4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated. ...
5. Highlight your best content on every page. ...
6. Create theme or category pages, and run more special series.
7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.
8. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images.
9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones.
More from Mark:
State of Investigative Reporting at Newspapers, Broadcasting. Live-blogging a panel in Berkeley, Calif., on the future of investigative reporting.
Are Veteran Media Execs the Ones Who’ll See the Future?
April 30, 2008 at 10:15 PM in Media, New media, Search engines | Permalink
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NewsTools gets underway
I'll be attending NewsTools on Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Silicon Valley. Ustream should be carrying live streams of the event here. Here's a list of the attendees.
April 30, 2008 at 06:24 PM in New media | Permalink
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How New Influencers are reinventing journalism
From Paul Gillin: How New Influencers are Reinventing Journalism.
Ben Popken (above) sits atop the editorial pyramid at the blog The Consumerist. In conventional media terms, that pyramid isn't very big – only seven people – but Consumerist's reach far outweighs its small staff. The site gets 15 million unique visitors per month, a number that has roughly doubled in the past year. Perhaps more importantly, it's closely watched by mainstream media outlets. For example, The New York Times has referenced Consumerist 381 times, The Wall Street Journal 114 times and BusinessWeek 37 times. Consumerist gets picked up on the popular social bookmarking site Digg.com constantly -- 34,000 citations and counting. Popken was recently featured in a cover story in BusinessWeek and just wrote a 2,300-word article for Reader's Digest. All without a day of formal journalism training.
April 25, 2008 at 05:23 PM in New media | Permalink
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Following NewComm Forum
I'm on the Advisory Board of the Society for New Communications Research, so it was a double disappointment to miss this week's NewComm Forum. But I'm reading about it second hand.
Live-blogging the NewComm Forum.
Bitemarks: Thoughts on SNCR's New Communications Forum 2008.
Biz Media Scientist: SNCR NewComm Forum Day 2 - TS Eliot, Ezekiel, Beehives and Mighty Mouse.
Provident Partners:PR practitioners should plan for the Next Newsroom today.
Communication Overtones: Integrating Social Media Into Your Public Relations and Marketing Plan and Brand.
PR Communications: New Comm Forum: Final Day & Reflections.
April 25, 2008 at 05:10 PM in New media, Social-media | Permalink
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Practicing open source journalism
Rich Gordon at the IdeaLab blog: A Coder Practices Multimedia Journalism -- with Open Source Tools.
Rich lists a number of open source software tools and platforms, some not so practical, some very much so. For example:
Image editing - The Gimp
Unless you’re a professional graphic artist, all the of the image manipulation you might do in Adobe Photoshop can be done in The Gimp. It’s a brilliant tool.
Sanity preservation - Subversion
This one deserves its own article. Subversion is what keeps me from freaking out every time I have to pull my laptop out to go through airport security. Everything I write, all of my notes, resources, and photographs - Subversion enables me to easily copy them out to a secure server online. It does a lot more than that, but I love it most because it makes my computer disposable. ...
If you love it and are ready for more, check out Lifehacker’s Ubuntu coverage for gobs more fun.
April 24, 2008 at 12:26 PM in New media | Permalink
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Smoking Gun's staying power
Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift: Public Documents + Shoe Leather Reporting = The Smoking Gun's Staying Power.
April 23, 2008 at 09:41 PM in New media | Permalink
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Virtual debates at WhereIStand.com
Online Journalism Review: Virtual debates at WhereIStand.com. Simply compare candidates to each other, and yourself with new wiki opinion aggregator.
April 23, 2008 at 09:28 PM in New media, Politics | Permalink
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Long-term trends in the mediasphere
My 20-minute phone interview with Jen McClure, founder and executive director of the Society of New Communications Research -- about long-term trends in the mediasphere -- just went up on the NewCommReview site. I'll be speaking at the NewComm Forum on April 24 in Sonoma County, Calif.
April 10, 2008 at 07:48 PM in Media, New media | Permalink
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NPR's GetMyVote
I had been hoping to spend more time with NPR's new site, GetMyVote, before I left, but can't. In any case, it's certainly worth showcasing here.
Says NPR's Andy Carvin:
"The purpose of the project is to ask people to upload audio, video or text commentaries in which they explain what it'll take for candidates to get their vote. We've designed the site around a collection of widgets, so local NPR and PBS stations can create their own local Get My Vote projects for state and municipal elections, as well as participate in the national version of the project.
"As users post their commentaries, NPR staff curate some of the more interesting ones on the homepage, though all of them can still be accessed via the tag cloud, search and various sorting mechanisms. Our shows plan to feature commentaries on air throughout the election cycle."
They're now in public beta and have begun discussing the effort on air. If you have any feedback, leave it here or email Tom at NPR. It's now in public beta, and we've just begun talking about it on air. Most of the bugs have been fixed, though there's still a lot of fine-tuning going on
April 9, 2008 at 07:29 PM in New media, Politics | Permalink
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How to take journalism into the 21st century
Veteran San Francisco Chronicle reporter Tom Abate has a four-part series about the future of media:
- Take me to your leader
- The Pyramid and the Cloud
- Newspapers don’t FARK yourselves to death
- Follow the audience into the 21st Century
April 7, 2008 at 12:14 AM in Media, New media | Permalink
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Next Newsroom, day 2
The second day of the Next Newsroom Conference is today. I'll be checking in on their live blogs.
April 4, 2008 at 12:35 AM in New media | Permalink
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The new rules of media
Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift blog: The New Rules of Media.
April 2, 2008 at 12:52 AM in Media, New media | Permalink
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Citizen Huff
The NY Times takes a look at progressive political blog pioneer Arianna Huffington and the influence of the Huffington Post. (Beautiful shot of her, above, by NY Times.)
March 30, 2008 at 05:56 PM in New media | Permalink
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'Reinventing Local Media'
Terry Heaton, one of the wisest observer of the personal media revolution, has a new book coming out, "Reinventing Local Media: Ideas for Thriving in a Postmodern World." The book is a compilation of the essays Heaton has written over the past five years, during a time of epochal change in the world of communications. It's more than 500 pages long and fully indexed.
Says Terry: "It's my hope that it will be one day be used as course material in colleges and universities everywhere."
The book will be available, likely at Amazon and other online distributors, within a month. The price is $24.95.
March 30, 2008 at 05:42 PM in Books, Media, New media, Television, Web/Tech | Permalink
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Camp Videojournalism convenes in Cairo
Chicago-based Camp Videojournalism is gearing up for a media summit in Cairo.
Camp Videojournalism features US and UK journalists, including US-based Visual Editors Robb Montgomery and UK Viewmagazine.tv's David Dunkley Gyimah unveiling their new designs in visual and video journalism.
In a week they visit the region's major newspapers, universities, and the Old
City spreading the word of IM6VJ Integrated multimedia videojournalism.
March 24, 2008 at 11:17 PM in New media | Permalink
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BBC's preoccupation with multitasking, mashups and media
Guardian UK: The BBC's latest multimedia exercises mixing film, sound and online trickery have, er, mixed results.
A wry commentary about the BBC's preoccupation with multitasking, mashups and media.
March 24, 2008 at 06:26 PM in New media | Permalink
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How to build a successful news blog
From Maki at doshdosh: How to Build a Successful News Blog: 10 Information Sources You Can Use.
March 20, 2008 at 09:28 PM in Citizen media, New media, Social-media | Permalink
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Blogging networks raising $$
At TechCrunch, Mike Arrington rants about blogging networks raising money.
Just a month ago VentureBeat
reported a $320,000 raise. In 2007 we saw Sugar Inc.
March 20, 2008 at 01:03 AM in Citizen media, New media, Weblogs | Permalink
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It's always about the money
Terry Heaton's latest is a keeper: It's Always About the Money. Excerpt:
As Upton Sinclair wrote long ago, "It's hard to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." This is our problem. This is our sin, one for which we can only assign blame to the mirror. Some local media companies are about to die — as in, go away permanently — if we don't do something about it.
J.D. Lasica first coined the term "Personal Media Revolution" in his seminal book, Darknet, Hollywood's War Against The Digital Generation, and it is complex and profound. However, most people in media think of it as just bloggers and YouTube and Facebook and such. The demagoguery of Andrew Keen in his book, Cult of the Amateur has done considerable harm to media company thinking, because it badly misses what's really taking place and instead offers a "professionals versus amateurs" theme.
The problem is that the rise of personal media includes the use of its technology by businesses, and this is the ultimate disruptor for professional media and the advertising industry that supports it. When a business creates a dynamic website, it becomes a media company, and nobody knows this better than our friends at Google. Go back and look at the iceberg, for the rise of personal media is supported by the internet pureplay companies, who view the Web itself as their business platform. ...
I'll be writing more about the experts vs. amateurs meme later this week.
March 18, 2008 at 12:34 AM in Citizen media, Media, New media | Permalink
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Coverage of the Journalism Enterprise unconference
JEEcamp is an opportunity for a range of people to get together to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we've learned so far.
I couldn't make it to Birmingham, UK, for the unconference this past weekend, but here's coverage of the event via Coveritlive.
March 17, 2008 at 02:16 AM in Media, New media | Permalink
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How 3 citizen media sites are covering the election
Over at PBS's MediaShift, Mark Glaser offers an interesting look at three team efforts of "semi-pro journalists" who are covering the U.S. presidential election: PurpleStates.tv, MTV's Street Team and the Huffington Post's Off the Bus (including Amanda Michel, an old friend, above).
Mark says, "So far, the three projects have done a good job of bringing up new topics that resonate more with real voters -- but they haven't received much notice from the public and their sites suffer from poor navigation." He offers a mid-term report card for each one.
March 13, 2008 at 04:09 PM in Citizen media, New media, Politics | Permalink
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Where's the new business model for news?
At the IdeaLab blog, San Jose Mercury News reporter Chris O'Brien has an insightful post today: Is that my corpse they're talking about? It's in response to a trio of entries the past few days, including one I wrote titled, Newspapers: Innovate or die.
Excerpt from Chris's piece:
I see tremendous energy going in to breaking new ground in gathering news, telling stories, and creating community. What I don't see is an equivalent amount of innovation occurring around the business models that will support journalism going forward. What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.
This model is dying. ...
Why is there all this energy around reinventing the content and almost none being directed toward reinventing the business models? It represents a failure of imagination. ...
At the end of his post, Chris also outlines a few of the efforts aimed at identifying "a way toward a more sustainable journalism."
March 13, 2008 at 04:02 PM in Media, New media | Permalink
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Kevin Sites' backpack journalism
Caught Kevin Sites on PBS's NewsHour tonight. (Alas, no podcast of his remarks on their website.) Kevin, who seems to be just about the only journalist at Yahoo, talked about using backpack journalism with small gadgets and light staffs to capture individual narratives — "capturing the essence of a person's existence," as he put it — in war zones and remote locations.
Kevin's book, In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars, is now in paperback.
And his series of documentary videos, A world of Conflict, is on Yahoo! Video.
March 11, 2008 at 08:24 PM in New media | Permalink
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NewComm Forum coming to wine country next month
I'm a senior fellow with the Society for New Communications Research, whose next can't-miss gathering is the New Communications Forum 2008, April 22-25, 2008 at the schmoozy Vineyard Creek Inn & Spa in Sonoma County, CA.
The conference brings together thought leaders and decision makers from around the globe to discuss the impact of social media and new communications on media, marketing, journalism, PR and advertising, business, culture and society. The goal is to help you learn the best practices, strategies and tactics that will enable you to effectively use the power of social media and new communications in your organization.
I'll be giving a breakfast keynote — more of a conversation, really — with Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic, on April 24. (It was at NewComm in Las Vegas last year where a conference-goer came up to me after a session and said, "That was the best presentation I've ever seen.") This is one of the few events that bring together new media and social media professionals in journalism and marketing.
Gotta love the setting: not only an educational experience but relaxed conversations during receptions by the fireplace, wine tastings from local vintners outside under the arbor, a picnic on the lawn with the SNCR Fellows and more. Hope to see you there. Register here, and you get $100 off with the discount code NCF08100.
March 6, 2008 at 12:09 AM in New media, Social-media | Permalink
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Next Newsroom Project coming to Duke in April
Chris O'Brien of the San Jose Mercury News, who's putting together The Next Newsroom Project at Duke University on behalf of the Knight Foundation, wants to pass along word of the gathering April 3-4 in Durham, N.C.:
Our goal is to research and design the “ideal” newsroom for campus media, and for the past nine months, we’ve been interviewing folks and profiling newsrooms to gather ideas. You can learn more about our work at our web site.
The next step in our process is to hold the Next Newsroom Conference at Duke. We’ll be gathering a number of folks we’ve interviewed and inviting many others to join us for two days of discussions to help us develop our proposal.
On Day 1, we’ll be hearing a keynote delivered by Saf Fahim, who has designed some of the most advanced newsrooms in the world. We’ll also have a panel on the Newsroom of the Future that will include folks from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and several other advanced newsrooms. Day 2 will be organized around a series of breakout sessions designed to spark wide ranging conversations about the newsroom of the future.
I won't be able to attend, but I can't think of a more important gathering for the news industry on the near-term horizon.
March 5, 2008 at 11:55 PM in Media, New media | Permalink
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Roles of bloggers, journalists blurring more than ever
Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift: Distinction Between Bloggers, Journalists Blurring More Than Ever.
The time-worn debate of Bloggers vs. Journalists has finally run its course. For years, traditional journalists scoffed at bloggers as pajama-wearing screamers, while bloggers have pointed to MSM (mainstream media) as secretly biased and obsolete. While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly (and it continues to this day), what has happened quietly in the background has received less attention: Mainstream media reporters have started blogging in droves, while larger blog operations have hired seasoned reporters and focused on doing traditional journalism.
How indistinguishable are large independent blogs and traditional media sites? Take the following quiz:
1. Who won a recent Polk Award for investigative journalism, a blogger or MSM reporter?
2. Which big New York-based website has four editors and four reporters, and is looking to hire two more reporters — a blog or traditional media outlet?
3. Which site hired a young blogger fresh out of college? Blog or MSM site?
4. Which site in Silicon Valley edits 80% of stories before being published online? Blog or MSM site?Answers: 1. Josh Marshall, Talkingpointsmemo blogger;
2. Gawker blog;
3. NYTimes.com, hiring TVNewser’s Brian Stelter;
4. GigaOm blog. ..."I think the argument about bloggers vs. journalists has been over for years. We've all co-existed just fine for a while now, and the truth is, the distinction is less relevant every day. There are thousands of journalists who now blog, and there are lots of bloggers who are trained journalists. Josh Marshall winning a Polk Award is a sign that the distinctions are becoming less relevant. I don't think readers care whether what they're reading is in a blog or not. What they care about is whether they trust the source of that information, whether it's a mainstream site or a pure blog." — Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com
Great quote from Brady. It's a point Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and I (and others) have been making for years, and it's good to see it becoming a widespread reality.
February 28, 2008 at 03:04 PM in Citizen media, Media, New media, Weblogs | Permalink
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Follow We Media online
Sorry that I'm missing this week's We Media conference in Miami — I got a lot out of last year's gathering.
Check out the interactive flash feature at the top of the page. (I see Michael Smolens, CEO of dotSUB, is there.) Some interesting posts on the We Media blog, and Leonard Witt at PJNet has been live-blogging the conference.
February 28, 2008 at 02:32 PM in New media | Permalink
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Producers Guild of America bicoastal event
The Producers Guild of America had an interesting live new media event on the East and West coasts last night on "Local T.V. Meets Global New Media," and a video of the event is now up. (You can skip SF Mayor Gavin Newsom's intro for the first question at 10 minutes in.) Panelists included Craig Newmark, Dan Rosenheim, Vice-President & News Director, KPIX-TV, and Danny Passman, Vice President, DailyMotion, among others.
February 27, 2008 at 11:14 PM in Media, New media | Permalink
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Yahoo! plans a Digg clone
NY Times: Yahoo Plans to Let Users Help Mold New Feature. "On Tuesday, Yahoo plans to introduce a service called Buzz that relies on users to help it compile the most popular articles from around the Web."
In other words, Yahoo's latest whiff of inspiration is to try to clone Digg.
February 26, 2008 at 12:39 PM in New media | Permalink
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Journalists and technologists: An uneasy courtship
Rich Gordon at the IdeaLab blog: Journalists and Technologists: An Uneasy Courtship. He reports on the highlights of last weekend's inaugural Computation + Journalism Symposium at Georgia Tech.
February 26, 2008 at 12:35 PM in New media | Permalink
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Josh Marshall wins Polk Award
Somehow I missed this bit of news from last week, but the NY Times catches us up today: Blogger, Sans Pajamas, Rakes Muck and a Prize.
Of the many landmarks along a journalist’s career, two are among those that stand out: winning an award and making the government back down. Last week, Joshua Micah Marshall achieved both.
On Tuesday, it was announced that he had won a George Polk Award for legal reporting for coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys, critics charged under political circumstances. The “tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,” the citation read. ...
Marshall does not belong to any traditional news organization. Instead, he is creating his own. His Web site, Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com), is the first Internet-only news operation to receive the Polk (though in 2003, an award for Internet reporting was given to the Center for Public Integrity), and certainly one of the most influential political blogs in the country. ...
For those not in the biz, the Polk Award is one of the most prestigious awards in all of journalism.
Congrats, Josh, well deserved.
February 25, 2008 at 12:16 AM in Citizen media, New media | Permalink
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How one investor used social media to shake up Yahoo
Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift blog: How One Investor Used Social Media to Shake Up Yahoo.
February 21, 2008 at 07:59 PM in New media, Social-media | Permalink
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Farber takes over as editor of CNET News
My buddy Dan Farber has just been named editor-in-chief of CNET News. Congrats, Dan!
February 19, 2008 at 10:20 PM in New media | Permalink
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