Twitter's future depends on changing human nature?

Simon Dumenco of Ad Age offers ten lessons he's learned from Twitter. I especially like his number nine, which posits that Twitter's future depends on our changing human nature. I doubt it.

If rumors are enough for you. . .

I love well-thought-out lines that really nail a thought so I wanted to share this from Christoph Keese, head of public affairs and an architect of the online strategy followed by the publishing giant Springer (publisher of Europe's biggest daily newspaper). Talking about the need for journalism, he said: “A highly industrialized world cannot survive on rumors."

Keese wants publishers to work with Internet companies to create a “one-click marketplace solution” for their online content with Internet gateways displaying links to newspaper articles, videos and other content from a variety of providers, as search engines do now. But some of the items would include something new: a price tag.

Free journalism is an example of getting what you pay for (see most newspapers, which are in the process of slashing their staff members by the scores or, even cheaper, Internet websites depending on free reporting). If you think rumors are enough news for you, please come by just about any McDonald's or bagel restaurants in the morning and listen to the fact-free zone. I am stunned at what I hear that passes for fact.

Thinking about the sports game story

Erin Sheehan, former editor of the M.U. Journal and currently with guest relations for the Atlanta Braves, passed along a link to a column by Jason Fry at the National Sports Journalism Center suggesting radical changes in the sports game story.

She was correct in that the column was thoughtful and interesting. Its premise was that the sports game story – the mainstay of most sports pages – is outdated, dull and unable to compete with all the other ways sports fans have of getting information about a game (or other sports event). Fry is correct; most game stories are all of the above. However, as a sports fan (and former sports writer in a bygone era), I think the game story is still the most important story in most sports sections.

First, let’s deal with that pesky competition angle since that’s what most new media folks have used to convince newspaper editors to commit seppuku by saddling beat writers with tons of other stuff. Yes, we know who’s won; we probably look at the box score or other statistics before reading the game story; we may well have seen the highlights on “Sportscenter.” So? We’ve long known one fact that seems to get lost in all the speculation about competition – people who have gone to a game are more likely to read a game story than those who didn’t go to the game. So much for the competition problem. People don’t care about the competition; if the story’s any good, it will be read.

Second, Fry suggests four tactics – two of them are the surrender mode adopted by most newspaper editors, but the others, reinvigorate and reenergize them, are worth following. The reason sports fans who have been to a game want to read the game story is to put what they’ve seen into perspective. They want the quotes, the play-by-play of key moments, and the analysis. They’ll also seek out the best story they can find among all the stories. If it’s not in the newspaper but some new media form, that’s what they’ll find. One of the advantages of new media is that sports fans today have a lot of options, and I’ll bet they use them all. I read ESPN and The Sporting News online daily in addition to sports sections from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, New York Times and, sometimes, USA Today. And I sure read various takes on the same story. But I read them anyway. A good story works every time, and, frankly, I see an awful lot of smart young journalists like Erin Sheehan in classes and student media at Marquette (and lots of other schools). Give them time and opportunity and watch them do their own reinvigorating and reenergizing.

Pete Hamill on journalism, a must-read

Great interview with Pete Hamill on syracuse.com about journalism that should be read by every aspiring journalism. Following is his answer on writing columns:

"The editor is part of it. If you’re writing a column and the editor says go cover the Vietnam War or go cover the World Series or the last fight of Sugar Ray Robinson, you go. But most of the time you’re making choices. What I did as a columnist because I liked (Jimmy) Breslin and (Murray) Kempton and a lot of people after that, the opinions in the column were based on the reporting. You went somewhere. My routine was to call in fairly early and see what was on the AP datebook and the paper datebook and see what was the best thing for me to cover. And make sure nobody else was going to be there.

"I was a generalist. I wanted to cover politics on Monday and the Rolling Stones on Wednesday and whatever I felt like, a good murder, on Friday. You learn more that way. You can tell when a guy is at his 27th World Series. The prose flattens out. The sense of surprise is gone. It’s like another day at the office. If you can keep enthusiasm going for a lifetime, then it’s better to be a generalist. . You can pick assignments that force you to read three books before you show up if you want to."

Should news be free?

Arianna Huffington offers a long defense of new media (actually it's an attack on old media attacks on new media) in which she poses arguments that aggregators are doing news sites a service.

There's a lot of thought and good points in the article from the Chicago Tribune, along with some fuzzy thinking and deceptive numbers (for example: "Did you know newspaper advertising fell nearly 19 percent this year while Web advertising is up 9 percent and mobile advertising is up 18 percent?" Probably true, but using percentages hides the fact that the bases are so dissimilar, which means that the money lost is newspaper advertising is a heckavua lot more than the money gained in web advertising).

A big part of her problem, as is much of what I read about this situation, is due to differing definitions of "news." Huffington says, and I agree, that charging for "news" won't work since there are many free sites. But are columns news? Analysis pieces? The Journal Sentinel's "Packers Plus?" For example, if I ran a "news site," I'd charge for all the extras -- those things that just can't be found everywhere. For example, I enjoy reading Bill Simmons on sports or Andrew Sullivan on culture or Frank Rich on our society. Why should everything they write be free? Should everything Bob McGinn writes on the Packers be free? I don't think so. I strongly suspect Huffington was paid for writing her piece -- and she should have been.

Today is a big day for discussing media.

In Washington, a Federal Trade Commission two-day workshop is bringing out a host of big names in the field, including Rupert Murdoch, Steven Brill, Paul Steiger, Leonard Downie and others. There is sure to be big news from this area.

In Hyderabad, India (where I had a 12-hour airport layover a year ago; not fun), the World Newspaper Congress is underway with lots of interesting tidbits. Not surprisingly, the lead is one of Murdoch's minions, Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton whose talk could be summed up with this quote: " How can it be that the Internet offered so much promise and so little profit?" Don't look for much new media love from Hyderabad. The link is to paidcontent.org so you can imagine that group's take on the situation. (Hint: "Free costs too much."). Lots of stories out there. Search using "World Newspaper Congress."

And I fully appreciate the irony that I'm using new media, including both links, to report on old media. We certainly live in a crazy media world these days.

Newspapers oppose online "opt-in" advertising strategy

Depending on what point of view you have, newspapers are weighing in on one of the hot topics of the day -- behavioral targeted advertising -- on the side of the devil or that of the angels.

The Newspaper Association of America is urging the federal government not to follow an "opt-in" strategy for such advertising. "Opt-in" means that consumers can't be targeted unless they specifically allow it. It's the opposite of the "opt-out" strategy used in telephone marketing (another area where the newspaper industry has sided against most consumers).

New media looks like the old

New media looks awful, well, white, says Byron Monroe, former Ebony magazine editor and former editor of the National Association of Black Journalists. He's got a point. For new media to actually be an improvement over the old, it must represent a diverse America.

Ready for the robots?

AOL is. CEO Tim Armstrong announced that AOL robots will trawl the web, suggest stories, calculate payment (and ad rates) for free lancers, edit the stories and check for copyright infringement.

Can this be the future of the Internet? Or just the failure of yet another plan put together by human MBA drones?

Magazines readying for growth of eReaders

AdWeek says that magazine publishers are readying digital platforms for the growth of eReaders, which are expected to multiply within months.

The sky already fell, but . . .

Interesting musings on media from David Carr at the New York Times. For some time I've repeated the line that historians tell us what life was like before Gutenberg and movable type, and what life was like afterward. But nothing tells us what life was like when it revolutionised the media landscape -- and the world.

Carr does a nice job of looking at the chaos as the sky fell in great chunks (his phrase), but then waxes optimistic about a future without the heady days of media past:

"So what do we get instead? The future, which is not a bad deal if you ignore all the collateral gore. Young men and women are still coming here to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent.

"For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down."

The sky fell. But there's a new dawn with a new sky and lots of people are looking at what might be instead of what was. That's a pretty good way of looking at things.

Ad spending optimism rebounds

For some time, observers have wondered whether the decline in advertising was a consequence of poor media performance or poor economic performance. MediaPost reports today that it seems to be the latter, since ad executives report the highest level of optimism since before the recession hit.
Now someone needs to tell the media companies so they'll quit committing suicide by attrition and start giving us consumers a reason to buy their product.