Every once in a while, I have the urge to consolidate the scattered pieces of the online me. And every time I try to bring those pieces in, the web keeps dragging me back out again.
The last time I redid this blog, the intent was to consolidate: continue the journalism-related blogging, pull in my Twitter feed, publish photos here… It worked fine for a while, at least until the blogging became sporadic (more on that in another post).
And, meanwhile, the web kept spinning out new socially-driven places to park bits and pieces of me. Without taking into account those services I’ve signed up for and since abandoned (hello, MySpace), my i-addresses include Flickr, Linked In, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Publish2 and a couple of Yahoo newsgroups.
Over the weekend I added Quora and Tumblr to the mix, Quora because is looks interesting and Tumblr as the platform for my take-a-photo-a-day-in-2011 project.
Being here, there and everywhere, indeed.
I’ll admit to being a follower, jumping in (usually later rather than early) on the newest hot thing. It’s my nature, and part of the nature of the web.
What keeps me out there is the value that I find: each of the services that I stick with adds something. Which is all for the good, but it means, I suspect, that scattered me, online is my norm and any thought I have of consolidation is pretty much a pipe dream.
Tags: identity, online, social media
Sometime next month, a day will slip by that marks the 40th anniversary of my more-or-less continual immersion in journalism.
When I started, the now-dead Terrace Herald was only two years past the end of hot lead typography (and I had enough earlier exposure to that to love the mixed smell of melting lead and printers ink). Earlier today, I was watching a new “newspaper video,” delivered to my phone.
Forty years. Twenty-six of them spent in small newsrooms, five running a home-based design and media company, and now 11 or so in the classroom. (Yeah, those numbers don’t add up; there was some overlap.)
I was both unfortunate and fortunate to come into the game without training. Unfortunate, because it meant a lot of sometimes hard learning and too many failings. Fortunate, because it meant I was constantly learning, trying and stretching. It seems to me, beyond the ability to research, write and verify, those three — learning, trying and stretching — may be the most important skills I ever learned.
Journalism has been good to me. It never made me rich or anything other than somewhat locally famous. But it put me together with a lot of talented, passionate people, and it still does, even if now I’ve never met a lot of them face-to-face. It has allowed me to create, to explore, to express, to help, to celebrate people and accomplishments large and small. It has taken me places I never would have gone.
I wasn’t always passionate about the craft over those 40 years, but I’m as passionate about it now as I ever was, in love with its successes and experiments, in awe of its accomplishments, impatient with its failings.
At 58, I should be benching myself in favour of young folk, of course. They are living the future in ways that I can’t, blazing trails that will take them places I may not see.
I’m not ready for the bench, though, and not only because I can’t afford to retire.
Journalism is still hard work and it’s still fun. Teaching skills and attitudes, exploring storytelling and staying immersed in the flow of innovation and experimentation is invigorating and challenging. I’m still deep into the learning, trying and stretching that has defined my newspaper and classroom work.
After 40 years, I can’t conceive of a life without journalism, then, now or going forward.
(Note: Thanks to everyone who has made the time I have spent wit journalism such an adventure and so enjoyable.)
Tags: career, journalism, personal
I’m no good at predictions. An example: when the video-enabled iPod was released, I raved a little about the thing but noted that I didn’t see much point in adding video.
So, I don’t have predictions for 2011, but here are a few things I’d like to see in the new year.
(1) Media organizations start using Twitter to engage, more than they use it to promote. It’s one thing to rely on a handful of engaged reporters; it’s another to manage an organizational tweet stream that adds personality and the human voice.
(2) Publishers and editors finally fully grok that the web — and apps — are primarily visual and give photojournalism it’s due: bigger images, more storytelling, no more let’s-drive-page views slideshows of dubious nature and content. And proper credit for the visual journalists. There’s no reason to continue to mismatch of nine-point bylines and six-point photo credits.
(3) Someone will write a social media script that will change all instances of “Breaking news” to “WJLT” (we just learned this). The result will be much more accuracy and I will be much less annoyed during the year.
(4) Aggressive experimentation with newspaper pay walls, with something behind them that is worth the money. Asking me to pay for “the usual” won’t cut it, but there is a model. I pay for books, music, magazines and apps that are of deep interest and personal value. Moving past the age of mass, newsrooms can start to explore and discover a myriad of sweet spots.
(5) Publishers paying more attention to the quality and capabilities of their RSS feeds as the success of Flipboard prompts development of other multi-source aggregators.
(6) Finally, a long-standing prediction/wish that may finally come true this year: publishers will finally stop seeing multimedia, video, data visualization, etc. as special. All of it will become a regular part of the storytelling, fully integrated. Silos of “special content,” with their own often hard-to-find menu links, will fade away.
Recently added:
(7) The definition of book begins to waver a little more, as inventive folk turn their attentions to apps, not least because of the media-richness and creative navigation possibilities, and the ability to update as needed. I could see a multimedia journalism “textbook” as an app, for instance, taking advantage of all three of those attributes.
(8) All social media apps and websites adopt the “translate” feature from TweetDeck, further opening up the world.
Tags: 2011, media, RSS, social media, twitter, visual journalism
On the newspaper front, it seems there has been more cause for fiscal optimism over the last little while. The mantra that “you need to support us because we are good for you” (which tends to put reading newspapers on par with, say, eating broccoli), has slowly given ground to cautious and understated optimism about coming experiments with paywalls and great dollops of excitement about the emergence of tablet and smartphone apps that people are willing to buy.
When it think this through, though, and read the anaylses and predictions, I keep coming up against the thought that while the financial opportunities for journalism may be changing, one thing isn’t: abundance.
It is an accepted truth that one of the major effects of the internet age, or whatever we are calling this new time, is the end of scarcity, particularly as it applies to the availability of news reporting and journalism.
One implication of abundance is that I’m going to carefully choose the journalism I pay for once we reach the golden age of paywalls and tablet apps. It’s a question of money, certainly. But it’s also a question of time and attention. Back when I subscribed to three daily newspapers, a lot of issues got glanced at and put on the to-be-read pile, which inevitably became the recycle-this-now pile. I don’t want a digital equivalent of that.
The other implication, of course, is that I’m no longer limited to the handful of titles that could have been delivered to my door a decade ago. I have, literally, the world at hand.
And we can add to the paywalled websites and purchase-by-the-month subscription apps the rest of the great, untidy modern world of communications: television, radio, blogs, Facebook status updates, the great sweep of digital did-you-hear-about-this chatter. And the links, always, the links.
Deciding where to spend money on journalism — when that day comes — is going to be complex. How much local, national, international will I really need to pay for to be comfortable that I am informed? What value will any of the dozens of daily publications I might consider really deliver for me that I can’t get elsewhere?
It’s no longer as simple as one from column A (local), one from column B (national).
And, if that’s the case for a news consumer/user/reader (or whichever label we finally land on), it’s even more challenging for the publications that will be after my media dollars: pure presence (on the local scene, for instance) will be no longer enough to convince me that this is media that I have to have.
No matter how good, in their minds, it may be for me.
Tags: apps, newspapers, paywalls
I tweeted this this morning…
The problem isn’t coverage of the Koran-burning idiot; it is that we are not yet used to a world in which there is too much journalism.
…and got a little push-back, including this from a former student…
such a thing as too much journalism? that doesn’t sound right coming from you, Mark
Here’s what I meant.
The breast-beating over the coverage of that idiot who’s threatening to torch copies of the Koran struck me as a little overwrought. It’s as though a whole bunch of people forgot that what we do in journalism is go see what’s happening in the world and then report back. We can debate forever the value of much of what is reported, but it’s the second part of my tweet I’m most interested on exploring here: too much journalism.
Was a time when only those in the biggest cities enjoyed a surplus of media. For many of us, our window on the world was the local paper, augmented (maybe) by a regional or national title, and whatever combination of national and local TV and radio was available. Newspapers (the medium I know best) took seriously their responsibility to bring us the local, the regional, the national, the international, mixing bits and pieces of everything. Every newspaper in every market did the same, but only the clipping services, newspaper chain offices and contest judges noticed that, local aside, every paper was doing the same thing. Piling on a story — whether it’s some kid in a weather balloon or an idiot with a match — happened, but, like WIlliam Gibson’s famous remark on the future, was “unevenly distributed.”
That age is gone, of course. In its place, we have access to all of those publications and all of that news, and in many more places than just those publications. And we have the death of the portal (Facebook, perhaps, aside). The result is that we no longer have a window or two on the world: the internet has pretty much knocked down the whole wall. Everything from everywhere comes pouring through.
We readers have the easy part here: turn on the tap and wade in.
Getting used to a world with too much journalism, by which I mean a world in which all of the journalism is more or less available, is much harder for newspapers and other media. They’re behaving as though journalism and information is still scarce, and in many cases they need to in order to serve a diminishing but still present traditional audience. It seems to me that it’s inevitable there will be times when too many journalistic assets, ranging from the boots on the ground to the number of column inches, seem too much devoted to matters of too little importance.
(Can we agree that it is important to cover the fringes, not only because the fringes sometimes move to the centre, but also because issues raised by the actions of those on the fringes — in this case freedom of expression, concepts of tolerance and more — are ones we need to continually address? The issue of how proportional the coverage of the odd, the weird, the fringe is another issue.)
This is where we appear to be now: newspapers can’t, for much longer, be what they used to be but have not yet figured out what they need to be, where they will fit, in a world that much of the audience already inhabits.
Vuvuzela sellers just prior to the start of Wednesday's game. They did not do great business, although a few of the plastic horns were sounded.
The vuvuzela seller started the afternoon in a Brazil shirt, but quickly changed to German colours.
German fans were out in force just before the game; by the opening whistle, Spanish supporters pretty much matched their numbers.
Curbside seating, and plenty of tension, for a young German fan.
Spanish fans react to a close play for their team as the game plays on.
Game over: let the flag-waving begin.
Ah, youth: Celebrating for the cameras as Spain closes out Germany 1-0.
I saw this in a Toronto Star article yesterday: John Paton is apparently one of those advising the new owners of chain.
Paton is the recently named head of the Journal-Register newspaper group, and when I saw him speak at last month’s International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas, he drew a big round of applause, from an admittedly news- and tech-geeky audience.
The nut graf was something like this. J-R is aggressively adopting a strategy of digital first for its newsrooms. To (horribly) paraphrase, the digital stuff is “easy stuff” and if you can’t do the easy stuff well, you can’t do the harder stuff — print — effectively.
(There was a lot more to his presentation, including this nugget: as well as issuing Flip video cameras to the newsroom, J-R issued them to ad sales staff to shoot pre-roll and other ads. The cameras have paid for themselves.)
Paul Godfrey, the man who will head the new chain, is apparently already on-board. He’s quoted in a Victoria Times-Colonist article as saying:
“We’re going to have to do business a little bit differently. Newspapers are in a transition to the digital world . . . and the chain will be digital-first newspapers.”
The Canwest newspapers I’m most familiar with, the Vancouver Sun and the Province, have already moved toward online first, although online augmentation of print best describes their approach.
It will be interesting to watch what happens with the Canwest papers and any digital-first strategy, given a couple of hurdles that newspapers everywhere, it seems, are struggling with.
One is putting digital first in a process designed to efficiently deal with a couple of deadlines a day and the production of a single, fixed product. That’s an issue of mind-set and of internal processes and organization. I recall Paton saying that the day’s print issue would become the final product of the day’s online reporting. That’s a big switch.
Another — and this is particularly relevant to Canwest — is division of labour. Paton spoke of a newsroom where three people are doing 10 things, not 10 people each doing one of the 10. That may reflect a couple of realities, which include the financial hit newspapers are continuing to take and the efficiencies that multimedia reporting can create. Please note the use of the word “can.” Simply asking one person to do more than one job is not in any way efficient.
Division of labour is a huge issue with Canadian newspapers, which are by and large unionized, with rules and regs that define who does what, and who can do what, again premised on a process that is aimed squarely at a single product at the end of the day.
It’s those challenges — the reinvention of process and target, and who does what — that, I suspect, will be the big ones as Canwest moves to Godfrey’s “digital-first newspapers.”
Tags: CanWest, digital first, newspapers
Canwest’s newspaper division will emerge from bankruptcy with the major debt holders paid off, new owners and a new lease on life.
That’s great news. Relieved of the debt that dragged Canwest into oblivion, the money-making newspaper division will have a chance to carry on. Even better news comes in the early words of Paul Godfrey, who will head the new company. He has said that all pension obligations and the like are intact, that all full-time employees have jobs, and so do “substantially all” of part-timers.
All this is great news for the newspapers and the people who put them together.
But I have some concerns.
One is that the money-losing National Post is going to be a continuing drain on the chain. It has rarely made money in its 10 or so years, and the general trends among newspapers (falling circulation, disrupted advertising and overwhelming competition for attention), aren’t in its favour.
Another is the plan of the new company to go public. The health of publicly-held companies depends on keeping shareholders happy. In the newspaper biz, that’s meant focussing on quarterly results and high levels of profit. The first interferes with longer-term planning; the second is something most folks don’t think we’ll see again in most forms of mass media. It is possible, however, for the chain to focus on investor returns by concentrating on titles that generate high levels of profit (such as newspapers with local monopolies) and cutting others adrift.
Canwest’s secured creditors come out of the deal happy, because they get their money back. The new owners include some who bought Canwest debt at a deep discount (reports as as little as 30 cents on the dollar), which might make it tempting to get out with a healthy profit if there’s a successful IPO (or to get out quickly if the IPO falls flatish.
While the news is good, for now, it wouldn’t surprise me if there aren’t more ownership changes coming for some of the newspapers that make up the chain.
Three brass bands and belly dancers brought the southeastern European spring festival Ederlezi to Vancouver Friday night, giving me chance to do some shooting. This was in the way of a test of both a new 55-250 Canon lens and my newish Canon T2i. Photos were shot RAW, using the P mode, and are untouched other the default conversion settings in Aperture 3. I’m really happy with Canon’s lowlight abilities: at 6400 ISO, the results are great for web publication, and I was able to shoot, in rather dismal light, at 1/30-1/60 of a second.
A note about the audio: I forgot to take my recorder along and wound up grabbing the sound on my iPhone, which is why it is a little less than stellar.
Tags: brass bands, ederlezi, music
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