Just Do It!

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If it had not happened to me recently, I might not believe it.  Despite David Cohn’s exhortations earlier this year, experienced, smart journalists, all atwitter, saying they could never Tweet or blog.  Experienced journalists interviewing me on my blog, without reading the blog.  Executives acting condescendingly toward social media.  We can’t create the Complete Community Connection if we don’t have direct experience.  By trying to “possess” the stories of our communities, we might lose them.

Virginia Heffernan provides insight in today’s New York Times Magazine that the world of content has changed fundamentally.  Much more “with and by” than “for and to” audiences:

People who work in traditional media and entertainment ought either to concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending a day on Twitter or following a recipe from a Mark Bittman video played on a refrigerator that automatically senses what ingredients are missing and texts an order to the grocery store (it will soon exist!). Then they should think about what content suits these new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types, mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret we have been missing.

Several people have made this point, but John Bell made it well, and recently:

You cannot be great with social media through simple observation. Applying it to your life and committing the time to actually “do” it will help your business. It will help you understand first-hand and give you ideas. It will suck up time. But two things happen: it doesn’t suck up as much as you fear and you end up with greater rewards than you imagined.

So, how to start?  First of all, join Twitter.  Follow Steve Buttry, Amy Gahran, John McGlothlen, and Steve Outing to start, along with anyone else you know on Twitter.  A great introduction to Twitter is provided by TwiTip, including some informative Twitters to follow.  If you really want to explore Twitter, Guy Kawasaki has some detailed ideas.  Once you are up and running, try Twhirl to start, and once on your feet, perhaps Tweetdeck to sort things out.

Then, sign up for Facebook,  have your Twitter feeds automatically update your Facebook account, and search Facebook for local friends, or long lost high school classmates.  Be amazed at what you can discover.

For a more professional view, start with LinkedIn.  You should find many people from your company already there.

If you would like more motivation, check out Xark and Twitter:

Journalists are in the communications business. Shouldn’t they at least have a professional interest in the evolving state of modern communications technology? Shouldn’t journalists at least be curious about the way other people communicate?

Only they aren’t curious: They’re hostile.

I said this back in September, and it’s as true now as it was then: Newspaper companies (and many of their employees) hate modern journalism. They resent change they don’t control. They’re angry that “the people formerly known as the audience” have developed alternatives to their mass-media monopolies.

So, let’s just do it, and see what we learn!

Are you willing?

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Information in the First Instance

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Being with Bill Densmore and the group he assembled at Missouri this week was a refreshing introduction to new people and ideas.  We were gathered to create the “blueprint” for the Information Valet Project, which we tentatively described as:

A permission-based ecosystem assuring privacy that allows you, in a trustworthy way, to share personal information so that content providers and partners can create a structure to provide you with content, applications and incentives tailored to you and your needs.

This “ecosystem” assumes that an individual, by giving secure personal information and desires for specific information, will be able to access that information in an elegant way.  As I participated in the discussions, I kept coming back to the need for a whole new structure to create the Complete Community Connection (C3). So, with a nod to Steve Outing, I am trying to be as transparent as I can be, both to our employees and the industry, about the issues in creating this new entity.

In looking for discussions on changing the way we create information in the first instance, I was struck by the conversation between Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer on the Ecology of News.  They both break down news into the essential elements, and then discuss the best way to package and distribute those elements.  I would propose that the elements are Sources; Quotes; Factual Statements about people, places or events; Ideas; Data; and Opinions.
The Complete Community Connection would expand the current reliance on packaged stories in both directions – back toward the original elements, offering transparency, and forward toward a summary of local knowledge in a local wiki.

So, how do we do that?

We have to start with the creation of the “elements” in the first instance.  By starting with each source, quote, factual statement, picture, graphic, audio clip or video clip as an isolated element, or “tweet”, properly tagged with automatic tagging engines, those elements can be packaged or searched directly, allowing the most transparent view of local information.  Sometimes that could be done by reporting on scheduled events by live blogging, using Twitter tweets for participant comments, with the resulting “record” time stamped.  All audio and video clips could also be tagged to the time, place, event and people.  From those elements, packaged stories could be written, but any reader could go “through” the story to the original elements.

For investigative pieces, getting at those issues harder to pry out of the community, the reporter could still keep track of the elements in a similar system, but without the initial public input.

Patrick Thornton, with his BeatBlogging posts, is trying to highlight the best efforts to learn what can be done in this area.  I believe that the transformation necessary from “for and to” to “with and by” will not take place until we engage our communities in the first instance of information creation.

To take it another step, what if the community could suggest what needs to be investigated?  Leonard Witt arranged funding for a representative journalism project in Northfield, MN that Bonnie Obremski is carrying out at Locally Grown.  Listening to Bonnie describe what she has accomplished in her six months in Northfield makes me think that local community bloggers, both employees of media organizations and organizers of particular micro-communities, can be the key collecting forces of the elements of local information for C3.

Those community organizers, with their blogs, would be operating under Alfred Hermida’s Three Principles for social media:

1. Be human: Mass media was based on the notion of reaching millions of people with one message. As a result, that message often came across in an impersonal, corporate voice. Social media provides an opportunity to be more personal, informal and conversational.
2. Be honest: Be transparent and open about what you are doing. Social media is about genuine relationships and anyone trying to fake it is likely to be found out very quickly.
3. Be involved: Journalists should not approach social media by thinking, “how can I use this for a story”. Social media should be part of your job, not an add-on or something to be used for a story and then abandoned.

What do you think?

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Learnings from API Summit

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Many have asked about the significance of last week’s API Summit.  As a participant, I was greatly informed by sitting in the room, and seeing what messages API was trying to send to the industry, after years of their Newspaper Next work.   In addition, I was overwhelmed by the response to my first attempt at live blogging, using the just introduced tool of adding Twitter feeds to CoverItLive, which worked very well.

However, the transcript of the live blog, which is linked in full to the right at this site, covers seven hours.  As Amy Gahran noted, I am trying to distill that, as the whole transcript is more volume and clutter than most want to spend time on gleaning the essence of the conversation.  So, I have edited the transcript, and offer that edit for download below, with the following learnings referenced to the time stamped conversation from which I gathered that particular perspective:
1.    Our fellow employees have ideas to pursue alternative strategies – 8:40 on
2.    Our co-workers in media are frustrated as they try to act – 9:39-9:49
3.    Live blogging and using Twitter gives tremendous access to ideas – 9:50
4.    We need to stand traditional news gathering on its head, and engage the community from the very beginning, capture each essence, (whether text, video or audio) and link back to the essence as we package the story – 9:51-10:06
5.    Even without the packaging into print, broadcast or online stories, the essences could be gathered with semantic technology to provide more efficient answers or commercial messages to user generated information requests, or flows of content around concepts – 10:06-10:20
6.    It is not about change, or turnaround, it is about starting with a blank slate – 10:24-10:32
7.    We need to start NOW – 10:33-10:42
8.    Jeff Jarvis provides Davos perspective: we are not approaching the opportunities we have in front of us to start over – 11:04-11:11
9.    Mark Potts begins conversation about why API participants aren’t linked into online conversation – 11:25
10.    Michele McClellan notes that the power of the network is unseen until you start using the network through blogging and Twitter – 11:26
11.    Twitter identities – 12:02-12:03
12.    Top questions for API participants – 12:07-12:14
13.    What we would do if we owned media – 12:14-12:52
14.    Comments on social media tools – 12:58-1:02
15.    Focus on revenue – 1:02-1:21
16.    Video discussion – 1:21-1:37
17.    Why don’t we act, NOW? – 1:48-2:09
api-summit-liveblog-summary1

API Summit

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I am still trying to decompress from a week of travel, ending in the API Summit today in Reston, VA.  I plan to offer thoughts, when rested, to put the Summit into context, but Mark Potts did not need recovery time, he just let us have it:

The liveblog of the meeting has attracted a spirited discussion among true believers about what the 50 execs should be talking about, and while that’s interesting, it’s a little pointless–the true believers in what it takes to get to the future are on the outside, and the people on the inside aren’t listening to them. The liveblogger did manage to get the discussion put on a screen at the meeting for a few minutes, but odds are few in the meeting had any idea what they were looking at–or dismissed it as the usual rantings of idealistic underlings they’ve ignored (at their peril) for years.

The concept of the liveblog did not hit me until early this morning, after I had read last night that Twitter had been integrated into Cover It Live.  Since the whole point of the conference was frank discussion, without attribution, I was not there to report on the proceedings, but to keep my notes for myself, and ask questions to those who care deeply about these issues.  I believe that many who attended will read this blog, and several will actually read the thread of the conversations in the liveblog, and the results of the polls.

As I have been saying here for some time, we have much work to do, and need a completely different mindset from the traditional packaged media to achieve our goal of a Complete Community Connection.

Congruent Thoughts

Image by Roo Reynolds via Flickr

For some time, I have been saying that the problem with the media industry is that we are stuck on stories, or packages, whether they be articles with photos in print or online, or video packages.  I have limited time, and limited brainpower, and I want to see current, relevant information, in context, anywhere and anytime.  I don’t think we can get there until we create our content, in the first instance, as a “post” or “tweet”, and organize from there.  It is nice to see others expressing the same thoughts.  We need all the conceptual clarity we can muster to tackle the Three Gorillas.

Jeff Jarvis says the “article” can no longer be the building block, and that we have to build, from the “post” to a new organization:

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

Steve Outing explores the value of Twitter:

The (fast-)growing number of people who use Twitter find it to be an easy and fast way to share their lives, thoughts, opinions, links, stuff they have for sale, recommendations — their personal newsfeed — just with the people who care. They can do so whether sitting in front of a computer or out in the world via their cell phones. By also “following” Twitter feeds of news organizations, you can even get a pretty good overall view of the big-picture events of the day. Ergo, Twitter already can, to a degree, serve the expanded version of “the news” that I’m describing — from the globally significant to the micro-personal

As a subscriber to a news Web site, you’ll be able to configure your account to the type of news you wish to receive. The content will come from a variety of sources (listed here from global sources at the top down to micro-personal ones at the bottom):

* Wire services and syndicates with which the newspaper already has contractual agreements.
* Unaffiliated news Web sites. (Bring in their feeds; think Google News or Topix-like functionality.)
* Unaffiliated blogs. (Ditto; think Technorati or Google Blogsearch-like functionality.)
* Newspaper staff and freelance content. (Local and national. Text, photos, audio, video, multimedia.)
* Staff and freelance blogs.
* Citizen-/user-contributed content.
* User comments and interaction on all content.
* Discussion forums.
* Personalized news based on user preference. (Topic selection and/or keyword searches.)
* Micro-personal news from a user’s social networks, filtered from external sites by capturing user’s log-in data for those services.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see anyone who offers this range of news. News aggregators (Google News, Yahoo! News, Topix, et al) bring us the world via hundreds or thousands of sources; but they omit the micro-personal, leaving that to the social networks. Sites like FriendFeed can tap into multiple social networks and bring you micro-personal news from your social circle; but they don’t work well (if at all) at providing conventional news.

Perhaps the opportunity for newspaper companies is to evolve into the one source for ALL of an individual’s news needs.

Amy Gahran, who was most gracious as I spied her on the street in Boulder, expresses the urgency for us to act now:

What if the core of a news org wasn’t only a staff of trained journalists and editors gathering information primarily to produce packaged stories based on just a small fraction of available info? What if librarians and technologists also were on the job, getting as much info as possible into useful, modular, searchable formats that could be easily searched and mixed according to relevance to particular communities, interest groups, or even individuals?

What if news orgs’ core offering was not a basically one-size-fits-all newspaper, but rather a statewide or regional “relevance window” service that could be tailored to meet the needs of lawyers, businesses, property owners, schools, activists, healthcare providers, parents, teens, etc.? What if news orgs became very, very structured and flexible about how they collect, collate, and distribute information? What if, as a result, citizens, organizations, and communities could easily stay better informed than was ever before possible?

This isn’t just my bright idea, of course. Remember Robin Sloan’s classic prediction EPIC 2014? My Tidbits colleague Barbara Iverson observed, “Today, when you look at Epic 2014 or the update, you can hardly tell the imagined fictions from actual fact. …And look at the list of activities of a ‘newsmaster’ in Bill French’s 2004 post From WebMaster to NewsMaster, because it is more specific than what Jarvis says, but certainly calling for the same kind of changes in how we pull together information.”

Seems to me there’s a huge potential window of business opportunity here. Temporarily.

It is not just a business opportunity, it is an opportunity to create a new way of interacting with information that is relevant to us.  Our current packaged articles and products just won’t do.

What do you think?

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