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Copyright 2008
CBS buying CNET might make sense financially and the chart they released (see bottom of post ) showing the various properties makes a good case for "synergies" of adding unduplicated audience in various verticals. CBS Chief Les Moonves, in PaidContent interview , makes a good case for the assets and how they all fit. It's the operational part -- integrating the two -- that will be a challenge. Very different cultures, even if CNET is one of the more traditional-style companies in its space.

A whole bunch of folks who deserve it have been awarded Knight News Challenge grants to carry out some interesting media development projects.

There’s a PDF with a look at the 2008 winners, with photos, brief bios and a few words on their projects.

Among the winners are Ryan Sholin, David Cohn and internet founder Tim Berners-Lee, and the range of projects funded covers everything from mobile to media literacy.

Congratulations to all, and if any readers are in need of inspiration, reading through the list of projects is a pretty good place to start.

I was going to write a post about the backlash against Twitter, in the wake of a number of posts touting its performance in early coverage of the horrible Chinese earthquake.

But I largely don’t have to, because Mathew Ingram beat me to it:

I don’t think anyone is saying — as Kaiser puts it at the end of his post — that this episode saw Twitter “drive a nail in the coffin of traditional media.” If anyone is saying that, then they are stupid or being inflammatory. The point is not that anything is driving a nail into something else; it’s that new tools are emerging that can be used to some benefit.

Actually, my post was going to take a slightly different tack: Twitter (and the many other ways information now spreads) is valuable to journalists but it’s even more valuable to those of us seeking information. The common argument against Twitter, IM and all the rest is that while they can provide information, they can’t provide context and depth. But when news breaks, it’s information that I want, not the narrative-nutgraf stories and not the context. The steady flow of information as the story develops is what I’m looking for (and that steady flow carries with it a lot of the context that some newspaper reporters insist only they can provide).

Note: For another take on how Twitter can help spread information, read Myanmar: Twittering the cyclone disaster at Global Voices.

TAGS: NEWS,

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A few more things.

• #99 Grammar. The latest post at Stuff White People Like is a hoot because it’s oh-so-true.
• Journalism: what is it now and where next? At the blog Mediating Conflict, a collection of definitions of journalism as she is today. A handy list, coming out in advance of the Future of the News workshop.
• Future of News. Speaking of the workshop, Kevin Anderson has been doing a great job of covering speakers. Check out his reports on Paul Starr, Dan Gillmor and the Economics of News panel to have your thoughts prodded and provoked.
• The newspaper disease. Newspaper design guru Roger Black (and what a lovely site he has) has a lengthy piece on newspaper folks’ perceptions of the newspaper and the problems they create. Includes: “Newspapers have about a year to get rid of all the people who can’t pull their own weight and to redeploy all the smart energetic journalists who can find the great stories and push them out to print, web and video.”
• Blogger Tariq Baiasi sentenced to 3 years. A Syrian blogger has been jailed for leaving a comment at a

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I’m separating the squibs out a little tonight.

• Thomson Reuters Plans ‘Immediate Reduction In Headcount’. A year after the merger, Paid Content is reporting coming “major job losses.” The merged companies have 50,000 staff in 93 countries and will reduce headcount by eliminating duplication.
• Journal Register Shareholder Wants To Invest $25 Million In Company— If Lenders Restructure. The details of the story are horrendous: the newspaper company’s stock is down to 17 cents a share and still drifting down, and it has filed with the SEC saying “it risks violating a debt covenant come late July, barring some change.”
• Some thoughts on classifieds and Seesmic. Steve Outing isn’t sure that Seesmic is the right platform for video classifieds, but it’s the right idea. Publishers need to move on this, I think, whether it’s Seesmic or something else.
• The inconvenient truth for publishers. Alan Mutter’s lede: “With global warming and soaring gasoline prices focusing consumer, political and eventually regulatory interest on environmental sustainability and energy consumption, people looking to be kinder to Mother Earth are going to start wondering about the impact their daily paper makes on the environment. They might not like what they learn.” I’ve felt for a while now that

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Online polls don’t mean much. In a lot of cases they don’t even reflect a snapshot of the visitors to the site, merely a snapshot of those interested in clicking on the buttons.

But there is something interesting about one being run by Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review. It asks visitors to compare their newspaper reading habits today to what they read in 1988.

Right now there are 138 responses on today’s habits and 103 on reading habits in 1988 (including mine). As expected, the number of people of people who don’t read a print edition has climbed from 15 per cent in 1988 to 35 per cent today. And the number of people who read one newspaper a day has also climbed, from 28 per cent in 1988 to 39 per cent now.

The decreases are in those who read two newspapers a day (from 32 to 17 per cent), three newspapers a day (from 14 to 3 per cent) and four or more newspapers (from nine to three per cent). So, more than half of those talking the poll were reading two or more newspapers a day in 1988 and only 23 per cent are today.

As I wrote, you can’t make much of the numbers, but remember that the OJR’s readers are for the most part journalists, journalists-to-be, journalism educators and the like, some of whom have left interesting comments.

TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, READERSHIP
Currently playing in iTunes: Jutros Mi Je Rusa Procvjetala by Amira

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Old man Disney was no fool. After he and his Imagineers had completed the GE "Carousel of Progress" for the 1964 World's Fair, Walt invited a gaggle of GE executives to the studio for a peek at the show. They loved it. But Walt wasn't so sure. "It doesn't have a wienie!" he said. "Come back in a couple weeks and I'll show you." The puzzled executives did as Walt asked. A week later they returned to see the show again. It was virtually identical to the first version - with one exception: Walt had added a comical audio-animatronic dog with a wagging tail to each scene. It was the "wienie." The "finishing touch." The delightful, magnetic bonus. Wienies are extra. Wienies are what you give the audience after they think they're already satisfied. Wienies are what you add when what you have is good - but not good enough. No boss will demand that you add a wienie. In fact, your boss would prefer that you don't waste your time with wienies. The wienie is the seamless way the glass fits into the metal on an iPod. It's the solid slam of a Mercedes door closing. It's the "Easter Egg" on that DVD you just bought. It's the glow of the logo on the back of my MacBook Pro. The wienie isn't what you must do It's what you want to do. Its delightful impact arises from the sheer joy of its creation and the desire of its creator to share that joy with others. Wienies are to powerful brands what cost cuts are to cash flow.

According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22.3 percent of U.S. households with both landline and cell phones receive almost all of their phone calls on their mobile phone. That's 13.1 percent of all households in the United States.

Combined with wireless-only households, 28.9 percent, or nearly 3 out of every 10 households, are reliant or almost completely dependent on cell phones.

Now obviously Arbitron is aware of this problem. And, as they often tell us, coping with it is difficult and expensive. But what does it mean for these people to be - as a group - potentially stripped of qualification for your ratings?

What does it mean for radio's effort to target younger audiences in particular? What does it mean when the 100 shares in your Arbitron rank don't include the one in four households who opt out of landlines?

Arbitron's stated percentage of cell phone onlies is 11.8% overall - but this number is dated. And it specified cell phone ONLY households, glossing over those households who may have a landline and rarely if ever use it - even (or especially) for a call from Arbitron. If, for example, a listener is using her phone line only for DSL then she may not even have a phone attached to it. Good luck answering that call.

Listen to some of these horrifying anecdotes from the same story:

"I keep it for emergencies and for DSL," said E. Gilliam, 38, an Alameda graphic artist. "If ...

A friend of mine, 0, is a Burmese artist, residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although he prefers abstract trumpet blasts of colors and swirls of dancing texture to realism, in order to raise money for his village back home, he'll often dedicate many canvases to meticulous reproductions of the da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

He leaves for Burma next week (his visa confirmed), so I’m helping him directly because I know him to be a person who lives The Gift.

In a blog post months ago, I mentioned that I had a small cluster of friends that helped each other out. If anyone sells a painting, while yet another's scrounging for scraps to eat, they'll share the money, and/or cook you a home-cooked simmering soup and Burmese noodles supper. "Artists gotta help other artists," 0, my Burmese friend, would instill in me.

Normally, 0 self-funds his visits to Burma (loaded with medicines, water purifiers, energy drinks and foods, books and educational materials) with his art work sales, but this time he'd only just returned from a 5-week trip in April with $5 in his pocket. Then Cyclone Nargis hit.

If you'd like to help,

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Here’s stuff I’ve been meaning to tell you about but haven’t made the time.

Our good friend Propaganda is at it again. He’s made some deep posts here and on the forums - thought you’d be interested in what he actually does on his own time.

I’m speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum at the end of June in NYC. This should be an interesting conference - but it costs. With any luck there will be a simulcast of some kind. I will push for that. Mark Pesce will be in town, so let’s try to force him to go out with us.

A rare - and maybe my last voluntary synagogue talk - for the Sutton Place Synagogue on the evening of June 8. An old friend used to officiate there, so I relented. Every brush with organized Judaism pushes me further towards the Brights, so enter at your own risk.

I met a very cool guy, Alan Gershenfeld, who is doing some bottom-up, decentralized business experimentation, including Filmaid International, which shows giant-screen movies to refugee camps in Africa, and a company that lets inner-city kids create T-shirt businesses for way way cheaper than Cafe Press. I’ll be writing about him in my next book.

Which I better get back to.

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A few bits and pieces that have fallen into the web:

• Networks closing on Facebook will restrict journalists’ access. Facebook is moving users from network pages to groups. When you read what the British journos have to say about this, it doesn’t seem that big a blow to reporting. The fact they’re talking about it all tells how much times have changed.
• The Chinese earthquake and Twitter - crowdsourcing without managers. Like a lot of others, I learned about the horrible earthquake in China first from Twitter and that’s where I’ve been following the updates throughout the day. Paul Bradshaw takes a look at how the microblogging service “covered” the news, and there’s a lot in his post both about how the story developed and some of the other tools that those following it were using. See also Mathew Ingram’s Twitter: The first draft of history? and Twitter’s quicker debate over, at the Frontline Club.
• Tripods in three…two…one… A guide to the suddenly essential tripod from veteran shooter Cyndy Green. Everything you need to know.
• The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech. I

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Copyright 2008
What do you think are/should be the rules of Twitter journalism? A few folks have been using Twitter as a kind of live-blogging mechanism, so folks following a Twitter feed can read what a reporter has to say about an event or news scene as he/she types it in a handheld device. That can be perfectly valid, but it’s important -- as with any medium -- to consider the audience, and how they’re likely consuming what’s being provided. A lot of the Twittering I’ve seen reads as if you have to be at the event to understand what was said -- you have to be so much an insider that you’re already on the inside. If that’s the case, what’s the point? To be pedantic about it, some questions: Do your readers need more information? Should you give a full name of whom you’re talking about? Shouldn’t you say specifics rather than just allude? Can you sum up, or should you quote? Yes, it’s only 140 characters, but as Mark Twain might have said: I wrote a full article because I didn’t have time to Twitter. Writing intelligently in 140-character bursts is a hard thing to do. What else?

It doesn’t appear we are anywhere near the remaking of the newspaper business scene, if the headlines from the last couple of days are any indication. Consider this sampling:

Sun-Times draws attention, concerning the potential sale of parts of the flagging Sun-Times Media group, which has reported a first-quarter loss of $35.8 million.

Gannett offers 160 buyouts in NJ as ad revenue declines. The buyouts are being offered to those 55 and older, with at least 15 years service, at newspapers in New Jersey. If not enough are claimed, layoffs will follow.

Read the Fine Print: Smaller Newspapers Still Thriving, contains some good news, but overall circulation for the smaller-sized, locally-oriented newspapers is still down 2.7 per cent in the latest six-month period.

And, in Cablevision’s rosy vision for Newsday, Alan Mutter analyzes the “hyper-consolidation of local media by a single company” and suggests it may not work quite as well as the corporation hopes it will. (Alan’s earlier post, Why Tribune has to sell Newsday, spells out why Newsday had to go in the first place, and says the Tribune Company isn’t alone in being saddled with huge and hard-to-service debt.)

Now, this isn’t to suggest that newspaper companies are in such deep trouble that the industry

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Beau Fraser is co-author of the new business bestseller, "Death to All Sacred Cows: How Successful Business People Put the Old Rules Out to Pasture." Fraser is also managing director of the international advertising and corporate identity firm The Gate Worldwide. I spoke with him about the themes of the book, and what they mean for the radio industry.

Here is the full audio of our conversation. What follows is a heavily edited transcript


MP3 File

Beau, what is a “sacred cow” in the business world?

A “sacred cow” is a rule, a standard, a formula that we, in business, blindly follow because that's the way things have always been. At one time those rules, those standards, those formulas may have made sense, but unwittingly they became “sacred” over time even though the world, the consumer, the business, the industry has changed. And, unfortunately, a lot of businesses don't recognize that the rules have changed and the world has changed, yet they still use these outdated criteria.

One of your chapters is “Follow the

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From Seth Godin:

That bell curve [above left] represents acceptance by the focused/excited/tastemaking community. Those are the people who love microbeers and haute couture and Civil War memorabilia. Like all market curves, there's a sweet spot. Go too nutsy on us ($90,000 turntables, for example) and even the committed will flee. Go too pop, though, and we'll avoid you as well.

Simple example: Jazz. If you do atonal world jazz played in the dark underwater, few people will come. On the other hand, you won't get many jazz fans at a Spyrogyra concert either. Too pop.

The bell curve [above right], you'll notice, is bigger. This is a second market, a bigger market, the market of pop. These are the folks who go to the Olive Garden for a nice italian meal instead of the authentic place down the street. They too want something that's not too edgy and not too (in their opinion) trite.

The reason you need to care is that gap in the middle. Every day, millions of businesses get stuck in that gap. They either move to the right in search of the masses or move to the left in search of authenticity, but they compromise. And they get stuck with

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At the end of the week (I can’t say work week, because that, apparently, doesn’t end):

• CBS Digital Chief: Networks must embrace ‘user editors’. This video report from Advertising Age features a news exec speaking sense.
• Community is its own newspaper. Interesting development as a small Washington State town loses its newspaper and gets a citizen-driven online alternative that’s owned by an ad agency. Jerry Large’s column about The Orting Times includes this: “He’ll pay a pro or get one of his staffers to do important stories that haven’t been submitted by readers. But if readers have a disagreement, he’s not playing referee. Responses go directly to the writer. And The News won’t do the big stories and investigations traditional papers do. It’s a model that wouldn’t fly in a city. Maybe in a town small enough for most people to know each other there would be some natural checks and balances.” Hmmmm. It may also be a model that works well in a neighbourhood in a city. Discovered through Wired Journalists, via Twitter, because that’s the way the world works now.
• New Audacity beta. I’ve pretty much switched to Amadeus Pro for audio editing, but I’ll still give the latest beta from Audacity a shot. Via

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This headline drew my eye, particularly when combined with the dateline “Surrey.”

Bear attack prompts conservation officers to issue vigilance warning.

Surrey is a suburb of Vancouver. While bears are not that uncommon in the suburbs, attacks by bears are exceedingly rare. I can’t remember one, in fact.

It wasn’t until I got to the end of the fifth graf that I started to realize there was no apparent connection between the bear attack and the suburbs of Vancouver. And at the start of the sixth graf, the location of the attack was finally revealed as being near Bella Coola, which is almost 300 as-the-crow-flies miles north of the suburb of Surrey.

It isn’t clear from the article why the Surrey dateline is there at all, unless that’s where the son of the man who was mauled, who is quoted in the story, lives. That’s a guess: the article doesn’t say.

A long time ago someone said to me: "When the parent becomes threatened by the child, the stage is set for a Greek tragedy." If reports are to be believed, that's playing out right now in San Diego, where Karin Winner, the editor of the decaying and decrepit Union-Tribune, has engineered the exit of Chris Jennewein and Ron James, two of the best online guys in the newspaper business. Not the first time this has happened. And sadly, probably not the last. The newspaper's audience in-market penetration has sagged to 54%, while the website has added 17.2%, according to the latest ABC data. In addition, the website has built a separate national audience/revenue proposition (out-of-market usage is not measured by ABC) based on inbound tourism. So the response is for the newsroom to seize control and oust the growth guys. Dumb.

A successful day at a committee meeting with with a student interview, so let’s celebrate with a squib or nine:

• “If I Can Help A Reporter Out…” Cool idea that started as a Fcebook group and has grown to its own site: you sign up and get requests for help from reporters (or you sign up as a reporter and make requests for information). Nice, simple way for all of us to party together. It appears aimed at PR folks, but I signed up anyway.
• How Little Do Users Read? Jakob Nielsen has a new web users study that’s all about how few words people read on web pages. Kind of interesting in a theoretical way. My own web reading habit is this: I keep reading until I lose interest, no matter how long the piece. I suspect I’m not alone, regardless of what the graphs say.
• The future of investigative journalism… Adrian Monck points to one man’s answer: books. It makes some sense: as important as investigative journalism is, the number of people of who will read 17,000-word pieces is not huge, but there is a market for it.
• how portuguese news websites (don’t) use citizen journalism. Wondering about the state of new media initiatives in Portugal? Alexandre Gamela has it covered.
• Looking for the Mouse in Media: Clay Shirky on Deploying the Cognitive Surplus for Public

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If you follow this blog, you’ll know I’ve been trying to get the Seesmic video plugin working, so I can leave occasional video posts. Turns out the same problems I have here — the recording is fine but it plays back at half-speed — I also have at the Seesmic site. I just tried to leave a video comment for Paul Bradshaw, and again I’m playing back in slo-mo. Others seem to have no problem recording their videos, so there must be something on my set-up.