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Excerpted from a Flickr email sent to me today...

Testing the WP app for ITouch

Oh, how the info rolls in. Note: Pointers to all of these came via tweets or Facebook. I haven’t even hit the feedreader yet today. The times they keep achangin’.

• Even As Local Online Ad Spend Surges, Newspapers Can’t Win. David Kaplan counts the ways that newspapers are up against it in the local online market, ranging from the fact ad reps stand to make less to the number of (sometimes savvier) competitors.
• Canada by car. Daniel Pi, a former student and a talented nature photographer, took six months off work and travelled by car across Canada. He has now produced two separate slideshows (one of them self-portraits) that are most enjoyable.
• How the UK Tabloids use video: The Mirror. Andy Dickinson, having analyzed the British broadsheets, has turned his attention to video on the tav sites.
• New investigative blog PaperTrail launches. A new blog from the Centre for Public Integrity touted as “the hard-hitting, investigative blog that Washington is missing.” It’s an interesting, short-hit publication. The question rises: how do you get something like this in front of the masses in a time of mass-less media?
• Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom. The first few commenters on this Chris

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I missed this in the wake of the holiday weekend: the share price for CanWest, one of Canada’s meg-media companies and a major owner of newspapers, jumped 12 per cent. The reason? Speculation that the company is considering taking itself private.

According to Reuters:

Citing “people familiar with the situation,” the Globe and Mail newspaper reported on Saturday that Canwest had pitched the idea of a go-private deal to Fairfax, which owns almost 19 percent of Canwest’s shares. The paper said no deal was imminent and that a privatization may not materialize.

Canwest spokesman John Douglas declined to comment on Tuesday but characterized the report as “pure speculation.

Prices hit $2.25 a share and remain up today, at $2.30 a share, although they’ve drifted down from the day’s high of $2.37. They are still well off the 52-week high of $8.28 a share, and the graph of their share prices over the past year looks like a slope in the Rockies.

TAGS: BUSINESS, CANWEST

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I listened to a semi-interesting local radio interview this morning - Is the newspaper a dying medium? - on CKNW, featuring guest Jonathan Kay of the National Post. (The half-hour piece was based on Kay’s column, You’ll miss us when we’re gone.)

Kay’s piece is a good one, and well worth reading right to his conclusion:

Will I be here in a year, or five, or 10, still lecturing you on the importance of my industry? Or will I be taking your burger order through a staticy speaker? I don’t know. But I can promise you one thing: If print scribes do go the way of buggy-whip makers, the marketplace of ideas is going to be more superficial and unedifying than it already is.

This isn’t a curmudgeon at work, it is someone who genuinely fears of the loss of revenue that funds in-depth, interesting and important journalism, revenue which hasn’t be replaced despite a number of worthwhile attempts.

As I said, the interview was only mildly interesting (you can’t do much depth with a half-hour punctuated by traffic reports and ads). Kay did say - and this is partially paraphrased - that he thinks there are too many newspapers in Canada and “we’re obviously going to see a big shakeout,” with the resulting loss of journalism jobs. Newspapers, he added, are going to have to find micromarkets, based on politics or geography.

More interesting were the three callers who got through during the show and their reasons for reading newspapers. (Note: I know three callers to an 8:30 a.m. call-in show don’t mean much.)

The first

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In the continuing quest to get my open browser windows down to one:

• #105 Unpaid Internships. From the always entertaining Stuff White People Like, a subject near and dear to my heart.
• Flip-o-meter. Who says newspapers can’t innovate? The St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly have a new feature at their nicely innovative U.S. presidential election fact-checking site PolitiFact.com. We have rumblings of an election coming here in Canada, making this a concept worth stealing.
• Blog investigations not all dog’s dinner. Paul Bradshaw on the distributed nature of some new investigative reporting. It, unfortunately, has been labelled as though it’s a story about bloggers, but it’s much more fundamental than that.
• An Israeli in Kosovo. Have I told you how much I like the journalism Michael J. Totten is doing through his website, Middle East Journal? I’ve become a subscriber and, due largely to his recent articles on Kosovo, I think that will be added to next summer’s trip through Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and other areas of the former Yugoslavia.
• Get creative with your video camera. Yet another list of tips from Colin Mulvany to all us newcomers to video. Pay attention to what he says, though: use these techniques for a reason, not just because you

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I somehow doubt that those who fought to entrench the right to free expression in various charters and declarations of rights and independence envisioned a major media company claiming that right is violated when drug companies can’t advertise directly to consumers in Canada. (Fourth graf in linked story.)

What message is sent when this becomes CanWest’s fight and not the fight of the drug companies?

TAGS:
ADVERTISING, MEDIA, RIGHTS

Currently playing in iTunes: Ke Aka O Ka Li‘ula by Kaumakaiwa Kanaka‘ole

Plucked from the avalanche of information and opinion that is the internet:

• US: Two dailies and three weeklies to merge. Interesting that while the buzzword is hyperlocal, in Idaho, Lee Enterprises is cutting costs/staff and going regional.
• A video resource for learning video. Andy Dickinson finds some great stuff and shares it with the rest of us. I love this kind of thing: the more I can point my students to online tech training, the more time I can spend talking about the journalism.
• Harnessing the wisdom of users at the Houston Chronicle. Interesting idea in Houston: “sphere blogs” on climate change, astronomy and space, and evolution run by specialists (who aren’t paid).
• Newspaper industry woes deconstructed. This piece by Bryan Murley is just plain fun (and maybe a little painful for some).
• E&P Tries to Reach Young Journalists. Or, as Amy Gahran wonders, are they trying to reach old journalists and explain the young journalists to them? And, as Amy writes, it’s interesting that in a blog aimed at young reporters, they’ve chosen a title - –31– - that harks back to earlier days and likely makes no sense to young reporters.
• Deputy News

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David Vinjamuri teaches at New York University and is president of Third Way Brand Trainers, a marketing training company whose clients include American Express, Starwood Hotels and other leading consumer brands. David formerly was a brand manager at Johnson & Johnson and Coca Cola. Here we discuss David's new book, Accidental Branding, and what it means for radio.

What follows is a brief transcript of our conversation. Click below to hear the entire chat.


MP3 File

David, what is an “accidental brand,” and if it’s accidental, how do you create

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Just three or four years ago, when I had just published my “business” book Get Back in the Box, most organizations still thought of the Internet as a distraction from their core competency. They saw interactive media as a marketing opportunity, and little more. At the time, I could only conclude that on some level businesspeople understood that engaging with the Internet in any real way would force an openness for which they were still unprepared. Competency on the American business landscape is down; any form of transparency would just expose the dearth of expertise at the company’s core. Most real processes had already been outsourced to the lowest bidder, so the only way companies had of distinguishing themselves was marketing.

Outsourcing scandals, economic tightening, a long hard war, and a declining currency have forced everyone to reconsider this strategy. Though the shift has been motivated by tough times, I’ve been glad to see so many companies, organizations, and even political campaigns attempting to embrace the “real” Internet and cultures making it up. Instead of just buying banner ads or conducting new forms of computerized market research, many of these players are coming to understand that the Internet is a social phenomenon - not a content revolution - and that it offers the opportunity to connect to a real culture and its most competent members in a real way.

At the same time, most of them either fail to recognize the full impact that an Internet community can have on their ethos and operations, or they do recognize it and fear it. That’s understandable. When the Obama campaign says it’s here to listen and enact the will of its constituency (”we are the change”), they get a constituency prepared to have its will enacted. This is a great thing, but it also

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Starting the week with these:

• Prestes Maia Exhibition. I really wish I could in in LA on Aug. 9 for the opening Tatiana Cardeal’s photo exhibit on Prestes Maia, an abandoned clothing factory that has become home to almost 500 families. I’ll have to be satisfied with her Flickr set.
• Newspapers that Twitter: July numbers. Elaine Erica Smith (sorry, Erica) has an invaluable report on the American newspapers that use Twitter and what the traffic is like. If I get time today, I may try to track down what Canadian newspapers are doing with Twitter.
• Even Worseness: The Even-Worsening. Sadly, No! outs Amy Chozick of the Wall Street Journal for some rather questionable research tactics done for her “news story” on whether Barack Obama is too thin to be president. Seriously.
• Newspapers Could Be Bargains, but Few Are Buying. This NY Times piece sheds more light on the current situation in newspaper-dom but seems to miss what to me is an essential point: yes, newspaper stocks are ‘way down, and, yes, there are bargains, but most of those companies are carrying huge debts, making them even more unattractive. Related: Alan Mutter’s post,

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Because this is how we old folks send our Saturday nights. Longer blogging posts coming soon, I promise.

• Saving newspapers: scarcity isn’t the answer. John Robinson has a very nice answer to Ted Rail’s recent pitch to newspapers to take themselves offline and make the readers come back to them.
• twentysomethingjournalist. A new site for young journos to talk about the changing face of the news business. Odd that for such cutting edge folk, it’s being run on a BBS platform and not something a little more interactive and Web 2.0-ey.
• Do you twitter? A discussion at Sportshooter.com about Twitter where the opinions pretty much cover all the bases.
• (Note. There might have been a pointer here to a CJR article, bit it took the writer so bloody long to get to the point of the article that I gave up on it.)
• Did This American Life affect the media conversation about the mortgage crisis? Blogger Simon Olver talks to Jay Rosen and some of those involved in the recent, heavily-praised This American Life piece on the U.S. mortgage meltdown (The Giant Pool of Money), which is emerging as the poster child for explanatory journalism.
• An outline for taking ownership of your

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I intended to do some blogging last night but instead got caught up in watching the 55-minute video An anthropological introduction to YouTube, a presentation by Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. I highly recommend it, both for the entertainment value and the thoughts it provokes.

On to squibbing, drawing on open browser windows from the past few days. I may have more later today.

• 12 Things to tell your tech-impaired editor. A straight-from-the-shoulder list of new realities at 10,000 Words.
• Still a newspaperman. Steve Smith takes a lingering, nostalgic look at the past. This is a fun read but what makes it especially enlightening are the comments.
• The Guardian does it cheap and simple with 3rd party widgets. Paul Bradshaw points out how The Guardian does Web 2.0 faster and cheaper by tapping into what’s already out there.
• Frustrations of a young journalist. Not a post, but a whole blog. I like the blog; love the graphic at the top of Hilary Lehman’s place, which includes the words, “I [stubbornly] believe in the profession of journalism.”
• Ted Rall tells daily papers to close their websites. Pointage to a business model for

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"Oprah's on one, and Howard Stern's on the other. That's how you tell XM and Sirius apart," said funnyman Harry Shearer on his weekend NPR show. In fact, that's quite right. And I've seen it firsthand. Most folks had no idea what differentiated these two services (and more than a few continue to pronounce "Sirius" as "Cyrus," but that's another story). That's because the distinctions beyond Oprah and Stern are muddy or subtle or non-existent. And muddy, subtle, and non-existent do not make good differentiators. In differentiating any two reasonably similar things - whether they be radio stations, satellite services, or presidential candidates - consumers are looking for "hooks" which are crystal clear and simple and polarizing. One guy wears a flag pin and is "patriotic," while the other does not and thus is not. One empowers women while the other strips them naked, verbally or otherwise. Crystal clear, simple, and polarizing. What's your differentiator?

Are you connected with the community you cover? That may be hard to answer honestly. Sort of like asking, "Are you nuts?" You may not be the best authority on that. But it's likely that you could use some improvement. On the connection thing, I mean. Philadelphia Daily News journalist-columnist-blogger Will Bunch spells it out in an AJR piece titled "Disconnected:" "I myself was a poster child for the newsroom gypsy that [Jim] Batten was decrying." He describes a "lack of connectedness" at the rival Inquirer that "was surely a factor" in the Inky's loss of more than one-third of its readers since the 1980s, and his personal and sometimes painful journey away from journalistic detachment that he accomplished through his blog, Attytood It reminds me of the journey taken by Mary Lou Montgomery, editor of the tiny Hannibal Courier-Post, which I described last year in a post titled "Live newspapers and dead deer." With the best of intentions and concerns about ethics and standards, we've built walls between journalism and the people and places we write about. America's newspapers were founded by activists, boosters and community-builders. The institutions they built had hearts and souls that over the years have been lost, forgotten, or just thrown away. This problem is not peculiar to America. Simon Jones, a former newspaper editor who's gone over to government work in a London borough, writes in the Press Gazette that "The very best papers want to be at the heart of their community and are produced by people who understand the area." But he also describes many regional and local papers as "afterthoughts, poorly produced by undervalued, disillusioned sub-editors in centralised “pods” where the only relationship to the area they are serving is through a worn-out A-Z." That's led local government councils to produce their own newspapers, something that's not likely to happen in America. Reflecting a ...

Yesterday, The Patriot Ledger carried a story on the apparent death of a reporters' shield bill in Massachusetts."The effort to pass a shield law in Massachusetts offering protections to journalists and their anonymous sources was declared dead by its supporters on Monday.

"The bill would have put Massachusetts among 34 other states and the District of Columbia that have shield laws. Three days remain before the Legislature adjourns from formal session on Thursday night, and the bill has not emerged from the judiciary committee." I was part of the ad hoc group advocating for this bill, which was spearheaded by Charles Kravetz, president of New England Cable News, and joined by a cross-section of print and broadcast media representatives. It seemed for a time that the bill had a good chance of at least making it out of committee and to the floor for a vote, but with the formal session ending tomorrow, that no longer seems likely. The legislature remains in informal session through the end of December, so it is possible something could still happen, just not, it now appears, likely.

The Boston City Council today voted to approve a significant overhaul of the city's ordinance governing the placement of newsracks. The most significant change is in the fees newspapers must pay. Under the prior ordinance, newspapers paid a one-time registration fee of $150. Now, they will be required to pay an annual registration fee of $300 plus annual fees of $25 per box. The new ordinance must be signed by the mayor before becoming law and then will take effect after 150 days.

The ordinance consolidates newsrack oversight and enforcement within the city's public works department and creates a system for electronically tagging and monitoring newsracks. It allows the commissioner of public works to designate locations as high-traffic areas and limit the number of newsracks in such areas. In areas where the numbers of newsracks are limited, eligibility to place boxes will go to newspapers on a first-come, first-served basis.

Here is a copy of the ordinance approved today (PDF): Boston Newsracks Ordinance 07 30 2008.

From the newsreader over the past couple of days, with the possibility of a second round later today. (Apparently having more than 60 browser tabs open at the same time will slow your computer drastically. Who knew?)

• Daily Life in Belarus. Boston.com’s The Big Picture, which has drawn plenty of praise and drawn other sites to start similar ventures, seems to have stepped things up with this collection of photos. They’re not photojournalistic eye candy: this is a nice piece of journalism. Related: The Frame, the Sacramento Bee’s photoblog.
• Common Ground. At Media Storm, which continues to raise standards for storytelling, Scott Strazzante has an amazing story about the use of the land, told through a farming couple, and the family that now lives in the subdivision that has replaced the farm. Astonishing.
• Newspaper video. I have been remiss in not pointing to this new Ning site, which has taken off in much the same way Wired Journalists did, pointing to journalists’ desires to link into online communities for sharing, support, learning, etc. The site is newish but already filled with great discussion, strong newspaper video and more.
• School Tools Even Journalists can Benefit From Using. A two-fer of online goodies from Shawn Smith, one for my students and the second for any journalists who wander by this blog.

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The local CBC has produced a Google map of homicides in the metro Vancouver area that’s worth a glance.

Each of the plotted points has a brief story about the killing - some with images - and links to CBC coverage. It’s also a reassuring reality check: in an area with a population of more than two million, there have been only 36 homicides so far this year.

More could have been done with it. Right now, the “pins” come in only two colours (red for the most recent slaying and green for everything else). The stats could be broken done further: perhaps a separate colour for cases where there has been a suspect charged, or different markers for categories of homicides (gang-related, etc.).

The use of Google maps as the base for storytelling isn’t new. In fact, it’s the type of thing that, by now, should be a no-brainer for local media: a standing feature that’s easy to produce and update. Despite that, the fact this caught me eye shows how unusual such storytelling is in the local media.

Matter of fact, the use of maps is inexplicably rare, given how easy they are to produce. The lede story at the Vancouver Sun website right now is about a landslide that has cut the highway between Vancouver and Whistler. No locator map.

Update: Turns out there is a Google map showing the location of the slide. It comes not from legacy media, but from blogger Robert Ballantyne. C’mon newspapers, if a blogger can do

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It's common to say that radio is in the content business - because obviously we are. And in the digital arena, traffic is the primary measure of the popularity of that content. What most folks in radio don't know is that nearly half of all web traffic happens on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks - that's the place where fans share music and movies. Now radio stations spawn a lot of content - some of it available in mp3 files and podcasts. But have you ever tried to look up your favorite morning show on a P2P network to see what, if any, of their content resides there? I have, and the results come up way short. There's very little authentic content from even the best known morning shows (with the possible exception of a certain "Howard Stern"). Why is this, and what does it mean? P2P content is shared content. And shared content is content that I or you save. When you don't find your radio station's non-music content on a P2P network that means it's generally not saved in folders which are open to sharing, which is another way of saying there's little interest in sharing it in the first place. Now granted, a morning show interview with a music star or a comedy bit is in a different category than, say, your favorite song (the former you want to hear once, the latter many times) or a movie that has yet to hit DVD. And I know you might argue that P2P is driven largely by the sharing of illegal content, but you can find plenty of free TV shows on there, why not free radio shows? Sure there's a bunch of Howard Stern and NPR content there, but where's your "content"? Could the relative absence of commercial radio non-music content from P2P networks suggest that what we consider content is not easily labeled as such for the audience - that passively-experienced "content" is something altogether different from the kind of content one seeks ...