I’ll be spending my evening in front of the tube, mostly with New England Cable News (all is forgiven, sort of), in preparation for writing something for the Guardian later tonight. If you are not sufficiently distracted, I’ll probably post an occasional observation to Twitter.
Category: Media
Sree Sreenivasan on journalism’s future
Columbia School of Journalism professor and dean Sree Sreenivasan, who describes himself as a “tech evangelist/skeptic,” will be speaking to Northeastern journalism students in a few moments. I will try to live-blog this as best as I can, though at the moment my connection seems a bit flaky.
Here are Professor Sreenivasan’s tips on social media. Perhaps his most important observation that didn’t make it into my notes below is that journalists should use social media mainly to “listen,” not to “broadcast.”
3:10 p.m. “I consider myself a print guy who happens to like some aspects of the Internet,” says Sreenivasan. He reads two newspapers and subscribes to five magazines. “I’m hoping there will still be print for many decades to come.” Believes there will be print for some time, but it might be “more expensive,” “more specialized” and “more niche-ified.”
3:16 p.m. Sreenivasan finds that when he talks with prospective journalism students, “there’s a sense of optimism and excitement about the media that isn’t shared by older people.”
3:23 p.m. Sree is sharing a post written for Mashable by one of his students called “8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist.” Perhaps the most important trait: be entrepreneurial.
3:24 p.m. “I may be the only Indian in the world who can’t do math.”
3:27 p.m. Need to be able to do video, photos, audio slideshows. Sree’s involved in a start-up called DNAinfo, which covers New York’s neighborhoods, and it involves the heavy use of multimedia skills. Also need to be a blogger and a curator. “Be a great pointer.”
Being a good pointer is in “direct conflict” with what a traditional journalist does. You have to be able to point to your own work, talk about it, and point to other people’s good work. Hard to do because journalism “has traditionally been such a competitive field.” If readers believe you can be trusted to be a good follower, they will follow you.
3:30 p.m. “The Tra-Digital Journalist” is a phrase coined by one of Sree’s colleagues — “a traditional journalist with a digital overlay.” Traditional journalism skills are as important as they ever were.
3:33 p.m. “I have news for you. All of you are going to be radio journalists whether you like it or not. Only it’s not called radio. It’s called audio.” Check out Blog Talk Radio, which allows anyone to have a talk show. “Problem: not everyone who wants to have a radio show should have a radio show.” It’s a great way to practice.
3:39 p.m. Following the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Sree and other members of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) interviewed some 50 guests via SAJA’s channel on Blog Talk Radio.
3:52 p.m. “It’s really important to add these vitamins to your media diet”:
- Mashable (the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times of social media)
- MuckRack (follows only the tweets of journalists)
- LifeHacker (“how you can use technology to improve your life,” explains Sree)
- ReadWriteWeb (how the Web is changing)
- PaidContent.org (the future of the newsroom and how people are going to pay for our content)
3:53 p.m. Need to learn skills now. “When the plane lands in the river, it’s too late to learn about Twitter.” Students should join LinkedIn now, for instance, even though they won’t need it for job-hunting until later.
3:59 p.m. Facebook can be used as a tool for journalism. “Learn to use it better.” In a course he teaches on social media, he tell students it’s a professional tool, and they should take more control. Three advantages:
- Find sources and stories
- Connect with your audience
- Bring eyeballs to your work
Human attention is an increasingly scarce commodity, and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can help command some attention.
4:04 p.m. “Facebook is the greatest time sink in human history.” You should put people in lists and label them. If you’re a Washington Post reporter, you can see what Senate staff members are talking about, or State Department employees. “You’re not learning everything that’s going on, but you’re learning something.”
4:08 p.m. “LinkedIn is one of those things that everyone is on, or should be on, but they don’t know how to use it better.” If you’re writing a story about the Red Sox, you can use LinkedIn to find not only people who work for the Red Sox, but who used to work for them, and who live near you. Also, you can pose questions to your community, a useful reporting tool.
4:11 p.m. Some acronyms: BAW (bored at work), CPA (constant partial attention), CCT (conference call time), CMS (content-management system) and Bit.ly (a link-shortener that provides you with analytics).
4:14 p.m. “The power of Twitter is not in the tweet. The power of Twitter is in the retweet.” To be a successful tweeter, you should do everything in 120 characters, because “I want people to retweet my work.” He’s often wanted to retweet something, but he doesn’t because he has to edit it. “Don’t make me work for you.” “Make it as easy for them as possible.”
People are often skeptical of Twitter because of the 140-character limit. Yet there are virtually no newspaper headlines that are longer than 80 or 90 characters.
“Success on Twitter is listening, and then listening to the right people.”
4:18 p.m. One of Sreenivasan’s students was stuck in Haiti when the earthquake hit. He was able to let his wife know he was all right because someone tweeted it.
4:23 p.m. @Digidave, founder of Spot.Us, is a former student of Sree’s.
Why NECN didn’t carry Obama’s speech
I watched President Obama’s speech at Northeastern University online Sunday, so I didn’t realize until later that New England Cable News hadn’t carried it. I e-mailed NECN spokesman Skip Perham, and here is his response:
Over the life of the Obama administration we have consistently carried his policy speeches live.
We made the decision not to cover Martha Coakley’s rally featuring President Obama because it was a pure political event. We made the same decision about candidate Scott Brown’s event in Worcester.
If you take a look at NECN’s Sunday-afternoon schedule, you’ll see that it says “Paid Programming.”
Now, there’s an old cliché that elections have consequences. One of those consequences is that a speech by the president of the United States in your own back yard is by definition more newsworthy than a speech by Curt Schilling.
Was Obama’s speech purely political? Yes. But if NECN wants to amend its guidelines so that it will be able to carry all live speeches by the president within 10 miles of its headquarters, I don’t think station executives will have to inconvenience themselves more than once or twice a decade.
Ups and downs of higher education
Two headlines on reports about the same survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education:
- Boston Globe: “Public college presidents feeling salary pinch” (Associated Press)
- New York Times: “Pay Rises for Leaders of Colleges, Survey Says” (staff report)
Faces of the disaster in Haiti
This heart-stopping video/slideshow by the Boston Globe’s Bill Greene and Maria Sacchetti is a vivid illustration of the situation on the ground in Haiti right now.
The Globe has gathered together all of its Haiti coverage here. It includes stories, photos, audio and resources.
Lowell Sun’s owner seeks bankruptcy protection
The Wall Street Journal has the story. (Via Romenesko.)
An award for an innovative online news site
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWrzex2yeoA&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
The Batavian, an online-only news site based in the western New York town of Batavia, has been recognized as the “Innovative Enterprise of the Year” by the Genesee County Chamber of Commerce.
Founded and now owned by former GateHouse Media executive Howard Owens, the two-year-old Batavian is among the more serious for-profit local-news experiments unfolding nationally.
Above is an interview I did with Owens last June during a visit to Batavia. Congratulations to Owens, an innovative thinker who has fully embraced the just-do-it ethos of online journalism.
A citizen-media aggregator for Haiti
On Wednesday I mentioned Global Voices Online, a Harvard-affiliated service that was rounding up citizen media from Haiti and the Caribbean.
Global Voices has since set up a Haitian Earthquake 2010 section that aggregates citizen-produced content and includes key links to mainstream news organizations — including the Boston Haitian Reporter. It’s got its own RSS feed, so you can plug it into Google Reader.
Here’s a first-hand account of the quake that I found on Global Voices:
Towards 4:45 PM, with our driver, we enter the parking lot of Karibean, Pétion-ville’s big mart. As usual, the way in is slowed by the usual Delmas traffic. While driving up the entry, our Patrol began to dance. I was imagining three or four boys standing on the bumper wanting to swing the car. In front of us, the parking lot ground rocked like the waves at Wahoo Bay. The Karibean building started to dance and in 3 seconds’ time completely tumbled down. A white cloud swept across the parking lot and you could see zombies whitened by dust appearing, in complete panic.
The earthquake is a tragedy whose full dimensions won’t be known for quite some time
Editor & Publisher lives
The venerable newspaper trade magazine Editor & Publisher lives after going dark at the end of 2009. But editor Greg Mitchell tweets that neither he nor staff writer Joe Strupp were offered jobs at the new E&P. The new editor will be another E&P veteran, Mark Fitzgerald.
Will Mitchell and Strupp’s Web site, E&P in Exile, morph into something else now that the magazine is being revived without them? Stay tuned.
Haiti is not the 51st state
In my latest for the Guardian, I take on pundits like Howard Fineman, who are trying to make the ludicrous case that Haiti is President Obama’s Katrina.