Gannett ‘Gets’ News Climate Change

Big changes are coming to Gannett…you might even call it a “transformation.” As Wired describes it:

According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.

Apparently Gannett’s leadership has seen the melting iceberg, and is taking action.

What’s melting under you?

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GTD and Entourage

In my next post I’m going to delve into my experiences with taming the e-mail beast over the last year using Mail ActOn and Mail.app for Macintosh, but sadly those are no longer available to me. (Thankfully, I still have my Mac, but due to a server upgrade I need to use Entourage instead of Mail.app…and I really miss Mail ActOn.)

But now, based on some things I just found, and in keeping with the idea that a blog is the ultimate, unlimited searchable general reference filing system, I want to zoom up to today and some things I’ve discovered that I think will be really useful for me…and maybe for some others too.

Yesterday I came across the $10 paper Davidco has available for how to use Entourage for implementing GTD, but this morning may have found something even better. Nik, who has contributed some Applescripts to extend the functionality of Ethan Schoonover’s Kinkless GTD system, has made the jump away from kGTD to using Entourage.

I’m looking forward to seeing what OmniFocus will do, but maybe Nik’s scripts can bring this all into one system that syncs with my Blackberry. That would be sweet.

I also found another article about using Entourage for GTD. I will want to digest that, too.

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Pew Releases Report on Health Web Search

The Pew Internet & American Life project has just released a new survey (download the PDF here) examining the behavior of the American public when it comes to on-line search for health information.

The Headline:

Most internet users start at a search engine when looking for health information online.
Very few check the source and date of the information they find.

About 10 million people search for health information each day, but only 15 percent check the validity of sources they find. The Pew pollsters hypothesize that it is because about 10 times as many people say they have had positive health results from their on-line information quests as compared to those who say they got bum info.

For people looking for trustworthy health information, I would suggest (in addition to the official government sites like NIH and CDC) MayoClinic.com for general health information or mayoclinic.org for information about specific treatments at Mayo Clinic. I know the people who work on both sites, and I know the editing and double-checking processes ensure that the information will be reliable. If you don’t check the sources, they have.

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Weird Al: Nerdy Hit Machine

Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing out this story about “Weird Al” Yankovic having his first-ever top 10 hit and top 10 album, 22 years after his Michael Jackson parody, “Eat it!” peaked at number 12 on the Billboard charts.

Weird Al

Steve correctly points out that Weird Al has used a variety of creative promotion methods, including YouTube. The article Steve references also highlights Al’s use of MySpace and his release of some free downloads from his website as important to his success.

I would only take issue a bit with Steve’s characterization of this as a Long Tail example. I understand the essence of the Long Tail as niche marketing, or as the subtitle of the book says, “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” In his recent use of internet technology along with exposure in traditional media (CNN, etc.), Weird Al has his biggest hit ever. He’ll be on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Nov. 2. Al’s in the head now, not the tail.

The Long Tail is about making it economically viable for non-hits (or oldies) to still see the light of day, because inventory and delivery costs have essentially reached zero, and search helps us find even obscure titles. Weird Al has lots of songs that are truly part of the Long Tail: “Addicted to Spuds” can be available on iTunes even though it would never find shelf space at Tower Records. (Come to think of it, even the big hits aren’t getting shelf space at Tower anymore.)

Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with most of the new songs Al is parodying. I probably don’t “get” his jokes quite as well as I would have two decades ago. When he did “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “Girls Just Want to Have Lunch,” and “Like a Surgeon” they were songs from my high school days. Part of the humor was knowing what the next line in the original song was supposed to be, and seeing how Al would change it. Or how he would arrange the preceding lines of his parody so that the original song’s concluding lyrics would become the joke’s punch-line.

I listen more to spoken word podcasts and non-hit music these days, which are part of The Long Tail.
But I did download one of his new freebies, “Don’t Download This Song,” and even though I don’t know the original, I thought it was pretty good. Maybe someone can’t clue me in on the part of the joke I don’t yet get.

It’s interesting that in an age in which software companies and web sites (like WordPress.com) are giving away free services (or at least samples) to build an audience or community of users, most of the recording industry is still in 1980s mode. It’s cool that at age 47, Weird Al gets the new marketing methods of the digital age, even if I don’t fully “get” his songs.

Weird Al was an inspiration to me about 10 years ago, when I was working in politics, and for fun I was involved in a parody band that used to play for some parties. We even recorded some cassettes. Unfortunately it was five years before the iPod and widespread mp3 distribution.

Congratulations to Weird Al on his latest and biggest hit!

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The Long Tail and the Economics of Abundance

Chris Anderson’s best-selling book, The Long Tail, is predicated in large part on the assumption that as inventory and delivery costs approach zero, and with highly sophisticated search able to help people find what people want, choice becomes practically unlimited and niche content becomes economically viable.

He goes into this concept in more depth in a new post on his blog entitled “The Economics of Abundance,” in which he reviews (and links to reviews of) a presentation he made on the topic. The review by David Hornik has a particularly appropriate paragraph:

The same businesses that are the poster children for the Long Tail, are the poster children for the Economy of Abundance. And the same businesses that are the victims of the Long Tail are the poster children for the Economy of Scarcity. With bandwidth and storage approaching free, iTunes can offer three million songs (P2P offers nine million). In contrast, with limited shelf space, Tower Records can only offer fifty- or sixty-thousand tracks. The end result, consumer choose abundance over scarcity (something for everyone) — Tower Records gets liquidated while iTunes grows dramatically. Television is undergoing a similar transformation, from scarcity to abundance. TV initially consisted of only the major networks. Consumers were limited to 3 choices in any given time slot. With cable the number of channels was dramatically increased and a broader range of content became available (Food Channel, Discovery Channel, ESPN, CNN, etc.). To many, 250 channels may constitute sufficient abundance as to approach infinite choice in their minds. But the true television of abundance is YouTube. With unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage, television is subject to microprogramming — millions of shows, viewable on demand at any time. Now not only should NBC be worried, so too should be Comcast.

I highly recommend both the post by Chris and those to which he links. I also would add that there is a point at which content creation costs (not just storage and distribution) approach zero. When content is being created for TV, for instance, putting it on YouTube, or creating a video Podcast, is almost free. And instead of being time-bound and limited to scarce airwaves and cable channels, it can be available as long as you want it to be…and as long as potential viewers want to see it.

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