Category: News Media

BuzzMachine: Covering conventions is a waste

As usual, Jeff Jarvis nails it in his take on the number of journalists covering the major party national conventions:

Forbes.com reports that the number of journalists covering the conventions this fall will remain at the same level as 2004 and 2000: 15,000 of them. What a waste. The outcome of the conventions is known. There will be no news. Why are these news organizations sending so many staffers there?

Ego.

That’s it, pure ad simple: Our man in Denver. Instead of your woman. It’s for bylines, bylines the public couldn’t care less about. The coverage will be no different outlet to outlet. We can watch it all ourselves on C-SPAN.

Read Jeff’s entire post, including his counter-argument to the “we’re covering our local delegations” objection…and his interesting perspective on whether bloggers should attend.

When every newspaper in the country has laid off dozens, scores or hundreds of reporters, it’s hard to reconcile how they would send reporters across the country to cover an event in which there won’t be any real news.

If newspapers were flush with cash, this ego could be rationalized. But given that they are all fighting for survival and that there will be no shortage of stories to which they can link, sending reporters to Denver and Minneapolis seems an indulgence they can’t afford.

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Can Cuil Cut it?

Former Google Engineers Launch Search Engine – WSJ.com.

This is an interesting article about a new search engine called Cuil, which I had seen on Twitter a couple of days ago. It will be interesting to watch and see whether it can make a dent in Google’s dominance.

Update: I originally posted this using the WordPress.com Press This bookmarklet. It will be interesting to experiment with that, and I’ll report on it later.

The Black Magic of Compounded Newspaper Losses

It hasn’t been a good decade for newspapers, but the last month has been especially bad.

It’s not like last year was good. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s ad revenue was down 8 percent last year, and is now about 12 percent below that pace. The Times says the Chronicle is losing about $1 million a week.

In school we learned about “The Magic of Compound Interest.” The magic for newspapers must feel like something straight out of Mordor.

Compounding losses have a way of spiraling. Ad revenue falls, so papers cut back on staff and on the number of pages. The paper is less compelling, so circulation falls. Advertisers won’t pay the high prices for reduced reach, so revenue falls still further.

Add to this the general trend among younger people to not read the newspaper, and on-line alternatives such as eBay, Craigslist and Monster.com that are claiming an ever-larger share of what was formerly a classified advertising monopoly for newspapers, and the situation looks quite bleak.

It’s hard to know which of these trends started first, but Clay Shirky has a good analysis of the monster forces conspiring against the newspaper business in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. I hope to write a review in the coming days; it’s quite insightful.

It will be difficult for my review to do it justice, though,  and besides, I might not get to it for a while. So you should just go ahead and order it today.

I’ve got a Podcasting curriculum to finish.

Blogger Relations

Jon Greer is moderating this session. He is Jon (at) jongreer (dot) com.

Craig Newmark is the founder of Craigslist. He says most of his role is customer service. He has a sense of mission, speaking up on behalf of the lobbyist industry and PR, who are just trying to get a fair shake for their clients. His personal blog is cnewmark.com. He says he is a libertarian moderate, not a socialist, despite those who think that his site has undermined for-profit media. In response to a question about people fraudulently posting ads that lead to houses being looted, he says they’re not very smart, because IP addresses can be traced.

Tom Foremski writes Silicon Valley Watcher, reporting on the business of technology and media. He mainly considers himself a reporter. He did an experiment, “Pitch me only through Facebook” and recently discontinued it mainly because Facebook’s email management isn’t good. Basically he recommends that people should connect by following on Twitter. He was the person who basically kicked off the social media release with this post. Don’t call and ask: “What have you been writing about?” Tom says: “I don’t have time to read my latest posts to you.” Exclusives or access to a CEO are interesting to him. He doesn’t want to just add to the white noise by writing what everyone else is doing.

Carolyn Pritchard is from GigaOm. (They are on wordpress.com, too.) She is the editor for six blogs. They are all niche sites, and PR people should be pitching to those sites individually instead of her. Following the conversation is key; sometimes knowing what people have said in the comments on recent posts would help engage. The principles of media relations hold for blogger relations, too. Do your homework.

Tom says media professionals will be increasingly moving into blogging where they will do journalism, but with a different cost structure. They are now “always on” and don’t have the high cost structure of massive skyscrapers. When he left the Financial Times, he decided he didn’t want to be on the sharp pointy end of the disruption.

Tom thinks a social media release is a better way of distributing information because it’s more modular. Fundamentally, though, all he was asking for was more links in press releases, and tag things, and organize the information better. Check out socialmediarelease.org. Businesswire says there is no additional charge for this, but getting the buy-in from PR people is limited.

Another great session. I had read Tom’s blog (it’s even part of my presentation tomorrow), and everyone knows Craig. It was great to get to see and hear them in person.

In Case You Slept Through 2007

Jeff Jarvis has a year-end wrap-up column in The Guardian that does a great job of summarizing the key developments in the media world. He calls 2007 “the year of Facebook.” I certainly agree with that, as regular readers of this blog would attest. I highly recommend this column for anyone looking for a succinct analysis of trends affecting both mainstream and social media. And check out his blog for more regular dispatches on the topic.

Jeff says it’s been Facebook’s year, but the century belongs to Google…so far. It’s good that he added that qualifier, because the century is still young. Facebook didn’t exist four years ago. Google is less than a decade old. We can’t imagine the changes we’ll see in the next 92 years.

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