This from our friends at Occupational Health and Safety:

Author Robert Pater asks: Interested in significantly stepping up Safety culture and performance? Focused leaders frequently ask me two questions:

1. How long does it take to get cultural change?
2. What can we do to get to the next level of Safety culture?

Read the article: Fueling Cultural Change

Michael Giberson

Will Wilkinson, at The Week, writes about “The perils of political correctness–left and right.”  How we think about what is and is not socially acceptable can, in some cases, get people killed.

If you move to a new place as the trailing spouse, your transition could feel like a rollercoaster ride. This is especially important to realize if you gave up a job or a career where you’ve spent years building up your reputation, only to move someplace where you have no job lined up.

Consider the fact that when you have a job, you have a pre-defined structure.  You go to work in the morning, do the tasks assigned to you, then come home in the evening.  This habit becomes so automatic, you don’t even think about it.  If you’ve been doing that for years, and then suddenly have full days ahead of you with nothing planned for you, be aware that the experience could be overwhelming.  It’s very different than being on vacation, where you feel inspired to take advantage of everything because you’ll be expected back in the office. The result could be a feeling of disorientation, confusion, and possible depression. If you are struggling to meet new people on top of this, it can hit you even harder.

If you find it hard to get out of bed in the morning, realize that your thoughts keep you from kicking off the sheets and starting your day, or have a sense of despair as you try and get going, these are some signs of depression.  It can hit all too quickly, and unexpectedly.  If you can’t get out of those periods of despair, and get so demotivated you can’t do anything, hire a therapist to help you with some tools to navigate the depression.

Knowing how hard relocation depression can hit, I’d like to offer some tips for trailing spouses who might eventually, or currently, find themselves in this position.

1. Know Yourself. Take a good look at your life before you move. How do you fill your days? What activities do you do? What keeps you busy? What things do you do so regularly and automatically that you take them for granted?
2. Make Goals. Even if they’re small, keep yourself inspired by striving to accomplish something, and rewarding yourself when you do.
3. Take Action. Make an effort to do at least one thing every day towards a greater purpose – whether that be finding work, finding friends, or something else – one concrete action towards it each day will keep you going.
4. Create a Routine. When we have structure, we get used to a dependable schedule – something we do at the same time, on the same day, every week.  Find a way to recreate this pattern with a reliable activity – either one you do every week (e.g. going to the gym), or one you find and pay for (e.g. a continuing education class).
5. Join the Community. Find a way to get involved in your local community – this will help you meet people, and also find companionship, and give you a sense of purpose.
6. Find a “Check-In Buddy”. Once or twice a week, talk to someone to check in on your emotions and activities.  Make it someone you respect and agree to let them be honest with you and to tell you if they sense you’re depressed.  Agree to try and follow their suggestions.

Heather Markel is a cultural transition specialist and helps people who are relocating from one country to another adjust and settle in to their new life overseas. You can find out more information at www.culturetransition.com

I’ve always thought that one way you know you’re learning is you’re surprised a lot. If I’m right about that, I’ve learned quite a bit in the last few weeks.

There was the moment I got Twitter lists by seeing what the Texas Tribune was up to with Tweetwire — a moment that was equal parts “A-ha!” and whatever sound your hand makes impacting your forehead in frustration. I’d gotten used to Twitter as a way of delivering news and to it as a way of promoting a brand (whether personal or corporate), but it hadn’t occurred to me that a news organization ould use Twitter lists as simple but powerful aggregation, putting together a mix of sources from its own ranks, other news organizations, bloggers, readers and public figures/organizations and sharing that as a real-time news feed. That was exactly what I did with Twitter as a user, but I missed the simple idea that a news organization could do it to. Hand to forehead.

Then there was the moment the light went on while I was reading the Abernathy/Foster report, with their note that print papers defined community (and prepared content accordingly) based largely on geographical and political boundaries, while the Web’s aggregators define the boundaries by special interests. That was interesting; soon after that came their advice that newspapers rebuild around specialized audiences and communities, including hyperlocal. It was that last part that really made me sit up. I’d been talking up hyperlocal because I’m keenly interested in the increasing intersection of the global Web with real-time information and locations, and in what newspapers can do to reclaim a more vital role in civic life. But in focusing on hyperlocal so specifically, I’d lost sight of the fact that it’s a kind of specialized audience. Hyperlocal’s very important — we all live somewhere — but it’s not necessarily the only way to build community, and in some situations it might not be the best way. Hand to forehead once again.

I think this is why I had such a strong reaction to the dust-up over the Columbia Journalism Review’s critique of the Spot.Us garbage-patch story: I thought some of the early criticism was defensive and dogmatic. That’s never good, and it’s particularly unfortunate given how new all the digital-journalism initiatives are. We can’t be closing ranks behind the merits of alternating current or direct current when we’re still just trying to keep a fragile carbon filament lit. We’re experimenting, and that means ruthlessly poking and prodding and questioning and critiquing, iterating and borrowing and discarding. Strong opinions are productive and essential; orthodoxies are counterproductive and distracting.

I’ve learned an enormous amount, and it’s embarrassing to look back and realize how stuck I was in a certain well-worn groove when I wrote something, or how I didn’t see you could do something slightly differently at the start and get a very different result. But given the tumult all around us, it would be worse to look back and find my opinions are exactly the same as they were when I started writing this blog, or three months ago, or even a month ago. So I hope I keep hearing that hand-to-forehead sound, even if the slap sometimes hurts.

* * *

I conduct periodic Web chats with my friend David Baker of EidosMedia. Here’s our latest back-and-forth, looking at Web metrics and publishers’ changing expectations about audiences and scale.

This morning while I was getting ready for work, the hottest topic on the radio was the new Operation Unite initiative from both the Australian and New Zealand police.  It was splashed across all of the major papers, in articles just like this one from the Brisbane Times.

For those of you who haven’t heard the news yet, here’s the first three paragraphs from the article:

Police around Australia and in New Zealand will take two days of co-ordinated action in a major crackdown on binge drinking and alcohol-fuelled violence.

Operation Unite, launched in Perth on Thursday by state and territory police chiefs joined by a representative of the NZ police force, will be the biggest joint police operation ever staged in Australia.

During the 48-hour blitz on December 11 and 12, extra police and special units will flood major trouble spots to discourage excessive drinking, said to be the nation’s greatest social ill.

It sounds pretty full on, doesn’t it?

I’m not entirely sure announcing a crackdown on particular dates is going to really achieve much, I’d have thought simply implementing a permanent programme to address the issue would have been the best step, but the article does say that it isn’t just a one off weekend blitz.

I know it seems terribly grumpy old woman of me, but something does need to happen to change this.  I do understand that it doesn’t seem like violence and aggression is escalating to most young people under 25.  It probably feels like it has always been the same way to them.  But ask anyone who has a few more years behind them, and there is a palpable difference in the level of violence and aggression that is around today, compared to what it was like ten, and even 20 years ago.

And not just out on a Friday or Saturday night either.  It’s there all the time.  On public transport, on our roads, in our schools and workplaces, at the beach, even in public libraries!  This morning I saw a guy aggressively abuse a bus driver when he didn’t have enough fare for the trip.  Road rage happens all the time.  Bullying is getting more violent both in schools and the workplace, with cases of people even dying because of it.  People are getting beat up at the beach for a few dollars and their mobile phone.  I know of cases in public libraries where customers have come to blows over internet computer bookings.

There has been a cultural shift within the past ten years that sees many people believing that aggressiveness and violence is acceptable behaviour.  Not just what is reported in the media either, which I know is often played up for sensationalism, but just in my experience and the experiences of people I know.

I don’t pretend to know the answers.  It’s been bandied around that parents need to be teaching children that aggression and violence is never the answer, and that they should have some respect for authority.  I think that would certainly contribute, but I don’t think it’s the only answer.  We need to shift the attitudes culturally.  Maybe the way to do that is to hit people where it really hurts, their wallets?

Recently there was a case of a glassing at a hotel here in Brisbane where the perpetrator was identified and arrested.  I have heard that the owner of the hotel may be suing the perpetrator.  Maybe this is the tack we need to take.  In the case of the hotelier, his venue has now got a bad reputation, his business is probably damaged and he has had the general cleanup and recovery after the event itself.  He may even have to change his entire bar ware to plastic if the Queensland Government follow through with their proposal to enforce plastic “glassware” to the pubs with the worst reputation.

So why shouldn’t he sue the goon who has caused all of this?  And perhaps if the said goon lost a considerable sum of money, and I’m not talking a couple of hundred dollars on a fine or a slap on the wrist probation, he might think about doing it again, and other goons might  hear about it and have a second think before getting aggro and violent.

Of course, I don’t believe this is the only answer.  Teaching kids about alcohol helps, it was always taboo for me, so I was nicking it from a very early age, and was a huge drinker from my teens through to late 20’s.  I wish it hadn’t been such a way of rebellion for me, I regret the amount I drank in my youth.  Education about drugs too for that matter, especially those drugs that encourage violent and aggressive behaviour like ice.

That, coupled with stronger penalties for those found guilty of violent, aggressive behaviour, a strong police presence on Friday and Saturday nights in public places around nightclubs and bars, as well as on public transport, where I know the level of aggression has skyrocketed, and perhaps some kind of societal campaign to highlight just what douchebags people who behave in a violent and aggressive manner are might just be what will shift the culture that is allowing this kind of behaviour.

Something has to give, because if it doesn’t, we’re going to find these crackdowns becoming curfews, lock outs and prohibition, which I think are pointless and excessively prohibitive.

In discussing why Wikipedia was beating newspapers as an information source when news breaks, I used the example of health care in illustrating how upside-down storytelling leaves readers struggling to put new developments into context, something Wikipedia handles much better by giving you the basics of the narrative. (Though as David Gerard pointed out in the comments, Wikipedia does draw on “a certain amount” of inverted pyramid — “The first sentence should be good standalone, the first paragraph should be good standalone, the lead section should be good standalone. Then you can get into a structured article. That way you’ve got something useful for everyone who comes by.”)

Here’s a more-specific example of what’s so frustrating, from this morning’s New York Times. The news is that a federal appeals court panel upheld the conviction of Lynne F. Stewart, a defense lawyer found guilty in 2005 of assisting terrorism by smuggling information from an imprisoned client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, to his violent followers in Egypt. You can read it here.

I remembered this case, partly because Ms. Stewart is from my Brooklyn neighborhood, but mostly because of the controversy over what she’d done and whether she’d done something clearly wrong, or run afoul of post-9/11 terrorism fears. That was all I remembered. The news that her conviction had been upheld wasn’t particularly interesting, but I was interested in revisiting what exactly she’d done, and what the arguments were on both sides.

After reading the Times story, I still didn’t know.

The Times story is 23 paragraphs long. Here’s what those paragraphs contain (my apologies for where my frustration shows through):

1. News — Conviction is upheld, general reminder of who Stewart is, legalese that just confuses me (what’s a federal appeals court panel?) location (“in Manhattan”) that I don’t care about.
2. News — Stewart’s bond is ordered revoked and she must begin serving her sentence. More baffling legalese — it’s a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. As a reader I tripped over that and still don’t understand what it means.
3. News — Trial judge must consider whether she deserves a longer sentence.
4. Reaction from Stewart.
5. News — Trial judge orders Stewart and co-defendant to prepare to surrender when their bond is revoked.
6. What’s Next — It’s not clear when they’ll have to do that.
7. Analysis/Context — The judge who wrote the ruling rejected her claim. I’m told the ruling is 125 pages. (There’s no link to it.) Her client is named. I’m told she “passed messages for him” and that she “has denied seeking to incite violence among his militant followers.”
8. Quote from judge.
9. More reaction from Stewart, making reference to prisoners at Guantanamo.
10. Context — A note that Guantanamo detainees will be tried in New York.
11. More Stewart reaction.
12. Ditto.
13. Ditto.
14. What’s Next — Her lawyer says they’ll keep fighting. Spokeswoman for other side has no comment.
15. Context — I’m told that prosecutors charged Stewart with conspiring “with two others to break strict rules that barred Mr. Abdel Rahman … from communicating with outsiders.”
16. Context — I’m told that prosecutors charged Stewart, a translator and a third man with helping the sheik pass messages to the Islamic Group, an Egyptian terrorist organization.
17. News — Two other judges joined the ruling.
18. Reaction from translator.
19. No comment from lawyer for third man.
20. Quotes by judge from ruling explaining decision.
21. More quotes  from judge.
22. Ditto.
23. Quote from another judge who partially dissented from ruling.

The conviction being upheld and the imminent revocation of Stewart’s bond is the news, with the context for the news what the judges on the panel said. I get that, and while I’m not qualified to judge, I’ll assume the Times reporters did a good job with that. (Though why can’t I read the ruling?) But that’s going to be of interest to a fairly small subset of legal-minded readers. The interesting news for most readers will be what I wanted to know — what did Stewart do, and was it wrong?

I’m told that in the lead, but the description is so general that it doesn’t help me. I’m not told about it again until the seventh paragraph, which is the first time I learn who her client was. And then I get nothing until the 15th and 16th grafs, in which I learn the name of the terrorist group, and that (according to prosecutors) Stewart and two other men helped the sheik pass messages. This is what I want to know — but again, I’m only given cursory information that’s of no help to me in forming an opinion.

I know what the institutional reasons for the lack of explanation is — it’s old news, and was covered by the Times at an earlier date. Stewart’s name was hyperlinked, so I followed that to a Times topic page, hoping for at-a-glance background information on the case. This wouldn’t have eased my frustration about upside-down storytelling, but it would at least have answered my question. What i found was an automated archive of articles about Stewart — and, eventually, the explanation I’d been searching for. It was on the second page of the 25th article linked, on the third page of search results. (By the way, Wikipedia’s page for Stewart wasn’t much more help — it’s slapdash and vague, though if the case were more high-profile I’m sure it would have attracted more editors. I went to Wikipedia in frustration halfway through the Times article, when it was obvious I wouldn’t be told what I really wanted to know.)

The Times article and approach is broken. It’s broken for print readers who only have that day’s Times article available to them. It’s broken online, where ferreting out the information I wanted to know turned into a frustrating scavenger hunt that I stuck with only to prove a point. As news it misjudges the audience for the story and ignores what that audience wants to know, and as storytelling it’s incoherent. And this is coverage from one of the world’s best newspapers, and one of online news’ best innovators.

We can do better than this. We have to do better than this.

Update: You might be interested in the follow-up to this post: An Example of Searching for the News Decoder Ring.

Maybe I’m just getting cranky, but over the weekend and into today I’ve found myself thinking about some building blocks of journalism and thinking, “You know, this is broken.” Not broken as in “this really needs to be recast for the Web” or “some kind of digital adjunct would help here,” but broken as in “this no longer works, and we need to stop doing it.”

My latest sportswriting column for Indiana University’s National Sports Journalism Center looks at ways to reinvent game stories — the day-after accounts of sporting events that tell you who won, how they won and (hopefully) why they won. In discussing how the game story could be re-prioritized, reimagined or reinvigorated, I talked with four very smart sportswriters (Buster Olney, Joe Posnanski, Chico Harlan and Jason McIntyre), and kept in mind the opinion of a fifth, my co-columnist Dave Kindred, whose plea for game stories can be found here.

I hope I surveyed the potential alternatives fairly, but re-reading my own column this morning, I realized I’d made up my own mind on the question: The game story is broken. Its time has passed, and it is an anachronism in a world of Web-first journalism. We should stop writing them. Now. (I wish I’d come to this realization a day earlier, but sometimes you’ve got to take the journey to figure out where you’ve ended up.)

The sportswriters I talked to discussed the terrible deadline pressures of game stories — pressures that can result in the familiar, tired game-story formula of lots of play-by-play and some paint-by-numbers quotes. They discussed how game stories get in the way of old-fashioned reporting — building relationships with players and coaches and other sources, allowing for more interesting reactions and sharper analysis. Their love for the form came through loud and clear, yes — but so did their enumeration of its flaws.

The question to ask about game stories is the same question to ask about everything we do in journalism: If we were starting today, would we do this? That’s the question. Not whether we’ve spent a lot of money on the infrastructure of producing something a certain way, or whether a journalistic form is a cherished tradition, or whether it still works for a niche audience, or whether it can still be done very well by the best practitioners of the craft. All of those questions are distractions from the real business at hand.

If we were starting today, would we do this?

So: If I were starting a sports site (or a sports section on a general-news Web site), would I pay a reporter or some third-party source for a summary of yesterday’s game, knowing that today my audience is much more likely to have watched the game, can get a recap on SportsCenter once an hour during the morning, can see the highlights on demand from a team or league site, and can watch a condensed game on the iPhone?

Absolutely not.

Depending what budget you gave me, I would pay for the best box score I could get, get a graph of win probability or some other interesting visual metric, and try to offer a slideshow of key photos and/or video highlights. But I wouldn’t run game stories. Instead, I would tell my reporters to write something that a reader who knows what happened would still want to read the next morning. I would work with my reporters to find a new starting point. Maybe that starting point is this idea from Chico Harlan, a quote that wound up on the cutting-room floor of my column: “Maybe there’s a way to interpret [game stories] not as the story about the game, but as being about the most interesting thing to happen to the team that day.”

Maybe this wouldn’t be an enormous epiphany, but this morning I read Steve Myers’ interview with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, which Jay Rosen described aptly as “a lesson in how the Web works, disguised as a Q & A about topic pages and such.”

Asked if he sees Wikipedia as a news destination, Wales replied that “people do often come to Wikipedia when major news is breaking. This is not our primary intention, but of course it happens. The reason that it happens is that the traditional news organizations are not doing a good job of filling people in on background information. People come to us because we do a better job at meeting their informational needs.”

It’s a quietly devastating indictment of journalism. And Wales is absolutely right, for reasons explored very capably a couple of months back by Matt Thompson. Arrive at the latest newspaper story about, say, the health-care debate and you’ll be told what’s new at the top, then given various snippets of background that you’re supposed to use to orient yourself. Which is serviceable if you’ve been following the story (though in that case you’ll know the background and stop reading), but if you’re new you’ll be utterly lost — you’ll need, to quote Thompson, “a decoder ring, attainable only through years of reading news stories and looking for patterns”. On Wikipedia, breaking news gets put into context — and not in some upside-down format that tells you the very latest development that may or may not affect the larger narrative before it gives you the basics of that narrative so you can understand what that news means.

There are historical reasons for this upside-down storytelling in print, but it makes no sense online. The form is broken. Yet our Web newspapers have largely kept shoveling it into pixels — if you’re lucky there will be a link (if you can find it) to a topic page that’s built along Wikipedia’s lines. But odds are you already went off to Wikipedia before you saw that page.

Why didn’t we change? Journalists are masters at filtering, synthesizing and presenting information, yet we’ve spent more than a decade repurposing a 19th-century form of specialized storytelling instead of starting fresh with the possibilities of a new medium. Newspapers could have been Wikipedia, instead of being left to try and learn from it. And what are we learning? The news article is in some fundamental ways just as broken as the game story — if it weren’t, Jimmy Wales wouldn’t see a surge of traffic to Wikipedia in the wake of any big news event. We need to rethink the basics: If we were starting today, would we do this? But when will we unshackle ourselves from print and really ask the question? And at what point will the answer come too late to matter?

A follow-up to this post is here.

Gerade ist die 52. Ausgabe der LO (Lernende Organisation – Zeitschrift für systemisches Management und Organisation) erschienen.

Schwerpunktthema dieser Ausgabe: Mythos Kommunikation.

Gemeinsam mit Dr. Andreas Philipp  konnte ich einen Artikel beisteuern zum Thema Change Kommunikation:

1. Einleitung: Unternehmenskommunikation in Zeiten der Veränderung
2. Was ist Change Kommunikation
3. Ein Modell für den Change-Alltag
4. Praxisbeispiel: Revolution im Projektmanagement

Laden Sie den kompletten Artikel kostenlos als PDF herunter. Oder lesen Sie hier schon mal die Einleitung:

Wie sieht heute der Alltag in unseren Unternehmen aus? – Alles ändert sich ständig. Immer umfassender. Immer schneller. Alles auf einmal. Change ist nicht mehr Ausnahmesituation oder Sonderfall. Change ist heute Business-Alltag.

Unbestritten gilt Kommunikation in Changeprozessen als zentraler Erfolgsfaktor. Doch wie sieht das im  Unternehmensalltag aus? Die Kommunikationspraxis in vielen Unternehmen ist dafür weitgehend nicht gerüstet. Komplexe Stakeholderinteressen, furchteinflößende Gerüchte hinter vorgehaltener Hand, Orientierungssuche in Informationslöchern… Die Folgen: Unsicherheit, Taktieren, Überanpassung, Absicherung um jeden Preis. Mit einem Wort: Jeder will Überleben. Unternehmensziele sind nur soweit interessant, wie sie dem eigenen Überleben dienen. Meistens sind das sehr natürliche und verständliche Reaktionen. Reaktionen, die zu enormen Reibungsverlusten führen.

Doch wie es besser machen bei exponentiell steigender Veränderungsgeschwindigkeit? Wie das Management immer wieder für neue Herausforderungen und Unsicherheiten stabilisieren?  In welche Rolle die Interne Kommunikation weiterentwickeln?

Schauen wir einmal in die Praxis der Unternehmenskommunikation. Der in den letzten zehn Jahren gewachsene Anspruch einer Integrierten Unternehmenskommunikation, also einer Integration der Kommunikationsperspektiven nach Innen und Außen, hat eigene Früchte hervorgebracht.

In der praktischen Umsetzung haben sich dabei Herkunft und Ausbildung der Kommunikationsprofis als prägend erwiesen: Eine Vielzahl der amtierenden Kommunikatoren hat die Public Relations (PR)-Schule durchlaufen. Sie verstehen sich als PR-Leute, denken und leben PR:

„Eigene Themen auf die öffentliche Tagesordnung zu setzen und damit die öffentliche Diskussion und Meinung in gewünschter Weise beeinflussen, ja, im Idealfall sogar steuern zu können, gilt gemeinhin als wichtigste Aufgabe und gleichzeitig höchste Kunst der Public Relations.“

Soweit die Konferenz-Einladung eines führenden Anbieters für Kommunikationsthemen (K2-Konferenz 12/2009).

Dieser Anspruch wird immer wieder 1:1 auf die Interne Kommunikation übertragen. Es geht auch gegenüber den eigenen Mitarbeitern um das Verkaufen von Botschaften ‘in eigener Sache’, um das mediale Inszenieren eines Images oder einer Marke („Branding“). Der Mitarbeiter wird dabei im besten Fall zum Botschafter der Marke. Kommunikation wird zur Inszenierung, im schlimmsten Fall zum Manipulationsinstrument.

Interne Kommunikation heißt dann „Internal Relations“ oder ein andermal: „Internal Branding“. Kaum eine Kommunikationsabteilung, die auf diese Trends nicht reagiert hat. Kaum eine Kommunikationsagentur, welche diese neuen Teildisziplinen nicht anbietet.

Der Harvard Business Manager bewertet diese Praxis als Fehlentwicklung und titelt dazu in einer seiner letzten Ausgaben: „Interne Kommunikation – Fehlende Glaubwürdigkeit“

„Medial hochgerüstet und auf der Höhe der Zeit, scheitert die Interne Kommunikation doch häufig an ihrer eigentlichen Aufgabe – dafür zu sorgen, dass die wirklich wichtigen Informationen im Unternehmen zur Sprache kommen. Stattdessen wird Kommunikation inszeniert, ja sogar vorgetäuscht. Ein immenser Aufwand, um Mitarbeitern Sand in die Augen zu streuen.“

Das bleibt nicht ohne Folgen. Eine aktuelle Studie der Universität Hohenheim weist unmissverständlich darauf hin, dass die Kommunikationspraxis in Veränderungssituationen deutlich am Bedarf der Mitarbeiter vorbeigeht:

„Welcher Typ des Wandels auch immer auf der Agenda steht: Die meisten Projekte scheitern an einigen wenigen, aber hohen Hürden. 49 Prozent der befragten Unternehmen geben zu, dass sie die Kommunikation des Wandels ohne oder mit einer völlig diffusen Strategie angehen, weil sie von der Wucht der Veränderungen überrascht werden und dadurch unvorbereitet sind. Hinzu kommt noch, dass 43 Prozent der Firmen klar erkennen, dass sie sich zu wenig an den emotionalen Bedürfnissen ihrer Mitarbeiter orientieren. Dadurch ist ihre Kommunikationsleistung nicht zielgruppengerecht.“

Doch es gibt noch einen weiteren Trend. Von dem soll dieser Artikel handeln. Die Rede ist von Change Kommunikation. Change Kommunikation hat ihren Ursprung in den Notwendigkeiten und der gelebten Praxis von großen Veränderungsprojekten.

Lesen Sie hier weiter: Zum vollständigen Artikel.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dave_Offen

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sue_Herman

The latest attempt to summarize the challenges facing newspapers and recommend a course of action is out, with the alarm bells being sounded this time by veteran media executive Penelope Muse Abernathy and former McKinsey director Richard Foster.

The study (linked from Bill Mitchell’s overview as a PDF) struck me as a fairly familiar overview, though the writer/editor in me appreciated that it’s admirably succinct, and written with a welcome bite. (And I laughed out loud at the examination of Hindu and Judeo-Christian demises.) Certainly Abernathy and Foster find the right targets and hit them hard.

For instance, they nail the industry’s major disadvantages in the digital era:

• the high cost of printing and distribution
• the loss of geographically protected market dominance
• the loss of high-margin advertising to online competitors

And their proposed plan of action seems sound as well:

• shed legacy costs as quickly as possible
• recreate community online in an effort to regain pricing leverage
• build new online ad revenue streams

For me the best section of the plan is the one concerned with community, particularly how it’s defined and how it should be approached. A theme of the report is that news organizations keep using new digital tools in an effort to repurpose old models, when they ought to be reinventing things from the ground up. For instance, Abernathy and Foster note that pre-digital newspapers aggregated content and defined community largely based on geographical and political boundaries, but the new aggregators — search engines and commerce sites — do so around special interests. That simple, essential shift may be obvious to Web-business types, but I think it’s a blind spot for newspaper veterans.

Their advice: Rebuild newspapers around specialized audiences and communities (including hyperlocal), instead of continuing to try and reach a single mass audience or community. Start with niche audiences that papers are already serving. Become their aggregators, and customize stories for them — for example, instead of writing one big story about the health-care debate, write different versions tailored for those different specialty audiences. Such reinvented papers, they say, might be able to charge advertisers a premium to reach those communities, and charge customers for unique information.

An interesting point I hadn’t encountered before is that Abernathy and Foster say there’s a precedent for this — magazines responded to the threat posed by television by migrating to serve specialized niches or interest groups and charging advertisers a premium to reach them. Newspapers, on the other hand, have largely reached for eyeballs, putting themselves in competition with better aggregators such as Google.

There are some rather searing quotes in the report. Here’s one: “Unless news organizations simultaneously invest in re-imagining and re-inventing the online edition, there is no transformation of the traditional newspaper and the industry dies with its aging loyal readers, who pay an ever-increasing price to receive the ‘last’ printed copy of the newspaper.”

Ouch. And the report is nicely short on Pollyanna-ism, as this warning makes plain: “[a]n enterprising executive may accomplish all three goals … and not achieve the operating margins typical of news companies in the last quarter of the 20^th century, since those profit levels were largely the result of being de facto geographic monopolies.”

Abernathy and Foster are sympathetic to companies that know they need to change, but find those changes difficult to implement. As an example of how to escape that trap, they cite Intel, and its change from making DRAMs to microprocessors. That difficult transition was finally made, they write, when Gordon Moore and Andy Grove asked themselves a brutally simple question: “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?”

It’s a good question. Here’s hoping it gets newspaper executives nodding, and causes them to take action.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Brannigan

F+N International Removals are at the forefront of transportation services in Europe and beyond. We offer a complete professional logistic service, and are continually investing in the latest technology and working practices in order to fulfill the needs of our Customers.

Founded in West Berlin in the twilight of the seventies, F+N Worldwide attributes its prosperity and the expansion of its customer base to dedication, determination and diligence to provide for every demand made by their customers.

F+N Removals is dedicated to providing an unrivalled service by treating each customer with courtesy and professionalism, attained through the Company’s wealth of over 40 seasoned experts and specialist staff who offer experience, stability and a multi-lingual communications network.

This dedication is evidenced by the Company achieving ISO 9002 in 1995. F+N Removals endeavours to increase its quality with each additional service it provides and to develop new customer bases for commercial storage at its Grantham and Peterborough depots which house excellent facilities for both heated and dehumidified storage.

Please click here to find out why Moving etc… recommend that you use F&N Worldwide

Location: Grantham, Lincolnshire, NG31
Area Covered: All UK

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Web Address: http://www.fnworldwide.com

Trade Association Membership:
The British Association of Removers (B.A.R.), The British Association of Removers – Overseas Group, ISO 9001, The International Federation of International Furniture Removers (F.I.D.I.), Federation of European Movers Associations (FEDEMAC), Household Goods Forwarders Association of America (HHGFAA), The Road Haulage Association (R.H.A.), Office of Fair Trading – Approved Code of Practice
Specialties:

* EUROPEAN and Long Distance Removal Companies
* Fine Art, Antique and High Value Removal Companies
* International Pet and Animal Exporters
* INTERNATIONAL Shipping Companies
* International Third Country Moves
* International Vehicle Shipping Companies
* Packing Materials and Box Suppliers
* STORAGE Companies

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marlene_Budde

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=A._Hughes

F+N International Removals are at the forefront of transportation services in Europe and beyond. We offer a complete professional logistic service, and are continually investing in the latest technology and working practices in order to fulfill the needs of our Customers.

Founded in West Berlin in the twilight of the seventies, F+N Worldwide attributes its prosperity and the expansion of its customer base to dedication, determination and diligence to provide for every demand made by their customers.

F+N Removals is dedicated to providing an unrivalled service by treating each customer with courtesy and professionalism, attained through the Company’s wealth of over 40 seasoned experts and specialist staff who offer experience, stability and a multi-lingual communications network.

This dedication is evidenced by the Company achieving ISO 9002 in 1995. F+N Removals endeavours to increase its quality with each additional service it provides and to develop new customer bases for commercial storage at its Grantham and Peterborough depots which house excellent facilities for both heated and dehumidified storage.

Please click here to find out why Moving etc… recommend that you use F&N Worldwide

Location: Grantham, Lincolnshire, NG31
Area Covered: All UK

Contact F+N Worldwide now for a FREE quotation

Web Address: http://www.fnworldwide.com

Trade Association Membership:
, , , , , , ,

Specialties:

• EUROPEAN and Long Distance Removal Companies
• Fine Art, Antique and High Value Removal Companies
• International Pet and Animal Exporters
• INTERNATIONAL Shipping Companies
• International Third Country Moves
• International Vehicle Shipping Companies
• Packing Materials and Box Suppliers
• STORAGE Companies

My list of interesting Monday reads begins with an article I clicked on only because I found the headline amusing: “Everything I Needed to Know About Social Media I Learned From Spider-Man.” But lurking behind that teaser is a very smart article looking at how Stan Lee built Marvel Comics into a powerhouse by interacting with his readers in a way any blogger or forum regular will recognize. Lee was protoblogging in print a good three decades before the digital boom. All the hallmarks of blogging and community are there — the direct, colloquial, personal writing style; encouraging readers to engage each other as well as the person providing the forum; acknowledging smart comments and building on them; and rewarding frequent writers with ranks. A very smart take by Sven Larsen, of Zemoga.com.

Judy Sims of SimsBlog (which has one of the more awesome taglines I’ve seen on a blog) passes along six hunches about the future of journalism. I agree with them all, particularly her hunch about journalists becoming their own brands (the subject of my very first post here), but what really jumped out at me was something I hadn’t encountered before: Reuters CEO Tom Glocer’s dividing of new-media companies into three categories. To Glocer, those categories are seeders of clouds (generate high-value content for links/comments), providers of tools (along the lines of the Guardian’s work) and editors and filterers. That’s an interesting way to think about the challenges facing newspapers as they transform themselves. Should they make sure they have editors and products that cover all three of those missions? Or are they better off redefining themselves as one of those things? And how do you decide which path is the right one?

Then there are two stories I read, found fascinating and need to think about some more.

The New York Times’s Bill Carter writes that everything you probably think about DVRs and their effect on how many ads consumers watch is wrong. It turns out that many more people than networks expected watch the ads rather than fast-forwarding through them — according to Nielsen, 46% of viewers 18 to 49 years old do so. Carter explores what this means for free TV’s business model, and what might be behind such counterintuitive behavior.

Finally, Robert Scoble examines why chat rooms and forums get less interesting over time, while blogs get more interesting. Required reading for anyone thinking about Facebook, Twitter and any other form of community — which today means all of us.

Yesterday the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach explored narrative in the digital age, beginning with the great Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith and wending his way through the distractions of Facebook, Twitter and the rapidly changing newspaper business.

It’s a rather tortured, ambivalent read. (That’s not meant as a criticism — discomfort and ambivalence are part of figuring stuff out.) On the one hand, Achenbach has faith in the power of narrative to survive amid distractions and fads, writing that it’s not “merely a technique for communicating; it’s how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this. They know that the story is the original killer app.” On the other, he frets that “narrative these days competes against incrementalized information — data, chatter, noise” and worries about newspapers’ embrace of charticles, content creation and aggregation — as well as readers’ love of blogs and Facebook. (“It’s hard to sustain a story on a page designed to put you in contact with your 1,374 close personal friends.”)

There are some overgeneralizations here — I could have done without Achenbach’s dismissal that “to a remarkable degree, bloggers aren’t storytellers.” (Read most anything by Joe Posnanski. Or, if I may be horribly self-promotional, one of my own attempts at blog storytelling.) And after firing somewhat random shots at Facebook and aggregators, he notes that the Internet can send good stories winging from user to user — which is one of the things I love most about social media and aggregation done right.

I think Achenbach nails it when he notes that “the Internet can be, for the very best stories, an accelerant, not a retardant, of great narrative. But mediocre stories need not apply.” That’s right — but it skips over the fact that long, mediocre stories never worked in print — or in any other medium. (Picture a bunch of ancient Greeks walking out of a tavern in the middle of a dull tale, leaving behind a blind storyteller you’ve never heard of.) If the Web has put more pressure on long-form narratives to pull their considerable weight and engage readers, that’s not a bad thing.

Yes, there’s a lot of noise in the digital world. But good storytelling is signal. Done skillfully, long-form narrative works online — just as it does anywhere else. Gary Smith works. And so does Joel Achenbach, ambivalence and all.

Ah, but there’s a rather important question worrying Achenbach that I’ve left out: Who’s going to pay for those long stories?

I don’t know that — nobody does. But I do stubbornly maintain that long-form journalism will be a big part of whatever answer emerges.

One of the engines of hopefully creative destruction for the newspaper industry is that the Web has destroyed papers’ old geographical protections, throwing them all into a common pool. That pool is full of commodity journalism, which is useless for enhancing a newspaper’s brand and impossible to charge for. On top of that, the lifespan of a scoop has dwindled from days to minutes. Too many newspapers have been revealed as a veneer of local news over a lot of me-too stories you can read done better elsewhere — and endless rounds of cost-cutting have just made papers thinner and poorer.

But slowly but surely, papers are waking up to the idea that they have to stop doing what everybody else is doing and find ways to be unique. (This is one factor driving the renewed interest in local news — the old geographical protections still apply.) And this is why I maintain long-form journalism — whether it’s investigative journalism or just superb storytelling — will not only survive but emerge as more important than it is today. Unlike a lot of other news stories, long-form journalism can’t be copied quickly or easily. That will make it valuable.

* * *

From the MinnPost’s Joel Kramer, here’s more evidence of the trend for publishers to value the loyal few over the empty many. (See also Slate’s David Plotz on core readers vs. drive-bys, and my own conversation about traffic stats with Greg Harmon.)

After I tweeted about this, a friend of mine raised an objection: How you can sell the “loyal few” to advertisers, given agencies’ struggles with understanding digital as it is? My answer was that different advertisers want different things. Publishers are only now realizing that big traffic numbers piled up by non-local drive-by readers are useless to local advertisers — they need real numbers about local loyalists who might actually buy something. There are global/national advertisers for whom pure reach is important, but they’re not the only game in town — and probably not the most valuable one.

Having slept on the ideas raised by Cody Brown’s latest thought-provoking essay, I find an enormous amount to like, but one big question that still nags at me: Is there still a role for traditional reporters, backed by traditional newsrooms?

Hold the torches and pitchforks. By asking that, I’m not trying to restore reporters to their status as a priestly caste ordained by j-schools, sustained by newsroom sacraments and beset by infidels. I’m not implying that I think Brown’s idea of a news ecosystem based on the “direct method” of sharing and disseminating news will be the death of democracy or anything like that. I’m not arguing that the traditional, print-first newspaper model can be saved, or particularly needs to be. (To the contrary, in fact.) I’d be sad to see some cherished news institutions go, but that’s nostalgia talking, not a lack of faith in the alternatives. For the most part I agree that alternatives will appear, and that we need to be patient as a wealth of experiments are tried and assessed and retried.

This isn’t a traditionalist’s defense of legacy news methods — or at least I don’t think it is. Rather, I think my questions are a little different: In this new news ecosystem, do we need professional reporters and newsrooms? If so, for what? And where will they come from?

Perhaps my favorite thing in Brown’s essay is the way he traces the evolution of the “trustee method” of creating and organizing news that’s factual, neutral and fair from a 19th-century market strategy of New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs into an article of journalistic faith. Brown rightly notes that the Ochs strategy was so successful that we now get confused between the method and the desired outcome. And he points out that a lot of our Web success stories — the Huffington Post, Gawker and their ilk — can be viewed as just trustee-method organizations without presses and delivery trucks. The zinger is a pair of graphics with a cheekily labeled “Magic Journalism Box” on the left and a public cloud on the right. In the Ochs model the box and the cloud are connected through the agency of reporters and a single red line of reader reaction; in the New Media model the only difference is there are more red lines.

In discussing public discourse online, Brown brings the graphic back, with a twist — the Magic Journalism Box and the reporters are blurred, not part of the equation, and the red lines connect points in the crowd.

OK, but where’s the Box in the direct-method ecosystem? Do we still need it? And what should it be called? (Magic Journalism Box is a nice rhetorical device, but I’m not sure it’s entirely fair.)

Some would say the Box is no longer needed: Professional reporters will be replaced by users creating and sharing their own news and by sources themselves, speaking directly to readers without journalists as intermediaries. (See Dave Winer on the latter point.) For the most part, I agree. Yes, it’s true that a lot of conversation in the blogosphere begins with news stories produced in the traditional manner — but that’s because there’s still a lot of that news, from sources that still have a lot of influence. I’m sure the conversation will be just as robust as new sources of news arise and gain their own influence. (And actually, I’ve always thought the City Council would get covered.)

But does that leave anything out? The part that worries me is what’s sometimes called accountability journalism. Not all sources want to speak to the public — some don’t want the public to see them as sources at all. And some sources are too vulnerable or damaged to tell their own stories in ways that will be heard or believed. The public can’t discuss stories it doesn’t know exist.

Brown does a good job discussing how fluid public leverage (a vigorous retweet campaign on Twitter, for instance) can replace institutional brand leverage. But can fluid public leverage find and hold to account sources that are trying to remain hidden? Can it advocate for the voiceless? Can the direct method ferret out information about and tell the story of, say, the care of veterans at Walter Reed or the LIRR disability scandal? Or is this one aspect of journalism that does require “professional” journalists, backed by a certain amount of institutional clout? Brown references a clever Clay Shirky metaphor about how we’ve forgotten that a few daring “amateur” drivers of the first cars fired their “professional” chauffeurs/mechanics and took the wheel themselves. But it strikes me that the question isn’t about learning to drive, but how you drive to places that are behind locked gates or in areas powerful people don’t want mapped.

One thing I thought the recent Downie/Schudson report zeroed in on effectively was the value of newsrooms — not print newspapers, but newsrooms — in supporting the infrastructure required for accountability journalism. This isn’t a disparagement of the direct method or a defense of the trustee method, but a question: Can the public produce such accountability journalism on a significant scale? Can individual reporters do it? Do you need newsrooms of a certain size to accomplish it? If so, where do they come from? Or do they no longer exist?

As part of that, I wonder if Brown doesn’t conflate news production and news dissemination. I absolutely agree with his conclusion that the public no longer needs to be told what’s news, and can share and disseminate it on its own — like a  lot of people, I increasingly create my own “bundle” of news, and the idea of accepting one produced by a single news organization now seems strange. As those bundles fall apart, news will be increasingly decentralized and decoupled from news organizations, replaced by a public that carves out its own beats within which news is shared, iterated, commented on and corrected. All to the good. But I maintain those news organizations may have a valuable role to play in news production.

If so, where do they fit? Brown’s Magic Journalism Box also appeared in his equally evocative dissection of “batch” processing vs. real-time processing. (His essay is here, and here’s my reaction.) Papers have to make that process more open, turning the Magic Journalism Box into an Marvelous Glass Box, with an occasional opaque panel to shield internal disputes, sources that need protecting and off-the-record material. If big news organizations can do that, perhaps they have a place in the new ecosystem, alongside a huge host of new boxes of all shapes and sizes, producing news that a public will organize and share as it sees fit.