My latest piece for PBS MediaShift examines a new generation of people in politics who have largely gone through college online. I profile several young political candidates with long tails on social networking sites and how it helped them in other cases and not in others.

Launched just three weeks ago, the satirical @FakeAPStylebook Twitter feed is well on its way to garnering twice as many followers as the real @APStylebook.

And the popularity is easy to understand. From the very first Tweet, each posting is a comical mashup of J-school basics with witty pop culture references that just beg to be re-Tweeted, such as:

• Use ’sick!’ in brackets as an editorial comment on something awesome. Ex: ‘Apes with flamethrowers [sick!] burned the police station.’

• Use quotation marks to express skepticism: Cher’s “Farewell Tour,” Creed’s “Best Album,” Jay Leno’s “comedy.”

• Use emoticons to let readers know exactly the type of person they are dealing with. \m/ O_O \m/

• @kingthor Yes, you should include “To Boldly Go…” in your Star Trek article’s headline if you want to be known as “That Guy.”

• Pluralizing colloquial references to the Internet is frowned upon and may adversely affect your credit rating.

So who the heck are the geniuses (disgruntled journalists, perhaps) behind the Tweets, as well as a forthcoming book?

Here’s an interview with the @FakeAPStylebook founders by MediaShift’s Mark Glaser.

by Steven Davy

In my latest piece for PBS MediaShift I explore the question: With social media technologies like Facebook and Twitter providing politicians with direct access to constituents, is the mainstream media now irrelevant?

Click on the screenshot to read.

Via PBS‘(!) MediaShift – 8 Tips to Make Sponsored Tweets Work.

Great article on how to engage in advertising via Twitter. Even includes a guide to a few Twitter Advertising Startups for reference, followed by 8 tips on how to make sponsored tweets work. I have my questions – but I’ll post a reaction once I’ve figured things out a little better. Meanwhile, enjoy the tips – caveat emptor.

1. Protect your reputation.
2. Beware of systems based on pay-per-click.
3. Clear transparency and disclosure are important.
4. Ads perform better on smaller networks.
5. Go beyond a simple product pitch.
6. Ads should be conversational.
7. Beware of fake Twitter accounts and spammers.
8. Too many sponsored tweets will turn off followers.

Full article here.

I came across this blog by Mark Glaser, the host of “Media Shift: Your Guide to the Digital Media Revolution” on PBS. In addition to it being interesting and informative (Glaser really does know what he’s talking about), I thought his 10 reasons were something to think about. We keep hearing about how newspapers are dying out, how individual journalists are becoming more important than the journalistic institution as a whole, how newsrooms are diminishing and how sites are enabling anyone to become a “journalist.” But I whole-heartly believe that journalism will never die because people still want the kind of accountable and investigate reporting that only journalists can provide. Journalism isn’t dying…it’s evolving.

Check out Glaser’s blog here. He discusses everything that we’ve been talking about in class.

Amanda Marzullo also posted an interesting video about the future the journalism, which you can view on her blog page. (Posted by Amanda on: October 6, 2009)

by Steven Davy

Click on the image for my lastest piece at PBS MediaShift. The story explores the evolving use of social media technologies on the local political level in the wake of the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

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Click on the image above for my most recent piece on PBS MediaShift. The article examines a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that conducted a survey on Internet use during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. Additionally I interview Todd Mundt of Louisville Public Media to discuss his ongoing experiment living without traditional cable television and how that has impacted his news consumption habits.

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So many issues, so little time.  Hey, we’ve all got real world issues – things like families, jobs, bills, fantasy football draft preparation.  Wait, did I say that last one out loud?

But, really, with all of the daily activity that we pack in, it can be hard for anything remotely political to register anything more than soundbites into our psyches.

There is, however, one issue creeping into the political dialogue that probably deserves the attention of anyone who considers themselves a moderate or heavy user of the Internet – and that is the issue of “net neutrality”.

I do not consider myself an expert on the topic, but it did catch my attention when FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced last week that “this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles.”

David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times brings the issue to the forefront in his column today, referring to the issue as “a debate over whether the companies that own the pipes through which data flow can dictate terms to the websites that originate the data.”

Pretty heady stuff and a discussion that appears to still be in its infancy as new policies will be formed moving forward.  Educate yourself and make your own determinations, but don’t wait until it is too late to let your voice be heard. 

For a great overview, be sure to check out the Guide to Net Neutrality published last year by PBS’s MediaShift.

Le 19 août, un billet a été publié sur le blog MediaShift (du réseau public américain de télévision, Public Broadcasting Service) : “Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand” (traduction : “les étudiants en journalisme doivent développer leur marque personnelle”).
Depuis deux jours, les plus branchés des étudiants-journalistes se gargarisent ; ils ont relayé l’article sur les réseaux sociaux (twitter, facebook ou friendfeed), certains l’ont même commenté sur leur blog.

En fait, ce billet se veut un peu évangélisateur mais ne révolutionne rien du tout ; tout le monde doit gérer son identité en ligne. Une “marque personnelle”, c’est tout simplement avoir une vie en ligne.

Il ne faut pas prendre brand au sens premier. Ici, c’est son nom personnel qu’il faut comprendre. Certes, “avoir un site Internet qui reflète votre identité professionnelle est votre carte de visite digitale” comme l’écrit Alfred Hermida. Mais nous avons tous, qu’on le veuille ou non, déjà des traces nous concernant sur la toile. Et plutôt que de construire une marque (ex.: un pseudo), contrôlons déjà celle qui existe. Ensuite, continuons à la construire. Il convient d’abord de savoir gérer sa propre identité réelle. Commençons par utiliser notre vrai nom, et pas une marque créée de toute pièce. Un journaliste se vend auprès de ses employeurs potentiels, actuels ou futur, se construit une image, mais il doit avant tout “être lui-même”. “Il n’y a nulle part où se cacher sur le web”, pourquoi vouloir se cacher derrière une marque ?

Plus que son nom, c’est une personnalité et ce qu’elle crée qu’il faut vendre. Cette réputation/image doit se compléter en ligne comme hors-ligne. Ce que l’étudiant-journaliste a à construire et à vendre, c’est une griffe. Sa griffe.

No, this is not my attempt to billboard my face across my blog.

But this article from PBS’ Mediashift by Alfred Hermida got me thinking.

“Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand“

Do I really have to become a “product,” as the article suggests, to become a good journalist?

I beg to differ. I think this shift towards all journalists owning a domain name represents the establishment of credentials. In a Internet-crazy and Internet-dependent world, it’s necessary to stake one’s claim and become a specialist. No longer are jack-of-all-trades, every-man or -woman types sought after. We consumers want expertise and we want it fast. If our website doesn’t have the precise information that we’re looking for, then a cursory click is all we might receive as bloggers. But no, I want people to be able to come to me to be a reliable source of _________. I guess figuring out what the underscore is is the next step.

So staciechan.com, here I come.

A mistaken matter-of-fact statement in an Associated Press story launched Chris O’Brien on an insightful blog post that had little to do with the original story.

In the same way, a statement in Chris’s post launched me on this post, which will start out in a different direction from his blog.

The AP story, about Microsoft, said, “If it doesn’t make the right calculation, the software maker could find itself in the same position as newspapers that gave online content away and now are struggling to replace print revenue.”

Chris, contributing to the MediaShift blog, wrote: “That second line is almost a throwaway, written with no attribution. That means that the notion has officially entered into conventional wisdom: Local newspapers screwed up by giving away for free the content everyone used to pay to consume.”

That launched him on one of the best explanations I have read about the paid-content issue. I’ll get back to that in a while, but first, as promised, I want to take this in a different direction.

The AP story was repeating a notion that has been gaining traction all year. Newsosaur blogger Alan Mutter called publishers’ decisions not to charge for online content their “Original Sin.”

Mutter is right that newspapers are still paying for an Original Sin committed in the early days of the Internet, but he (along with the AP story and lots of newspaper executives today) chose the wrong sin. (For one thing, many newspapers did try charging for online content, both initially and through the years, but that’s not my point here.)

The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers.

We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn’t work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.

As Borrell Associates pointed out in the Newspaper Next 2.0 report, about 60 percent of online advertising comes from businesses who don’t advertise in print. And newspaper ad staffs barely bothered with potential new advertisers, instead calling on our usual suspects. In addition to conditioning those advertisers to think that online ads were just a throw-in of marginal value, many of them just took their online ads out of their print budget, so we weren’t really getting new revenue, just shifting what they already spent with us. And increasing our dependence on the same businesses, some of whom were also failing to innovate. So we grew increasingly vulnerable to an economic recession. But that was a boom time and our business boomed.

Meanwhile, other businesses such as Amazon, Google, eBay and craigslist were exploring the possibilities we were ignoring. We could have been developing the possibilities of search, direct sales and self-service ads.

Our Original Sin was failing to  see beyond our original business model, not failing to force more of it on the new opportunity.

Which brings me back to the paid content issue. I wrote last month that I would try to stop blogging about paywallers. As soon as I wrote it, I knew it wasn’t true, so I hedged the promise immediately (I noted that it was a promise to try to stop, not to actually stop), rather than deleting it. OK, I tried for about a month.

I was goaded back into this tireless discussion by a Twitter exchange with Tim O’Brien, editor of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times (and apparently no relation to Chris, though I haven’t asked either about that). I’ve never met Tim but we’ve followed each other on Twitter a while. While I don’t always agree with his tweets, I think of him as one of the thoughtful voices of the Twitterverse.

He took umbrage when I favorably tweeted a link to an Information Week post by Michael Hickins. What I liked most about Hickins’ post was this passage: “The problem with the newspaper industry isn’t that free online content has destroyed its business model, but rather that the Internet has exposed and exacerbated its inherent weaknesses.”

Tim tweeted that the Hickins piece was asinine, the first of 15 tweets he addressed to me over Friday, Saturday and Sunday on the subject of paid content and the views of Hickins, Chris O’Brien and me on the topic. I fired back nine tweets and Chris, a business writer and journalism innovator at the San Jose Mercury News, joined the conversation with six tweets of his own. Guy Lucas, Media General manager, also weighed in with a tweet in support of Hickins.

I won’t repeat Tim’s tweets here (though you can read all our tweets by clicking the links above), but the essence of his argument, against both Hickins and Chris, was that they didn’t cite data to back up their opinions. (I wonder how frequently you could say the same thing about columns in the New York Times.) He specifically took issue with Chris’s contention that people buy newspapers for a variety of reasons — news stories, yes, but also for the coupons, comics and crossword puzzles. Tim dismissed this as anecdotal, demanding data to support this obvious point.

I was tempted to argue the value of anecdotes (the lead story in the NYTimes.com business page starts with an anecdotal lead) and to brush off the demand for data by saying that most newspapers have years worth of Belden and/or Scarborough research reports (mostly proprietary, so Chris or I couldn’t have access to them, much less cite them) showing the variety of reasons why people buy their products. But it took me just a couple minutes to find related research from the Readership Institute (delivery is one of the most important issues to newspaper readers; news content ranks more important than ad content, but advertising is important).

(I should add here that Tim’s paper, along with the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and perhaps a few others, is far different from most metro papers, and I presume that a greater percentage of Times readers do buy solely for the content than is the case for most metro or community papers. But I am sure that they buy it for different kinds of content: some for the national news coverage, some for the sports or arts, some for the business coverage, some for a particular columnist, and most, I presume, for a combination or for the whole package.)

I also need to address Tim’s dismissal of Chris’s citation of analyst Lauren Rich Fine’s figures on where newspaper revenue comes from (only about 20 percent comes from subscriptions, she said). Tim dismissed this as unrelated to the issue of why people buy newspapers. Here’s how the two are related: They are the two sides of the business model.

It is true, I believe (sorry, I won’t cite data here), that most newspaper customers do think of themselves as paying for the content of the paper, whatever reason(s) they buy the paper. So from that standpoint, it is a change for them to receive that content online without charge (and publishers who decide to charge for content invariably mention that they are tired of subscribers saying they quit taking the paper because they could get it free online). But the business model involves more than customer motive. Fine’s figures are relevant because, whatever newspaper customers think, their subscription or single-copy price barely covers the cost of production and distribution, if that. So, regardless of why customers buy the print edition or what they thought they were paying for, they never paid for the content. They would have paid several times more than they do if that were the case. What would that do to circulation? Would that model have thrived in print in the pre-Internet days?

So here’s the bottom line: Whether I am right about paid-content being a foolish idea or the paywallers are right about it being wise and necessary, it’s going to be a new business model, not the restoration of the old model. That was the central point of Chris’s blog post and I stand by my initial tweet that it was maybe the best take I’ve seen on paywalls. (And this doesn’t even address the challenge that our industry is facing in trying to force a paid-content model into a medium where free content reigns.)

And before I could get this post finished, other tweeps called my attention to two more related posts:  

• Blogger Bill Wyman (no, not the guitarist), who says he has spent most of his career in the alternate press sniping at daily newspapers, wrote a long treatise: “Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Failing.”
• Howard Weaver, a retired McClatchy editor and executive whose writing about the business is usually insightful, responded in his Etaoin Shrdlu blog with a post headlined, “Why are newspaper doomsayers usually so sloppy?” (exactly the kind of sweeping generalization for which he criticized Wyman). 

Like Weaver, I agree with about 80 percent of what Wyman wrote. He did paint with a broad brush and damn the whole newspaper industry for some failings that were common but far from universal. His view was far more cynical than mine. But Wyman was so much closer to the truth than most of the industry leaders now that I’ll stand up and cheer the 80 percent that he got right and let the rest slide.

Wyman’s other four points deserve attention and I hope you read them. But for the purposes of this post, I will focus just on his first point: “Consumers don’t pay for news. They have never paid for news.” He went on to elaborate: “Subscribers didn’t pay for news. Advertisers did. … Some people liked the news, sure; most thought they were paying for it. And some papers spent more money on news than they had to. But the papers weren’t selling the news. They were selling ads and charging a lot of money for them because of one thing only: They held an informal monopoly on a societal convention whereby they deposited those ads—around which they wrapped some reporting, some of it serious, some of it fluff —on subscribers’ driveways.”

With this many people sounding off this vigorously on the issue of paid content, I had to weigh in. And I probably will again. But I am looking forward to a live chat for the American Society of News Editors later this month (Aug. 27, details to come soon) about some ways to innovate beyond the paywall issue. I do wish we could get past this issue and spend more time on genuine innovation.

Take a look at my first story as a political correspondent for PBS MediaShift.

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Adam Ritchie was interviewed about working with influential bloggers by the digital media division of PBS. The article covers Adam Ritchie Brand Direction’s approach to placing its clients’ news on top blogs.

…. from my last post, Mark Glaser over at MediaShift has written an interesting piece entitled “Personal Branding Becomes a Necessity in Digital Age.”

Couldn’t agree more. Note the comments from Matt Cutts.

MediaShift has 5 Ideas to Transform Newspaper Sites, at least one of which gets my full endorsement:

Instead of having a single website divided in sections which often replicate the sections in the print newspaper, we could have many different sites each focusing on a specific topic of interest to our communities.

It’s not so much the idea itself that I find intriguing as it is the idea behind the idea—to stop thinking of building a newspaper Web site and start thinking about building a good Web site.

Nothing drives me nuts like the thought that, “If we could just turn back the clock and charge for content in the first place, everything would be fine” (my words). You’re imagining a world in which a magic journalism time machine exists and that’s the best you can come up with? Jack Shephard had a better idea for fixing his life. If I could turn back the clock, I would’ve invented Facebook. It’s everything a news site should be: a tight-knit community, sharing information and content on a site that makes it almost impossible to leave and makes a ton of money. (Bonus: People want to use their real names.)

If you’re so intent on wasting your money by designing Web sites that look like newspapers and trying to charge for them—which, by the way, is about as ridiculous as putting a camcorder in front of a stage play, projecting the recording on a big wall and calling it a “movie” (and charging $10 for it)—why not throw that money into something brand new that may or may not make money? At the very least, you’re looking at a 50/50 chance of success.

Mediashift, the PBS guide to the digital media revolution, published an article about the online world of Zombies today, and we’re proud to say that the Zombie Research Society was heavily featured, along with our brand new social network,  Zombie Central.

Zombie Central is a place for zombie groups and enthusiasts from around the world to connect, share and discuss.  Members can join an existing group page, or create their own.

To check out the full Mediashift article, click HERE.  And don’t forget to become a member of Zombie Central by clicking HERE, because only together will we survive!

Mediashift has some recommendations for journalists in using social media to assist their profession.

Online social networks are essential tools for journalists. They make it possible to build extended networks, search for story ideas, build contacts and dig up information. But even more important, they help to shake up the relationship between the individual journalist and the people formerly known as the audience. But many journalists don’t know how to get the full benefit of online social networks…

[via Mediashift]

Some take-aways:

• Invest time in your profile. Social networks are different, and you should tailor your presence to suit the network. (e.g. Facebook vs LinkedIn)

• Participate. Ask questions and respond to user questions posted to the network. This is how you establish quality connections.

• Utilize strong and weak ties. Weak ties (those contacts whom you barely know) provide new insights, and they help promote your projects and ideas. Strong ties are nice for socializing, but the information they provide is often very similar to your own.

See MediaShift for the full article.

At the Reynolds Journalism Institute Symposium at the University of Missouri, a nifty application called NearBuy won the student iPhone app competition:

The app uses your location to serve up either homes for sale in the area or apartments for rent. They bring in listings from Google Base, Craigslist and Oodle. You can then view info on listings on a map, including photos, property details, contact information. Plus, you can use Twitter to query people for opinions on particular places, and then rate the place. Extras include a rent calculator and a Flickr add-on that lets you see photos geo-coded nearby.

And even though it didn’t win, I really like the sound of The ADverse Network, which offers an enticing business platform for news outlets in need of innovative ways to work with advertisers (particularly local businesses):

They wanted to create a geo-located advertising service, so that you would get local ads based on your location. Ads are inserted into the two apps we developed, iCoMoNews and Vox. For the advertisers, there are tools like a live map that shows where people are accessing the network, and even more granular “heat maps” to show where people are viewing and clicking on ads. They say they got a clickthrough rate on ads of 3.8% which is pretty good.

Michael Josefowicz at MediaShift makes the case that, despite all the hype, print isn’t dead.  The reason this idea is so widespread, he claims, is that

most of the public discourse tends to be dominated by information junkies and there is little doubt that if you’re an information junkie, the web is the way to go. But the reality is that info-junkies are only a small tribe. They consume the news at a prodigious rate and the web is the fastest way to satisfy their appetite. Thus, they’re also the most vocal tribe — so it’s easy to get the impression that theirs is the most widely held conclusion. But if you listen to some of the discourse, it soon becomes apparent that it’s only one way to look at it.

In addition,

[t]he “End of Print” is a meme that has gained ascendency in an environment of disruptive change in the communication ecology. It’s similar to the dot-com boom meme that bricks-and-mortar stores were doomed and would soon disappear. But fast-forward 10 years and you’ll see that prophecy never came to pass. Stores with physical presences are still strong: Wal-Mart had the third most visited e-commerce website last Christmas and continues to lead retail sales by using stores and the website. Pets.com didn’t work out as predicted, while brick-and-mortar pet stores continue to thrive. (However: Independent bookstores have been decimated by Amazon.com.)

In his view, print is still king because

1. The best interactive tools for learning are still a page of print and a highlighter.
2. Print is the best search platform in proximate physical space.
3. Print can be seen as a toy, a token or a tool — things that people have and will continue to gladly pay for.
4. Once print is connected to cloud computing, everything will change again.

Is anyone out there ready to give up print altogether?