Open The Dialogue

Apologies to Steven Wright, the source of the quote I used for the title.

I’ve talked often about John Frost and his passion for Disney and how that’s a great example of someone who has built a following just talking about something he loves. Not only that, he’s a great brand ambassador for Disney because of that.

It’s that passion that’s on display as he expresses his love for the “It’s a Small World” ride and his displeasure over what’s being done to it in the name of reinvention. Read his whole piece here.

There’s not much that hasn’t already been said about the findings from Pew on how young people are getting their news not so much directly from the source but from friends - through the filters of email, social networks and other tools. But with a few days perspective and the appearance of other stories that offer additional insights into similar stories a fuller picture can be painted of the latest water-line we’ve reached in the evolution of news and community.

Take for instance the increased focus on creating “appealing content” by journalists in the recent PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey. Add to that the 73 percent that now say they turn to blogs as part of their research efforts. Even if it is just to “measure sentiment” that’s a significant number of writers that new touch base with social media outlets in order to get a sense of what’s being said on a topic as they’re writing their own stories. And add to that the fact that more journalists are being tasked with re-purpose their stuff for online and you get a feeling that, even if the corporations they work for aren’t quite sure of where they need to go, the men and women in the trenches know exactly what they need to survive as both employees and media brands.

One group of writers that won’t be working harder are movie critics, an industry that continues to be decimated by cutbacks as movie conversations shift to blogs and fan sites. While there is a bit of a case to be made that the loss of professional critics will hurt smaller movies that need critical praise to survive, I don’t think the serious film community is exactly going to be hurt. Plenty of niche sites exist that appeal to this crowd and the better films still make it to mainstream sites.

I wonder, though, if that situation could have been avoided if the professional critics that looked down on fan enthusiasm had instead gotten in the conversation more and engaged with online writers. If they had spent some time building relationships and gotten to know people would that have led to more links back to their reviews, leading to more links back to the sites in general and so on. I don’t know if that would have been successful but it certainly would have done a lot to avoid the “critics are out of touch in their ivory towers” attitude that has become pervasive over the course of the last number of years.

You still have surveys showing print publications are more trusted than online sources, though honestly the data isn’t sliced and diced enough in this MediaVest survey to show how opinions might vary by age group.

One way some major media companies are attempting to do that is by partnering with niche publishers, most often with advertising or content networks. But these aren’t conversational tactics, their branding efforts. That’s better than nothing but it’s also limiting in some regards because there’s still no opportunity for interaction with the people behind the brands.

The Internet is changing how we pull content into our days and how we interact with that content. From the way we research obscure trivia to finding and donating to political campaigns to what we get for our concert ticket money our expectations of content availability to how we think journalists will find information.

There’s value in creating your own experience, though there’s also some in having an experience defined by so-called experts. But people are, because communications are no longer limited by geography or even niche interest, finding the experts most relevant to them and latching on tightly. And that shift is only going to increase as new technologies develop.

Because I like to extrapolate (it’s my second favorite thing to do after insinuating) from one vertical to another, this AdAge story on what women want out of the Internet certainly got my interest. It’s certainly filled with some interesting information on current trends of female behavior online and how traditional behaviors might be shifting or changing, all presented via graphics that, if they were static and not interactive, would not be out of place in People Magazine or Entertainment Weekly.

Aside from that, this sort of story could be written on just about any given demographic any given week. That’s how fast things are changing. That’s why blogs and the industry watchers and players who pound them out are so valuable to marketers. If you’re going to try to reach people where they are, then it makes sense to know where that is, no?

The audience, now more than ever, is a constantly moving target. If one tool stops meeting their needs they’ll move on. And the early adopters are never going to sit still long enough for you to get a bead on them.

So while trade mags like AdAge and others serve a great role in terms of providing context and in-depth reporting, for insights on consumer trends I’ll take blogs any day of the week. That’s especially true since those blogs are often written by people who are trying to dissect and analyze the data for themselves, making their perspective all the more relevant to the reader that’s trying to do the same thing.

Last week a report was released showing the extent to which reporters and traditional journalists felt their field was being impacted by bloggers, citizen journalists and other new media creators.

According to the survey that formed the report, 74 percent of journalists say new media outlets have “very” or “somewhat” effect on the speed of the reporting they do. So we can conclude from that, it seems, that journalists are feeling the eyeballs being trained on them and are speeding up their processes in order to make sure they get the story first.

But only 43 percent (and I say “only” lightly since that’s a pretty good-sized chunk of respondents) say that new media has had similar levels of impact on the quality of news coverage. 56 percent say little to no impact on quality has been felt.

The story ends with the author of the study saying journalists are at the very least turning to blogs for context and new ideas or angles for their own coverage, a topic I opined on before, bemoaning the fact that while they may get ideas and information on blogs, they rarely link out to or otherwise credit the bloggers.

Whatever impact journalists might feel blogs and new media in general is having, the tea leaves are aligning in such a way that it’s impossible to not see the tidal wave rolling around the bend.

(Mixed metaphor skillz: I haz dem)

Consider that political blogger James Pindell is leaving the Boston Globe for ThePoliticker, a new national network of such blogs. At the site a series of state-specific blogs will be brought together to form national coverage of the political arena.

Or that The New York Times of all papers is now openly soliciting for user-submitted photos of polling places during the primaries.

Or that magazine publishers are increasing the number of online features like social networking, games, and videos they roll out each year that not only make the sites more sticky but also allow for some creation of content by the visitor.

Or that this election cycle is featuring an incredible amount of new-media/old-media partnerships as each outlet looks to tap the other’s audience.

In an interview with New York Times “Bits” blogger Saul Hansell, he makes the case that blogging is not so very different from traditional journalism, at least not in the tools themselves. It’s the person wielding the tools and how they’re used that make some blogs - or even individual posts on a blog - what they are. Hansell acknowledges that the journalism world has changed to some extent because of the ubiquity of online publishing tools but that the worth of the outlet is determined more by the content than it is by the platform that content is published through.

Former Newsweek CEO Rick Smith, on the other hand, isn’t thrilled with how so many people with such easy access to publishing tools has devalued the news his magazine and others traffic in. Smith says that so much of the media people are now consuming is made up of opinion and not facts that the reporting is losing importance to readers - and the advertisers who want to be attached to breaking news.

I find more agreement with Hansell’s comments then I do with anything else. It’s always the content and the intent of the writer that trumps everything else. If someone puts out good stuff - be it audio, video or text - it will gain an audience and be taken seriously. If the content they’re producing is found to provide better context, be more relevant or in some other way more deeply and meaningfully connect with the audience then it will win the battle for eyeballs.

Instead of complaining over the injustice of consumer-generated content taking readers away from the reporting an established outlet does, it would be better for those editors to look at what they might not be providing to the audience and seek to address that shortcoming. Change. Adapt. Improve.

But still let your readers and other experts participate in the conversation. Allow comments on story and look to see who’s linking to you. Despite all the resources a newspaper or magazine might have (at least those resources that have survived the most recent round of budget cuts) there’s still going to be someone out there with a different take on any given story. They might live in the neighborhood you’re covering and know what their Alderman has just said on an issue. They might work in the industry and know that X was a direct result of W.

Traditional media no longer exists in a vacuum. They have to compete harder than ever for readers and advertisers. But there’s too much “Well we’re better” being proclaimed and not enough “Well we’re better” being practiced. The determination of your quality - whether it be media, consumer-packaged goods or anything else - comes from the number of people who shell out their money for what it is you’re producing.

(Afterward: I had this all written when I saw this pop-up - “How to get a job in journalism.” Lots of good stuff in there for the aspirational.)

Nielsen has launched a blog devoted to discussions of advertising in and around the Super Bowl. The Road to the Big Game blog is reported to be one of a handful launched by the measurement firm around major events, with another one coming soon that will be devoted to the Academy Awards broadcast.

The MediaPost story says the blog is supposed to be an outlet for more informal communications from the Nielsen team, allowing them to sort of think out loud and the posts to date more or less prove that out. It’s also a great example of a corporate blog that really embraces multimedia, with lots of YouTube videos and pictures, as well as linking out to other resources, with lots of pointers to Wikipedia pages and such.

Makes much more sense to START a blog about advertising just before the Super Bowl than to SHUT ONE DOWN just before the game, doesn’t it?

Wow. Steve Safran is more or less leaving Lost Remote. LR, of course, has an all-star caliber team that Steve was a part of but it will be a bit strange not having his name in some way showing up on the site regularly. LR was one of the first blogs I subscribed to when I first started getting into that and so I feel like an era has ended in some manner.

Good luck to Steve and to the rest of the LR team.

Some interesting stats from research done by Ipsos into the media habits of upper-level executives and those in the upper economic classes. The study showed that C-level executives are heavy blog readers and podcast listeners, with nearly a third reading a blog at least once a month. More than that, the usage of blogs and podcasts by those executives is increasing at a clip faster than the general public.

If corporate executives want to stay on the cutting edge of their industry - whatever it is - they need to up that usage even more dramatically. More than that it’s the responsibility of those below him or her in the corporation to be showing their executives what they need to be reading daily or weekly and then doing something with that information. There need to be people guiding him or her one way or the other.

That means, of course, that the people below the C-level are reading and listening themselves. So that might be the first hurdle to clear before things go any further up the org chart.

I was checking out the newly launched WeSmirch leaderboard and was taken aback by the lack of blogs - assuming a “self-published website with a single author” definition - among the top cited sources for celebrity gossip news.

Then I realized that this was not anywhere near what the creator of the leaderboard intended to create and so went about my day, realizing there was nothing at all odd about this.

The Chicago Tribune’s first blogger, Eric Zorn, is reflecting back on his first post four years ago and asking for feedback on going forward. I’ve been reading Zorn’s blog since its inception and am always fascinated on how he uses the blog platform to its hilt. Not only does he put up great original content but also uses it to provide expanded related and supporting material to the columns he writes for the Tribune proper.

Really in a good number of the things I’ve done I’ve used Zorn’s blog as a guidepost. It was the fact that I enjoyed it so much that prompted me to make my first foray into blogging, so you all can blame him for the fact that Chris Thilk is now moderately Internet famous. He mixes personal anecdotes with local news items with national topics and manages, by taking strong positions himself, to provoke strong reactions in his readers. For that I respect him greatly. I don’t care if I offend you, I’m just happy people are engaging in the debate.

Zorn’s blog has changed a bit over the last four years but still, I think, provides a great example of what the addition of a blog can bring to the Web site of a newspaper or any other media outlet. It’s a strong connection with readers that goes beyond the print edition. Here’s hoping, by me at least, that Zorn keeps going strong and continues to spearhead the Tribune’s new media activities.

I’m lifting the title quote from David Armano’s Twitter feed. He posted that in response to Steve Rubel’s whole-hearted agreement with a Guardian article saying that blogging was just like so totally over. Allow me to enumerate my problems with said article.

1) The writer says the latest Technorati SotB report “undoubtedly” contains some fascinating growth numbers. The use of that word makes me think he saw some news about that report but didn’t actually, you know, read it.
2) He says blogging is a “minority sport.” Unlike the tens of millions that contribute their personal thoughts and anecdotes to national TV and newspaper outlets.
3) Yes, blog growth isn’t happening at quite the clip it has in the past. That’s a fair point, especially compared to the number of TV stations that are created everyday.

And to anyone and everyone who does or might be tempted to agree with the point of this article: I look forward to your shutting down your blog since apparently there’s no future there. The rest of us believe that blogging has power simply because we can do it. We can broadcast our thougths into the world. The good ones will catch on, the bad ones will be ignored or shot down and eventually die. (cough “code of conduct” /cough)

While Rubel does say there’s a “bigger story here than just blogs” I still have fundamental problems with the story’s premise - that the lack of growth signals a lack of power. I’ve often said that web publishing - and especially RSS distribution - means I get to put everyone I read on equal footing. The power a particular blog has is primarily only the power I’ve assigned it as a reader.

So regardless of how much blogs are growing or who says what about what that growth rate means our lives I believe there’s still significant power there in terms of thought leadership and letting the community brainstorm on good ideas and best practices. But what do I know. I’m just a blogger.