Open The Dialogue

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.

Wanted to follow up my previous post on the evolution of the media landscape with another batch of stories in that same vein.

First, the Chicago Tribune has added 13 new communities to its TribLocal site, which lets people in those communities post news, photos and events. The only thing I think they can be doing better in this venture would be to let the people add communities at will, extending the reach of the site indefinitely instead of putting themselves in the position of allowing areas to be involved.

Second, John Frost at the Disney Blog says that the crew from the Orlando Sentinel live-Twittered the opening of a new attraction at Universal Studios Orlando. This might not bring down Twitter like all the live coverage of MacWorld did, but it is great to see a mainstream pub embracing insta-micro-publishing like this.

Next is a piece from Marc Glaser on how mainstream media outlets are slowly beginning to embrace their place in the conversation and allowing for more reader participation on their sites. The internal debate, he notes, is now not about whether things like comments should be allowed, but to what extent they need to be moderated. I stick to my contention that moderation is not an absolute evil as long as the policies regarding said moderation are clearly spelled out for everyone to see.

Lastly, the magazine industry has gotten some advice to start thinking of itself as a multi-platform content provider and not view the Internet simply as a way to bring in print subscriptions.

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.)

Add Shel Holtz to the list of bloggers writing industry opinion pieces for Brandweek. His first contribution is on using social media as a customer relations contact system and is, unsurprisingly, well worth reading.

A few months ago I got an email from an editor at Brandweek asking if I would be interested in contributing an occasional op-ed to the magazine’s Website. Always being interested in finding new and interesting outlets for my thoughts and seeing Brandweek as the opportunity to reach a large new audience, I jumped at the offer and have since contributed nine or so columns.

But I was not alone in getting this offer. Brandweek was, unbeknownst to me at the time, building up its roster of blogger contributors. If you hit the site, you’ll see a number of items headlined “Blogger X talks about…” and such.

Here’s the list of contributors to date, with more said to be coming soon:

• Me (Self-promotion skillz - I haz dem)
• George Parker: AdScam
• John Moore: Brand Autopsy
• Mark Stevens: Unconventional Thinking
• Paul Dunay: Buzz Marketing for Technology
• David Armano: Logic + Emotion
• Peter Kim: Being Peter Kim
• Maria Popova: STICK and MOVE

In addition to being bloggers, it should be noted that these people are also doers. They’re agency practitioners, they’re industry analysts. In short, these people are out there on the front lines of the social media marketing world, a perspective that greatly increases what they’re contributing.

But just the fact that Brandweek has decided to open up the gates to people who are knowledgeable and passionate about topics, passion they normally express on their personal sites, is a story in and of itself. By tapping bloggers who are also industry professionals as contributors, Brandweek has in its own way embraced the power of social media. Opinions and industry insights are not the sole domain of mainstream publications. And by offering some fresh voices to Brandweek readers, the magazine has made itself more valuable to those readers and garnered some goodwill in new media circles at the same time.

1/15 Update: I fixed the link to Maria Popova’s blog. Maria also pinged me with the following thoughts that she apparently tried to leave as a comment. I agree with what she has to say for the most part, there is room for improvement. But any start is a good one and I’m hopeful Brandweek - and anyone who engages in such outreach - will evolve their approach as time goes by and lessons are learned. Anyway, here are Maria’s comments:

First of all, right on about Brandweek’s effort to finally embrace social media and move away from old-school “suits” marketing. Secondly, there’s a “but”: if they’re going to tap social media, they have to adhere to the implicit rules of the game. There’s nothing “social” about their blogger posts, they’re so user-unfriendly you have to go out of your way to see, say, what else this blogger wrote. Even the basics, like “love-links” and such, are either messed up or entirely missing.

• AdAge: Down is the New Flat for Magazines
• MediaBuyerPlanner: Newspapers Suffer Most in Ad Dollars Lost to the Internet
• Creative Loafing: Old media meets new realities at the AJC
• Jon Fine/BW: When Do You Stop the Presses?

I’m sure there’s absolutely new trend that can be determined, no matter how hard you might look, by the appearance of these stories, which only represent what I saw in one day. Move along. Nothing to see here…

There’s a section of this story on how media companies are struggling to make money that I think is important:

After spending millions of dollars to buy digital media companies, online advertising firms and search engines, only a few of the 350 magazine and newspaper companies represented at the conference said, in a show of hands, that they were making more than 3 percent of their sales online.

Combine that with all the chatter about whether or not Google essentially wasted its money in the YouTube acquisition and I think you have a clear picture of the problem. Companies spent tons of cash to buy their way into the online game and they’re now finding it hard to actually make up that money. They felt they had money to burn and did so accordingly. Now they’re finding that, since a news organization’s brand name isn’t exactly a guarantee it will win in head-to-head combat with citizen media, it’s a bit harder to make that money back than they thought it would be. It takes more than that brand name to compete. It takes user relevance and usability, two areas most media publishers need to make dramatic strides in.

Not to be outdone in the arena of pandering to the public by Time’s Person of the Year, Advertising Age has named “The Consumer” its Agency of the Year. Seems they were on the cusp of naming DraftFCB but then decided that didn’t have quite the headline value.

What’s the point of this? Are we as either media producers or consumers so needy and insecure that we need this sort of validation? I don’t think so. Which means these publications are doing this, embracing the general public so that they might be embraced in return.

As Joe Jaffe and others say, there’s still a lack of marketers who, as Mack Collier puts it, are willing and able to walk with their communities. To often CGC is co-opted by big companies or people are asked to create ads or something like that. There’s not enough genuine interaction between marketers and the people who are talking about them. Regardless of how many times we’re given the tacit endorsement of big publications like this it’s not enough - there needs to be action there for it to really mean something.

So I’m in a meeting today and we’re talking about different approaches for garnering mentions in trade versus consumer media. As I’m listening to the others having this discussion it occurs to me that such designations mean almost nothing to me. There are certain sites that certainly have a focus on one or the other but they’re open for everyone to read. There’s no barrier for consumers to read a B2B-oriented site just like there’s no barrier for B2B firms to read a consumer-focused site.

Many of the previous lines between such publications have been broken by the all-powerful link. It doesn’t matter what the source is - if it’s of interest to the blogger it gets linked. So I think in terms of how to get coverage that will get linked to by the influential bloggers in this space. Where it originates is immaterial to me. There are strategic decisions that impact who gets pitched and such, I know, but overall it’s just not something that I think about too much. I think about getting coverage - period.

What do you all think about this?