Final Thoughts

We've come a long way.

In my first Journalism class, we were assigned to read a report that suggested ISPs should subsidize newspaper sites. One year ago, I sat in a Missourian lecture hall full of people who couldn't understand why forcing commenters to use their real names was a problem.

A friend of mine who recently graduated from the newspaper sequence used to espouse that "nobody knows how to make money on the Internet" as if it were an absolute fact. The shortlist of people who'd quit their day jobs for web start-ups didn't seem to change her mind.

So I spent a few years being really outspoken, and almost enjoying it.

I still have no problem playing devil's advocate. I really dislike the idea of making iPod touches/iPhones required for freshmen (they're cool, but why should we target a single arbitrary mobile platform? In the real world there are Blackberries, Windows Mobile, Google Android, and some shell of Palm OS. Why should we pick an arbitrary platform when we could... well, this is an argument for another day.)

Anyway, something changed. The journalists and the technical people are starting to speak the same language. And today's presentations were not only in the same language, but on the same page.

Matt Thompson's experiments with context speak directly to Paul Boll's realization that journalism should make people smarter. It's related to the same discussion we've had about what belongs on Money Commons.

And he may not know it, but his discussion of clutter on news sites was really about usability. That's as web-geeky as it gets.

Jane Stephen's idea is essentially a way to rapidly establish niche media outlets in a standard, repeatable manner with a very small staff. This takes an idea straight out of the blogosphere and tries to localize it. Since quite a few bloggers have managed to make a living with this on a global level, it makes sense to try and apply it to local journalism.

And of course, there's Jen Reeves, Community, and Money Commons.

Money Commons is not a failed project, it's an experiment that provided insight. I learned a lot about RSS, XML, Wordpress, php, workflow, aggregation, XAMPP (Apache MySQL PHP and phpMyAdmin), and a few... we'll call them principles.

1. Never assume you'll be able to dismantle someone else's code. That's only true if it's clean and documented, and if you don't always do that yourself, why should anyone else?
2. Wireframing is not something you can skip. If you don't know the content structure of a website before you design it, you will be unhappy later.
3. Great content works a lot like trees that fall in the middle of the forest. Yes, it happened, and it was pretty impressive, but nobody gives a damn.

I'm trying to look at this third problem from two different angles. (Oh, and because I'm me, that also requires me add a list of things we should try to do along with it.)

In the weeks before our Salad Daze premiere, we pitched the story to every newsroom in Columbia, in addition to a list of other promotional efforts. We did this because we wanted to spread the message to large, existing audiences.

KOMU, and the other newsrooms, already have audiences, so rather than building them, what we need to do is interact with them better. I have a creeping suspicion that part of the reason we're having trouble with this is that journalism is used to being a mass media. Journalists sent stuff to the Audience, period. And so all of our traditions in how we "do" news aim at that, rather than building relationships with and interacting with audience.

That's what Money Commons, Smart Decision, Ning, Twitter, and all the other things we've been playing with are meant to do.

We already know that some, if not all, of these things are really good at doing just that.

I just installed a new system called BBClone for monitoring traffic on BeTheShoe.com. It's faster and gives me better data, but for the past two years we've been able to see what kind of traffic we get. And in looking at the data, we've found that when we do things that engage our audience, traffic spikes.

The days around a premiere, a trailer release, a news story... you can pick these events out on the timeline without even knowing when they occur. And that makes sense, because every time we do one of these things, we plug the website everywhere we can, directing every audience we put ourselves in front of to go look at that content.

With that in mind, it's really obvious how to make these engagement projects work: push them to our existing audiences beyond just word of mouth. Can we have an on-air Twitter graphic? A prominent Twitter link on the front page of KOMU.com? Can we do that for Ning too?

In other words, if we're up to things, we should tell our entire existing audience about them.

One last thing: There was a woman in the audience this afternoon who was asking about research. Of course I like the idea of having data that tells us a little more about the measurable impact of these new technologies and techniques, who doesn't? But I think it's easy to forget that we're just getting started. The computer geeks of the world know where the technology is going, and the Mike Fanchers, Matt Thompsons, and Paul Bolls of the world know where the journalism needs to go. But the details about how to make the pieces fit together - which is really what Money Commons and Health Commons are about - are still napkin sketches.

But there's something to be said about napkin sketches. They tend to point to exciting times.

Twittermania

Everyone and their mother is Tweeting about the new Nielsen study. The two big headlines: Twitter is growing really fast, and it sucks as a marketing tool.

Um, was this a revelation to anyone?

Growth is obvious... Considering that the people who were skeptics in 2008 are now recruiting friends from outside the tech-and-media-audience, yeah, that seems fairly clear.

But as for marketing?

Advertising is all about eyeballs and impressions. So if you want to grow your audience, you need to put things in front of new people. Your followers aren't new people, they're people who are already interested in paying attention to you.

On the other hand, it's really good at communicating with people you know by just "throwing stuff out there," instead of having to write them directly. Last night everyone was Tweeting about the RJI flood. Everyone wants to know about that, but without Twitter, chances are whoever saw it first would not have sent a mass email out.

From a journalist perspective, I think having @komunews Tweet what's on the upcoming show is a great idea. But that's something you do as a way to communicate with your existing audience. It won't bring in new people.

The Nielsen data wasn't negative for Twitter, it just tells certain journalists/PR/marketing people that they never quite understood it to begin with.

S3, Tara, and Media Giraffe

It looks like I'm going to be teaching Tara web design. It actually sounds like fun.

I've been spending too much a lot of time playing with Amazon S3, because of Project Shoestring. It's a neat system... apparently part of Twitter's backend runs off of it.

The way I've been explaining this to people has centered around the concept that it lends you economies of scale. So if you need to host an online portfolio, it's probably not cost effective, but if your project needs to handle outrageous amounts of traffic or send very large files, it's much cheaper than dedicated hosting.

I started thinking about what this can do for journalism, and my first instinct was, well, nothing. Journalism is mostly short videos and blocks of text. It doesn't seem to need it.

But then again, maybe it doesn't have to be. There's some really interesting stuff going on with IPTV. There have been online "TV stations" like Revision3 for some time, but they used to distribute using poor quality or exclusively by BitTorrent. They've only recently been able to stream video, thanks to Flash 9 (H.264 encoded video) and specialized services like Bit Gravity and BrightCove, which aren't cheap.

But Amazon S3 is designed for services like this, and it charges based on usage, so it's possible to start a small streaming video operation with only a few advertisers.

This is happening at a time where the costs of equipment is in freefall. You can buy a decent prosumer HD camera for $600. It doesn't support XLR and it records to HDV, but it does the job.

So, hypothetically, a group of tech-savvy journalists could do broadcast style coverage and deliver high quality content via web without the startup costs of an actual broadcast station.

Would it be sustainable? Perhaps, but it's a longshot. The point is, now it's plausible, whereas ten years ago the technology to do something like this didn't even exist.

Dear Convergence,

Convergence, you need to put an end to this, immediately.

It doesn't matter how, but it's time to either clean up your act or bring it to a close.

For the last few days I've been talking to a guy who was assigned to build a custom Wordpress theme for his Convergence capstone. He bought a book, started working, and quickly ran into trouble.

So I took a look at the code, and it wasn't wrong, it was just full of little odd things. The CSS was double-spaced, there were CSS descriptors that would work if only the element they described appeared on the page.

In other words, he didn't actually know CSS, and as we went over this, he started to realizing exactly how deep in over his head he was.

This wouldn't be that bad, except it's becoming a pattern.

I don't know what Convergence is supposed to be. I don't know if they want their graduates to know how to build a website, or a Flash application, or edit video well. But whatever they think Convergence Journalists should be able to do, they should actually teach them how to do it.

Throwing people into a situation where they're expected to create a professional quality website with no prior xhtml/css experience is the equivelant of sending someone out to shoot a story for KOMU when they've never used a camera before.

To be fair, I'm self taught on everything but Avid. But that takes time, research, practice, and a couple projects that can stay far away from my portfolio.

And yes, I throw myself into these positions all the time, but not without scoping them out first, and certainly not on any sort of deadline. The difference is I do it to myself, knowing exactly how involved the subject is and having plausible goals. These convergence people almost never have any idea what they're getting into.

A few months ago I met with a group of people working for KBIA with a nearly indentical problem. One girl was learning HTML from a book for the first time while she was supposed to be building them a new site from scratch.

Tonight a girl came into KOMU with a camera full of pictures to use in a Flash map. She's never used Flash before. I don't know how this is supposed to work.

The program has gone along for years banking on the idea that "look, we're new, and we're not sure what we are yet." But how many classes will be allowed to graduate who are supposed to be experts in online media, and no virtually nothing about how to make online media.

This isn't print or broadcast, where having some new media skills is an asset. New media is supposed to be their thing.

Under normal conditions, I'd write off my observations as, well, being me. We'll call this the iMovie effect. I think iMovie is the Ford Pinto of video editing software, but even I have to admit it does make it possible for people to edit video without spending any time learning how to do anything.

The problem is, almost everyone I've ever met in convergence has the exact same complaint.

[EDIT] Apparently this starting happening after a certain semester. Or people tend to be more critical of the whole program while they're in the middle of a crisis. [/EDIT]

That's telling.

- Jason

More on Twitter, and branding media

Twitter keeps growing on me, and my roommate keeps mocking me for it. Earlier tonight I posted something and my phone rang in response 30 seconds later. That doesn't happen with, say, Facebook.

At the same time, some girl I've never met started following me. She knows some of the other movie people, and... got me thinking.

She's PR, so she's been Tweeting (virtually every two minutes... it gives Tweeters a bad name) about branding and advertising.

Coincidentally, I've been personally attempting to protect Kinkos from the recession in preparation for this premiere. (Posters start going up Thursday.) Considering that we're already over $400 over our original budget, I'm sort of in a Catch-22. We have to spend as little money as possible, but at the same time we have to try everything we can that might bring more audience to the show.

This girl linked to a post, that basically said pushing name recognition isn't enough; you need to engage your target audience. This is really obvious. Using Facebook alone, I could gather an audience of 200 people for a show, because these are people we know and who know what we do.

But that's Facebook's upper limit.

For anything more, we have to actively engage people.

Flyers don't work. Last year, prior to the screening of American Gothic (first feature), we plastered campus and downtown. Within 48 hours, every flyer we posted came down.

Nobody was walking around stripping flyers, they were just covering them up. There were so many groups, bands, businesses and the like that were trying to drive a message that our ads couldn't stay up for more than a day before someone else came along with their own flyers.

Did people see the flyers? A few, but I've heard much more about the Marquee over Missouri Theatre. So instead, we're trying new things: printing larger, color posters and putting them in coffee shops and other local arts-supporting businesses. Emailing other groups, people, etc who are interested in indie film... We'll see how well it works a week from Saturday.

Which brings me to journalism. A few days ago I saw a TV ad for the New York Times. It's true (in part by design) that the press sort of has a bad rep. In the meantime, newsrooms are adopting Twitter like it's will magically solve all their problems.

But Twitter is all about engagement, and plenty of journalists would be appalled by the idea of building a brand around their paper.

At the same time, all journalism serves PR goals. Talking to people/sources is engagement. It counts. But I don't think I've ever heard of anyone talking about the identity of a newspaper.

The Broadcast world does. Anchors are all about personality and identity. Even in the midst of a straight news story, the reporter still has a face, voice, and a demeanor.

Newspapers don't. They have reputations, but when was the last time we saw a newspaper publicly communicate identity to its entire audience?

It's an odd line of thought.

On the other end of the spectrum, Newsy has apparently had success growing astroturph. Digg and the Web 2.0 world are designed to disregard this stuff... who knew it might actually work.

That's right, I owe you a blog post this week...

It'll have to be brief because... I need to pack.

Xampp works. I'm going to take a shot at our MoneyCommons to-do list over break. In the meantime, I'm helping Jenn Kovaleski and Liz build their portfolios... they look really good so far.

On an unrelated note, since all those people called into KOMU about the rumored gang initiations at Walmart, I've had an uncontrollable urge to see how far this can go. I mean, if so many people will freak out over something that sounds so sketchy, what else will they believe?

Plots of B-movies? Bad conspiracy theories? Zombies?

And I always thought all this technology made people more skeptical.

My attention needs to voluntarily divert, so this'll be brief

Quote of the week: "Journalists are supposed to make people smarter." I'm going to start using that... As much as I dislike being anywhere but bed or a shower at 8:30 AM, I'm really glad we woke up early to see him.

Missed Twitter hashtag opportunity of the week: #Liz_Coffee.

And we have a running theme too: technology that doesn't work. To put matters in simplest terms, KOMU's ability to get content online collapsed Wednesday night. The input switch was messed up, the deck crapped out, and all of a sudden we were getting severe distortion on the live input.

Add in the small fits of misbehavior from ACM, and I think Tara got it right in her tweet: "crazy fun night dot comming."

It's funny how the most stressful, dysfunctional nights can actually be fun when you're doing it with other people.

Now, doing it alone, not so much. After trying a few more times to make sense of the WordPress theme files without doing too much damage, I'm taking a shot at installed xampp, starting in about 15 minutes.

I have absolutely nothing else that I need to do this weekend aside from make this work. So if I break my own setup in the process, oh well, I'll fix it Sunday night.

Of course, the big news of the week is the premiere of Salad Daze.