Fish or cut bait

Posted on | May 19, 2012 | No Comments

Years ago, Girish Mhatre or Steve Weitzner (one of those eminences grise in the e B:B journalism business) told story about the co-founder of CMP, Gerry Leeds. Leeds, years into the successful expansion of the company he founded with his wife, Lilo, would wander into his newsrooms and scan the stories being readied for his newspapers.

“This story would be better if you killed the lede and just started with the second graf,” he would invariably say. And he’d be right. Most of the stories being published in his papers weren’t the hard-news, inverted pyramid types of stories. They were news-features.

Flash forward to today, and you can discount perhaps the 25 percent of any blog post you read. (Much like this very post). Most of the time you’re reading online, you’re looking for answers and insight. Yet, most of our posts wrap a painfully fat amount of context and story-telling around one or two info-nuggets.

Give me the good stuff quickly so I can move on to the next thing.

I thought about this reading Danielle Kurtzleben’s piece in U.S. News and World Report.

Does the post better serve the reader by just cutting the lengthy financial context out or smashing it into a simple declarative sentence: Newspapers are on the ropes. How can they learn from the Game of Thrones?

Probably, yes. You’re drawn in not only by the compelling statement and odd question but by their connection.

Context is vital to story-telling, though. And we go back and forth between story telling and data delivery. Understanding when to craft which is an art.

Lou Hoffman of the Hoffman Agency has been href="http://www.ishmaelscorner.com/">hammering on the value of story telling lately. And right on to that: In a world of INFINITE information, story telling is more important than ever. This is important for his business and mine.

Today’s priority online is figuring out when to fish and when to cut bail, how to tell a story without watching your reader wriggle off the hook.

War of the Worlds (journalism edition)

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 2 Comments

Get ready for robo-reporters. Not in a decade; not in a few years but now.

Steven Levy writes in a recent Wired article that a company that burst forth from the loins of one of the country’s great j-schools, Medill at Northwestern, has a product that creates narrative stories out of data. Narrative Science, for example, will take a pitch-by-pitch, play-by-play summary of a baseball game and turn it into a readable, accurate description of the game.

“Narrative Science’s algorithms built the article using pitch-by-pitch game data that parents entered into an iPhone app called GameChanger. Last year the software produced nearly 400,000 accounts of Little League games. This year that number is expected to top 1.5 million.”

As Levy puts it, Little League games may be the sizzle, but financial reports could be the steak.

So you knew this was coming right? We’ve already waded into the shark-infested swamp with Indian and Pakistani writers churning out news stories for local newspapers about town meetings they couldn’t cover, all by reading the meetings’ minutes online. It hasn’t fared too well, but you see where things are headed.

These technological invasions of our sacred profession seem life-threatening every time they land on Earth. The Internet. Newspapers ignored the threat until it was almost too late, but they’re finally transforming, albeit slowly and less than elegantly. Mobile technology was a huge opportunity for traditional media, and that train may have left the station.

In any case, traditional media is still breathing. Embrace this kind of technology–no matter how counterintuitive it seems–and free your staff to do what they do best: find sources, build relationships and tell compelling, provocative stories.

The more open-minded among the inked-stained wretch set is waking up to the fact that there are a lot of things we shouldn’t be doing any more, and acting like stenographers on our own valuable time is one of them.

The week in media, April 2-8

Posted on | April 4, 2012 | No Comments

News organizations’ cultural paralysis

Posted on | March 10, 2012 | No Comments

PaidContent’s Staci Kramer took a deep dive into the much-discussed Project for Excellence in Journalism study that shows among other things that news organizations are losing $7 for every $1 gained in digital revenue. A sobering but not new statistic. (See other interesting media stories in the Week in Media post).

What’s surprising–and what Kramer illuminates in her piece–is the cultural paralysis that plagues news organizations. Presumably most executives know a little math and how to navigate their way around an Excel spreadsheet, but the numbers they’ve been staring at for a decade seem not to be sparking much action.

She writes:

One exec bluntly states, “There’s no doubt we’re going out of business right now.” (Who said it? Unless he or she comes forward, we don’t have a clue. The same is true for all of the newspaper execs quoted in The Search for a New Business Model.)

The same exec explains: “There might be a 90 percent chance you’ll accelerate the decline if you gamble and a 10 percent chance you might find the new model. No one is willing to take that chance.”

I sat in an internal meeting this week at UBM Electronics in which an executive from our parent company, UBM, mentioned that overall the company’s print-digital revenues are now about 50-50. It surprised me that it was even and that print wasn’t, say 25 percent of overall revenues or less. There are still many audiences and advertising segments that prefer print, and that’s fine.

But for those that don’t, many of us have struggled with our changing business for more than a decade. And we’ve acted. It’s a process and an evolution and it’s often not pretty, but we’ve acted.

Acting good. Inertia bad.

Is journalism thriving or dying?

Posted on | March 8, 2012 | No Comments

Newspaper revenue has collapsed (see chart). No surprise. Employment is down only slightly in the past few decades. Surprise.

That’s because organizations (or journalists themselves) are doing more with less, as Steve Myers points out on Poynter. Tools continue to evolve rapidly to give journalists more ammunition to create startups and compete with entrenched media organizations, many of whom are amazingly (still) reluctant to jump in the river and swim. (I see something like the San Francisco Chronicle’s iPad app and just scratch my head: How can you be located in the middle of app development ground zero and not have America’s most powerful newspaper app?)

But back to Myers’ piece: We initially wring our hands over these trends (especially the undeniable revenue collapse), yet recall that 20 years ago we were wringing our hands over the “decline of reading and the American newspaper.” Yet revenues for newspapers were soaring and other publications we springing up like daisies in the weekly, bimonthly and monthly segments, and in the trade press.

I suppose it would be ideal if the people ranks were thinned in tandem with the revenue collapse, which would mean that editorial supply and demand remained in balance, but that’s not the case. And since everyone’s a publisher, it makes the challenge all that much more daunting.

We see that in our own sand box in the electronics B:B segment. We’ve undergone a massive shakeout in the past 10 years. In fact we did the editorial resizing/right-sizing thing before anyone else in the industry because our world (semiconductors and electronics OEMs) moves so much faster than anyone else (for good and ill).

Publications fell by the wayside, and, at times, it seemed like editors were falling as if they were on a field at Antietam. But most of those (most, not all) are still plying their trade in some form. Some doing the same thing for a different (often startup) publication; some doing similar things in a different media sector; some doing good work in the emerging corporate-publisher space.

That’s heartening news. For the mainstream media, the pain level today is where our industry was 5-7 years ago. It’s not pleasant, but people and industries learn to adapt.

The week in media (March 5-11)

Posted on | March 5, 2012 | 3 Comments

A selection of intriguing stories from the week of March 5:

[<a href="http://storify.com/bfuller9/the-day-in-media" target="_blank">View the story "The week in media (so far)" on Storify</a>]

New social-media tools for journalists

Posted on | March 4, 2012 | 1 Comment

I can’t remember where I came across Mindy McAdams and why I subscribe to her blog feed, but it’s been worth it. Here’s a great post with a number of handy tools for digital journalists…

You’ve hopefully heard of most of them (I’d add Storify to her list of curation tools; I’ve been playing with this tool for some time). But the one I hadn’t come across and looks like it has amazing potential is FreeDive from the Knight Media Center.

There is a treasure trove of tools out there for us to exploit and use to tell and present great digital stories for readers. Now if we could only jump off the hamster wheel for a bit to use them!

Chevrolet Volt called back over battery-fire issues

Posted on | January 5, 2012 | No Comments

Electric vehicles timeline 2011

Posted on | December 31, 2011 | No Comments

The world’s most dogged industry

Posted on | December 14, 2011 | No Comments

The newspaper industry is nothing if not dogged.

It’s been savaged by multiple IEDs on Evolutionary Road–the Internet, mobile phones, video, podcasts, two major recessions in 10 years–and it’s still alive.

Sure, Lee Enterprises, which owns the St. Louis Post Dispatch, filed for bankruptcy this week, but those stories seem to come less frequently these days. The industry has, after all, slimmed down significantly and is slowly but surely embracing the digital world.

One sign post on that road just now shows just how dogged the industry is: The Washington Post’s creation of The Washington Post Social Reader on Facebook has generated more than 5 million readers, according to Social Media Today. That’s what brand recognition can do for you in an era of digital realignment.

You can see more doggedness if you check out the Andrew Rossi documentary Page One, about the recently struggles and evolution of the New York Times. I mean how much more inspiring (and metaphoric) can you get when media reporter David Carr doggedly defends his profession and his paper by telling a media source who has dissed The Times to go fuck himself. “Now, please continue,” Carr adds.

Pure stones.Watch the film. It’s great and it’ll make your heart beat warmly.

In the meantime, I think of that old joke about the indefatigable dog whose owner is looking for it:

“LOST: male dog, has one eye, mangled left ear, paralyzed hind leg, crooked tail. Answers to the name, ‘Lucky’.”