Publishing
“Crowd Powered” Journalism Gets $10M Boost
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Written By Drupad Sil | July 30, 2007 | Share This
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As reported by Mathew Ingram at reportonbusiness.com, Vancouver-based journalism site NowPublic has raised $10.6 million in funding from Rho Ventures/Rho Canada, Brightspark, and the Working Opportunity Fund. The windfall increases the company’s resources to $12.5 million in all.
A self-described “crowd powered” site, NowPublic uses citizen journalism to produce its local news content. Founded in 2005, NowPublic claims more than 100,000 members spread across 140 countries, generating over a million monthly unique visits.
The company plans to utilize the funding to several ends, including expanding its technology, making it easier to submit news tips and photos from mobile devices, and compensating members for certain stories. Though NowPublic is currently partnered with the Associated Press, they’re also in partnership discussions with 7 to 10 major organizations.
(more…)
LG Developing YouTube-focused Phone
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Written By Emily Koh | July 3, 2007 | Share This
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LG Electronics, the world’s fifth-largest mobile phone manufacturer, have signed a deal with Google to develop a YouTube-focused 3G phone. Expected to hit the European market in the later half of 2007, users will be able to upload, view and share video clips directly on YouTube.
LG already has ties with Google — it started selling 3G handsets called “Google phones” in Europe last month, which are bundled with software that offers one-click access to Google services like its search engine, Google Maps, and Gmail.
(more…)
Web 2.0: A Cult of the Amateur?
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | May 22, 2007 | Share This
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On Friday May 18, Craig Newmark, Robert Scoble, Clay Shirky and Andrew Keen met on stage to debate the merit of today’s “Web 2.0″ revolution at the Personal Democracy Forum. There were a number of notable people in the audience - Jeff Jarvis, the women from Feministing, and dozens more bloggers hidden behind their glowing laptops.
The debate centered around Keen’s controversial, soon to be published book, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.” Keen’s thesis is that the internet is causing a decline of professionalism, particularly in journalism, and that the blogosphere is “a kennel of dogs who are all barking and don’t know how to listen.” Our current structures are disintegrating, he said, in the face of these amateur networks.
Not surprisingly, the panel and the room (aka, the kennel manifest) jumped in gleefully after Keen presented his ideas. Shirky, Newmark and Scoble each took turns essentially debunking his book.
Shirky argued that the death of culture isn’t necessarily bad, citing the decline of vaudeville when movies emerged. He used the example of the high cost of advertising being challenged by cheaply created viral marketing, to point out that big-budget advertising is really more about controlling access to a distribution bottleneck than about creativity. Web 2.0 opens distribution, he said, thus helping to “level the playing field”.
Newmark talked about the wisdom of crowds, aka democracy, as an equalizer. When experts aren’t great at their jobs, the crowd fills in the gaps of information. Newmark admitted that there are issues with crowdsourcing problem solving, but maintained that the community will work through any kinks that arise. This is Craigslist’s basic philosophy.
Robert Scoble was much more combative than Shirky or Newmark. He read excerpts from the galley of Keen’s book and called it “a brilliant marketing strategy wrapped in a book.” Keen argued that Web 2.0 can’t be trusted because it doesn’t have any “gatekeepers” (editors, fact-checkers, etc), to which Scoble replied that no one should trust anything - audiences are the new editor, he said. Scoble furthermore pointed out the comments section of any popular blog acts as the proverbial “gatekeeper”, where the crowd is ready to point out and argue any errors. Traditional media doesn’t foster that sort of participation from its audiences, which makes it arguably less accountable than blogs and other collaborative media.
There were a million hands up at the end of this session, but not a single memorable question. It struck me, though, that Keen’s “old-guard” stance is controversial because it’s so rarely addressed. The so-called kennel isn’t even tuned in to the concepts of “amateur” and “professional”, which kind of proves Keen’s point. In the end though, I have to side with the new media advocates - the power of crowd proves itself time and time again in citizen journalism, open source, etc. Web 2.0 helps close the digital information divide, which, though it may displace some of the “old-guard”, is returning power to a global public.
Further Reading
- Battle Between Old and New Media (Down the Avenue)
- Who Do You Trust to Edit Your News? (Union Square Ventures Blog)
- Web 2.0 Good Thing/Bad Thing? (Steve Urquhart)
PdF Morning Sessions: Social Media Marathon
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 21, 2007 | Share This
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Like a speed dating session for the Who’s Who of Online Media, eight headliner panelists rotated through 20 minute presentations for the morning session of Friday’s Personal Democracy Forum. Below is my attempt to condense this two and a half hour marathon into a single post:
“Online Politics: A Demographic Look at Who’s Doing What.”
Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet & American Life Project gave an overview of the online political sphere. The spread of politics online can be partly attributed to broadband, said Rainie, and to the growing importance of the Internet as a source of news among young people. The Under-36 demographic is largely attracted to the forensic quality of the Internet; they want transparent primary sources (ie: YouTube), but also demand that information be easy to find. According to recent data from The Pew, 21 million people have watched political videos online as of February 2007. Rainie believes that political candidates should look to wireless as the next-gen technology revolution, and that future voters will consider the Internet an integral part of their everyday lives. The Internet is no longer in competition with old media, it’s just becoming more integrated.
“Politics is Flat I: What Happens When a Billion People Own the Means of Production of Ideas?”
Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale, spoke next, with more words per minute than I thought was humanly possible (I can only hope that his students use tape recorders to take notes). Benkler opened with a discussion of the startup costs for newspapers. He noted that computation, storage, and communications capacity are becoming decentralized. Large groups of collaborators and free/open-source software are changing the market. Social networks are eschewing the paradigms of government altogether, by forcing a previously exclusive sphere to embrace mass participation. The “networked public sphere” is causing the power of money to change, as it becomes easier for citizens to act as professional journalists at virtually no cost. Likewise, the notion of “superstars” has been broken down. Benkler is extremely interested in following the progression of journalism (and economics?) into a decentralized system, as the Internet continues to offer people visibility with almost zero financial constraints.
“Politics is Flat II: What Happens When We All Have a Dog’s Hearing?”
Thomas Friedman, famous author of The World is Flat, read a passage from the third iteration of his book. Friedman discussed the sway of citizen activism, the proliferation of media consumption, and new social chasms being caused by digital media. Said Friedman, “Technology can make the far feel very near, but it can also make the near feel very far.” What’s more, as the tools to create internet media become cheaper and easier to use, the old rules of journalism are falling apart. There is no system of lawyers and editors in place to sort out fact from fiction on the internet, which has consequently turned everyone into a simultaneous contributor to and victim of the “virtual paparazzi”. No less, Friedman is hopeful about the economic power afforded to individuals by the Internet, and he anticipates that global change will be stimulated by social entrepreneurs moving online.
“Digital Handshakes on Virtual Receiving Lines”
Danah Boyd followed with a conversation about different types of Social Media. She related the instigation of conversations in social media to a politician’s handshake with potential voters. For many of the under-30 crowd, she said, the Internet is the only public space they have access to. The same way that a politician would meet and greet at a campaign rally, they should be commenting on people’s Facebook profiles, inviting “friends” on Myspace, and so on. Boyd believes that comments online are as valuable as meeting someone in person, because both are representations of a real relationship made in the public sphere. Boyd attests, however, that a “digital handshake” is fundamentally unique in four key ways: 1) Content online is persistent, 2) content online is searchable, 3) Anything online can be replicated out of context, and 4) The audience online is invisible.
“Taking Facebook by Storm: The Million Strong for Barack Story”
This past January, Farouk Olu Aregbe started the ‘Million Strong for Barack‘ group on Facebook. The group quickly spiraled into an unofficial meeting spot for college-aged Barack Obama enthusiasts. Aregbe’s presentation was mostly a personal account of how the group started as a single visual idea, and evolved into a thriving organizational center for political activities. The key transition, said Aregbe, was when the group decided not to become a PAC, but to raise money by breaking into topically-focused subgroups that would support their own offline events.
“The Making of NetRoots”
Matt Stoller from MyDD.com followed Aregbe’s presentation. “This is a story of betrayal”, he began, as he launched into a history of liberal activity online. Starting with Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot, the first people to make a hit online were the “crazy uncles” - aka, the people not afraid to say radical things that made people just a little uncomfortable. These candidates had two things in common: 1) unlike broadcast politicians, they got people talking to each other, and 2) They appealed to voters who felt betrayed by the system. This betrayal of the system is what motivated the origins of internet politics on the left. Today, liberal politics is so entrenched in the Internet that social media has evolved as it’s own political structure with unique funding mechanisms and systems for allocating credibility.
“Is it Time to Flip the Funnel?”
Finally, Seth Godin presented his very funny diatribe on broadcast vs. new media. He said the “push” model of marketing that uses media to interrupt people (as with broadcast tv) is broken. Today, the inundation of media content (online and elsewhere) has trained people to tune out push-driven messages. As a result, our voices are getting lost in the clutter. How do marketers and politicians fix this? Godin says that we have to focus less on the broadcast of the message, and more on the relationships cultivated with individual buyers. Relationships are assets, he says, that reveal themselves in the conversations between consumers. What’s more, Godin thinks that we should be more concerned with targeting innovators and early adopters - aka, the “conversation starters”. Most importantly, marketers have to turn their product into a story that people will choose to talk about.
“In Conclusion…”
The overarching theme of this morning’s presentations was that “new media is a conversation”. I was especially surprised to hear only one panelist (Godin) mention search marketing as a way to seed conversations online. Though politicians are clearly getting savvy to YouTube and blogging (likely because social media has been the subject of political discussion since 2004) it seems like few of them have caught onto search. Before YouTube, before Facebook, people use search engines to find more information about the candidates. What’s more, the majority of traffic from search is from undecided voters - aka, people actively looking for a candidate’s marketing message.
So why no mention of search at the PdF? Well, with 8 panelists and dozens more still yet to present, I guess they had to fit our lunch break in somewhere.
Online Newspapers: Hot Or Not?
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 8, 2007 | Share This
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The Newspaper Association of America has just released a report boasting that online news sites are growing at twice the rate of the normal web. They’ve include some other provocative stats to show that online newspaper visitors are richer, buy more, return more often, are more web-savvy and smell better too (okay, maybe I made the last one up):
- 12% of all visitors to a newspaper web site make over $150,000, compared with 9.3% of the overall internet audience.
- 88.1% of newspaper website visitors have made an online purchase in the last six months, compared with 78.9% of the overall Internet audience.
- 73% of newspaper website visitors go online every day, vs. only 57.8% of the internet population as a whole.
- 42% of people who have visited newspaper websites have viewed streaming video on their computers in the last 30 days, compared with 27.4% of the overall internet audience.
- Online newspaper readers are more likely to read blogs (28.4% vs 16.7%)
- Online newspaper readers are more likely to be politically involved (23.3% vs. 10.8%)
- Online newspaper readers are more likely to seek out or post a product review (28.9% vs. 16.1% in the past month)
Shockingly, the online media has been quick to call out the NAA for reporting “strategically irrelevant” numbers and “fishing for something to spin as good news.” Susan Mernit notes that breaking web growth out by other categories completely outstrips the NAA’s numbers:
” Nielsen also reported this year that the online dating space grew about 16%–far more than the newspaper category’s 5.3. And Facebook grew, what–300%? So ratio of growth is relative–comparing you category to ALL of the web has only relative merit.”
Rather than comparing itself to the overall web, perhaps the NAA should’ve just said that newspaper websites are doing better than they did before? Ignoring, of course, that classifieds sales are dropping and that old-industry folk continue to preach the imminent demise of Journalism (sub. required, naturally! Or read a larger exerpt here).
If nothing else, everyone seems to agree on one thing: “The newspaper model is broken” because it doesn’t directly translate to the web. The news media scoffed at Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy Dow Jones (and the Wall Street Journal), but maybe it’s not so far off - if newspapers can’t find a way to turn their content into profit, then maybe an organization like News Corp (or Google?) that can turn anything into an ad-supported business really is going to “save journalism”.
Digg Users Riot Against Censorship
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 2, 2007 | Share This
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Not since LOST has a string of numbers held such seeming importance - a 32 character code used to remove copy protection on HD-DVDs was posted yesterday on Digg, censored, and re-posted in what became a massive user protest. The battle between Digg users (protesting code censorship) and Digg moderators (censoring to avoid lawsuit) shutdown the site and finally culminated in a secession by the Digg moderators. SMO Blog has the best rendition of this May Day Saga that “almost killed Digg.”
It all seems overly dramatic to me, but it brings up interesting issues regarding DMCA laws and control in social media. This isn’t the first show of power by a social media community - Facebookers got all riled up over Facebook’s news feed, and Wikipedia got into trouble when they started using rel=no_follow tags. But this is the first instance of a user protest that might actually lead to the termination of the site. As Graywolf writes,
“While the Diggers may be congratulating themselves on a hard fought victory, it will be short lived. Basically they set their own homes on fire and burned them to ground to prove the point they were in charge. When the “suits” come in I fully expect there to be some changes and the power and freedom the users had will start to be throttled back.”
Search Engine Land, on the other hand, thinks the DMCA enforcement doesn’t hold ground,
“Publishing instructions rather than actual devices does not seem to be a violation of this particular part of the DMCA, to my non-legal but common sense eyes. Frankly, the AACS seems to be stretching those provisions to suggest that simply writing about how to override copyright protection is a violation of the DMCA, one that might require information to be taken off the web.”
Follow the developing story/opinion stream on Techmeme.
Further Reading
- Kevin Rose Hands over Digg Control
- Geeks will Not Be Silenced
- Digg Revolution Looks Like Iraq (SEO Critique)
Dark Day for Internet Radio
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | April 17, 2007 | Share This
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The Copyright Royalty Board has denied all motions to reconsider a ruling that forces Internet radio stations to pay royalties for songs heard per user. Under such an absurd calculation of royalties, webcasters will be expected to pay upwards of millions of dollars to operate. The new fees will go into effect May 15th - though NPR and other small action groups have appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From Ars Technica,
” The ruling is a huge blow to online broadcasters, and the new royalty structure could knock a large number of them off the ‘Net entirely. Under the previous setup, radio stations would have to pay an annual fee plus 12 percent of their profits to the music industry’s royalty collection organization, SoundExchange. It was a good setup for the webcasters, most of whom are either nonprofits or very small organizations…
SoundExchange is jubilant over the ruling. Executive Director John Simson called the CRB’s ruling a victory for performing artists and record labels. “Our artists and labels look forward to working with the Internet radio industry—large and small, commercial and noncommercial—so that together we can ensure it succeeds as a place where great music is available to music lovers of all genres,” said Simson in a statement.
Noble words, but after today’s ruling…there probably won’t be much of an Internet radio industry left for SoundExchange to work with.”
Go to SaveNetRadio.org to sign an online petition and email your thoughts to congress.
Further Reading:
- RIAA Pushes Through Internet Radio Royalty Rates Designed to Kill Webcasts (Techdirt)
- No, Mr. Web Radio. I Expect You to DIE! (Copyfight)
- Dear Record Companies, You Are Complete Morons (LikeItMatters)
Virginia Tech Shootings: Role of Social Media & Search in Journalism (and the Suckiness of Contextual Ads)
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | April 16, 2007 | Share This
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Within minutes of the first shootings this morning on the Virginia Tech campus, students began posting near-live updates of the events through blogs, photos and even video. Even with the number of students killed still uncertain, the documentation of the event was so rich that readers could glean a near perfect re-enactment of the […]
Within minutes of the first shootings this morning on the Virginia Tech campus, students began posting near-live updates of the events through blogs, photos and even video. Even with the number of students killed still uncertain, the documentation of the event was so rich that readers could glean a near perfect re-enactment of the morning. In addition to personal accounts posted in students’ LiveJournal pages and in the comments field of blogs, photos have been posted to Flickr, a Wikipedia entry has a collaborative updating timeline, nearly 160 tribute groups have been formed on Facebook, and a student-made video hosted on CNN has been viewed over 1 million times.
I’m blown away by the role that social media sites - most notably Live Journal and Facebook - have played in the development of this major news story. Here’s an excerpt from one student’s entry,
“The story goes that she was in class and they heard a banging, her teacher opened the door to find out what was going on, and after not seeing anything, closed the door. Not more than two seconds later, a gunman entered her room, to which the class responded by getting underneath the desks and basicly hiding as well as possible from this guy. He then shot at the class somewhere between 8 to 12 times and then left.”
And from the comments left by another,
“Apparently one of my friends was shot in the leg at WAJ, the dorm shooting this morning. I have heard he was shot in the leg, he’s an RA there. I have heard there was one female shot and killed in WAJ and a male RA injured on the news. Unconfirmed, I have heard that at triage there were more than 30 “black tags” at triage. That means body bags. I hope that’s not true…I have two friends in Derring Hall, near Norris, and one in Slusher, closer to West AJ. Students have been scared and flourished. No one is allowed to leave or come onto campus. Students have come on the news saying they have jumped out of windows in Norris and seen a man come out of the building covered in blood.”
Students are using Facebook as a way to share information about students hit, the delayed response of campus officials, misinformation reported by FOX news, and the identity of the shooter. As such, social media sites have become a visible first source of information for journalists. You can see journalists from CBC, NPR, NBC, and more reaching out to students in the comments fields of posts and in facebook forums.
Just as the major news sources are using social media to stay updated on a rapidly developing story, they’re using search to broadcast that information back to the public. Here’s a New York Times paid search ad for “student shooting”:
In stark contrast, the contextual ads shown against this story are almost completely irrelevant, if not inappropriate - further proof that contextual ad networks need human editors (or at the very least, a way for advertisers to safeguard against poor placement). Here are just a few examples (note text in the first display ad on the right!!):
(Larger screen shot of the left-hand text ads)
Technorati Releases “State of the Live Web”
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | April 5, 2007 | Share This
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After six months of silence, David Sifry has finally released an updated State of the Blogosphere report - well, technically, “State of the Live Web“. The new data isn’t revolutionary, but it does show a rich picture of many obvious trends. Sifry reports:
- Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, with about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day.
- Spam and splogs (spam blogs) continue to be a problem in the blogosphere
- The blogosphere is no longer doubling every six months, but that’s understandable considering its size
- Posting volume is growing more slowly, though spikes in posts per day occur surrounding global crises.
- Blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets.
- Japanese blogs occupy the greatest percentage of the blogosphere
- Tagging has seen “explosive growth”
(and of course…)
- “Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots as the leading blog search engine”
Two significant points stand out from this report. One: the decline in posting volume, and two: the “explosive” use of tagging. The fact that people are posting less is likely attributed to their increased participation in other networks - Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. The increase in tagging, likewise, shows a growing perception that content is threaded across multiple networks. Together, these points indicate a new kind of awareness required for online marketers. As users’ attention fans, it will be increasingly important to leverage search as the gathering point of all related content. The footprint of a site, thus, may one day be more valuable than the site itself.
For more detail, check out some of Sifry’s charts :
- Daily Posting Volume
- Weblogs Cumulative
- Total Posts Using Tags
- Monthly Percent of Posts Indexed Using Tags
In Praise of Paid Posting
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 3, 2007 | Share This
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Yesterday Kate wrote about Topix.com’s “citizen journalism” approach to local news. In her discussion about how Topix will filter content, I couldn’t help but think of a similar citizen journalism project that uses a very different model - Associated Content, aka “the People’s Media Company”, filters content by rewarding quality posts with cash. Better known as the Pay-per-post approach, Associated Content (AC) reviews submissions, makes a bid, gives contributors rights over their work, and finally, rewards the posts that yield higher page views. Think of it as a combination of Google’s Quality Score system (minus the “black box”) and Digg’s democratic ratings.
The Online Journalism Review recently interviewed Luke Beatty, Founder of Associated Content. He describes AC’s system,
“The bidding process is totally transparent. We’ve built a system that allows people to easily submit content for publication. Each submitted piece of content is reviewed promptly by a real person on our content buying team. If it needs polishing, we’ll bounce it back to be re-worked, and it if it’s something we think that people will want to access (based on our proprietary evaluation criteria), we’ll tell the contributor exactly what we’re willing to pay, and we’ll typically bid higher for exclusive rights. The key is that the communication is fast and straightforward. We put the Content Producer in the driver’s seat. If we’re interested in paying for the submitted content, we make a clear, fast offer. If the offer is accepted, we pay promptly, which many of our contributors really appreciate…
We just launched a beta of a new page view bonus program to augment our upfront payments for desirable content. In order to offer this bonus, we felt it was necessary to provide our Content Producers with a personal dash board of statistics to track the popularity of individual pieces of content. This is in line with our “people’s media” philosophy. A contributor to a traditional media company never even gets a glimpse into how his or her content performs over time; at Associated Content, we’ve tried to create an atmosphere of total transparency, because we’re all in this together.”
Granted, most of AC’s content is comprised of how-to stories, not breaking news or investigative reporting. So perhaps comparing it to Topix.com is a bit apples and oranges - but the point is that, a pay-per-post model is a good way for old media to transition to new media. Traditional newspapers are heavily dependent on free-lance writers who earn their paychecks per-word based on background and experience. Similarly, paid posters are measured in page views to assess talent, with a bonus system tied to the publisher’s profit.
As print news publishers continue to slash jobs left and right, the market is being flooded with freelance writers. For media outlets like Topix.com that are touting citizen journalism as a way to boost content, Associated Content’s pay-per-post filtering model is a great way to attract professional writers at a fraction of the cost for print. Companies using similar models (like the appropriately named PayPerPost.com) have received a lot of flack from bloggers and journalists as a deceptive form of advertising - but perhaps we should stop thinking about paid posting as something to scorn, and start considering it due compensation for quality writing.