Mobile platform delivery begets mobile journalism – mojo

Electric NewspaperImage by mushon via Flickr

Originally from my auto-posting daily Delicious links, I have cut this back to just a few links I have added comment to or that I think particularly useful. I have also retitled the post. This is in preparation for a blog redesign, where I no longer want posts titled “links for YYYY-MM-DD”. A live stream of Delicious links will also always be available in a sidebar widget and/or stand-alone page.

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Google Reader trends

I spend a lot of time reading RSS feeds – as evidenced by these screenshots from Google Reader.
I often come across things I’d like to write a post about but don’t have the time, so finally implemented delicious to post a daily links roundup here on the website.
It also allows me to at least make comment on a few things, even if I won’t go to the extent of a full post.

What Google Reader is less able to do is manage my growing addiction to Twitter – which is becoming an entire other reading list. I’m also on FriendFeed, but haven’t yet taken the full plunge there. I’m still a little intimidated by the torrent of information on display.

GoogleReader trends - 080727

I don’t really use the ‘share’ feature in Google Reader. I tag things as my Reading List, and share that instead. It’s currently feeding into my sidebar.

And my top 20 reads in Google Reader.

GoogleReader top reads - 080727

A wending path does lead

July 23, 2008 by  
Filed under News, Online, SMO, Social Networking

As the internet leads a wending path, a range of discussions (starting with Jeff Jarvis and on to Stilgherrian’s comments section) brought me to news.com.au’s live Twitter coverage of the pope at WYD08 on http://twitter.com/popedownunder.
Twitter - popedownunder

I like the live Twitter event coverage (as a personal effort instead of just a pushed RSS feed).
The Twitter account web link was to news.com.au’s in-depth WYD08 coverage page, linking to their What’s on when? page, with an embedded Google map.
Follow that through to the same Google map, full sized, showing, amongst other things, pilgrimage routes, papal motorcade and boat-a-cade routes, and locations for mass.
The creator of that map, news.com.au journalist Alexandra Marceau, has also created 58 other news maps for individual stories. What’s great about creating a map for an individual story is that it’s a mapped record of that story, available through a permanent list of user-created maps.

Obviously, you say, but I’ve been in the habit of giving a quick search-generated map reference link to online for a news story, one that simply points to the intersection where said news event took place, for example. That’s not a permanent record, and doesn’t extend the news into the “user-generated content” section searchable within Google Maps. Creating individually annotated news maps is something I’ll consider doing from now on, time permitting.

It would also be much better if I could mash up a geotagged rss feed with Google Maps to automatically show news down to the street, or at least suburb, level. That’s something I would still like to work on, again, time permitting.

Mind you, somebody much smarter than me is probably already doing that.

SMO: Social Media Optimisation

April 5, 2008 by  
Filed under Media, News, Online, SEO, SMO, Social Networking

Social Media sitesSocial Media Optimisation, or SMO, is gaining momentum as the new content distribution buzzword. Content is increasingly shared, and news content particularly is delivered through social networking sites. Will SMO replace SEO, search engine optimisation, as the way news organisations get their content seen by a wider audience?

A New York Times article last week tried to explain the future of news distribution by describing how ‘the young’ share news online via social networks.

SMO, or Social Media Optimisation, is one of the most important stories of the new media campaign – for several reasons.

  1. MSM (main stream media) are beginning to understand that social content distribution is a serious threat to their current distribution methods
  2. MSM in the main were disrespectfully late in adopting SEO, and
  3. It’s only now, well into the Facebook boom, that people are starting to take notice of the value of SMO.

While SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, will remain very important to news gathering and searching methods, it could soon be superceded by a much more important player in news distribution channels and strategies – Social Media Optimisation, or SMO.

How do people share information online? How do they find it? How does social media facilitate this?

What the New York Times article shows is the acceptance, if only partial, of the concept of SMO – that news is no longer force-fed, it is now shared, social, viral, and word of mouth.

Young people expect to see video with campaign stories
New York Times

“And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message,“ says Huffington Post’s Danny Shea. Brian Stelter writes: “Younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading the Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.“
via Romenesko

Like it or not, for traditional news media the news is a commodity that must sell. For it to sell and make money, it must be traded, clicked, monetised, and advertised. When content went online, MSM (mainstream media) very slowly caught up to the idea of SEO – making content user and search engine friendly.

Arguments from MSM – and let me be brutally honest here – dinosaurs, have been that using SEO techniques in news media is simply bowing to a digital master. Many in MSM have for too long bucked at what they call ‘writing headlines for a machine’.

That argument represents a fundamental lack of knowledge about how the future of information distribution will be shaped, and does not bode well for the necessary rapid uptake of SMO – integration with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, and numerous other variety of social networking startups.

People use the internet to search for information. When doing so, people looking for a story about the conclusion of the divorce trial between Heather Mills and Paul McCartney would most likely use the search terms, heather mills divorce, or paul mccartney divorce, or heather mills paul mccartney divorce, or even add the word settlement to any of those searches. They will not search using a print headline like “Damnation of Her Ladyship“ or “Lady Liar“, from the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror respectively, both on March 19.

People use a search engine to find what they are looking for, so writing page or article titles that assists them to do that is by no means writing headlines for a machine – it is writing headlines that will help real people find information using a machine.

But as MSM has only recently grasped the importance of doing this, and just as they catch up and start optimising content for search, the rules of the game gradually begin to change again.

MSM need to not be left behind this time. News in the new world of digital media is shared. Social media is word of mouth advertising. Social media is recommending a product to a friend, and whether that be viral video or a news story, it is a link to content of mutual interest, shared among a community of friends, a seperate community of family, another community of professional contacts, and innumerable other communities that gather around hobbies.

That MySpace, or Facebook, may be the flavour of the social networking month and gone tomorrow as another new social networking site enters the friend-swapping fray, is no good reason to neglect to stay in the game. If you’re only just starting to embrace MySpace as the skyrocketing Facebook begins to face new competition from bebo, you’re two full lengths behind the leaders.

The only saving grace for MSM in the past is that they have generally formed a pack that lag behind the innovators. Be warned though, as soon as your competition gets a clue and embraces the reality of online content sharing and community building in their news distribution strategy – you’ll find out just how lazy you’ve been when you lose community respect and relevance.

When the editors and owners hit the panic button and ask, “What the hell have you been doing? We’ve been left behind!“ – What will you say?

Integration is not just newsrooms. Integration is leading innovation, or at the very least keeping up with it.

Traditional media no longer control the news distribution channels.
Seed your content. Link out. Allow your video to be embedded, linked to, displayed elsewhere.

Slow progress

March 25, 2008 by  
Filed under Online, SEO, Social Networking

Apologies for the infrequency of posts. The site has been undergoing a protracted redesign, and in the process has seen a dramatic decline in its most important aspect – content.

In the meantime, please take a look at one of the new additions, my Reading List, which has been added to the right sidebar.

It’s my selection of the best and most useful content from a wide array of new media blogs and industry sites that I regularly read.

Updated in real time as I hand-select the most valuable content, you can read the best of new media and online news industry content that I would be blogging about if I had the time.

Alternatively, I have also added related post links to the bottom of each individual post page, through which you can delve deeper into this site’s content.

Enjoy.

Australian media organisations on Twitter

March 12, 2008 by  
Filed under Media, Online, Social Networking, Technology

In a rush to get this post out, I buried it in another article, Email Old News to Gen C.
It reappears now because it needed to be republished in its own right as a review of Twitter usage in Australian media and politics.

———-

In Australia, very few news organisations use Twitter. As full disclosure, before I continue, I work at The Courier Mail, a News Limited paper.

An informal audit of a selection of Australian media and their Twitter presence

Fairfax Digital logoFairfax masthead sites

ABC News - logoABC News

News Digital Media - News Limited logoNews Limited masthead sites

I am assuming the unused Twitter accounts above belong to these publications, but it’s entirely possible someone could simply be ‘squatting’ on the Twitter user names.
Twitter logoI set up Twitter accounts for all of The Courier Mail’s news sections in early October last year, making our newspaper one of the only two news outlets in Australia using Twitter (that I have found), and definitely one of the largest media contributors to Twitter by number of content categories, but not necessarily volume of content.

The Courier Mail’s current crop of 20 Twitter user accounts are providing free SMS/IM updates on topics ranging from sports, to business, to breaking news, all with tinyurl links to the original story content. I’m now trying to find time to play around with a Facebook page for The Courier Mail, although I rarely have any spare hours at home to spend doing that.

During the process of setting up these Twitter accounts, I did a search to see if other Australian news outlets were already using Twitter.

Of News Limited mastheads, apart from The Courier Mail, none of the other existing News Ltd Twitter users have posted.
Of Fairfax mastheads, only The Age has a single feed, last updated in May 2007.
The ABC has two feeds – one of which I follow to receive local news alerts on my mobile phone.

A search for “news” in Twitter yields a large number of results. Here are just a few (listed as their Twitter user name) that may be of interest – financialtimes, npr news, cbcnews, wired, ITN_NEWS, BBC, SkyNewsBusiness, indianews, SkyNews, and CNETNews.

In the UK, the BBC and Sky have a larger selection of Twitter updates that can be followed.


The 2007 federal election was approaching when I was working on the Courier Mail Twitter accounts so, having already written a story about politics and social networking, I had a look at what political parties had on Twitter.

At the time the results were:
Greens: http://twitter.com/Greens
Three updates in total, all on August 2, 2007, that are worth mentioning.

The Greens have established a twitter and are testing it.
04:11 PM August 02, 2007
Do you receive my Greens twitter?
04:26 PM August 02, 2007
Hrrrmmm, if I was 14 I’d know exactly what would happen
06:39 PM August 02, 2007

Liberal (both spoofs)
http://twitter.com/johnhoward
http://twitter.com/johnhowardfacts
Labor: none
Democrats: none
Nationals: none

In 2008, however, the Greens seem to have got their act together with a Twitter page feeding from the Greens Blog website.
https://twitter.com/greensblog

I also didn’t find this during the election last year , but https://twitter.com/kevinrudd is another spoof Twitter account.

The possibilities of Twitter as a quick and easy mass distribution method would be well utilised by politicians.

CIA notes declining newspaper influence

February 9, 2008 by  
Filed under Media, Online, Social Networking

CIA logoThe CIA may not hold the same respect they once had, but you must admit their intelligence-gathering techniques must still be superior to either yours or mine.

The CIA have said newspapers have not just become less important as a source of information, but are in freefall when compared to the growing importance of online information gathering.

From Doug Naikin, director of the CIA’s Open Source Center (OSC), formerly the Foreign Broadcast Information Service which was tasked to collect and analyse public information, comes the following.

What we’re seeing [in] actuality is a decline, a relatively rapid decline, in the impact of the printed press – traditional media.
A lot more is digital, and a lot more is online. It’s also a lot more social. Interaction is a much bigger part of media and news than it used to be.

So watch out. The CIA is trawling your Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and any other social networking media you can think of. Just don’t say the ‘B’ word.

via EJC

Creating a Google storm map

February 7, 2008 by  
Filed under Media, Online, Social Networking

googlemapThe Spokesman Review is doing some cool things with Google Maps.

User generated content is populating a map, so that individual stories are tied to a particular location using plain text, images and video.

This could be compared to Every Block, but for breaking news/continuing stories on a particular event, rather than data.

The potential for storm stories, either by user submitted photos, or using information as it comes in from police, makes it a great tool for 1) rolling updates of affected areas and, 2) a continuing story of what people are experiencing on the ground.

And they’re sending it in to you, talking about it, interacting with it.

Often we may write, “The Smith, Jones, and Harry street bridges in Doe Shire have been washed away by flood waters,” but people could have no idea where those are.

In some instances online sites have been giving a link to a Google map of a street location mentioned in a crime story, for instance.

Expand that to include multiple locations and you have big-picture view, that everyone can see.

Spokesmanreview.com: Storm Stories

Colin Mulvaney works at the Spokesman Review, and for more pearls of online wisdom, see his blog, Mastering Multimedia.

Email is old news to Generation C

January 31, 2008 by  
Filed under Media, Online, Podcasts, Social Networking

LAMP - Laboratory of Advanced Media ProductionOn the LAMP blog, a podcast with Head of Innovation at Nine MSN Jennifer Wilson is instructional for those pushing online news as a social, sharing medium.

She describes Generation C as the 12-24 age range, who think email is for their parents – it’s outdated. They almost exclusively communicate via social networking.

So what are online news sites doing to push every possible integration with social networking sites to increase coverage in this demographic – other than selling out news coverage for entertainment?

The New York Times has started text message news alerts via keywords

I’m not sure how the text message news alerts are different than the text/im/web updates that are already available through their various New York Times Twitter updates. I imagine having the in-house control of text message distribution of news opens more possibilities for monetisation of that media further down the track, rather than waiting for Twitter to start advertising.

New York Times on FacebookThe New York Times also has a Facebook page (approaching 10,000 ‘fans’) and Rob Larson, vice president of product development and management at NYTimes.com said, “We intend to use every available platform to disseminate The Times’s quality news and information.”
via The Editors Weblog

The New York Times is by no means the only media organisation experimenting with digital access and social networking for news. They’re just recognised as one of the leading ones.

In Australia, very few news organisations use Twitter. As full disclosure, before I continue, I’m a journalist at The Courier Mail newspaper, where I worked as an online multimedia producer until December last year before moving into editorial.

Twitter logoI set up Twitter accounts for all of The Courier Mail’s news sections in early October last year, making our newspaper one of the only two news outlets in Australia using Twitter (that I have found), and definitely one of the largest media contributors to Twitter by number of content categories, but not necessarily volume of content.

Our current crop of 20 Twitter user accounts are providing free SMS/IM updates on topics ranging from sports, to business, to breaking news, all with tinyurl links to the original story content. I’m now trying to find time to play around with a Facebook page for The Courier Mail, although I rarely have any spare hours at home to spend doing that.

During the process of setting up these Twitter accounts, I did a search to see if other Australian news outlets were already using Twitter.

Of News Limited mastheads, apart from The Courier Mail, none of the other existing News Ltd Twitter users have posted.
Of Fairfax mastheads, only The Age has a single feed, last updated in May 2007.
The ABC has two feeds – one of which I follow to receive local news alerts on my mobile phone.

An informal audit of a selection of Australian media and their Twitter presence

Fairfax Digital logoFairfax masthead sites

ABC News - logoABC News

News Digital Media - News Limited logoNews Limited masthead sites

I am assuming the unused Twitter accounts above belong to these publications, but it’s entirely possible someone could simply be ‘squatting’ on the Twitter user names.

A search for “news” in Twitter, yields a lot of results. Here are just a few (listed as their Twitter user name) that may be of interest – financialtimes, npr news, cbcnews, wired, ITN_NEWS, BBC, SkyNewsBusiness, indianews, SkyNews, and CNETNews.

In the UK, the BBC and Sky have a larger selection of Twitter updates that can be followed.


The 2007 federal election was approaching when I was working on the Courier Mail Twitter accounts so, having already written a story about politics and social networking, I had a look at what political parties had on Twitter.

At the time the results were:
Greens: http://twitter.com/Greens
Three updates in total, all on August 2, 2007, that are worth mentioning.

The Greens have established a twitter and are testing it.
04:11 PM August 02, 2007
Do you receive my Greens twitter?
04:26 PM August 02, 2007
Hrrrmmm, if I was 14 I’d know exactly what would happen
06:39 PM August 02, 2007

Liberal (both spoofs)
http://twitter.com/johnhoward
http://twitter.com/johnhowardfacts
Labor: none
Democrats: none
Nationals: none

In 2008, however, the Greens seem to have got their act together with a Twitter page feeding from the Greens Blog website.
https://twitter.com/greensblog

I also didn’t find this during the election last year , but https://twitter.com/kevinrudd is another spoof Twitter account.

Online News Video

January 21, 2008 by  
Filed under Broadcast, Media, Online, Social Networking

When online video sharing is growing at enormous rates, and news video was the most watched category except amongst young adults in mid-2007, the logic is simple – share your online news video.

When I asked ‘where to news video?’ in the last post, I had forgotten about another Pew Internet survey I blogged about last year.

In that survey, it was found that news video is the most popular category for everyone except young adults.

My response, as young adults who are completely comfortable with online video get older and become more interested in news and current events, online news video naturally becomes a viable product with a genuinely loyal viewer base.

But you have to be able to share that product. Let a loyal viewer base help increase distribution, if they like your content they’ll want to.

Video sharing grows – where the news?

January 15, 2008 by  
Filed under Broadcast, Media, Online, Social Networking, Videos

Pew Internet logoAccording to a recent survey, daily visits to online video sharing sites doubled in 2007.

As online visits and online video viewership grows across every demographic, where does online news video fit in? The online department of a newspaper can’t cover every story in video, and shouldn’t be expected to. In Australia, international or national video stories for newspaper sites come from wire services, such as Reuters or Sky News video.

There’s no reason, however, for them not to come from independent video makers, or user-generated content, because they are competing with video-sharing sites.

What online newspapers should be doing better is local news video. They’re better placed and have better local knowledge to make the story more personal for their viewers. If they won’t do it themselves, providing the platform for user-generated content to appear could also be a ‘ratings’ winner.

User-generated ‘news’ content can be uploaded to a slew of video sharing sites, but it’s effectively invisible if people don’t know where it is or how to find it. Create the platform, and viewers will come to you for the people’s news, supplemented by your own. It doesn’t have to be extremely difficult either.

The Pew Internet: Video Sharing report showed that 15 per cent of respondents had visited a video-sharing site within a day, compared to 8 per cent in the survey a year earlier.

Overall, 48 per cent of those surveyed reported ‘ever’ visiting a video-sharing site, up from 33 per cent in 2006.

The largest percentage growth of users visiting video-sharing sites daily came from high school graduates, whose usage grew from five to 13 per cent, and was followed by women, who jumped from five to 11 per cent.

The largest demographic of daily video-sharing site users in 2007 was the 18-29 age bracket, of whom 30 per cent reported daily video views. The next largest demographic was men, of whom 20 percent reported using a video site ‘yesterday’ in the survey.

The only demographic in the survey not to record a growth in daily usage of online video sites was people aged 65 and over, who remained unchanged at four per cent use.

From a Pew Internet report from July 2007, half of those who view videos share the link, while three quarters of online video viewers reported receiving video links from others.
Pew Internet: Online Video.

Make your news video shareable, or even easier to view, and again the viewers will appreciate it.

Hulu Beta Testing

December 31, 2007 by  
Filed under Broadcast, Media, Online, Social Networking, Technology, Videos

Hulu.com icon logoIn a largely speculative post last month, I wondered about the possibilities of Hulu, News Corp’s new online video venture.

Since then I’ve received my beta testing login details. With a great deal of excitement I went to Hulu.com to see what fantastic wonders would be presented to me.

None. If you’re in Australia, bad luck – it’s a case of look, but don’t touch.

For now, Hulu is a U.S. service only. That said, our intention is to make Hulu’s growing content lineup available worldwide. This requires clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific geography and will take time.

Being limited to North America because of distribution rights, international users are agonisingly teased by a long list of currently popular TV shows they can’t watch – Arrested Development, Family Guy, Scrubs, King of The Hill, My Name is Earl, The Office… the list goes on, and unless you have a beta login to Hulu (get on the waiting list) none of those links will get you anywhere.

With a login, choosing any episode from one of those shows takes you to the video player screen, right to the excited point of ‘Loading Video’ before slapping you in the face – rejection.

Hulu.com screen grab - Unfortunately this video is not currently available in your country or region. We apologize for the inconvenience.
But I want to take advantage of the options alongside the video player – share, embed, watch it full screen! Hopefully it’s not too long before something is up and running for Australia.

In a desperate attempt to see the video player in action, I tried some older shows in the hope they were no longer affected by distribution rights. Thankfully, even Doogie Howser episodes (Breaking Up is Hard to Doogie) from 1989 were unavailable.

ABC Now

In a continuing push to break new ground in digital media, ABC (Australia) has released ABC Now, a desktop media player for select ABC digital content.

The potential of this application is huge. When I read the description of what it would do, I couldn’t wait to try it. Unfortunately the interface isn’t entirely user-friendly at the moment, but it’s in beta, so expect something great to come.

For what is obviously planned for this media player the ABC is again demonstrating why Australians go to them for original online audio and video content – because they try to make it easily accessible.

Often they succeed in the attempt, and that’s why their podcasts and vodcasts have enjoyed such popularity. ABC digital content has succeeded because it is available. If there’s not much to choose from, people move on. The ABC’s integration online of text, audio and video content is impressive, to say the least.

If you haven’t seen it, check out an example of their in-page video player on this story.

Hulu – the News tube

Earlier this year it was announced that News Corporation was developing a YouTube killer.  It was to be their own video serving site that was going to deliver full-length TV shows in a partnership with NBC, rather than the perceived notion (misguided I think) of the worthless fare served up on YouTube.

The News Ltd paper I work for (full disclosure) went so far as to declare in March 2007 that “YouTube’s dominance of online video content is about to end”.

Hulu.com is the outworking of that effort and is now in beta, and it’s looking pretty good.

Something very few news sites are doing today is incorporating social networking opportunities into their structure.  Even less are incorporating social networking into their video content – which remains for the most part clunky and unappealing.

Hopefully Hulu will change that for News Ltd/Corp.  This aspect of the current beta player is promising.

The “embed” function allows you to set in and out points, so you can embed just a selected chunk of a video clip on your blog.

I really hope this technology gets rolled out to all News Ltd/Corp sites, because it will exponentially enhance video content accessibility.

A review of Hulu at LostRemote.

Twitter News Media

October 11, 2007 by  
Filed under Media, Online, Social Networking

Twitter logoSomething I didn’t mention in the previous post is that Twitter can also be utilised as an advanced, and free, mobile news updating service.

The other day I discovered news feeds on Twitter. I started following the New York Times world news feed with mobile phone message updates. These consist of a headline and a URL link to the full story.

For anyone on an internet-enabled phone, this is a quick and easy way to get news updates. My mobile phone isn’t internet-enabled, so just getting the headlines wasn’t entirely useful, and the SMS messages filled the inbox within a few hours.

For the media outlet, the cost of putting headline updates on Twitter is minimal if done manually, none if the process is automated.

For the consumer there is no cost for receiving, or ‘following‘, the updates via Twitter.

They get a headline delivered. If they like it, they follow the link to your site.

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