Blogger 1 Twitter 0
Touted as the '
first draft of history', Twitter is also a tower of babel built on 140 characters at a time. Twitter might be a useful tool to break stories, it is useless to make sense as the story develops, because the activity on Twitter deteriorates into tweets, retweets, rants and it becomes a virtual dust-storm of sorts.
It takes human intervention to guide users through that storm of data, through careful curation. In context of the election controversy in Iran, The Economist magazine
praises the work of select bloggers who monitored the internet and helped readers make sense of what is happening in Iran.
The Economist writes,
Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English.
So much so for the demise of blogging, we were being forced to believe.
Labels: blogging, social media, twitter
How to improve quality of online comments
At best, comments are distractions or ego-boosts , depending on the bloggers personality. Once you read the first 5-10 comments below a highly commented-upon post, you know you have read all the comments - it is rambling echo chamber, if not a free-for-all self-promotion pulpit.
Writing about the disappointing quality of online comments,
Virginia Heffernan writes in The New York Times,
Commenters, in short, rarely really sock it to a columnist. They also too often go automatic, churning out 100-word synopses of one stock ideological position after another.
But most disappointing of all, for readers, is that commenters don’t, as literary critics say, read an article against itself to show how, for example, an argument framed as incendiary is in fact banal, or one that’s meant to be feminist is retrogressive, or one that touts its originality is a knockoff.
How do we fix online commenting? Virginia offers her solution, citing the example of Slate.com:
Creating registration standards, inventive means of moderating and displaying comments, membership benefits for regular posters and ratings systems for useful comments are just some of the ways that other news outlets like Slate have improved the quality of reader responses.
Labels: howto, online journalism
The coming age of booklogs
In short, booklogs are excerpts from books posted as blog articles and readers rate them, add comments a nd so on, sort of Youtube for books. Again, copyright issues will be sent for a toss but I think writers of controversial and racy paragraphs will find it easy to develop a following.
Booklogs will be fueled by Amazon's e-book reader Kindle, which is still in its early days. Steven Johnson writes about
booklogs in the Wall Street Journal:
As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages."
Labels: blogging, blooks, booklogs, trends
Swine flu and the uselessness of Twitter during emergencies
Mathew Ingram once said "
Twitter is the first draft of history." Sadly, this first draft is taken for truth on Twitter, multiplied with each Re-tweet.
What is more, in case of emergencies, Tweets become
'the first draft of fear'
- with little or no context, Retweeted over and over, until only nonsense remains.
The Foreign Policy blog explains the
uselessness of Twitter during emergencies:
Unlike basic internet search – which has been already been nicely used by Google to track emerging flu epidemics – Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: as opposed to search requests which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one's friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.
Labels: social media, twitter
It is Paid Media, not Social Media
For every success like Obama, Susan Boyle or the Battle at Kruger, there are millions of tonnes of social media spam. Social media experts have taken over social media from genuine social media users.
The abundance of cheap server space and mass availability of bandwidth has made sure that advertising remains as pervasive and sometimes deceptive as before.
In the Old Media Age, we all could identify advertising.
In the New Media Age, everything is promotion - Including the medium.
For every genuine Fan page on social networking sites, there are 100 Fan Pages created by overpaid so-called social media experts , populated by
fake fans bribed with freebies, if not money.
For every genuine link posted on Twitter, there are services like Twtad.com that pay users to put links in their accounts.
For every tweet from genuine experts (like Jay Rosen or Dave Winer) or a passenger on a plane that has just crashed, paid hacks at PR firms are tweeting for their celebrity clients. Celebrity Tweeting is worse than Celebrity Blogging.
For every genuine complaint on consumer sites like Mouthshut.com, there are fake reviews on especially created blogs and fake forum accounts by people from so-called Digital Ad Agencies. There are Ad Agencies in India who are experts at pushing down negative reviews.
For every genuine link for tag such as 'bike' there are 100 repeated links to empty pages for the same tag.
For every genuine consumer review at sites like Yelp.com, companies are being pressured to pay for positive reviews.
For every forum post by a genuine young gamer, overpaid interns are posting fake praises for dumb-ass games.
Related:The Confused Person's Guide to Web 2.0Social Media is dead in 2009Labels: social media
Economic Times Journalist barred by SEBI for forging letters to rig stock prices
As it is, Financial Journalism is not a high point in the annals of Indian Journalism. In its interim order, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI)
barred two promoters of Pyramid Saimira Theatre Ltd, and 228 others, including Rajesh Unnikrishnan, Assistant Editor, The Economic Time.
The Economic Times, India's largest selling business daily, is part of the Bennett Coleman Group. Flushed with cash from its print media operations, the group created
Times Private Treaty, an investment group that does dubious
'stock for ads and editorial coverage' deals with companies.
Pyramid Saimira Theatre Ltd was a client of the said Treaty Operations. The Times Group has special editorial people to deal exclusively with Times Private Treaty clients in all of its major editorial offices.
Result:
Hapless journalists who are forced to do what the master says - forget investigative reporting, work on his master's share market earnings.In the Pyramid Saimira case, the journalist has been accused of forging a letter so that it appears to be a SEBI letter. Not surprisingly, this story has been largely ignored by the business press in India. Among the mainstream newspapers,
only the Indian Express and DNA carry it.
Related:What we must learn from India's largest NewspaperThe sorry state of Financial Journalism in IndiaThe Indian Media would like us believe there is no recession Labels: india, news business, scam
The only course in Online Writing that you must take (sort of)
There are no clear cut solutions for people to money in a Google-ruled world but check this (non)course in online writing titled '
Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era' on Mcsweeney's, the list-making site for the smart set. Check out the prerequisites for the course:
Students must have completed at least two of the following.
ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption
Labels: education, funny, online journalism
Will somebody do a real study of blogging, please?
There is absolutely no useful study on blogging. The ones that we do have are from people who have vested interests. We are well past all those studies about what software people use to blog. People blog, period.
For example, Blog search Engine Technorati says there are many bloggers with 100,000 + monthly pageviews making $75,000/year.
What kind of blogger would be making that money on that small a traffic other than affiliate spammer or the gadget blog rewriter?Scott Rosenberg picks apart,
one by one, all the wrong facts cited in an unusually bad and totally incorrect Wall Street Journal
article by Mark Penn about the rise of blogging as a prominent profession in America.
The quality of bloggers/online journalists may be suspect in many cases but I reckon we have entered the Iron age equivalent for blogging as serious journalism.
Cases in example, Pulitzers for online journalism,
public funding for online journalism and
successful blog-based opinion networks.
1. We need serious studies of blogging to learn about
skill sets, skill deficiencies, revenue models; and to look into
new regulations for online journalists.
2. We need to how much of blogging is
reportage, opinion, analysis, rewrite, investigation, unique comparison, spam, cross-post, pr-blog/fluff-blog, ghostblog and so on.
3. We need to know the inner-workings of blog networks [I was the founding managing editor of one]
I tend to think that a blogger does not only deal with words. She posts videos. She networks on social sites. Most of all,
she is a starter of conversations.
Blogging is no more a fashion. We need actionable data to help us take blogging onto the next level -
as a serious replacement of all overpaid, under-performing, lazy reporters.
That is why we must not let its study fester in hands of sundry marketers.
Labels: blogging, study, trends
Why Economist must be the role model for Online Journalists
Comparing struggling newsweeklies Time and Newsweek to the thriving Economist,
Matt Pressman points out the
difference between being yourself and trying to please somebody:
...instead of filling their articles with self-serving quotes from government ministers you’ve never heard of, The Economist’s correspondents just give you the essential facts and a meaningful takeaway, whether the information came from their own reporting, the local press, or some obscure think tank.
The Economist was one Western Product even Mahatma Gandhi liked.
Time and Newsweek magazines are
'Readers' Digest meets People' for the kind of people who are now getting their time-pass fix from online sources.
What makes The Economist different and successful?
1.
It is about saying the truth as it is. Do more than original reporting and analysis.
Blunt is good.
2. Fluff is bad. Worse is fluff disguised in useless, fawning interviews. The Economist is sparse with praise and full of constructive criticism.
3
Do not listen to customers. Despite what you may have heard about Americans ignoring global news, The Economist will cover news from Bangladesh if it is important enough.
4.
Be useful: Give actionable intelligence rather some self-serving interview with some corporate 'hero'.
5.
Bylines do not matter if the words and ideas are too good to gloss over.
Labels: newspapers, online journalism, print media
How Online Journalism fared in the Pulitzers
2009 was the first time the Pulitzer awards considered Online-only news organizations. Sadly, no awards were given out
'to' or
'for' online journalism this time. Highlights about
Online Journalism in the Pulitzers:
1. The Pulitzer Awards received
65 entries from 37 different online-only organizations. 2. Out of 65,
21 entries were rejected because the sites don't primarily do original reporting.
3. Only one primarily online organization, Politico.com, a Washington-based politics news site, was a finalist - that too, in Cartooning.
[Lesson:
Politics and Cartooning are made for each other.]4.
Increasing role: Almost
One in Four of all Journalism entries had Online news component.
5.
Topics related to Online News content that were considered: Public Service News, Breaking News Reporting, Investigative Reporting, Local Reporting, National Reporting, Breaking News Photography and Feature Photography.Labels: blogging, online journalism, pulitzers
