February 8, 2010
in Media
A few ideas from today’s post Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog:
“If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance.”
“Relationships. That’s what the business of media must become. In our New Business Models for News, we began — just began — to project the value of the relationship a new media service can have in its community: creating events; educating; gathering and selling data; selling goods directly (as the Telegraph does, quite successfully); running networks to help others succeed; saving money by collaborating.”
“Information is not a scarcity, or at least it isn’t scarce for long. Yes, when I don’t know something, then the answer is scarce. But now it’s much easier to get that answer; Google will have it in .3 seconds and if it doesn’t and if enough of us ask it, then someone at Demand Media will write it for me and the rest of the world for $20. When news is new, its value is scarce (as Thomson Reuters Tom Glocer says, his information has its highest value in its first 3 milliseconds); but then that value deflates.”
Alrighty then.
Tagged as:
Jeff Jarvis
I think we can all agree that the hardest part of having a successful rock band is coming up with a good name. You can always find a drummer or a lead singer but a good band name… very difficult.
Fortunately, there are no shortages of websites to help with this critical task. At BandMaker.com you plug in some words and get some recommendations.
I think you can do the same thing at WORDLAB but I got distracted browsing their list of 4,000+ names for rock bands. A few of my favorites:
- Adjustable Waistbands
- Viral Bunny
- Twinkie Spore
- Turd Cribbage
- Tim Tation and the Quagmire
- Stool Patrol
- Sandy Muff
- Rock Paper Sisters
- Nuclear Winter Squash
I wanted to try my hand at some names but came up dry. So I pulled a few from my tag cloud (sidebar)
- Anonymous Audio
- Blackberry Brush with Near Greatness
- Coffee Zone Consciousness
- PowerPoint Prison Santa
- Smoking Spam Tattoos
Let me know if you decide to use one of these.
The headline above drew my attention to a post by Robert Niles in the Online Journalism Review. Mr. Niles has worked as an editorial writer and reporter for several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Rocky Mountain News, Omaha World-Herald and the (Bloomington, Ind.) Herald-Times.
“As the 21st century progresses, going to school to major in writing and shooting stories will become like going to school to learn breathing. What’s the point? It’s a ubiquitous activity that everyone learns on his or her own long before college. With so many more people getting their 10,000 hours of writing and shooting early in life, more people than ever are able now technically to report to others the news that they encounter. What’s the value in being a journalist when everyone is doing journalism? [emphasis mine]
“Yes, news organizations must find new production models that allow them to remain profitable in a competitive publishing market. But news publishers must also reconsider whom they’re hiring. Journalism schools must also reconsider the instruction that they provide.”
“There’s no longer any use in merely teaching people to write to a formula and conform to a specific style book. While those skills had enough value a generation ago for an individual to build a career, the new, hyper-literate media marketplace has rendered those skills – in isolation – as practically worthless.”
I remember when the number one requirement for getting an on-air job at a radio station was a pleasant speaking voice. A “good set of pipes.” If you could think while speaking into a microphone, better still but not a deal breaker.
If you were going to work in the news department (yes, radio stations used to have entire departments for news gathering), you also needed to know how to write a story (IN ALL CAPS) that included “sound bites.”
In an earlier post I referred to the RTNDA (Radio and Television News Directors Association). That was incorrect. It’s now RTDNA: Radio Television Digital News Association. An acknowledgment that news is happening some place other than on radio and television. When any website can have audio and video (that would be called “now”), one has to wonder if DNA might be the more apt acronym (already taken).
And when ALL news is digital, will it be the News Association. And when everyone is producing news…
I’ve struggled to understand why so many of the journalists I know resist learning the new skills Mr. Niles refers to. I’ve concluded it would be an acknowledgment that the skills they’ve worked so long to hone are no longer enough. It would be –in some sense– like starting over. No thank you.
We have an opening in one of our newsrooms now. I won’t be involved in recruiting and filling the position. For that I am grateful.
Disclaimer: I am not a journalist. I did not go to journalism school. I went to keep-my-deferment-and-stay-out-of-Viet-Nam-school.
From Matt Taibbi’s blog:
“I think we ought to get it over with once and for all and ask all the people who are interested in banning words to get together and form their inevitable committee on word propriety. I think it would be a great thing if we could just get the list together ahead of time, along with what the committee feels the appropriate sanction is for each word. “Ho” we know is a fireable word, as is “niggardly,” but what about “snapper”? How about “curry muncher”? What is the appropriate punishment for a “What’s wrong, do you have sand in your vagina?” joke? I mean there are so many unknowns right now, nobody knows where he or she stands.”
Excuse me, but I have to go look up “curry muncher.”
Tagged as:
Matt Tiabbi
Roger Gardner offers a good example of the idea in headline.
“Jefferson Bank, in Jefferson City, Missouri, has the banner on the business section of NYT. Of course, they don’t buy it everywhere, NYT knows where I am, so it inserts the local ad. Interesting to me is who sold it to Jeff Bank and how?”
Let’s say you sell yoga supplies and would like to advertise locally. But the newspaper, radio and TV stations don’t offer any programming or content relevant to your customers. The local media can’t afford to produce that programming for the few hundred people into yoga.
If you have a great database of readers (as the NYT certainly does) … and an ad network that can pull from yoga shops all over the country… you can serve up ads like the one above.
I think a more practical approach might be for the yoga shop owner to create his own content and community. We’re seeing that happen every day. Or, if they just don’t have the time… others will create that branded content for them. But the result is more and more business becoming “media” creators.
Found these (and much more) at Mashable. Specific digitally-oriented skills and traits a future journalist would need. These include being:
- a multimedia storyteller: using the right digital skills and tools for the right story at the right time.
- a community builder: facilitating conversation among various audiences, being a community manager.
- a trusted pointer: finding and sharing great content, within a beat(s) or topic area(s); being trusted by others to filter out the noise.
- a blogger and curator: has a personal voice, is curator of quality web content and participant in the link economy.
- able to work collaboratively: knowing how to harness the work of a range of people around him/her — colleagues in the newsroom; experts in the field; trusted citizen journalists; segments of the audience, and more.
If you are a working journalist, could you get the job you have today based on the requirements above?
