Category Archives: Journalism

“New media landscape”

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Clay Shirky thinks the media has failed to appreciate the full significance of WikiLeaks:

“WikiLeaks allows leakers transnational escape from national controls. Now, and from now on, a leaker with domestic secrets has no need of the domestic press, and indeed will avoid leaking directly to them if possible, to escape national pressure on national publishers to keep national secrets.

WikiLeaks has not been a series of unfortunate events, and Assange is not a magician – he is simply an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a much more general pattern, now spreading.

The state will fight back, of course. They will improve their controls on secrets, raise surveillance and punishment of possible leakers, try to negotiate multilateral media controls. But even then, the net change is likely to be advantageous to the leakers – less free than today, perhaps, but more free than prior to 2006. Assange has claimed, when the history of statecraft of the era is written, that it will be divided into pre- and post-WikiLeaks periods. This claim is grandiose and premature; it is not, however, obviously wrong.”

paper.li

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I LOVE Twitter. It’s where I follow the insights and links of 131 like-minded souls. I tweet with some regularity but it’s the sum of these parts that makes Twitter so valuable/interesting to me.

paper.li compiles all of those tweets into a daily “paper.” While I prefer to follow my Twitter stream on my iPhone app or Tweeti on the MacBook, paper.li offers a better answer to: “What do you see in Twitter?!”

It’s like having 131 hand-picked editors, commentators and comedians, continuously scouring and curating the web just for me.

Dave Winer’s advice to Keith Olbermann

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This post doesn’t depend on knowing who Dave Winer or Keith Olbermann is (are?). It’s about media and brand. My favorite part of Mr. Winer’s advice:

“…the future of communication is not about the bottleneck that MSNBC and their competitors control. I don’t think you really need them. Unless of course you need to make $5 million a year, in which case you probably do need them. But if what you’re interested in is power to influence public opinion, and becoming more relevant over time, not more niched over time — if being influential is what you’re about, they really did you a favor.

So here’s what I recommend. Borrow a page from Conan O’Brien’s playbook, and use the social network to communicate with your fans.

Get a video camera and put it in your living room or den at home. Hit Record. Sit down in front of the camera and rant for 15 minutes. You can do that, I’m sure. Then without any production at all, upload it to YouTube and send the link around on Twitter. The first time you do it, it will be the most watched video of the day. Far more people will see it than used to see you on MSNBC, or O’Reilly or Beck or any of them. Depending on how fresh and interesting it is, and how real it is, and how compelling you really are (I know that’s a lot of “depends”) there won’t be much of a dropoff on Day 2 and 3 and so on. Now you’ve got your own network. And no one can shut you down. And you’ll have a lot more people watching you.”

Leo Laporte has done such an amazing job of this. Same for Arianna Huffington, and I’m sure there are others that don’t come to mind. Begs the question: Who owns the Keith Olbermann brand? MSNBC/Comcast? Or Keith Olbermann? Who owns your brand? Have you established a brand? What is it and where can I find it?

Esquire profiles Roger Ailes

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I knew Roger Ailes was THE man behind Fox News but I had forgotten –or didn’t know– some of the other facts that make this Esquire profile so interesting. I know, you’re thinking an elite, East Coast rag like Esquire won’t treat Roger in a fair and balanced manner. Who can say? I can tell you that the piece absolutely savages Mr. Ailes.

You have to be of a certain age to remember or care what a lying turd Dick Nixon turned out to be but it was Mr. Ailes who put him in the White House.

He disavows his political commitment to Nixon by saying that he never worked in the White House and was more interested in the political potential of TV than he was in politics itself — “I wasn’t worried about the message. I was worried about the backlighting.” And a year later Richard Nixon was still sweaty, still shifty-eyed, still petulant, still paranoid, and still instinctively mistrusted by most Americans. The only difference was that thanks to Roger Ailes, he was president.

Can he make that horrible lightening strike twice?

“What kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?”

If you love Fox News, you gotta love Roger Ailes because he IS the network.

What will 2011 bring for journalism?

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“…syndication makes little sense in a world with URLs. When news outlets were segmented by geography, having live human beings sitting around in ten thousand separate markets deciding which stories to pull off the wire was a service. Now it’s just a cost.”

“Giving credit where credit is due will reward original work, whether scoops, hot news, or unique analysis or perspective. This will be great for readers. It may not, however, be so great for newspapers, or at least not for their revenues, because most of what shows up in a newspaper isn’t original or unique. It’s the first four grafs of something ripped off the wire and lightly re-written, a process repeated countless times a day with no new value being added to the story.”

Full article by Clay Shirky