Tag Archives: philadelphia

Norgs stories: The Web Disintermediates (wait for it…)

Posted on by

One of the ideas that gets branded about whenever slumping circulation numbers are screamed from headlines, CD sales are found to be tanking, movie ticket sales slumping, or broadcast TV viewers disappearing, is the notion that because the Web disintermediates the middle-man between content creator and content consumer, people are going to the Web and abandoning “traditional” media.

There is some truth in that to be sure, but there is also truth in that human nature abhors a vacuum. We seek out sources of information and entertainment we decide to trust. And as such, the Web has always created a new opportunity for intermediaries, bundlers of information and entertainment, and aggregators to help manage the flow we partake in each day.

A simple out of the box example – What is a good link blogger like Eschaton, other then an aggregator of sorts?

How about YouTube? What of Google or Yahoo!?

Something to chew on as you read the following stories:

paidContent.org: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment (source for the graphic)

Philly Future: MyFox Philadelphia – Fox News Wants Your Blog

Philly Future: DigPhilly.com – NBC 10 Wants Your Blog (includes a who-who in local social media efforts)

Washington Post: Howard Kurtz: At the Inquirer, Shrink Globally, Slash Locally?

Center for Citizen Media: Newspaper as Blog Portal

GigaOM: The Content Aggregators and the Fat Belly

The Sad Irony of Layoffs at the Inquirer and Daily News

Posted on by

Last week a prime example of the utility and the need, for news organizations like those in our newspapers, played out in the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer as it reported on mismanagement in Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services.

Mismanagement that has led to up to five children deaths in 2006.

In the report’s wake, two officials have been ousted and workers are left up in arms and in disarray, organizing a huge protest last Friday.

Contract negotiations are taking place at the Inquirer and Daily News, in the midst of huge shifts in the newspaper marketplace. Shifts that have been taking place for sometime now, shifts that force the issue – newspaper companies must change their business models or die.

Knight Ridder papers responded to changing marketplace, the past six years, with ever shrinking budgets, ever tightening belts, and consolidation of resources and empowerment in the hands of the few. The culmination of which was the fire sale that took place over the past year.

In Philadelphia a sense of optimism sprung as it was a group of local business leaders that purchased the papers. They talked of investment, and a recognition that further cuts were almost impossible to make.

So you gotta give the Daily News’s Will Bunch a pass for the bleak tone in his latest piece on the situation at the papers and the industry at large. I’m reflecting his irony here. This post being an echo of his in a sense.

How could he not feel that way with the memo him and other Philadelphia Media Holdings employees received Friday? A memo that sounded, I bet to his ears, all too familiar.

While saving the paper isn’t about saving jobs – it is about investment. Bold bets. A look towards the future. That’s hard to do with less and less resources, with folks busy just trying to keep up.

There is massive opportunity for the papers to reinvent their business models. And there are folks at the papers with the knowledge and wherewithal to do it (read all of Will’s post). But time is running out.

—————————————-

More at PJNet by Leonard Witt.

Condolences

Posted on by

To Susie Madrak, who said goodbye her father last weekend. Read her tribute to him. If you don’t know her, you are missing out on knowing a special, passionate soul. Her part in running the Norgs unconference was central to it being a success, in every way.

And to my friend Lynne, who lost her grandson this weekend.

My heart goes out to you.

Norgs Stories for October 10th

Posted on by

Whadda week!

  • Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock and everyone’s hearts are a flutter. There’s been much grousing about what this means (see Memeorandum), but like damn near always, I find what’s missing is a historical perspective. Google acquired large particiaptory media companies in the past. Think Blogger. Think DejaNews. This fits what has always been in the company’s DNA. A recognition that the web is social software. The frightening thing is that companies are liable to take the wrong lessons from this. Time for everyone to take a deep breath. For some interesting thoughts see Scott Karp, Scott Rosenberg, Niall Kennedy, Susan Mernit, lostremote, Jeff Jarvis, and Don Dodge.

  • ONA sounded like it was a success this year, where real progress was made and minds opened.

    Jeff Jarvis called it “The death of Eeyore”, sharing the optimism and passion he noticed at the conference.

    But it had to happen. Someone had to go back to that tired fiction,that tired lie – that of a ‘fight’ between blogging and journalism. This time it came from a blogger – Mike Arrington, of Techcrunch – who talks about it, from his point of view on his blog.

    It’s clear that from Jeff’s perspective, and Staci’s at paidContent,Arrington turned it into a polarized circus, and helped make bloggers look bad.

    Mike Arrington doesn’t speak for the rest of us folks. Take note of Staci’s and Jeff’s reactions. We gotta continue to build bridges of understanding – not walls.

    Amy Webb was there and thought that papers might be looking to hard at video as a savior.

  • Speaking of building bridges of understanding – Doc Searls has a set of ten tips for newspapers, that sound very much in line with what we’ve been discussing here. It’s a good read, even if you find yourself nodding in agreement the whole time.

  • Jay Rosen’s Q & A at Slashdot is a real must read. He answers, in depth,questions about NewAssignment.net, Citizen Journalism and the news industry.

  • Rebecca Blood, talking about product customer service, and a concrete example with United Airlines, explains how Social Media Works.

  • A long piece, that I have yet to read, but which looks to have much to chew on, is Alice Goldman’s paper (of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law) Community Node-Based User Governance: Applying Craigslist’s Techniques to Decentralized Internet Governance.

Hey – what’s a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.

Norgs stories of the week

Posted on by

Craig Newmark doesn’t plan to cash in on the current tech media bubble: “We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they’re not any the happier. They also need bodyguards.”

Michael Kinsley in Time asks Do Newspapers Have a Future?.

Seth Finkelstein in the Guardian writes why you might not want a Wikipedia piece on yourself. Leads me to comment on his blog, “I feel craven and souless – but I *want* someone to care about what I’ve done so much as to contribute to Wikipedia article on me and Philly Future. But I’m not *notable*. Just an average Joe. And as some would say (Ben Franklin I believe) – I guess I haven’t done anything worthy of being written about yet.”

Newsvine plans to expand into local news coverage according to Mike Davidson in a thread at paid Content having to do with the economics of local news coverage and an interesting article at The Seattle Times on Citizen Journalism.

Does Bob Woodward have enough juice left to influence the debate on Iraq? Or will his book be looked at as just another partisan hit job (ridiculous considering the other books he’s published painting Bush in a positive light)? Do facts matter anymore? Or is all that matters in this post-modern me-media age is our own points of view?

I’m starting to see technologists waking up to the political situation in the country now. About time. Lets ask ourselves, in this age of uber-connectivity and communications tools – why are we growing ever more divided, and ever more frightened?

Jay Rosen is taking questions about Citizen Journalism at Slashdot.

Mark Glaser publishes a guide to Citizen Journalism referring to a timeline published by IndyMedia’s Chris Anderson.

But where’s the mention of Slashdot?

Terry Heaton says that papers should work harder to provide databases of local information:

Remember that Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible. That ought to be the core goal of any Media 2.0 business, because that’s where the eyeballs and the money will be. We can either be contributors to the knowledge/information base by supplying content (the expensive end of the value chain), be the aggregator of local the local knowledge/information base, or we can do both. Let’s see, hmm. Which path should we take?

Hitwise opens up to reveal some interesting information from its datacenter. Look at the market share the top 25 have. It strikes me that it is so… small. Think about it.

Journalists confronting each other was a theme this week as The Philadelphia Daily News’s Will Bunch challenged the Washington Post’s David Broder to do better journalism and Salon’s Scott Rosenberg challenge’s Slate’s Jacob Weisberg to do the same.

Google Reader, Google’s RSS personal aggregator, upgrades. Its new functionality and UI are good enough to provide Bloglines with its first real challenger, as far as I’m concerned. I think I’m switching.

Jeff Jarvis gets on ABC with a clever piece about participatory media.

Hey – what’s a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.