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An opportunity to join a forward-thinking digital team

July 2, 2009 by wemediaguru

I’ve never tried this before, but I am going to use this post to promote an opportunity to join an online team at Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Ia.

I realize many talented folks are not looking to join what could be considered a traditional media company. But we are not a media company that is standing still. We believe we are headed in the right direction with a blueprint for a complete community connection and the leadership to make it happen.

Here is an opportunity to join a progressive six-member team in a fun, fast-paced environment at a media company doing cool stuff.

If you are interested, check out the job ad or contact me via email with questions.

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It’s time for the full-court press

May 9, 2009 by wemediaguru

I spent the better part of a Saturday morning at a coffee shop in Cedar Rapids and found an inspirational and motivating article by Malcom Gladwell called How David Beats Goliath.

The basic wisdom behind the piece in the New Yorker is that when underdogs break away from conventional wisdom, they win.

Gladwell uses a true story of a weak youth girl’s basketball team who utilizes a non-stop full-court press to have a better chance against stronger teams, and does it to great success. But yet the full-court press is not widely adopted in the basketball world. Why?

When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, ‘even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.’

This article was increasingly important to my mental status as the place where I work is undertaking another round of reorganization and uncertainty and what our CEO Chuck Peters labeled in an email recently as “reorganization fatigue.”

We are facing the same economic pressures and societal changes as every other media company. We also are in a community that suffered a historic natural disaster almost a year ago which has added to the tough economic situation.

As a company we’ve gotten smaller and recently reprioritized. We’ve focused on the concept of separating content from product, changed roles and responsibilities and have more people wearing more hats than ever before.

I’m not trying to say our current plight rises to the level of David vs. Goliath, but if that gets you motivated, go for it. Rather, it’s a plea to understand it’s going to take unconventional ways, uncomfortable moments and an increased willingness to try new things.

What was perhaps most fascinating in the article was the research conducted by political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft. Arreguin-Toft looked at every war in the past two hundred years and found that when the weaker combatants changed the rules, their win percentage went from 28.5% to 63.6%. That’s an astounding figure. (From Dennis Yang who writes how this also applied to the business world).

On that note, I agree with Gladwell when he writes about effort and ability. It resonated with me as we face an uphill battle to transform a media company into a community connection and how daunting of a task that must seem like given all the negativity about the media industry.

David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability . . . because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

I like that we are not sitting back and waiting for something to happen. We are likely to reorganize again and rethink think how we are doing things. And, to me, that’s better than the alternative. Doing nothing and trying only conventional ideas is not acceptable.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider.

But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.

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Is Rob Curley joining the News Innovation crowd?

May 7, 2009 by wemediaguru

It started yesterday afternoon with a request to join his LinkedIn network, followed by a friend request on Facebook. Then came the personal email.

Rob Curley, most recently with the Las Vegas Sun, contacted me in what I’m taking is an initiative to join the News Innovation movement. He is also seeking an opinion and advice from me on a project his team plans to launch soon. All good stuff.

Now, I took Curley to task about a year ago in a post called Kicking Rob Curley While He’s Down for not including more of the news innovators in his projects and experiments. Most have them have been pretty cool, but my opinion was and is that we can all learn and benefit from collaboration since we’re all on the same side.

Now he’s reaching out to the news innovators, and I’m happy to be a part to the process. This is a good thing. I’ll share how it goes.

Here the email:

Jason,

Thank you for accepting my Facebook and LinkedIn invites!

I am taking your advice. All of our big projects here at the Las Vegas Sun are being “ran by” different folks across the nation to get their input.

We are working on something at the Las Vegas Sun that we would love to share with you to get your most-honest opinions, thoughts, advice, or basically whatever you’re willing to share.

:)

Do you have the time or willingness for it?

We would be honored if you would help us with this.

Thanks for considering!

rob

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My top takeaways from BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly

May 5, 2009 by wemediaguru

So I’ve had more than week to digest and go through the data and contacts I made at BarCamp NewsInnovation Philadelphia., and wow, was there some great stuff and smart, passionate people.

For me, the point of the news innovation movement has not been about talking and creating new ideas. It’s been about action and collaboration. I think most people got that at the BarCamp.

With that said, here were my big takeaways, and I’ll go into more detail on some of them below:

  • Collaboration – although messy and hard to replicate – is vital to success.  Collaboration solves the filter failure issue. (Originally I couldn’t find the right link to the ‘filter failure’ post until Scott Karp posted this).
  • Organizations need to commit to innovation, despite the cost, and the sharing of those innovations leads to smarter ideas in the future
  • We have to better create more relevant user experiences across print, digital, mobile and the next platform to come
  • Sales staffs at media companies still have no idea how to sell or be creative when it comes to digital advertising, business models or call-to-action types of monetization efforts.
  • Three dudes – Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink – who run Technically Philly offer a great lesson on a digital startup.
  • Not many of the news innovators work for media companies. A lot of the talent is working for companies trying to help the media industry evolve.

One concept that I have not yet fully explored, but agree with came from Ted Mann via Twitter: @turkeymonkey: #BCNIPhilly takeaway No. 1: If you’re creating a blog or website, forget about building your business model on advertising”

The comprehensive roundup of the reaction from #bcniphilly gives a better overview of the day than I can, but I want to go into more specifics about topics that resonated with me.

Collaboration

Media organizations must learn and be better at collecting and curating content based on topic in a collaborative, networked way. Those companies are only one voice and there are hundreds of others out there locally who like to produce, consume and share. We need to find those people, engage them, work with them, publish them and celebrate their successes within this newly formed network.

Scott Karp of Publish2 talked about collaboration in general at #bcniphilly (which you can also view), and also what his company is doing to try and make it easier for media companies.

We believe citizen journalism is part of a larger process where professional journalists still play the vital role they always have. The key is to enable dynamic and ongoing collaboration between citizens and professional journalists, where citizens can become a true practical extension of the newsroom.

In all this, it was clear that we need to recognize the wetness of collaboration. It’s messy and there is no perfect formula to make it work. But when it does, it’s magic.

Someone working alone with really cheap tools has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing five years ago. – Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo

Innovation

Steven King, the editor of innovation for washingtonpost.com, spoke about the web ninja’s team and about some of the past and future projects they are working on. View his presentation and watch a video interview with him.

The team is made of up only three people. Their job is to, as his presentation says, rapidly develop innovative ways to present news and information. They also work with a three-person ad innovation team.

“If we are not looking toward the future, than we have no future,” King said. “It is very important to have these types of discussions and be flexible to be able to work with whatever comes next.”

In some ways that’s what I meant when I wrote about “What are the jobs to be done” saying if it is to solely make money now, than we will fail. Yes, we need revenue to continue to operate but we need that three –person team, or whatever it is, of smart, talented people looking toward the future. If we do that, I think instead of being way behind, we’ll be more agile and better equipped to address issues when they arise.

The startup mentality

As I noted above #bcniphilly organizers Sean Blanda, Christopher Wink and Brian James Kirk started a web site, Technically Philly, that for me offered some good lessons for the startup mentality we need right about now.

Whitney Rhodes sums it up pretty well on how to get started by finding 1) a need 2) a community based on that need and 3) a way to reach out and fulfill said need for said community.

Technically Philly suggests you tackle a community you already consider yourself a part of. Technically’s founders, three recent college graduates and tech gurus, did just that. They saw a tech coverage hole in Philadelphia and created TechnicallyPhilly.com to fill it.

The reason why I mention this mentality is because it plays into the moving away from the institutional brand to the person brand. Our society and industry seems to be shifting to that mentality and having the skills and mindset of a startup is going to play a big role in that.

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The ‘how’ of C3 starts with you

May 4, 2009 by wemediaguru

I’ve spent the better part of five days reading and thinking critically about Steve Buttry’s blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.

I also asked others to assume that the blueprint was the way to go and offer thoughts and ideas about how to implement it.

I went through the document myself and made notes about where I thought ideas needed to be modified in search of my own ideas on how to do it.

But I was asking the wrong question.

The how doesn’t really matter. That will come. What matters right now is this: What part are you going to do? What part are you going to take ownership of? What part are you going to task on?

Ideas are cheap. Execution and follow through are worth so much more. Obviously, we have to be smart in what we do, but failure is part of the process.

So what part am I going to take? I am currently working to re-envision a local news and information web site. You can keep track of the progress at NewsTribe.us.

I will make a commitment to what Buttry describes as community content opportunities and take ownership of the local knowledge and personal content and connection portions so they have a home on GazetteOnline.com.

Local knowledge – An important aspect of the Complete Community Connection will be to develop the place where people of our communities and perhaps across Iowa turn for answers to their questions about this state and its communities: databases, community resources, services, history, unique aspects of local life (attractions, institutions and events) and a user-generated encyclopedia of local knowledge.

Personal content and connection – A longtime contradiction of life in the news business has been that we ignore or downplay the biggest news in the lives of the people we serve. If someone in your family graduates, gets married, has a baby, dies or has a major illness or surgery, that’s the biggest news of the year in your family and often in a broader circle of friends and co-workers.

I’ll keep you in the loop on the progress. Again, what part are you going to do?

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How would you implement the Complete Community Connection?

April 28, 2009 by wemediaguru

This post is aimed at the News Innovators including those I just met at BarCamp NewsInnovation Philadelphia. Yesterday, my colleague Steve Buttry published a blueprint for change in a concept called the Complete Community Connection.

I will embed the PDF below, but if 30 some pages are too much Mark Potts offers a good, condensed analysis called Inventing the Future in Iowa.

So let’s assume this blueprint is the way to go. How would you implement it? What would you build? What are the ideas do you have for applications, widgets and whatnot? What should the priorities be? Where would you start? I’m looking for specific ideas that you think can be implemented anywhere.

What would an organization with this mentality look like? If this is a startup, what would it be in the first three months? Six months?

I’ve just now read it and am beginning to digest it. (Even though we work at the same company, Gazette Communications, Buttry rolled it out to me like he did to everyone else via his blog. I’m not bitter, but it would have been great material to talk about at #bcniphilly.)

I will be working through it as I travel back to Eastern Iowa in the next day or so and I will post my own answers to the questions above by the end of Thursday (If I’m asking you to do it, I have to follow through as well).

So have at it. Ryan Sholin asked me at the end of the day on Saturday what’s next for the BarCamp NewsInnovation crew. Could playing a role in forming some specific examples on how to implement this plan be a first step? I’m not sure, but it can’t hurt.

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A quick recap of BarCamp NewsInnovation Philadelphia

April 27, 2009 by wemediaguru

I’m still in the process of downloading and processing the ideas and next steps that came out of BarCamp NewsInnovation Philadelphia on Saturday, but I wanted to share some quick links that help give a sense for the kind of day it was.

I also managed to sit down with Sean Blanda, who organized the event and ran with the idea of News Innovation, and put together a short clip.

A full recap via Twitter is available by using the hash tag #bcniphilly. Amy Gahran provided a quick glance from some of the best Tweets at Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

Greg Linch provided live blogging coverage from the CoPress on j-schools, Publish2, Web Ninjas and separating content from product sessions.

Christine Cavalier has several video takes using qik.

You’ll be reading more from me in the next few days on my thoughts and some ideas for what’s next with the News Innovation movement.

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Depicting reader comments in a visual way

April 27, 2009 by wemediaguru

We’re all aware that washingtonpost.com has been able to do some cool stuff in recent years. One of their web ninjas, Steven King – editor of innovations – presented at BarCamp News Innovation Philadelphia and one of the lesser known ideas caught my attention.

It had to do with the way comments were visual shown in the WP’s online feature called OnBeing. It is the first time I’ve seen where comments were displayed this way and thought it was pretty cool.

visual_comments

In the photo above, the main piece of content is the image of the kid in a red and white striped shirt. The boxes connect to the main content area are the reader comments. You see some boxes are larger and some are closer to the main content than others.

“The larger comment threats get closer to the original content,” King said. “The comments on the peripheral of the topic stay on the outside. The more conversation pieces that break off the more value the conversations are.”

King said the three-person web ninja team is very visual, thus the idea of representing comments in a visible way. Not everyone likes it, but I do.

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Personal brand vs. institutional brand

April 27, 2009 by wemediaguru

To kick off BarCamp NewsInnovation Philadelphia, I was invited by Anna Curran – and by invited I mean I just happened to be standing next to her – to participate in a panel discussion on branding and whether the future relies more on the invidual than the institution.

A very timely discussion since organizations are looking at the separation of content creation from product development, and many journalists have lost jobs but have skills to collect content, create networks and gain dedicated audiences..

Review the session via the Twitter hash tag #bcnibrand.

The questions that started the session were this: How engaged are you with tweets from reporters as opposed to media companies. Where is that affinity going?

branding_photo_session

Julia Kaganskiy made a good argument from the outset saying personal brands have always existed as personalities that operate outside of an institution. What has changed recently, however, is that personal brands can now exist and thrive on their own.

With that said, most agreed it’s based on building a level of trust as to who you follow, who you read and who you interact with.

Howard Weaver said authenticity is what matters the most, not where the content originated from. The institutional tweets are less relevant to him than individual tweets, for example, he argued.

Kaganskiy asked a good question in reply. Is the institution part of a journalist’s personal brand? Is the institution the reason people engage with the journalists at least from outset?

So if the paradigm is shifting from personal brand to individual brand, how do they play together so the audience gets the best results? Do they play together at all?

One person said that journalists should operate under the philosophy that the media company they work for won’t exist in five years. His advice was to create your brand, your niche, publish, develop a specialty and do what you can to gain audience. Basically, make yourself indispensible because people want to connect with people, not institutions.

Here is how the session ended: We recognize that institutional brands are being broken down to individual brands. We’re not sure whether that’s good or bad, but we think we should salvage what makes since from the institution while given the personal brands the chance to thrive.

What say you?

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I’ve arrvied in Philly

April 24, 2009 by wemediaguru

I just got settled into the hotel in Philadelphia, PA and looking forward to a fun weekend. Below is a photo looking out of my hotel room. I’ve never been here before. Can’t wait to join 150 journalists and others tomorrow for BarCamp NewsInnovation.

philly_1

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