Jason Kristufek’s We Media blog

It seems there has been more written lately about the power of Twitter and so here I am about to add my two-cents worth.

I first signed up for the microblogging site more than a year ago during the Web 2.0 Expo, but didn’t really get into it until the past few months.

For those who don’t know Twitter is a social networking application that gives you 140 characters to tell those who choose to follow you what you are doing right now.

The number of uses for Twitter increases almost daily. The newsroom where I work has not yet taken advantage of the service for breaking news or any sort of coverage or networking, but my guess is that is about to change.

So here are two examples of how it can work.

One Saturday I was at a conference in St. Louis and a guy I was following on Twitter was complaining that the weather in Cedar Rapids really sucked and so he was thinking of not going out and shooting a video as he had planned to do.

Seeing this, I quickly sent him a message saying that if he did go out and shoot a video about the weather that I would put it out on the news site that I have some control over. He quickly agreed. The video was up the next morning and had about 3,000 views in about a day. Pretty cool, huh.

The second example is more abstract, but it comes from this kid Will, who I recently met for a cup of coffee. I met Will on Twitter and we have some similar interest in social and new media stuff.

Well, about a month or so ago, Will put a tweet out that he was spending another day job searching in the social media, new media realm.

another day searching for a job in new and social media marketing 09:28 AM April 18, 2008 from twhirl

I couldn’t believe what Will described happened in the next hour. Some HR person in San Francisco say Will’s tweet on the general public timeline and passed it and a link to Will’s blog onto the company CEO. The company CEO looked at the blog, found Will on Linkedin, downloaded his resume and then within an hour Will had an email in his inbox from the CEO wanting to know more. Pretty cool, huh.

And those are just two examples of the power that Twitter has.

The Associated Press has been going around to its members recently announcing some new technology and new ways it will distribute content.

I heard the announcement earlier this week at the Saxotech user conference in Tampa as the AP looks to integrate into Saxotech’s software platform.

This isn’t about more AP. It’s about a more relevant AP. It is all about finding new, smart ways to distribute content and make money on it.

I have to admit, I’m a little skeptical. I know we are all in this business to make money. But I wonder why the AP would put this statement out in this venue.

These changes will mean revenue stability for AP’s newsgathering efforts. Our members are currently getting about $600 million worth of journalism for about $108 million.

Anyway, on to the nuts and bolts. The big announcement was that the AP will allows its members to take advantage of a free classification platform for processing and enriching text, photos, graphics, audio and video. It’s a four step process that is said to take only a couple of minutes.

• Harvest - send your content to the AP for enrichment
• Enrich and index - the AP will then use its technology to classify, tag, and add meta data and so on to the content.
• Browse and select - the AP will allow its members to browse and the select which content to output.
• Distribute, integrate and use - the AP will offer various forms to distribute and use the enriched content.

The other news included in the announcement was the creation of a mobile news network, allowing members to have access to breaking news from all U.S. states and offering more content that media companies leverage in niche publications as they experiment in multiple niche areas.

I don’t know how relevant the AP will be in five years. Some of these changes are encouraging. But on a local level, I wonder how, specifically, these changes will help.

It wasn’t all business in Tampa this week. A couple of my colleagues can sing and took advantage of a local bar with a heck of a karaoke DJ.

The first video is Matt singing Billy Joel’s Piano Man.

The second is Matthew singing The Low Rider.

Shame on me for this. It shouldn’t take for my friend Matt to get some recognition on Beat Blogging for me to mention that he gets it and is doing a heck of job.

Matt is a reporter and blogger at the Gazette Times in Corvallis, Oregon. He has a personal blog too.

Watch this space for all things that don’t fit into the newspaper or work best online. And let’s face it: you know more about Corvallis than I do. Send me tips, links and background information to help me cover your city better. Let’s use this blog for a two-way conversation about our community.

Here is an actual blog post he did that sums it up for me and shows the value of what he is doing.

Rumor patrol…
We’re hearing rumors today about Hewlett-Packard.
Anyone have information on what’s happening? Send an e-mail or call 760-3183.

That’s simple and brilliant. Way to go Matt. Keep it up, and evangelize. And if anyone happens to be in the area, I will be visiting Matt and his lovely wife, Kristi, next week and attending The 2nd Annual Brewer’s Memorial Ale Fest in Newport, Or.

For those who don’t know, BeatBlogging.org “is a collaboration between 13 news organizations from around the country and NewAssignment.Net, to figure out how journalists can use social networks to improve beat reporting.”

Mike Blinder of The Blinder Group, a consulting firm that helps media companies maximize revenue, said at the Saxotech user conference this morning that Google is doing a fantastic job at killing yellow pages.

The mafia (yellow pages) comes to town every year and steals 18 to 20 percent of the revenue that newspapers should be getting in their local market. Google is doing a great job at killing yellow pages. The enemy of my enemy is my friend today.

You can view Blinder’s entire presentation in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2.

Blinder’s point opened something for me. My friend Tom believes search is overrated and I am still not sold on it either. But Blinder says you cannot ignore the $6 billion gorilla.

Used in this context, I can see a huge benefit for media companies and local advertisers.

You have to accept that Google is a huge player. Web searches are replacing yellow pages. What we have to do is help advertisers show up on the Google map that appears on the search results page.

Blinder’s point was that media companies cannot afford to be arrogant and think people will come solely to newspaper sites for local search.

You can do local search, but if you don’t incorporate Google, it’s a mistake. I like local search. But if you do it with the arrogance that ‘I am the only place people will search’, you will fail.

What do you think, does this theory hold water? If we are looking to build a local business directory, what’s are plan to incorporate the enemy? Should we be?

I’ll end this with some credit to my friend Matt who posted today a good test on this topic. I’m going to replicate the test here. I did a Google search for restaurants in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Here are some things to note, as Matt pointed out:

1. My newspaper web site is not on the first page of search results (and I’m stealing the last two word-for-word from Matt)
2. The top two sites contain reader reviews and do, in fact, highlight some pretty cool local eateries.
3. The search has brought up a couple of local restaurants who have done at least a passable job at SEO. Without an ally in the local media company, locals are taking the Web into their own hands.

How long can we afford to be in that position?

So I am over-achieving today with my third post, but I wanted share this because it has some validity with where I am at and the vendor I am meeting with today.

This presentation comes from Jeff Jarvis, who also teaches at CUNY.

We have to get our students ready to adapt as the tools inevitably evolve. But, of course, more than the tools change. The structure of the craft changes and with it the relationship of journaliasts with the public and with newsmakers. The structure of the industry changes and with it their jobs. And the structure of narrative changes as we have new ways to tell stories. So we are also teaching our students choice.

I’m at the first full day of the Saxotech user conference in Tampa and so far the talk has been good. I’m going to reserve full judgment until I see more, but the things I am hearing are OK.

Jeff Hoffman, Saxotech’s VP for client services, announced this morning the formation of a customer advisory board, an online user group and an online developer community.

Saxotech is committed to providing best practices teams, a framework, underlying architecture, contributing solutions and how-to videos.

The developer community is live. Here are some bullets points on the development site, as described by Erlend Viddal of Saxotech:

• An open source community within Saxotech
• A completely open environment with freely downloadable solutions
• A place where customers can contribute with own solutions
• Forums where customers can communicate with each other and Saxotech’s solutions group

A note from my Twitter feed: MatthewManuel Open Source within the proprietary client is no different than saying “With MS Word - you can write a story and share the text” about 1 hour ago from web

Viddal also provided some solutions currently on the development site. They include:

• AJAX based forums
• AJAX user management
• AJAX mini poll
• CCE wizard
• YouTube Solution
• My Favorites
• Marketplace

I’m in Tampa for a conference put on by the vendor Saxotech, a software company, and happened to catch an Eric Clapton concert.

You’ll be hearing more from me on the conference, but I wanted to share a few videos I shot from the concert on the Flip.

Here is Clapton playing Layla

Here is Clapton playing Wonderful Tonight

On Wikipedia, chronocentrism is defined as the belief that a certain state of humanity is superior to all previous and/or future times.

At the Web 2.0 Expo recently, Scott Berkun, an author, teacher and public speaker on creative thinking and innovation, defined chronocentrism as being prone to focus on the present and overstating the value of what we are doing right now.

Berkun’s point was that innovation becomes a commodity whenever chronocentrism is present.

The point of me bringing up the definition is that I see and read about media companies getting stuck in this grandiose sense of tradition and that chronocentrism inhibits their ability to innovate.

It’s getting better in the media industry, I feel, but as I am beginning to realize personally, being able to put a definition to a behavior is key to understanding how and why the need for change.

And I don’t want to get stuck on the word innovation either, which I think is almost a buzzword anymore. And I’m not about jump on Rob Curley’s bandwagon either. But, to me, innovation is basically doing cool shit that no one else is doing, and having fun while you do it.

Berkun defined innovation as a process that begins or introduces something for the first time. He further explained that innovation is always relative, that innovation is the multiple ways the innovator tries to solve a problem and that innovation really means exploration.

But the most important is this, Berkun said:

If you want to be an innovator you can’t do it in the abstract. You have to focus on a specific person or a specific problem. Then the definition has meaning. The sooner you can focus on a specific, the easier it is to innovate.

Berkun did a wrap up of his experience at Web 2.0 on his blog, and I’m going to tie a statement he wrote there to one he used in his talk at Web 2.0.

But note that the statement above is devoid of hyperbole like revolution, ground breaking, disruptive or transformative, things that are entirely subjective. If you identify a real problem well enough, you never need those words: the people who have those problems will naturally find what you do revolutionary if you really solve their problems.

Berkun has a lot of good stuff on innovation, too much to share here. He went through a 92-slide presentation at Web 2.0 that I’m glad I attended.

The one action item he suggested for folks that I think is a cool idea, but not new, is to give employees a free play day to experiment, be creative and prototype. And then, at the end of the day, make sure the employees demo whatever they came up with in front of an audience.

I want to touch on a subject that has opened a discussion around the building amongst online folks and photojournalists in the past few weeks.

About two weeks ago I approached the photography department to see about shooting local high school prom photos for online publication.

Mainly, I wanted photos of people standing next to each other looking pretty on prom night, for lack of a better description.

There was consensus among everyone that the content has value. Photos of people at prom are not new for news organizations to showcase online, and photo galleries are immensely popular online.

It also was a consensus that not a lot of talent was needed to take these types of photos

I did argue that staff photographers automatically bring a higher quality of photography by just showing up than someone off the street or even most freelancers.

The debate focused on who should shoot these photos. I thought staff photographers should be the first choice.

And here is why: I think the future of journalism requires staffing decisions to be made with more emphasis placed on audience demand rather than tradition, and I think the newsroom has to be flexible enough to cover these types of events, like prom, because of audience demand.

And it this case, it also would help the company extend some sort of branch, albeit not a great one, to audience that is often underserved.

Staff photographers say their time is better spent on more creative storytelling assignments, and that the types of photos I was asking for - people standing in front of a camera looking pretty - are perfect for freelancers.

There also was a concern about daily coverage suffering for at least a couple of days while a staff photographer spent a good deal of time at these events on a Saturday night.

I can appreciate both sides.

I am wondering what others think. How do you or your news organizations handle these types of events?

The solution we came up with was to have two freelancers take photographs of three high proms so far. And, as of being online for a day, the prom photo galleries have about 46,000 page views.