How many events will it take for the world to notice the other war in Sri Lanka: the war against the media that’s been going on for some time. Since the nineties, in fact.
News just in about the killing of the editor of a leading newspaper, following the attack against a news organization.
The Guardian, Reuters The Associated Press
Yahoo News and IFJ
One week after we heard that the news Chicago Tribune filed for bankruptcy protection, this piece of news about news was long overdue: The Pulitzer Board just announced it has expanded to recognize web-only journalism.
Indeed, many mainstream journalists have their own blog out of a changed job description, or recognizing the realities of a changing news landscape. The announcement:
The Pulitzer Board also has decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories.
Interestingly, one story below on the Pulitzer site: “Pulitzer Prizes redesign Website.
Given that social media are always on, how should you exploit it for a breaking event?
If you’re in an incident command center, then you have powerful channel –more ears to the ground, more lenses, more raw “intelligence.”
If you’re a news organization, you have a potentially dangerous weapon. Meaning, you could easily abuse it and have hell to pay. CNN’s iReporters are citizen journalists, rated by visitors and viewers to the iReport site. How? “It’s all in the math,” they say. The rating system assigns Superstar status to those with more reports.
I’ve heard a lot recently about how social media played a important part in Mumbai attacks, in communicating and updating ongoing messages of distress, mainstream reporting and even some forms of citizen journalism. Often, we could not believe what we were seeing and reading about.
But we cheerleaders of new media tools need to be careful and also admit to the potential downsides of such raw, real-time communication.
On that note, it is heartening to see that the BBC is also admitting to some of the risks it should not have taken, such as being careless about fact checking: “simply monitoring, selecting and passing on the information we are getting as quickly as we can.” In other words, just because we do have access to more eyes and years and thumb typers, doesn’t mean we should compromise on what the media does best –act as a filter, and put things in context.
Takeaways:
1. Adaptation: The use of the microblogging format as a news medium is still a work in progress. As someone commenting on this story said, the Beeb should adapt its journalism to the new tools “instead of dropping Twitter with burnt fingers.”
If we look back at how television blundered and blundered when covering major events in its early days, (look how they still do even now!) social media channels like Twitter have a long ways to go.
2. Naivete. Just because technology is used ro do bad things doesn’t mean it should be off limits. There’s anxiety that Google Earth is dangerous because one of the Mumbai terrorists used it in the plot. As one person commented, “Did they use any sort of shoes or boots? What about rope? Let’s ban everything….” !
3. Collaboration. Twitter and Flickr played a big part in providing rich information. But it did not prove that new media was better than old media. As Gaurav Mishra notes, “Twitter, and new media and mainstream media complemented each other in covering this story.”
The journalism school at Arizona State University celebrates 50 years this month.
A whole range of events, here. Topics cover Free Press in the Digital Age, A First Amendment Forum, TV Journalism, Business Journalism etc.
This month, the Cronkite school will also award Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, the PBS news anchors, the prestigious 2008 Cronkite Award. Past winners have included Tom Brokaw, Hane Pauley and Helen Thomas
The challenge of facing the media cannot be solved by studying our talking points, and coming up with zingers. As the media morphs into a real-time machine with a Google-enhanced memory, there are forces to be aware of.
Dan Gillmor, who now heads the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, recounts an incident that took place in 2002 that is even more relevant today. He was reporting in near real time via his blog about a panel discussion where then Qwest CEO Joe Naccio “whined” about the difficulty of raising capital.
The conference was in Arizona, but within minutes of his posting the story, someone in Florida emailed him a link to a story about Naccio cashing $200 in stock even as his company stock prices dropped. Gillmor posted that link in his next post, and almost instantly, the audience began to turn hostile against Naccio.
The feedback loop had unexpectedly given the audience –not the audience Gillmor thought he was writing for, but which happened to be sitting sight next to him– a new perspective. That audience-with-an-audience was also something the speaker never thought he would be facing.
Why should you care as a communicator or marketer?
News is under attack from many sides. There are digital missiles, financial grenades, dwindling readership and viewership, and the there’s the credibility factor.
So a story like this of a fabricated, unverified “source” brings up serious issues. Says The New York Times, peeling back the curtain:
“Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.”
Which is to say, not just old media but new media and hybrid media tend to get taken for a ride very easily.
OK, so this was just a prank –a film maker trying to make a name, no different from say, Lonely Girl trying to make a career. But we have seen this script before haven’t we, and they have had serious consequences. Remember SwiftBoat, and Dan Rather’s “gate“, and Jason Blair, and … the list could go on.
Let’s face it. Trust, has been shifting from authority figures and truth verifiers to (drum roll…) “people like me.” But even we are easily influenced (duped?) by some digital presence from people like us. When we do our due diligence as communicators we tend to assume that:
In a recent Harvard study, people trusted Cable news twice as much as Broadcast news. For print, credibility was nearly a quarter of Cable news. None of this is comforting. The Martin Eisenstadt story broke on Cable news first. But the scary part? Even bloggers were linking to the fake Mr. Eisenstadt!
Fun Sidebar: If you think most of the news is made up, take a look at at this edition of the New York Times. From the cover story, you might gues it is a fake New York Times.
I spoke to someone whom I thought might be interested in a Media Training session today. His reaction was “I don’t talk to the media. Nothing good ever comes out of it!”
Wow!
I was slightly taken aback, even though I have heard something like this before. (No, it was not Sarah Palin.) In fact, I have a mailer on my wall that announces “Don’t talk to the media…” On the reverse, is the line “until you talk to Gerard Braud.” Gerard is an IABC member I met earlier this year, who conducts this kind of thing, and his point is that you could tell an honest story, stripped of spin, and still have a great media experience.
Which brings me to the whole point of this. A survey of journalists just out (Bulldog Reporter/Techgroup International) on media relations practices. It’s an excellent insight into how journos think, what they do to connect (or avoid) PR spin, and how they stay on top of stories using social media. Among the findings:
So if you don’t want to share the same oxygen as journalists, at least try to make it easy to let them suck in your RSS feed from a distance. And that’s not just your from press releases, and your ‘about us’ page, but from your white papers, interviews, podcasts, blogs & thought pieces (same thing, huh?). We may not trust them, but we could trust them to do their ground work if we give them less puff pieces.
Hey, I can afford to say this because I wear two hats. I communicate with the media on behalf of whom I represent, but I also interview companies for my freelance writing.
In time there will be some big-picture interactive tools that let people look back at the great stock market crash we are witnessing. The roller-coaster indexes, the side-effects of deregulation, and the people behind the collapse.
The New York Times mapped how the crisis unfolded.
Here is one more, from the Guardian newspapers in the UK.
John Ridding, CFO of the Financial Times notes that, counter to most reports of newspapers dying, the FT is growing. Especially now.
As Reuter’s reports: “Newsstand sales rose 30 percent in the United States in September, and about 20 percent in Europe and Asia. “We basically couldn’t print enough copies and retailers were running out.”
His story is echoed in another market – the Middle East. “Don’t panic! says the editor of National says, “don’t head for the hills yet.” The Abu Dhabi newspaper was launched earlier this year.
But over here, it’s all doom and gloom. My hometown newspaper is cutting back, too. I don’t believe the struggle is between print vs online. That’s too simplistic, and from a marketing point of view, we communicators need to look deeper into these ‘death of’ stories.
The real struggle is not for this platform or that, between dead trees and PDF. The challenge we are up against is fighting for a finite amount of attention. You got this far reading this? I am flattered! Here’s a quick quiz:
I’d love to hear. It only takes a minute to respond!
Attention-deficit communication strategies will soon be front and center of everything we do, whether it is a press release, a podcast, a white paper (who reads those, you ask!) or a 20-page report. The printed word will survive, but like the way newspapers have been forced to adapt, so will we.
“”We are all Hussein.”
“Twitter is the public square. Lots of noise, little signal. Blogs are like a speech. Signal, but little noise.”
“Google is the perfect example showing reputation does not correlate with ad spending,”
“In this election the internet is for the Democratic Party what talk radio was for the Republican Party in the last 15 years”
“I’m not retiring until every American agrees with me.”
Rush Limbaugh, quoted in the New York Times, in a story on his $400 million contract with ClearChannel.
“Twebinar”
“Police wnt u to fight crime w/txt msgs.”
“Your Personal Brand may be doing much more harm than good… to others.”
Hoipolloireport 