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Category Archives: television
When news and entertainment media collide
Columbia Journalism Review on ESPN’s conflicts of interest when it comes to college athletic conference realignment:
If you cover college sports for ESPN, you’ve got a real problem right now.The biggest story these days is the conference realignment that’s bringing tectonic shifts to the NCAA landscape, ending century-old rivalries, and setting longtime partners at each others’ throats.
Problem is, ESPN itself is at the heart of why this is happening. Its Longhorn Network deal with the University of Texas kicked off the mess, sending Texas A&M to the SEC because they’re so mad about the deal, which gives Texas $300 million over twenty years, puts a conference game on the network, and wants to show high school games and highlights (ever seen a ticked-off Aggie? It’s not pretty). The idea of a school-only network played a role last year in sending the Nebraska Cornhuskers to the Big Ten. That helped lead Colorado to leave for the Pac-12 and left the Big 12 near death, having lost a quarter of its members, including two premier ones. The instability in the Big 12 and movement toward superconferences surely played a part in the ACC’s recent raiding of the Big East’s Pittsburgh and Syracuse.
The near-destruction of the Big 12 sent Oklahoma scurrying to the Pac-12 in the hopes of finding stability in the west with Oklahoma State, Texas, and Texas Tech (don’t ask me why OU, my alma mater, still wants to be in a league with UT, but that’s another story). On Tuesday, the Pac-12 said no thanks, in no small part because it was “appalled” at Texas, which insisted on retaining its $300 million TV deal with ESPN.
How has ESPN covered its own role in the fiasco this week? Poorly.
Read on for more details, but remember: ESPN is an entertainment outlet that sometimes pretends to be a news outlet. That is an important distinction to keep in mind.
Television’s future, visual storytelling and more
What comes next for journalism in the social media? David Cohn has assembled a list of sites you need. He ends with a caution:
If you ignore these sites, you will fail to understand how a growing portion of the population deals with the flow of information, and inevitably how more people will deal with this flow in the future. The best journalists will be problem solvers on the social web.If you are a journalist your JOB is to understand and insert yourself into the flow of information. That’s what Google+ represents, the flow of information.
Meanwhile as to the branding of a journalist, here’s one successful case study, by Jennifer Gaie Hellum:
It takes extra effort to maintain an online presence as a journalist. And I admitted I couldn’t tell him which tweet would be the one that got him retweeted 25 times, which blog post would be shared around the world or which skill listed on his LinkedIn profile would make him rise to the top of a search.Nonetheless, I assured him all that extra effort was worth it because each tweet, each blog post and each online profile defined his brand and provided a virtual trail for potential employers to find him. I told him I knew this personally because I’d sent tweets that got dozens of retweets, written a blog post that someone translated into Spanish and shared from Peru to Spain and been contacted for jobs via LinkedIn, all while I was still a grad student. And I said there was no reason he and his classmates couldn’t do the same.
Today’s j-school students have everything they need to start mapping out their careers. They can write niche blogs, create simple portfolios, connect with others doing the work they aspire to do and develop professional networks across the country before they’ve even begun their job searches.
The task is clear, then.
Statistics for journalists. Great primer, there. Ten rules for visual storytelling, from Professor Mindy McAdams at Florida. It starts with this:
“I want to know more. I always want to know who, when, and where. Always! For me this is part of authentication, which is part of what makes it journalism and not interpretive art. A photo without a caption is not journalism.”
A photo without a caption is far short of adequate reporting.
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks, of course. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal, headquartered across the street from the World Trade Center, published their Pulitzer Prize-winning Sept. 12, 2001 edition.
Here’s an image of their rare six-column headline. They hadn’t ran that style since Pearl Harbor was attacked. The headlines — how do you cover a story that everyone knows about? — are instructive.
Meanwhile, our shared experience is becoming history. Here a teacher tells of his students with no memory of Sept. 11th. Too young. That changes things, doesn’t it? If you’re in college today you were probably 8- to 12-years-old. How does your generation perceive Sept. 11th? How has that perception changed in the last decade?
You’re welcome for free the story idea.
Quick hits: TV in the cloud, which gets to the heart of something mentioned here previously. This, too, will become a stratified industry as executives retrenches online. Here’s a bit more on the shifts in television distribution.
Finally, Professor Dan Gillmor said two interesting things on Twitter yesterday:
Journalists stopped being gatekeepers when they became stenographers, a long time ago.
That second statement is of great interest, both for you as a journalist and as a consumer. Which noun form do you suspect “you” takes there?
Journalism links 8/31
Paul Wallen, design director at The Huntsville Times, points out the handsome and stirring Assignment Afghanistan. It is an incredible example of bring all the tools and techniques available to tell a more complete story. There are great stories, amazing photographs, maps, flash timelines, video, the works. I encourage you to spend some time, learning about what’s happening in Afghanistan and being inspired by a wonderful project.
I mentioned Mircosoft’s breakfast media table concept in this space yesterday. I tossed out a little flip line about competing against television. And now, today, there’s Google’s CEO:
“History shows that in the face of new technology, those who adapt their business models don’t just survive, they prosper. Technology advances, and no laws can preserve markets that have been passed by.” Google chairman Eric Schmidt may not have intended those remarks as a verbal grenade, but many in his audience of 2,000 television industry members took them that way.Schmidt was speaking at the 2011 MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, where he gave the prestigious annual MacTaggart Lecture. The festival is attended by over 2,000 people with a business interest in television, including on-air talent, broadcasters, distributors, support services and digital innovators.
Schmidt was the first person invited to give the MacTaggart Lecture who was not in the television industry. His remarks therefore were tailored to address the interests of his audience, many of whom believe Google has a destructive effect on their business and a cavalier attitude toward copyright.
Viewing will shift, he predicts, and location will become a critically important contextual signal. There’s a lot in that story worth chewing on.
Howard Owens writes:
Every time a small town n’paper publisher puts up a paywall, a potential local indie publisher should hear cash registers ringing.
He should now. Who is Howard Owens? He’s publisher of The Batavian.
There’s a simple principle of economics at play here. Scarcity creates value. But. If you hide behind a paywall you make yourself scarce, at the risk of losing an audience willing to find their information elsewhere. As you might have noticed, information is often plentiful.
Remember, yesterday, when I mentioned either human or algorithm curation? Steffen Konrath found a story that quotes a prediction of 40% of large companies using context-aware computing projects in the next few years. Context motives content and interactivity. That engagement gets results. Forbes picks it up from there:
It’s often said that “content is king.” The ability to create high-quality content that attracts, engages, retains and converts visitors is still an important objective for every website. Content is indeed still the heart and soul of every site. But if content is king, context is its queen; and together they will rule the kingdom of audience engagement and of the corporate Web site experience.Context is the key to providing Web experiences that deliver business results. Context shortens sales cycles and grows revenue. It increases customer engagement and loyalty. Gartner describes as “Context-Aware Computing,” and defines it as “the concept of leveraging information about the end user to improve the quality of the interaction.” Gartner goes on to note, “Emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes and other environmental information to anticipate an end user’s immediate needs, offering more-sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions.”
[...]
There is no excuse for ignoring context on the Web. Context is just as pervasive and just as available online as it is in the physical world. It comes in as many forms including preferences, behavior, location and social networks, there to be used by savvy marketers if they only would.
There’s that word again, location.
Quick hits: Mindy McAdams on getting that first job in journalism. Great advice. Another Apple employee, another bar, another lost iPhone. I’m beginning to think this is the soft-pedal link technique of choice at Cupertino. The Iron Bowl version of Stranger in a Strange Land. GQ comes down to try to figure it all out. (Hint: Fans can be overzealous.)
Finally, the finalists for the 2011 Online Journalism Awards are publicized. Tons of great material to examine there.
Journalism links 8/23
How do you make a long-running feature into fresh news? Localize the focal point.
When Kathy Johnson was raising her rambunctious teen son just a few years ago, she never dreamed Sgt. William David Johnson would become the 571st soldier to have the honor.Johnson, a 2006 graduate of Rehobeth High School, will make his last walk as a Tomb Sentinel on Sept. 9, in front of a proud family and grateful nation.
[...]
“The Walk” itself is one of the most celebrated and viewed ceremonies in the U.S. military. Sentinels, dressed in ceremonial blues, carry an M-14 rifle and walk in front of the tomb. He walks 21 steps in one direction in front of the tomb, then turns and faces the tomb for 21 seconds. Then, he turns to face back down the mat, changes his weapon to the outside shoulder, counts 21 seconds, then steps off for another 21-step walk down the mat. He faces the Tomb at each end of the 21 step walk for 21 seconds. The sentinel then repeats this over and over until he is relieved at the Guard Change.
Sentinels guard the tomb through all weather at all times. The ceremony is often witnessed by large crowds during good weather. Often, however, the sentinel guards the tomb alone.
They patrol through hurricanes, by the way.
Speaking of natural disasters, the 59. magnitude earthquake in Virginia. Arizona State’s Professor Thornton said “J-students: If tweets from people you follow didn’t include earthquake tweets, you need to follow more people, more news.” And that point is true, especially when Twitter was out in front of cable news in the first few minutes. One must also be tempered by the knowledge that there’s an echo chamber effect. Panic on Twitter gave way to business as usual shots from most places that felt the tremblor. As in all things in life, balance is the key.
Here’s the U.S. Geological Survey data, posted immediately after the quake. The intensity map and the shake map which is one of the first examples of online crowd sourcing? “Did you feel it? Tell us?” There’s an organic and realtime feel to that map. They also say “If you felt the 5.9 quake, let us know…help us improve the data.”
Sky News has done a great job with Alex Crawford in Libya, earning praise for the network while their BBC colleagues have been a bit behind.
She’s done a fine job throughout, and this piece is a bit more personal, with more personal pronouns than you might expect, but the tech they are using is ingenious. “Sky News sources told The Daily Telegraph that the astonishing footage from the streets of Tripoli was produced using an Apple Mac Pro laptop computer connected to a mini-satellite dish that was charged by a car cigarette lighter socket.”
I like to tell students that the world they work in will be different than the working world we know today. How you do the job by the time you’re getting ready for retirement could be almost unrecognizable. Consider, a woman working in a newsroom today, and what she had to work with when she started in the 1960s. But even before that, there’s a slightly more contemporary question. What devices will you carry in a decade?
Futurist and author Kevin Kelly posits that in 10 years time, each of us will carry 2 computing devices on us: “one general purpose combination device, and one specialized device (per your major interests and style).” He also predicts that we will wear on average 10 computing things: “We’ll have devices built into belts, wristbands, necklaces, clothes, or more immediately into glasses or worn on our ears, etc.”
The piece touches on form factors, but doesn’t mention motility, which will remain a pertinent point.
The comments are great, and even includes a few links of possibilities, like this one:
Still looking for a story idea? Alabama is one of just six states that have lost jobs within the last year. There are plenty of stories waiting for you to discover.
