by Mark Glaser, Host and Editor, MediaShift, PBS.org
There was a time when all you needed was a good record review in Rolling Stone or a stellar book review in the New York Times to get a boost in sales and popularity. But as those old gatekeepers lose their cachet in the digital age, a new set of gatekeepers has sprung up and they don’t have bylines. These are the editors who pick featured artists and apps at the Apple iTunes store, who choose videos to spotlight on YouTube, and who highlight Suggested Users on Twitter.
by Mark Glaser, Host and Editor, MediaShift, PBS.org
You’ve probably heard how much the microblogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social-networking site Facebook can boost your company’s profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these start-ups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren’t familiar with their Terms of Service.
by Mark Glaser, Host and Editor, MediaShift, PBS.org
Last summer, the British cellphone carrier Vodafone announced it would be offering a new filtering service for its Czech customers. “Child pornography and promotion of racism [are] such socially dangerous content that we have access to it automatically blocked for all of our customers,” said…Vodafone in the press release.
by Mark Glaser, Host and Editor, MediaShift, PBS.org
The numbers tell the story of the disconnect between online videos watched and online video ads sold: In December 2007, Americans watched 10 billion online videos, according to comScore. For the entire year of 2007, advertisers spent just $554 million on online video ads, according to Jupiter, while they spent $21 billion on all online ads.
The state of investigative journalism in America is in its five-alarm fire phase, with newspaper staffs being severely pared down, and TV news going for flash and celebrity. But Charles Lewis, the godfather of nonprofit investigative journalism as founder and former director of the Center for Public Integrity, would rather put out the fire than simply yell “fire!”
The younger generation will be our future leaders. We hear that a lot in politics, but it also applies to media companies wondering who will be leading them into a digital future. National Public Radio has two programs–Next Generation Radio and Intern Edition–aimed at training young folks to do quality radio reporting the NPR way. Not surprisingly, those twentysomethings have also pushed NPR further into the digital realm, creating an eye-catching blog and using Public Radio Exchange, an online marketplace for radio reports, to get wider distribution for their work.
In a world of social-network widgets, videoblogs and Web 2.0 gewgaws, sometimes it’s the simple things that work best. That’s the lesson of Web 1.0 start-up The Smoking Gun, a simply designed site that relies on public documents and criminal mugshots to bring in boatloads of traffic.
Silicon Valley journalist/blogger Tom Foremski had had enough. Two years ago, he wrote a poison pen letter to the PR industry in a blog post titled “Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!,” in which he exhorted publicists to break down press releases into sections, tag the information and provide links to more sources. … Much to Foremski’s great surprise, PR pros actually listened.
We are a society that lives more and more in our technology-induced bubbles. When we go outside, we wear an iPod; we talk on cell phones while driving. In urban areas, we might never meet our neighbors unless there’s a fire or earthquake. But can technology also help bring us together in our physical communities, and help us get to know our neighbors? Front Porch Forum (FPF) is making a valiant effort to do just that, offering up closed email forums that are strictly limited to people living within each physical neighborhood in Chittenden County, Vermont.
Elizabeth Gotsdiner got Joe Biden’s errant spittle in her mouth. Shantel Middleton got to ride on a Ron Paul blimp. Mayhill Fowler was following Barack Obama canvassers and ended up helping them carry brochures for the candidate.
Each of these folks represents a new class of semi-pro journalist tasked with covering the U.S. presidential election in innovative, more personal ways.
I struggle nearly every week with an identity problem: Am I a blogger or a journalist? Most times, I can take the easy way out and think of myself as the nouveau blogger/journalist or journalist/blogger–but which one comes first? Nags my inner pigeon-holer.
The time-worn debate of bloggers vs. journalists has finally run its course. For years, traditional journalists scoffed at bloggers as pajama-wearing screamers, while bloggers have pointed to MSM (mainstream media) as secretly biased and obsolete. While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly (and it continues to this day), what has happened quietly in the background has received less attention: Mainstream media reporters have started blogging in droves, while larger blog operations have hired seasoned reporters and focused on doing traditional journalism.
There was a time not so long ago when home computers sat on desks away from the main action in households. People used them for basic productivity tasks such as word processing and spreadsheets. Now, things have changed to the point where our home computers have become a center of our entertainment universe, offering up music, videos and photos.
If you’re following the twists and turns of Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo, you can’t escape one name that keeps popping up in the media: Eric Jackson. As an activist shareholder in Yahoo, he has become the voice of the opposition, calling on Yahoo to accept Microsoft’s takeover bid–or any reasonable bid. Last year, he was instrumental in raising a ruckus online over Yahoo’s poor stock performance, and helped get Yahoo CEO Terry Semel ousted.
But what’s amazing about Jackson is that unlike the big-name activist shareholders such as Carl Icahn and Daniel Loeb who have huge war chests to buy up stock, Jackson is a small fish. He only owns 96 shares of Yahoo stock. Where Jackson has innovated is in using the tools of social media to gather support from other shareholders and get the attention of the media to make his case for corporate change.
Today is President’s Day in the U.S., celebrating the February birthdays of past presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. But rather than looking back, I’d like to look forward to the next president of the United States–whoever he or she will be–and consider how they might use technology and new media to be more responsive to us.
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