Recreating consumerism

Ad agencies are now using cyberspace to recreate consumer culture so that they can launch and test marketing campaigns without the real-world dangers of failure. This excerpt is from an Austin American-Statesman piece:

"In the same way you can create 'SimCity,' you can create a
virtual marketplace," said Maury Giles, the head of GSD&M's
accountability and analytics department.

"Instead of spending $30 million on a campaign you're not sure is
going to work, you can try it and run it ... It's like a simulation of
what would happen if we spend this amount of money on this
message with this group of people."

Giles said Icosystem's software allows GSD&M to simulate a
population of thousands of consumers.

The space can simulate all kinds of market conditions, from a downturn to the latest scandal, and then let the virtual consumers interact. My question: are we that predictable?

No Internet

Check out this South Park clip about the town waking waking up to no Internet.
Pretty hilarious. Talk about the burning need to resolve ambiguity being taken to an extreme.
This reminds me of a story not too long ago about a sudden blackout for Blackberries. Here is a snippet from that NYT article on Aug. 19, 2007:

Stuart Gold was in Phoenix on a business trip when the service went down. Mr. Gold, the marketing director for Omniture, a software firm, noticed ominous red X’s next to his outgoing e-mails.

He is not proud of what happened next.

“I started freaking out,” he said. “I started taking it apart. Turning it off. Turning it on. I took the battery out and cleaned it on my shirt. I was running around my hotel like a freak. It’s very sad. I love this thing.”

At some point we need to heed the cautions of Mumford, Winner and other medium theorists to heart: Do we wield technology or does it wield us?

From Dana: News as Business

I found this NYT article today and I think it brings up some interesting points about news being a business. As it seems imminent that Brauchli will resign from his post as Editor at the Wall Street Journal because of the involvement of Rupert Murdoch's involvement in the daily operations of the paper it raises the question: how much should the business side of a company be involved in a paper's operations? Is this affecting the quality of the news we, as consumers, receive from these papers? Do you think Murdoch allows any bad press about himself to be published in one of the nation's most trusted newspapers?

One more point: A plea to trained journalists

I wanted to raise an issue for everyone to noodle over a bit, if you would indulge me. I am going to the Cap Times a bit later and a reporter asked me to bring up something that has caused some consternation in the newsroom: online pressures causing reporters to repackage press releases and old news as new stuff. This is a trend that has been going on for sometime -- way before online worlds, I might add (VNRs anyone?) But the technological ability to publish 24/7 combined with the ease of resurrecting archived material for new packaging (see a recent post on the Observer for a case in point), leads me to plea to all you budding journalists out there: STICK TO THE PRINCIPLES OF JOURNALISM, no matter the pressure to do otherwise. A woman in my newsroom got fired a couple years ago for publishing press releases as her own work. And this was a Gannett newsroom. My point? People still care about original reporting. If the trained journalists start taking liberties because we want to beat citizen journalists, where does that leave democracy?

Blogger or Journalist or Who Cares?

Another blogger vs journalist incident has created more debate about how we should be thinking about citizens who write about 'news' via their blogs. Mayhill Fowler, who writes for the OffTheBus.net blog (founded by Jay Rosen and Arianna Huffington), attended (and paid for) an Obama fundraiser and then wrote about the small-town comments he made there four days later. This NYT article details her inner turmoil as an Obama supporter vs her inner journalist. She came under fire from many in the blogosphere for even considering not posting the comments because of her admiration for Obama.

Can we please stop debating this? I like to think a new CyberNewsroom is developing here where citizens who want to 'be' journalists mingle with sources and reporters and audiences in a new layer of the public sphere. Their work is needed -- more so now than ever. But let's not confuse the expectations of these bloggers with what we want from journalists. In the end, Fowler posted Obama's comments -- as any good citizen should.

Mash-ups for Social Movements

Anyone who doubted that new technology could help us help ourselves and make real change in the bad stuff going on in the world should take a look at this latest news to come out of Google. Google is working in partnership with the United Nations and a bunch of non-profits to construct mash-ups of maps and networks that reveal connections and disclose happenings around the world.

This is from a CNN report today:

The maps will aid humanitarian operations as well as help inform the public about the millions who have fled their homes because of violence or hardship, according to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is working with Google on the project.

"All of the things that we do for refugees in the refugee camps around the world will become more visible," U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees L. Craig Johnstone said at the launch in Geneva.

Users can download Google Earth software to see satellite images of refugee hot spots such as Darfur, Iraq and Colombia. Information provided by the U.N. refugee agency explains where the refugees have come from and what problems they face.

The attribute I like best about these is the feature that allows people to drill down into each point on the map, to get more specific information about that refugee camp or this politician, and then donate money or find ways to help. Talk about "shifting audiences." With such in-your-face altruistic opportunity, it's kind of hard to affect that narcotizing that sometimes occurs with news consumers, who feel that simply by reading the news one has participated in democracy.

From Melissa: Citizen Journalism

I wanted to post this to go along with the citizen journalism discussion on the blog. It is a survey about citizen journalism that I thought was interesting and relevant to the previous blog posts.

(The survey reports how journalists and audiences are responding to and considering citizen journalism.)

Walmartizing the news?

Apparently CBS is thinking about "outsourcing" its news to CNN. The NYT article on the topic linked the announcement to the latest State of the Media report on broadcast:

“In the end,” according to the report, “if the problems of network news can be mostly attributed to the decline in the overall audience of broadcast network television generally rather than something having to do with the newscasts in particular, then the survival of the networks’ news divisions in some ways may well depend on their liberating themselves from the broadcast television platform on which they were founded — and even perhaps from the networks themselves.”

This could mean that citizen journalism is going to be more important than ever. One of the other panelists during my session at the 2008 International Symposium for Online Journalism reported her findings about source diversity in newspapers versus citizen journalism sites. (See Serena Carpenter's paper on the site.). She discovered that citizens tend to source their stories with nonofficials and more women, among other findings. She also found that contrary to other studies, citizen journalists in her sample had original reporting the majority of the time (as opposed to merely aggregating information from other news articles).

We need to continue efforts to train and encourage such citizen journalism, lest our country's journalism becomes a one-stop super store.

Blogging to death? From Dana in 561

This is an article I found that may be of interest for the blog since it ties in well with the conference you just attended.

"There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.

One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes."

I just thought this was interesting given our blog discussion of online addiction and labeling it a disease.

"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet."

Local or comprehension?

Yesterday at the 2008 International Symposium for Online Journalism we heard from the CEO of Dallas Morning News tell us that his company is cutting back on anything that is international and national in scope, re. newsroom resources, and beefing up all local, all the time.
Today we are listening to research by a UT professor George Sylvie, and he says the better idea is to deliver convenience, comprehensiveness and timeliness.

“Rather than try to build it and they will come, why not give them something they want when they want it, and why not also offer timeliness and comprehensiveness in the same breath… How unique is what you do? Jim said local is inimitable, but I think you can become too local."

Who’s right? What do you want from your news? Is it all about niche niche niche, location, location location? What happens to a sense of nationalism if all the big newspapers start concentrating only on New York, or only on Dallas? Is a sense of nationalism even still relevant and important?
The second point I'd like to make: Why can't we do both? I think a newspaper can respond to and match its demographics while also providing timeliness, comprehension and convenience. Often I believe that the professed market strategy of "local" is really code for "cutting back."

Subtleties

I am still blogging from the Austin, TX, 2008 International Symposium for Online Journalism, and today we are listening to all the academics tell the journalists what they have been researching. Well... some of the journalists... there are about half as many people here today as there were yesterday. A shame since I think this is a great opportunity for professionals to take back to their newsrooms some audience and production research for free.
One thing that has struck me in these presentations is the desire to move from the obvious to the subtle:

Are newsrooms advocating cross platform content or cross media content?
Are they practicing convergence or integration of their print and online products?

I like that are starting to think about the emergent phenomenon of online news in such nuanced ways right now, but I worry that as academics we get caught up in labeling and categorizing at the expense of really exploring what it all means on a conceptual level.

Other points to come out of 2008 International Symposium for Online Journalism

Local newspapers should be thinking of their business in terms of:

-- web "browsing," not web printing
-- "community hosting" not community news producing
-- an organizer instead of a gatekeeper
-- giving unfiltered access to sites, creating stakeholders of everyone who visits
-- think of new ways to offer content (streaming video of events, partner with other organizations such as satellite radio, merchandising, special added value such as highlights each day to your inbox, customized mash-ups, cell-phone content such as live-game action with announcer of your choice)

And furthermore:
-- Local ad revenue spending was up to $7.6 billion in 2007, an 181 percent growth in marketplace, though newspapers have lost 18 percent of that pie.
-- The Washingtonpost.com has about 70 blogs; NYTimes.com has about 55.
-- Discussion groups, sort of like play dates (err... my analogy, not theirs), are hot right now.
-- Blogging is 10 percent about writing and 90 percent about community building, said one Gannett executive.
-- People feel "safe" blogging on their community newspaper sites because of the brand.
-- The Simpsons' launch garnered 20,000 comments on one USA Today article.
-- Editors are "trying to tap into online audiences to power new, relevant content channels," said one executive of the social media software site, Pluck.

New Newsrooms: Notes from 2008 International Symposium for Online Journalism

-- The head of the Dallas Morning News believes in "live" journalism models that are local centric and exclusive of international or national news. Indeed, the company is eliminating or downsizing mose of its foreign and national bureaus outside of Texas.
-- This last point did not go over well with the academics in the audience, who suggested that the Dallas Morning News was doing Americans a disservice.
-- Newspapers need to move from the mentality that they are in the newspaper business and towards the fact that they are in the "information" business.
-- The Daily Telegraph in the UK just re-trained 350 of its print journalists for online considerations. Yet it will "continue to invest in its newspaper assets." Their revenues to the website are growing 18 percent every year.
-- Nytimes.com employees are sitting with print reporters in a new newsroom. So are the Wall Street Journal reporters. And the Miami Herald.
-- Everyone is getting trained in video, which has become "viral." (Viral situations emerge when the item -- ie videos -- instills itself into an industry/culture/etc, where its very existence and operation reproduces over and over, until it is an epidemic.) But there is some mocking. Check out this video in which a professor makes fun of the Journal's foray into video etc. The point here? Just because you CAN make video doesn't mean you should.
-- The Wall Street Journal has videos on pumpkin boats and football-throwing lessons. What's up with that?
-- The diffusion of online technologies into these newsrooms involve: physical, technological and cultural integrations and transformations. This also means new seating plans. By far the biggest challenge is cultural, say these editors (24/7 news cycle, content providing, "audience"-to-"people" considerations).
-- Gannett is experimenting with videos that are 1:20 minutes long, and that is IT.

You can find the conference information etc here: http://online.journalism.utexas.edu/

State of the Media

The 2008 State of the Media report was published recently and any student of journalism should be taking a look. According to the Pew Center Foundation, which puts out the report, the major trends are:

News is shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, Web site or newscast — to becoming a service — how can you help me, even empower me?

A news organization and a news Web site are no longer final destinations.

The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, for now appear more limited, even among “citizen” sites and blogs.

Increasingly, the newsroom is perceived as the more innovative and experimental part of the news industry.

The agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden.

Madison Avenue, rather than pushing change, appears to be having trouble keeping up with it.

These trends, and the fascinating data that support them (check it out), have real implications for the way press theorists examine political/social/economic/cultural/personal life here in America.

We have entered a new "Answer Culture," the report states, and in response, newsrooms much adapt: "journalism may have to move in the direction of making its work more transparent and more expert, and of widening the scope of its searchlight."

I've been hearing this call for more transparency ever since I got into journalism nearly two decades ago. And lately I've seen lots of attempts to comply (I am thinking particularly of work being done at The Spokesman-Review, for example, with their posted reportage interviews and their broadcast newsrooms). But I do not see a lot more reality represented here, in the sense that by hearing the interview I have a better sense of what is going on in my society. Rather, I get a lot of information I am not really sure what to do with. Journalists are supposed to transform into "authenticators," according to the report. That's a good word, and a fascinating concept, but how can this be done while staying within the parameters of institutional, cultural and economic constraints (i.e. realities?) and still making meaning for people?