Social Media Icing On Old Media Cake

The social media do appear to be saving old media. For now.

According to the Pew Research Centre's New Media Index, 99% of stories linked to in blogs during the year to January 15, 2010 came from "legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And... the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links."

Of course, while you may be reading a blog that links to an 'old media' story, that doesn't necessarily mean you've bothered to read that story. And every minute you spend reading the blog is time you don't spend engaging directly with 'old media'. Yet the social media are a source of both links and evidence of what resonates with readers.

So the old media may still be baking the cake, but the social media are supplying the icing. And who likes cake without icing? [That's enough analogy now. Ed.]

The reason this dynamic may not last is that the old media seem to be ignoring the stories that resonate most amongst the social media. Pew found that "the social media tend to home in on stories that get much less attention in the mainstream press. And there is little evidence, at least [in the year to 15 January 2010] of the traditional press then picking up on those stories in response."

In fact, you might conclude from Pew's table above that the mainstream press ignored the scale of reader demand for news on politics, foreign events, science, technology, the environment, pop culture, 'oddball', gay issues, consumer news and education. And it's worth noting that news related to "gardening, sports or other hobbies" was not tracked.

It would be interesting to see whether this imbalance is rectified in the coming year. But if it is not, I wonder whether old media will find itself permanently losing readership in these areas?

If so, no more cake!

Image from Petit Pois

Will The Social Media Save Old Media?

Interesting talk by Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian last night, hosted by Olswang as part of it's +Technology initiative. At last it seems the Web 2.0 sunlight is beginning to penetrate the gloom of the traditional media board rooms. They accept the unthinkable is now reality, as Clay Shirky would put it.

Whether it's all too late for newspaper publishers has occupied many conferences in the past year, the latest being the American Society of News Editors’ annual convention, where Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, seemed to promise a way to enable them to make money but was thin on the detail.

Alan's view of the Guardian's future rests on journalists' expertise in finding, aggregating, editing and opining on current affairs. The mistake newspapers have made to date is to presume they have a monopoly on the 'news' (now a freely available commodity) and must only deal in their own proprietary material rather than being a lens on all the relevant material in the world. Successfully lighting up Twitter with, say, the Trafigura affair (something that Private Eye missed an earlier opportunity to do), is only a glimpse of a brave new world. The Guardian now casts its net more widely for content, beyond its journalists, staff critics and commentators, and tries to foster discussion amongst the experts on topics of the day. Apparently it even offers the opportunity for regular thoughtful commentators on its stories and blog posts to 'graduate' to being paid to write stories.

Alan's thoughts echo those of a post by Ryan Sholin, Director of News Innovation at Publish2 on why newspapers should link to the rest of the social media (my edits):

"1. Bring your readers the best links related to your story, and they will thank you by coming back to your news site, which is no longer a dead end but a point of connection where they can find other interesting streams.

2. If all you provide your readers is flat content that doesn’t take them anywhere else on the Web, or back up statements with direct sources, or provide resources for those who want to explore a topic beyond what you’ve been able to provide with original reporting, you’re just shoveling text into another bucket, labeled “Web.” Your news site shouldn’t feel like an endpoint in the conversation. It should feel like the beginning.

3. Because it’s the best way to connect directly with the online community. If you mention a person or organization, link to them. Bonus points if you dig deep enough into the local online community to link to relevant content created by them. Sometimes they link back.

4. The days of your news organization existing as a monopolistic source of local information are over, and your readers know it. They browse local, national, international, and topical news and commentary in more places than you call “news.” But you’re the person in town who knows everyone who knows everyone. You’ve got the sources. Bring what they know to your readers as directly as possible: Link to them. David Cohn of Spot.Us offered up the now-classic Jeff Jarvis line: “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

5. By opening a two-way channel to let your readers tell you what you should link to next, you’ll cut down on the time you spend looking for that next thing... you’ll make it easier for sources who know the answers to your questions to find you, and you won’t spend as much time trying to find them."

All these thoughts resonate especially with me in my role as a member of the Society for Computers and Law media board. For nearly a decade I've witnessed firsthand the SCL's growing pains from magazine-only publisher, to web site publisher, to the operator of modest groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, to blogger, to budding member of the Twittersphere. Even now, the debate continues about how the Society should best participate in the social media in ways that will add value to the modest annual subscription, e.g. by supporting members' research activities, and running insightful events that also help meet lawyers' Continuing Professional Development requirements.

One thing seems assured: the social media, not newspapers, have shaped the future of journalism.

Photo from KPAO

"Green Shoots" Shot

It will come as no surprise at all to anyone that the UK is still crunched. Yet the economic headlines in our miserable newspapers have been flip-flopping around like so many dying fish, claiming green shoots and "milder" forecasts one week, and doom the next. TV and radio reports are no better.

Readers of Flat Earth News won't be surprised by this either. The traditional media have been reduced to merely summarising speeches and economic reports without having the time or resources to check the facts, to put the "news" into any perspective, or to thoroughly state the context or bias for each report they're citing.

So it's about time the newspaper publishers really save some money, by cutting out the middlemen and delivering directly from the paper manufacturers to the fish'n'chip shops. That way they won't need to print a thing.

And if we simply ignore TV and radio news, it too will go away.

Something Decent To Read

I rarely have time to read for the pleasure of it. So when I do get the chance to settle down with a book, I like to know it's going to be worthwhile. The joy of the Internet is finding great things you once read and working out from there. Reviews are helpful, as is knowing how someone else stumbled across the book.

My own tale of discovery really begins in 1976, when my father introduced me to Tom Wolfe's The New Journalism, which marked the shift from dispassionate news reporting to stories where the journalist is somehow involved. I was also captivated by Wolf's own collection of magazine articles wonderfully entitled The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. From there I meandered to Hunter S. Thompson (RIP) and The Great Shark Hunt and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

Much of the New Journalism was spawned by the Vietnam War, and some of the best writing from that conflict can be found in Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato and If I Die In a Combat Zone, as well as Michael Herr's Despatches. Norman Mailer seemed to find a similar voice in The Naked and The Dead, about the soldier's lot in the jungles of World War II (and recently Sgt Dan Mills captured it in the recent Gulf War in Sniper One).

Of course, Kurt Vonnegut took war reporting to a different plane in Slaughterhouse 5, about his experiences following the fire bombing of Dresden. His wondrous view of the world (partly via the planet Tralfamadore) can also be found in Breakfast of Champions. I've found some resonance of that in Nicholson Baker's brilliantly observed and highly entertaining The Mezzanine (the story of one man's lunch hour), Vox (a voyeuristic eavesdrop on a chat-line conversation) and his unashamedly voyeuristic tour de force, The Fermata.

Latin American magic realism has also tickled my fancy, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude to Louis De Bernieres' The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman.

I actually studied English literature and modern American novels for my Arts degree. That turned me into a fiend for Hemingway (A Farewell To Arms, To Have and Have Not, For Whom The Bell Tolls), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender is The Night, The Beautiful and The Damned, The Great Gatsby) and, of course, Catcher in the Rye.

But it hasn't all been high literature. I love crime fiction, and Raymond Chandler was a maestro (Farewell My Lovely, The Big Sleep - a great film - and The Lady in The Lake), as was Dashiell Hammett (especially The Maltese Falcon - also a great film). Since the '50s Elmore Leonard has been king, I think partly because none of his characters is necessarily good or evil (try Pronto, Out of Sight, Freaky Deaky, Get Shorty, Be Cool and so on). Others include the darker, police perspective of Ed McBain (Kiss is great), the blackly comic Carl Hiaasen (Tourist Season, Skin Tight, Double Whammy, Native Tongue, Strip Tease, Skinny Dip and so on), the laid back but brooding Tony Hillerman (A Thief of Time, Fallen Man) and the chilling Michael Connelly (The Black Echo, The Last Coyote, Angels Flight). The story of a crack dealer, Clockers (by Richard Price), sits somewhere between New Journalism and crime fiction.

I had a stab at turning an old manuscript into a screenplay while living in New York in the mid '90s, and Syd Field's Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting and The Screenwriter's Workbook were hugely helpful on plot and structure in particular. His dissection of Four Screenplays is a must, once you have the basic theory. Robert McKee is also very highly rated, of course (Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting). I also found Joe Campbell's The Hero's Journey a huge help in figuring out characters and their roles. I finished the screenplay, but it needed far more time and it was time for me to get back to London and earn some cash!). And a fantastic experiment in linking literature and film is to set aside a day to read Conrad's Heart of Darkness and T S Eliot's The Hollow Men, watch Apocalypse Now, then the film about the making of it (Hearts of Darkness) and, finally, read Eleanor Coppola's Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now. It's a fantastic journey accompanied every step of the way by the same sense of brooding malice.

While living in New York I became enamoured of JP Donleavy's The Gingerman, which I read after seeing a quote from the book in the bar of the same name. An interesting comparison is Jack Kerouac's On the Road, also written in 1955. It seems to have been the year for manic flows of consciousness. And I must say that chimes pretty well with my experience of living in NYC.

On the blogging front, I've found plenty of inspiration for my contrarian viewpoint in books like Liar's Poker (arguably, the story of where the ethos that powered the credit crunch began), The Black Swan (avoiding or exploiting situations and products that are predicated on their being no surprise events that will have a huge impact), The Long and the Short of It (you're on your own: pay less, diversify more and be contrarian), Blink (the power of the sub-conscious can mean decisions made quickly are as good as those we labour over - but see The Black Swan!), Freakonomics (basically, using data mining to re-appraise assumptions, like what determines a child's academic performance), Flat Earth News (confirmation - if you needed it - that newspapers can only make money if over half of the so-called journalism is a bunch of press releases - we need our news unbundled, like our music etc) and The Lexus and the Olive Tree (once globalisation hits your ville, there's no one you can call to stop it). More recently, I enjoyed Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die, about the tyranny of positive thinking, and Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold, a very readable account of the credit crunch from the standpoint of the JP Morgan staff who somewhat unwittingly unleashed the Bistro-style CDS into an environment of such stunning irrational greed, negligence, recklessness and downright fraud that it's left even the insiders angered and aghast.

And last, but by no means least, are Dean Johns' acerbic reflections on his days in advertising in "Ad Nauseam", and his "punchy political essays" from Malaysiakini, collected in "Mad About Malaysia" and "Even Madder About Malaysia" - still as inspirational as the day he suggested I read Tom Wolfe.