Why adult supervision is still needed

Here's a great lesson in why "citizen journalism" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

From Silicon Alley Insider:

"Citizen journalism" apparently just failed its first significant test.  A CNN iReport poster reported this morning that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the ER after a severe heart attack.  Fortunately, it appears the story was false. We contacted an Apple spokeswoman, who categorically denies this.

Here's a link to the full post. (Click here.)

In one sense I admire CNN for its iReport effort. But this for sure demonstrates the value "old media" still holds. Another good example -- many outlets have taken it upon themselved to verifty claims made by the candidates. Here's a good example from CNN. (Click here.)

Being genuine about monitoring social media

BusinessWeek recently ran an interesting piece on how multinationals are hiring others to monitor social media to see what people are saying about their company. (Click here for full article.)

The article, by Dexter Roberts, focuses on Daqi.com. Specifically, Daqi.com helps multinationals monitor their reputation online in China. The article has a few good examples and is a great example of how companies recognize the impact of social media.

But two things stood out:

• The article points out a case of a Toyota customer upset that his car wasn't delivered and venting about it on a blog. The customer was finally taken care of but the Toyota's PR agency then refused to comment on the complaint or provide details.
• Some of these agencies hire people to post positive things about clients on various blogs.

Seems to me if you're going to play in these arena you should be open about it. In the first instance, a golden opportunity was missed. It was a chance to talk about a problem and how it was solved. That, in turn, builds trust. In this case, Toyota dealt with this the old fashioned way -- doing what it could to make the customer happy and then saying nothing about it for fear, I presume, it would make the company look bad.

In the second instance there's a pretty good chance such actions will be found out pretty quickly. And then the world knows you are not being genuine. And then you have a real problem.

Conclusion -- if you're going to go this route you probably better off going the whole way.

Reporting on the China earthquake

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the China earthquake and the speed of coverage through Twitter and other online services. Robert Scoble seems to be crowing the most about how impressive this was. (Read his post here.)

Here's an example of his breathless excitement:

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. Now there’s lots of info over on Google News.

How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!!

It's no doubt impressive live updates were coming out of China but to what end? Most of the "instant" news and feeds were either inaccurate or totally out of context. In fact, I found myself searching for news on the earthquake through the traditional media I follow - CNN and The New York Times. Sometimes news can be reported too fast.

John Murrell at SiliconValley.com's Good Morning Silicon Valley makes some good points. (Read full post here.)

An important tipping point in news dissemination during a disaster? In timeliness, maybe by increments over phones, blogs, text messages, e-mail, forum posts and the news wires (assuming that you’re an active Twitter user and happen to follow the right people). In reliability, certainly not. By any of the aforementioned means, initial information is going to be scattered, anecdotal and often flat-out wrong.

Twitter, and SMS, serve a great purpose in keeping people in touch and sharing information. But it doesn't mean the information is any more reliable.

When machines take over

There's been a lot of discussion about the diminishing roles of newspapers and magazines. Let's not forget the journalist.

The latest is from Charles Cooper of CNet.

Charles points out how many PR people are bypassing news outlets to distribute news directly to the Web and news aggregators. Charles also noted that press releases sometimes rank higher on news aggregation pages (Techmeme, for example) than articles written by journalists. (Full post here.)

Here's an excerpt:

"The truth is that there are fewer and fewer of you guys," said a veteran PR-meister I know who works for one of the bigger technology companies. "You can't call the same reporter and expect him to do five stories on your company in the same month. So we have to have other ways to get out that information."

"Search engine optimization and other tools we have are better than they used to be and we're just taking advantage of the technology," this person continued. "We can go direct to audiences and bypass the filters--like the media--and have it picked up."

At some point journalists need to think hard about what their real role is. Companies bypassing journalists is not news. What's new is that users/readers seem to find value in the material. That's when you really need to rethink things.

Who owns the content and its comments?

There is something deliciously ironic about the current discussion over Shyftr, a new content aggregator.

The issue -- who owns the content on various blogs. The way Shyftr works is that the content on many blogs resides on Shyftr as do the comments about that blog. Other readers, instead, only publish a portion of a blog posting and refer to the entire post on its original platform.

At issue are two matters -- the original posting; the comments surrounding them.

Tony Hung goes on a bit of rant about how unfair this is:

Anyway, its not the conversations being hosted somewhere else that bothers me, its that there are a new crop of services which would not otherwise exist without republishing someone else’s content without the original author’s explicit permission. Well, lots of people’s content. And you can dress it up and all kinds of clothing and all kinds of nifty wrappers, but ultimately that’s what this is about. (Click here for full post.)

There must be a few folks in mainstream media chuckling at all this. After all, the knock on many blogs is that they don't spend any resources on original content instead feeding off of others. (Where would Drudge be without The New York Times, Wall Street Journal etc.?) Now some bloggers are upset their original content is being taken over by others.

I do understand the concern over the first issue. Taking over the content is wrong, even if it doesn't involve money. However, the issue over where the comments belong is, in my view, not worth fighting. As bloggers should know, it's really hard to control comments and where they live and in many cases the users of the content, not the content creators, determine its value.

Louis Gray points out:

As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don't want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else's name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held. Just as my blog's RSS views have undoubtedly eclipsed my blog page views, I would not be surprised to see that more comments on my posts might eventually live outside of my blog. It would behoove me and other bloggers to be aware of the other places the conversation will be taking place, and to engage there, in my opinion, rather than railing against the continued evolution of how we're consuming content and engaging online. (Click here for full post.)

Update (4/14): Since I posted this, Shyftr has changed its position a bit. (Louis Gray talks about it here.)

How to make sure the trains are running on time

A great example of the power of the community in staying up to date.

Last week I arrived at the local train station to discover chaos. The trains running into the city were delayed and nobody knew what was going on, particularly the station master. Yes, there were announcements over the PA but they basically told us that wires were down and no alternative transportation was being provided.

A minute later a gentleman starts reading updates off his BlackBerry. He read off some very detailed updates on what trains were running and when. All very helpful information. I asked him if was getting that off the Web site for the train authority. No. He was reading it off a mailing list generated by consumers.

So here we have a situation where the commuters, the customers, know more than the train authority. Even the station master was grateful for the information.

Finding local gas prices

There's an example I constantly use when people ask me how local newspapers could improve. In short, I tell people that local newspapers could publish more, get this, local news. And it should be something they're truly interested in. And it should be something that they can post in print and online. And the online version can be open so people can contribute and participate. The specific example I use is gas prices. There's something everyone in town cares about. Print a list on the front page every morning based on whatever was on line the night before at 11 p.m.

Well, time to forget that. Too late. Google has just figured it out. I just noticed the new My Maps feature on Google Maps. (Link to Google Maps.) Under the "add content" feature you can overlay all sorts of information from housing prices to, yup, local gas prices. The gas prices are supplied by Gas Buddy (link to Gas Buddy here) and they overlay a map of my neighborhood.

The other feature is "create new map" which allows you to customize a map with specific information (pizza parlors, places to visit, maybe even gas stations with cheap gas.)

Going local

The Washington Post's announcement that it will create a separate site to cover Loudoun County is one of the first encouraging bits of news I've seen in a while. (Somehow, the phrase "hyper local" has been applied to this trend.)

This is the result of Rob Curley's creative mind and is something smart newspaper executives will follow. The Internet has always been about local.

The difference between this effort, and others, is that there's a staff dedicated to gathering news and info. Other efforts have hoped (prayed?) that users would contribute content. They will. But only if there's a solid foundation to build on.

Another smart aspect -- creation of databases. There's countless opportunities at a local level: gas prices, church schedules, lunch menus. You name it. Communities live off this stuff.
This effort will be interesting to watch.

Update: Richard Waters has an interesting perspective on how this will work. Most important, he wonders how many other big media companies are thinking this way. My guess is few.

The opportunity, and pain, of local online news

I've always been convinced that local news is where the action (and money) is for online journalism. Low start-up costs, an attentive (but small) audience and relatively low overhead.

The Washington Post reports on the challenges facing Backfence. It's not the only such venture facing such hurdles. American Town Networks, based in Connecticut, had similar troubles.

My sense is that if you try to create a local site and only rely on local residents to post information you're making a mistake. You still need someone to "seed" the site -- someone called an editor or reporter. Sort of the old fashioned way of doing things. There's no reason you won't get a lot of residents contributing but you still need the strong foundation of someone making sure the critical news and events are posted.