Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Rory O’Connor: Traditional media companies cling to their brands at their peril
- How Amy O’Leary live-tweeted her own speech — and won the #backchannel
- The Guardian creates an API for n0tice, its open news platform
| Rory O’Connor: Traditional media companies cling to their brands at their peril Posted: 22 May 2012 11:00 AM PDT
That’s journalist and author Rory O’Connor’s nice way of telling big, traditional media companies that clinging to the power of their brands isn’t necessarily going to keep them afloat. As the lines between big brands, microbrands and personal brands keep blurring, O’Connor says expectations about brand value are changing. “The very notion of what a brand is is being radically stretched,” O’Connor told me. “We’re in an age where we’re all told that we have to create our personal brand… so we have to begin to question what that very word ‘brand’ means. It meant something large and rather expansive, and I think we’re moving away from that.” In his new book, Friends, Followers and the Future, O’Connor explores the intersection of social media, politics, traditional media and big brands. At one point, he details Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt’s controversial 2008 comments about the Internet as a cesspool where lies thrive like bacteria, and brands serve to “sort out the cesspool.” “People like Eric Schmidt, they’re clinging to brand power as the solution,” O’Connor told me. “That the Internet is a cesspool of information is so wrongheaded as to be laughable. To say the Internet is a cesspool of information is like saying you can’t trust the telephone system because peope tell lies over it. It’s just the medium. The people who are legacy media who are clinging to this idea that brands are how you sort out this cesspool, as Eric Schmidt put it, are exhibiting all of the foresight of an ostrich.” Schmidt’s not alone. O’Connor says he got a similarly brand-oriented response when he interviewed Paul Slavin, former senior vice president of the digital operation at ABC News. “Paul Slavin, I asked him, I thought, a very point-blank question: ‘Why should people trust ABC News?’” O’Connor said. “He was flabbergasted. He was almost speechless. He took it as some pejorative attack. After he stopped sputtering he said, ‘Because we’re ABC News.’” I asked Slavin about the exchange, and he said that he still believes “big brands are enhanced in this period” of media uncertainty. (Also: “As a rule, I don’t sputter,” he said with a laugh, describing his pause in the interview as a “moment of reflection” instead. It’s worth noting that Slavin is now general manager of Everyday Health, an online consortium of health coverage and information. His goal there is to increase brand power as part of Everyday Health’s “attempt to become a larger media company.” Does he miss working for a traditional media company? “No.”) “I still maintain that The New York Times or ABC or the Washington Post, those media brands still have power in the marketplace,” Slavin told me. “It’s possible that others can very rapidly though social media learn to trust someone, and a brand can very rapidly evolve to have the power it took ABC decades to get. It doesn’t diminish the big, old brands. It just means they have more competition. They have to experiment and play in the same space as the new media people are playing in. They have to be willing to try different things. They have to be willing to share their content more aggressively.” O’Connor argues that the power of a familiar news organization’s name — even a big, well-known, long-since-established name — has all but disintegrated as social structures based on self-organization have emerged. He sees traditional big media as dinosaurs that happen to be “still trampling around” at the beginning of an information revolution that will get even messier and more chaotic than it has already been. O’Connor says the death of a major daily newspaper would be significant only historically, not practically. “We’re there,” he said. “We’ve already witnessed, if you will, the death of the homepage.” He’s referring to the growth of social media, which is driving higher numbers of readers to websites. (Many major, traditional news brands still get most web traffic through the front door but those numbers are changing.) In his latest book, O’Connor quotes the Berkman Center’s Yochai Benkler — as quoted in The New York Times — describing a generation of 20- and 30-somethings who are accustomed to self-organizing: “They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren't anymore." In some ways, Friends, Followers and the Future reads like a sequel to Clay Shirky’s 2008 book Here Comes Everybody. That was the year O’Connor started the research for his book, a process he began with an assumption about the future of journalism that he now says he realizes was “rooted in ignorance.” At the time, O’Connor says he was biased against algorithms and “the idea that a machine would be able to play a useful role” when it comes to navigating a “crowded and chaotic news and information environment.” “From a distance of four years it almost seems obvious,” O’Connor said. “But at the time, not only was it not obvious but it was something that was challenged by traditional journalists. But I went out there and talked not only to tech people but academic researchers and they reassured me that in fact [machines] can and they will do better. They’re in their infancy, and they will get more sophisticated.” Put more bluntly, O’Connor says he believes that if there’s anything a machine can do that a journalist is doing, the machine should be doing it instead. “It frees the journalists,” O’Connor said. “It’s similar with publishers. Clay Shirky said publishers have been replaced with a button…and they get very freaked out with good reason. But my message to them was the same: Anything that a publisher can do that a button can do should be done by a button. Focus on value-added.” But also focus on getting it right. O’Connor says trust is the “No. 1 issue facing all of us” — meaning both professional journalists and people looking for accurate news and information — and that reporters need to remember their core values. You know, “make a phone call or two” before retweeting one another. “They’re so afraid they’re going to be scooped but they’re not bothering to check,” he said. “That’s precisely the kind of behavior that’s going to lead to poor performance, and diminished trust, and the breakdown of their brand. That’s how it works.” By O’Connor’s measure, we’re at the very beginning stages of an information revolution that may end with us relying on filters that haven’t been invented yet. “We’re in, like, Week 1,” he said. “Revolutions are messy and chaotic. They’re messy, and things get broken. There are winners and losers, and the outcome is uncertain. The outcome depends a large measure on what people actually do, and how they work, and whether they take responsibility. That includes the people formerly known as the audience. We do need these shortcuts and filters to assist us with the sheer volume of news and information. It is too much. But it’s not enough just to sit back and point fingers.” |
| How Amy O’Leary live-tweeted her own speech — and won the #backchannel Posted: 22 May 2012 08:30 AM PDT Ninety-nine years ago this month, when Igor Stravinsky’s violent and inharmonious “Rite of Spring” debuted in Paris, legend has it a riot broke out. This, this! — the dissonant chords, the grotesque choreography — was unlike any performance the crowd had experienced before. There was shouting. Then fist fights. The police came. Chaos.1 That’s pretty much exactly what happened when New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary live-tweeted her own speech in Boston last month. She was talking at BU’s NarrativeArc conference about digitally addictive storytelling, a topic itself interesting to Nieman Lab readers. As slides appeared on the big screen behind Amy O’Leary, @amyoleary would somehow — magically — tweet out expertly compressed summaries of her ideas, right on cue. They were live footnotes, a real-time narrative surprise.
Okay, it wasn’t a riot. But “I was surprised by how many people said they were freaked out by it,” she told me. “A bunch of people just thought it was some kind of crazy mind control. To me it wasn’t terribly complex.” But it was pretty smart. How she did it: The night before the talk, O’Leary tried to configure a simple script for Apple’s Keynote that would fire a tweet as soon as a slide slid. Wrap the desired tweet inside a [twitter] tag in the presenter’s notes and voilà. But the hotel wifi was shaky and she couldn’t get it to work. (Actually, the problem was probably this.) So she pre-wrote all of her tweets and handed them off to a couple of friends in the audience, who fired off each one when the corresponding slide appeared. O’Leary did not explain what she was up to. “It was funny because I had inadvertently left the Twitter beacon sound on my iPad on during the talk,” she said. “So at one point I remember laughing, thanking people for retweeting me because it was making so much noise.” As long as speakers have given speeches, audiences have talked about them in the backchannel. In the olden days, the backchannel might have the Parisian elite whispering to each other in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913. Then Twitter came along and it was like everyone looked around and realized, whoa, we can all whisper to each other now. Now matter how well-composed a speech or sound the ideas, people are bound to utterly mischaracterize you on Twitter. Some speakers got hip to the backchannel and decided to embrace it. They might begin a speech with “The hash tag for my talk is…” The most intrepid display the backchannel conversation on a screen behind them, sometimes with disastrous results.
O’Leary took the next logical step: She got into the back channel. She gives a lot of these talks and often finds herself with this sinking feeling that people will have missed the point. “I just feel like the public record of it was much more blunt and less subtle than I’d intended,” she said. “So this was basically my stab at trying to correct that record in advance.” It’s hard to capture subtle ideas quickly, and in 140 characters, especially if you’re listening and composing at the same time. O’Leary had the luxury of crafting each tweet in advance, serving the audience a sort of template for retweets, a framing for the live blogs. It worked. “This is the first time I left a speech and felt like all the tweets I saw afterward were a good reflection of what I was trying to say.” (See her Storify compilation.) She also sees it as a service to people who are engaged and want to learn more. “It’s a way to kind of show your work and provide people with a record of your sources while you’re talking,” she said. O’Leary says she’ll try this again at her next talk, in June, at the Reporter Forum in Hamburg. And, by the way, she’s totally fine with people disagreeing with her work or thinking she’s full of it. O’Leary just wants representation in the backchannel. If only Stravinsky had had been able to jump into the #rite13 conversation…but then, he probably would have started the riot. Notes This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| The Guardian creates an API for n0tice, its open news platform Posted: 22 May 2012 07:53 AM PDT
In the same way Twitter asks “what’s happening,” n0tice poses the question “what’s happening near you,” and on any given day that could include updates on Olympics-related road closures, public meeting notices or a recipe for a cocktail to celebrate the queen’s jubilee. In releasing an API for n0tice, the Guardian is inviting businesses, journalists, and others to find new uses for all of the information residents are searching for and sharing every day. “It feels like we’re sitting on this huge bundle of potential and it’s just a matter of continuing to execute,”Matt McAllister, the Guardian’s director of digital strategy, said in an interview. It’s probably not a coincidence n0tice asks a similar question to Twitter, both offer a deceptively simple service that has potential to offer more in return. n0tice is your newsfeed, but it’s also your CraigsList. And like CraigsList n0tice is inherently local. If you come to the site via desktop it asks you where you are, on the phone it uses GPS to determine your location. Though most of the n0tice activity takes place in the UK, you can find noticeboards internationally. “We’re certainly working with a new paradigm for users experience, where location is navigation,” he said. The Guardian sees that as a kind of utility that has value to readers, but also to a broader network of developers who can build new tools, visualizations and applications. They’re launching the API now because they’ve built up a small but active user base and are looking to grow further, McAllister said. The API can help with that in some ways by exposing n0tice to more people in new incarnations. The Guardian has been using the n0tice API internally for crowdmapping projects, including their coverage of the summer Olympics. As the the games’ symbolic flame makes its way to London, the Guardian is using n0tice to help map the torch route. Using an automated feed of photos and text updates from local n0tice users, those submissions supplement stories and multimedia the Guardian is already producing for the Olympics, McAllister said. “The torch route is quite fun because it just ticks a lot of our boxes,” McAllister said. At least several of those boxes are marked “open” or “open source,” which is no surprise given the Guardian’s stated commitment to what they call open journalism. n0tice serves many needs, one for the locals as a means of connecting through news or activities, but also a need for the Guardian to continue to show what open journalism means. The API is a clear invitation for people to wrench on the data coming through n0tice and explore what an open journalism project could look like. The Guardian is using projects like the torch map as an example for what the platform is capable of. McAllister said a company in the UK is planning to launch a branded campaign using the API soon. More than 700 noticeboards have been launched since the project started in late 2011, and most people are still discovering new uses for the platform. Though people are finding new uses for n0tice, McAllister said they’re mirroring habits from other services, essentially as another place to link to a blog or Tweet. McAllister said the hope is for people to use the boards to cultivate public spaces they share with others. The more boards created, the richer the API becomes. “It comes down to an openness question,” he said. “When you can let go a bit and let a community run with the space you created then amazing things can start to happen.” This is why the boards offer users a lot of ownership, they can customize their own branding and subdomain. They also can moderate the activity on the board. Another benefit to owners is the potential to make money with their noticeboards through ads, specifically having advertisers pay for prominent placement on boards. With the n0tice site running and the addition of the API, McAllister said the next part of the trilogy is rolling out an iPhone app. While the site works well in mobile browsers, he said they wanted to create a unique app experience that can take advantage of the relationship between where you are and what’s happening around you. “When you’re holding a device location has much more meaning,” he said. |
“If everybody’s a brand then arguably nothing is brand.”
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