Post 18, 2009: Journalists and musicians

July 3, 2009 in Future of Journalism with Leave a Comment

A few times a year, I pull my old guitar out of a cupboard and play it for a while.

I can still remember a few tunes and chords and I have fun for a while. Back when I was more interested in playing music, I was a competent if talentless guitarist.

I would never, however, call myself a musician or suggest that anyone should go out of their way to behold me playing music. But I can play a little music.

Of late, I have been wondering about how we consider “journalists” vs. “musicians”. I think the comparison is useful because no-one runs down someone who occasionally picks up a guitar, sits down at a piano or plays any other instrument. It’s cool to have a go at playing music! Heck – it’s normal to encourage kids to do it, even though the sounds they produce are sometimes not much fun to experience!

As I swirl around inside the washing machine of debate about the future of journalism, I think we can usefully apply the attitudes we bring to people who play music for pleasure to those who practice the new forms of journalism that have been made possible by Blogs, Twitter and countless other online tools.

These tools mean that those with the inclination to do so can now pick up a journalism tool (maybe instrument is a better word) whenever they feel like it, and produce some journalism.

It may not be good. It may be the journalistic equivalent a tonally-challenged, lyric-mangling, 40-something playing hits from his teens on a cheap acoustic guitar with 15 year old strings.

But I think that rather than agonising over what sort of journalism is legitimate, we should simply say that it’s cool when people have a go at journalism.

The musical metaphor is also useful, I believe, because music is wonderfully fragmented. We have classical, pop, jazz, rock, about ten different sub-genres of each and about a million other top-line genres I haven’t mentioned.

I think journalism could do with similar diversity.

Music, of course, has some common values. It tries to entertain by making pleasing sounds (experimental music, IMHPO, tries to entertain through the self-conscious creation of un-pleasing sounds, but that’s another story).

Journalism also has common values. It seeks to discover and re-present facts, using the journalist’s experience of events and some rules about objectivity.

I believe that if we agree that journalism has very simple ingredients and apply the same liberal thinking we apply to music, we can get to a place where we revel in the diversity of journalism that we have today, rather than agonising over whether those using the new tools/instruments of journalism are any good at it. The quality, to me, is no longer the point. Understanding the diversity is where it’s at.

Post 17: When customer service meets PR

June 17, 2009 in Small business, Vendors I have met, Work with Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking lately about the interface between PR and customer service, in the context of an event in which I was forced to play the “I’m a journalist” card.

Let me explain.

I try to run my micro-business like any other, despite the fact that journalists tend to be offered free support for the products they use even if they are using them in their private lives.

For example, when I tweet about feeling frustration with some software products, PR agencies representing the vendors concerned often contact me and offer free support. I decline, as I feel the way to understand what my readers are going through is to live through some tech support engagements. It is also useful to fix the problem myself, as I can learn stuff!

Occasionally, however, a vendor’s service is so dreadful and an acceptable outcome seems so remote, that I play the “I’m a journalist” card by contacting PR representatives of the vendor concerned to let them know about the trouble I am having.

In nearly every case, they escalate the issue and solve the problem very quickly, a response I suspect is honed by years of interaction with consumer advocacy columns in various publications that name and shame vendors who provide poor service.

I played the card recently when a vendor simply refused to put me in touch with the support team responsible for providing me with a replacement for a faulty product. I had already followed a support process that asked us to post the faulty product to a certain facility, but had experienced no response for several weeks. The incident number provided was recognised by the vendor’s call centre, but there was no information whatsoever about the status of the incident. The vendor concerned refused to provide a phone number for the facility to which we had posted the faulty item, leaving no way at all to understand the status of the faulty product.

At this point, having been denied any chance to understand how the vendor proposed to resolve the issue it had created, and feeling mightily and frustrated us mightily, we did what some members of the public would do and let the vendor’s PR team know about the incident.

They resolved it quickly and very satisfactorily.

Had I been a consumer, this incident could have resulted in some ugly press for the vendor concerned.

What I now wonder is whether vendors ever contemplate the fact that PR can be called in – by the general public or media – to explain failures in support and service processes.

In fact, I’d like to have a discussion on these matters on my customer service podcast, if anyone is interested.

Post 16, 2009: Two new ways to fund journalism

June 3, 2009 in Freelance life, The future of journalism with 21 Comments

I think everyone now agrees that while newspapers in their current form are in strife, nobody wants quality journalism to disappear.

But no-one knows how to fund it.

I’ve got three ideas and in this post I want to deal with two.

1. Industries should fund journalism directly

I cover a couple of obscure industries that have little dedicated media and only a very small number of writers with any appreciation of the technical nuances of the fields concerned. I’d argue (in a self-interested way, of course) that these industries are the poorer for their lack of a full-time focus on their activities, services and products. These industries also lack the vibrant hub that a good publication creates. They also miss out on the chance to reach prospects and customers through a medium they trust, namely journalism.

So I can imagine that farsighted industry associations could start to talk to publishers about subsidising a journalist’s wages, in order to ensure there is a resource dedicated to covering their industry. An Association’s investment in a journo could benefit its members by creating a virtuous circle in which the dedicated writer means a publication becomes more attractive to readers and therefore more useful as a marketing vehicle.

Is this feasible? I do some work with an industry association that could probably not afford to do this. But not by a vast distance.  (Obviously this is my personal opinion and in no way reflects the position of the association, in case anyone knows the association concerned)

2. License PRs to access journalists

I think the way PR relies on journalists, but does not pay for them, is in many way analogous to publishers’ complaints about the way search engines monetise their content without any financial contribution.

I recognise that PR probably lowers the cost of operating a publishing house by providing content and/or making it easier to access (albeit with the content groomed for commercial intent, rather than reader value). But let’s face it: PRs are stuffed without influencers to influence!

I can imagine publishers licensing access to their journos to PRs that have paid for the privilege. Such a scheme could be run through a PR industry association and would involve a sliding payment scale,  so as not to disadvantage small PR shops. But unless a PR had paid their dues, a publisher’s journos would not take their calls. Blocking their email would be simple.

I imagine PRs would hate this regime. Everyone hates it when new costs arrive in their industry.

But seeing as the way we fund journalism now is borked, costs are going to land somewhere. And right now, PR cannot exist with media but does not fund it at all. Maybe that needs to change to help journalism survive.

These ideas are both thought experiments and have obvious problems in terms of how this kind of funding impacts’ media independence and the likelihood of fearlessly critical coverage. They both also devolve to industry paying for coverage, either through associations or via. increased PR bills. I suspect that, over time, industry will miss having a media to read about itself in. Or maybe not – which is a whole other kettle of fish and something I will blog about with my third funding idea soon.

Post 15, 2009: Chk-chk boom!

May 27, 2009 in Random, Ranting with 1 Comment

There you go … now I’ve blogged about it too.

But frankly, this is all it deserves.

Post 14, 2009: Reviewing the Cuddlee

May 18, 2009 in Random, Ranting with 2 Comments

Sometime last year, Jo White (aka @mediamum) wrote a series of tweets describing an object called a Snuggie.

If you are disinclined to follow the link it’s a fleecy blanket … with arms. And it has a “so bad, it’s good” advertorial I’ve embedded below.

There’s also a parody video.

Now you would think that after watching the parody, I’d think the Snuggie is a stupid, ugly thing. But no … ever since @Mediamum’s tweets I had been oddly intrigued by the Snuggie.

So when catchoftheday offered a local alternative/clone, the “Cuddlee”, at a price of less than $20 , including postage, I bought one.

It arrived with this …

… which gives you a fair idea of what is on offer.

But I felt like I should go further and describe it in more detail. So here goes.

The Cuddlee is made of thin polar fleece. Thin as in you can see through it. Perhaps thin as in “spare blanket from a $40/night
truckstop” is a more accurate description.

The garment, if that is the word, has at least been finished with a blanket stitch. But it is quite rough cut and there are some small tears around the outside.

The sleeves are enormous. You’ll start to remember really off jokes from Borat when you wear it.

It certainly warms up the front of you, but as soon as you put it on, your back feels cold. This could be solved with some kind of fastening mechanism, but I doubt the thin fabric could cope with that. The lack of fastener means the Cuddlee drapes awkwardly and is not easy to wear while walking. Nor is does it make any accommodation for the human neck and chin, and its rectangular shape means you have to somehow shunt bits of it out of the way so it does not cover your face. The resulting folds have nowhere to go and drape in a silly way.

As I have been warned, it makes a lot of static electricity. My daughter has walked away from it with her hair in considerable dissaray!

Having said that, I have found it quite useful when sitting down in front of my computer. The back of my chair keeps my back warm and the Cuddlee takes care of everything else, other than the rear of my calves.

The Cuddlee is, if anything, too large. I’m 190cm tall and heavily built and the garment covers me very comfortably when reclining on a pile of pillows.

Overall, the Cuddlee has some utility. It does keep you warm. But it is hideous, with its only aesthetic redeemer being the fact it makes you look a bit like the Avout from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

If  someone gave you a Cuddlee in, say, 1985, as a freebie when you flew business class on an airline owned by a developing nation’s government, you’d think it was pretty cool.

In 2009, it’s just tat. But it’s my tat and it’s quite warm and I think I will be able to hang onto it for one season before I feel like I’ve gotten $20 worth of fun out of it.

Post 13, 2009: Events need to get over the artefact, too

May 11, 2009 in Ranting, The future of journalism, Web 2.0, Work with Leave a Comment

I’ve written several times before that I try not to attend real-world press events. They are nearly always overly-long and contain too much marketing-speak, so are not often particularly good uses of my time.

I’ve been thinking about why, and I think there are some hints in the decline of newspapers.

The thing about newspapers is that while they are nice artefacts, the journalism they contain is what is really important. The artefact of the newspaper has massive cultural inertia for many people, but the sheaf of cellulose that arrives on my doorstep each morning is now just one of several ways to distribute and monetise journalism.

I’m beginning to think that press events (and many conferences) are in a similar position to many media outlets, i.e; wedded to the artefact of the get-together in a big room with adjacent catering facilities, when the real issue is not how to run good events but how to preserve the information transfer they allow while thinking about how to use technology other than that embedded in today’s most popular artefact.

There’s one barrier I perceive: no-one’s very good at using the technology yet. I’ve attended webinars that were just the usual drone-and-slides affairs. If I had any real wisdom in this area, I’d be starting a consultancy around it right now, to help businesses take advantage of web conferencing and similar technologies to improve the effectiveness of their communications. Because I don’t have that wisdom, I’m hoping someone else does so they can lead a charge towards new ways of sharing information that take the good bits from the meeting/event artefact of today and take steer it in useful new directions.

Post 12, 2009: Twitter means journos always have react quotes

April 24, 2009 in Web 2.0, Work with 3 Comments

Maybe I am dense, but while writing a story this morning it hit me – I can now get instant reactions on almost any topic or issue via. Twitter. A quick search, a few cut and pastes and …. bang! … the voice of the people, fresh from the Net can adorn any story.

I slipped a couple into this yarn.

It’s kind of nice to know that there is now such a fine resource out there. It’s also nice to know that the material is written in a human voice, unlike the quote the story contains. It was sent to me via. a PR company.

There are questions about how to use Twitter in this way, of course. It can be hard to know if a Twitterer is really just an ordinary member of the public or truly representative of the community. I think permission is cool – you can block updates if you don’t want your Tweets re-used.

I’ve decided to always link to Tweets and quote them whole. And I won’t be using them for every story.

But to add the “person in the street” reaction that is a journalistic convention, I think Twitter is very valuable.

(More so than blogs, on the topics I cover, a blogs are dominated by vendors or their employees. And they tend to spend their time calling one another names or spruiking their latest wares, rather than offering useful reactions).

Post 11, 2009: My completely random guess at what Apple will do next

April 21, 2009 in Uncategorized with Leave a Comment

The Macosphere seems to have assumed for some time that Apple has a tablet device of some sort up its sleeve, perhaps in the form of a big iPod Touch that one could use as a web tablet at home (a bit like a CrunchPad). Or at least some kind of Netbook response.

I’ve been thinking about this and wondering what Apple could do. Experience tells me their stuff needs a value add and use case others won’t consider.

So I reckon Apple will make a laptop with a detachable touchscreen. Connect the screen and you’ll be able to use it as a normal computer, complete with full keyboard. Detach it and you get a virtual keyboard, but WiFi access to data and apps on the laptop hard drive. Or if the main laptop is powered down, you get a web tablet offering a browser and access to web apps.

Why this arrangement? My belief is that the iPod Touch and iPhone are used an awful lot as web tablets in the home and office. There’s demand for such a device. And there are times when a very light computer designed mainly for reading – and very light typing – is appropriate. Tieing the web tablet and netbook to the heavier duty computer – and keeping the whole package portable – has immense appeal, IMHO.

Do I have any evidence for Apple considering this approach?

Not a shred. Not an atom.

But over here similar ideas are at least getting an airing. I am not a lone nutter, for once.

Post 08.1, 2009: PR truthiness fallout

April 21, 2009 in Uncategorized with Leave a Comment

I’ve been working with the PR agency that prompted me to write about “PR Truthiness” and the results were quite interesting.

Another member of the team there was very precise in explaining what a spokesperson could and could not comment on. They’d never done so before, or certainly not with the same depth.

In one way it’s appreciated, because it is a response. I feel my file there is probably marked “MAKE SURE YOU EXPLAIN EXACTLY WHAT THE INTERVIEW IS ABOUT OR HE WILL BLOG ABOUT US!!!”

I think it misses the point, though. The previous pitch simply had too much truthiness and that’s a stain that will take some time to fade.

Post 10, 2009: Some reasons why Twitter is and is not the new e-mail.

April 20, 2009 in P-aaaaargh!, Web 2.0, social networking with 1 Comment

I’m getting a fair few Direct Messages and @messages from Twitter friends – and folks like PRs.

They’re using it as an alternative to conventional messaging tools like e-mail.

Is it a good idea?

Perhaps, because Tweets are:

• Short! (mercifully so compared to many emails)
• Intimate, thanks to Twitter’s rules it is very hard to spam someone
• Deniable – Email is pretty reliable these days and false positives in spam filters are rare. Twitter’s flakiness as a message delivery system is therefore potentially useful!

Perhaps not, because:

• Twitter is unreliable – if you want to communicate something important, will Twitter get the job done?
• Twitter messages don’t queue well. Many Twitter clients – and Twitter itself – collects @messages. But while I, for one, process all my emails every day, I might go days without reading every @ message I’ve been sent.
• I have a whole application that collects and stores email and makes them available offline. Most Twitter clients rely on a live link to Twitter and do not store many messages, reducing the chance I will read a tweet vs. reading an email.
• Direct Messages generate email anyway – so why use Twitter?
• Can you really say that in 140 characters? (Yes, probably, but I am saving that for another post)

What do you think?