Friday link roundup

Aussie working the herd

Aussie working the herd. Round em up, pup!

Rescuing The Reporters, shirky.com
This is a great post. Clay Shirky breaks down the hometown paper and asks hard questions of what’s locally produced and puts some of the “newspapers should do x to survive” into context.

The Audacity of Free, chrisbrogan.com
Hey, I like free stuff as much as the next guy. I like getting paid, too.This post makes a great case for charging something for stuff. But the tricky question is how to boost value of the something enough that someone will part with sheckles for it.

NPR lands $3M grant for hyperlocal initiative, lostremote.com
Look out. Take a look at this report about how National Public Radio’s growth has tracked over the past few years, most importantly in how they’re working to create bonds with audiences.

With msnbc’s purchase of everyblock and local tv stations poised to launch local blogs, local is going to get pretty crowded. NPR will be a force to be reckoned with.

Google unveils new local search for mobile, lostremote.com
This is great: star stuff while searching and get an interactive list on your phone. But it skews toward chain stores in my quick tests. Will have to experiment to see if local joints can be preferred.

Is the revolution over?, collegemediainnovation.org
Is it safe to say that the rehash of micropayment proposals or bitching about comments signals a completed technology distribution curve. Game over.

I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m afraid there’s much more pain as advertisers really get a handle on (and more savvy than ever about) what they really want for their dollars spent.

I do think, though, that the pace of change in types of new tools will slow. That means microblogging as a concept will stick around, but self-hosted solutions or outright competitors to twitter, for example, are likely. Mobile as a viable platform is established, but how people interact with it is sure to change. Etc.

That circular talk, though, will continue as long as the old guard is still waking up to the discussion and cycles through the phases of how to “save journalism.”

Someone ought to make a primer! “So you think you can save journalism: A primer on what’s already been talked about so wired journalists at the bar don’t roll their eyes when you walk away.”

Happier, getrichslowly.org
There’s a whole blog post wrapped into the concepts that come to mind with this post. Until then, chew on this:

The shift from being a rat racer to pursuing happiness is not about working less or with less fervor but about working as hard or harder at the right activities — those that are a source of both present and future benefit.

Friday link roundup

 Returning at the end of the afternoons work; Gathering the Herd | Howard W. Marshall, via americaslibrary.gov

" Returning at the end of the afternoon's work; Gathering the Herd" | Howard W. Marshall, via americaslibrary.gov

I’m really liking the link management feature from Publish2. I can collect links all week long with notes and then share my take on them in one post.

Hope you enjoy. Let me know your take in the comments.

Story structure for the Web | NewsLab

Jacqui Banaszynski suggests a “totem pole” structure to Web writing, giving each element a label, summary and link. Don’t like it? Not “storytelling” enough for you? Change your criteria, she says:

All good writing has to honor the purpose for which you are doing that writing.

Google developing a micropayment platform and pitching newspapers: “‘Open’ need not mean free”

Google, the savior of newspapers? Nah. But it couldn’t hurt either party to team up at the hub.

Of course, Google is in a prime place to serve up content and charge a fee for processing payment, delivering content, etc.It’ll be interesting to see if newspapers will get greedy. They might try if they still think they’re the big dogs in distribution. And they might.

And will Google extend this service to bloggers, too?

Yahoo Local debuts ‘Neighbors’: Yahoo drills down…

Meh. Perhaps combining local search with conversation on the Yahoo platform has promise, but I get the itchy feeling that it’s all just another social time-suck with limited practical application.

But I could be wrong.

Growthspur: Help for revenue-challenged journalists?

Interesting idea here to set up an ad selling and serving on behalf of journalists working out on their own.

It will be worth watching to see what the revenue share is, and I’m sure there’s an academic argument about whether this is enabling journalists to avoid dealing with the money problem, but it might offer more journalists (pro and am) the chance to grow those niche audiences and make a few bucks in the process.

What do Lake Wobegon and journalism’s ‘golden days’ have in common?

A colleague forwarded a quote this morning from Garrison Keillor, of “Prairie Home Companion” fame:

“This is the beauty of the new media: it isn’t so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people email it to friends and it slowly floods the country. What the new media age also means is that there won’t be newspapers to send reporters to cover the next war, but there will be 6 million teenage girls blogging about their plans for the weekend.”

He’s right about information sharing and the long tail, but he’s wrongheaded about the “good old days” of newspapers.

I guess Keillor is selectively forgetting that newspapers haven’t exactly been doing much sending reporters to cover anything overseas lately.

In fact, Lake Wobegon and ideas of newspaper journalism golden days have a lot in common: fantasy.

Life (and the news) “back in the day” was just as tough and fraught with issues as today. We just choose to forget the yellow journalism that spawned the Spanish-American War,  the drive for celebrity and institutional malaise that gave Jayson Blair room to run and the controversial style (at the time) in coverage and design of the USA Today.

It’s all too easy to take the low road and declare all bloggers as miscreants in pajamas (except for those pesky journalists with access to an open source CMS), twitter simply a tool for narcissists (sometimes, but what about the other 60 percent?) and that newspapers have already tried online and failed (think again).

Actually, thanks to new media, I think journalism’s best days are yet to come.

Make new friends, but keep the old…

Note: This post started as a reply to a post by WeMediaGuru, but it just got too long for that format and turned into its own animal.

Today, Jason at wemediaguru notes words from Mike Blinder of the consulting firm The Blinder Group, which works with media companies to maximize revenue:

The mafia (yellow pages) comes to town every year and steals 18 to 20 percent of the revenue that newspapers should be getting in their local market. Google is doing a great job at killing yellow pages. The enemy of my enemy is my friend today.

Jason’s wondering if incorporating Google is a wise strategy for media companies, especially those who are considering local search, but aren’t entirely sold on the idea.

Building a Web strategy without Google is like trying to start a business in town 30 years ago without placing a newspaper ad.

The fact is that many people (though admittedly less all the time) think the Internet IS Google. Take Steve Krug’s example of people typing whole urls into Yahoo or AOL. The big problem Google has, though, is in rooting out relevant local information. But it’s getting better and we (local media) aren’t part of the solution.

Take my wife and me. We like local restaurants, quaint hotels and out-of-the-way sightseeing. Up until a couple of years ago, a pre-roadtrip Google search brought such local gems as Super 8 Motel and Pizza Hut.

That’s changing, in part because others are starting to realize that while Google might be the shotgun approach, once a source of good local information earns their trust, they’re the go-to for future information.

Take a Google search for restaurants in our current town.

There are three things to note here:

  1. Our newspaper isn’t among the top ten sites for information on the topic.
  2. The top two sites contain reader reviews and do, in fact, highlight some pretty cool local eateries.
  3. The search has brought up a couple of local restaurants who have done at least a passable job at SEO. Without an ally in the local media company, locals are taking the Web into their own hands.

There are some obvious lessons in all three. But where to go from here?

Why not become the local expert in getting local businesses in front of Googlers? Could we start consulting those who already have a Web presence in SEO (for a fee) and a link?

Obviously, reader reviews are a big part of Web 2.0 trust-building. Businesses don’t often want to take the bad with the good (and years of pandering local business coverage have taught them bad habits about dealing with us).

Why not sell ad space, for example, next to reader reviews of that business? Then maximize Google’s ability to access that information?

Am I out of my mind here?