Spied in my daily I Want Media e-mail:
AdAge's The Media Guy, Simon Dumenco (who?), rants:
IS THE 'TIMES' TRYING TO COMMIT SLO-MO SUICIDE?
Dumenco didn't mention TV books and grids, weather pages or sports agate, but he could have....
Spied this via Middletown's morning news e-mail today: Morning Updates.
Also linked from the image on their home page (right).
If logistics allow for it, I'd recommend publishing it before 7 a.m., to capture that crowd commuting to the big city. Nonetheless, the concept is righteous.
Could The Afternoon Drive be far behind?
Here is Sunbury's Pet Photo Contest 2006 that was referenced on today's call.
And from a friend of the media and long-time E&P columnist Steve Outing:
"The Enthusiast Group (TEG) develops websites that serve sports/recreation enthusiasts in telling their own stories without professional writing or photography help. Sports enthusiasts have compelling stories and images to share, but they typically are under-covered by traditional media. It's nearly always the stars of any sport that get the media attention. But everyday athletes and sports participants deserve coverage, too; many have compelling stories and images to share with fellow enthusiasts."
I see these groups as the youth groups, bowling leagues, softball, snowboarding, etc. Anyone doing stuff online to serve these markets?
From Business Week's Tech Insider e-mail:
"Nike executives approached Google with the idea of creating a social-networking site revolving around the world's most popular sport: soccer."
and
"Joga.com (the name of the Web site) is a free network where members will be able to create Web sites and send e-mail, photos, and video clips, as well as access Nike content..."
This is our opportunity with local sports franchises, I think. And now with google in the game, where do they stop? An easy next step for them is to take the joga.com platform and open it up to our local sports teams. There are lots of platforms already being used by local sports teams but what of the promise of all being linked together by Google?
What are you all doing to capture the local sports market? Here at the Record, we're not doing much unfortunately. But not for lack of desire ... .
Yesterday, the SPOTTED at St. Patrick's Day Parade photo gallery got 14,300 page views and catapulted the section to the number one spot above jobs and the front page. Yesterday's total page views were 75,530.
Not a bad showing for a Monday in a small market.
Sean asked me to share this internal memo with you all:
Just a quick note to let you know the results of our new SPOTTED! program.
What is SPOTTED?
SPOTTED! is a marketing program to drive page views to our online photo galleries. We create event-specific galleries, go to the events, take pictures of the people in the crowd, hand them a business card with the tagline “You’ve been SPOTTED!” and the address of where the gallery is located online (http://www.poconorecord.com/spotted), and then on the same day upload the photos to the gallery. We promote the galleries on the homepage and yesterday (Sunday, March 19) there was a great promo on the front page of the newspaper letting people know we would be at the parade taking pictures.
Yes and No.
Our first event was the Chamber’s Business Expo on Wednesday and Thursday of last week. The first Expo gallery got a total of 1,609 page views which isn’t great when compared to our Pet Photo gallery (6,311 in March to date) and the Highrise Tragedy (8,286). The Expo on Thursday gallery got a little more (1,959).
I ran across two nifty UGC ideas that relate to sports, two of which were linked from J-Lab's Cool Stuff: Participatory Content page:
Amarillo Globe-News - IBeatBeilue.com
The Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News invites its readers to go up against football columnist Mark Beilue in picking winners of local high school, college and NFL football games. Contestants who correctly pick more winners than Beilue in a week receive a free t-shirt, and the overall winner receives tickets to the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio, Texas."
St. Paul Pioneer Press - Average Joe Columnist
The Pioneer Press sports department and TwinCities.com are letting readers experience what it's like to be a sports columnist. In 2005, the second edition of the contest, over 150 columns were submitted. After the paper narrowed the field to 16, the finalists submitted columns on deadline for weekly head-to-head competitions. The columns were judged by a sports writer and a sports editor at the Pioneer Press and by an online reader poll. The winner wrote a live column from a Minnesota Vikings football game.
I'll be inserting this into the sports editors' packets for next week, but thought it worth sharing with the online editors too:
Poynter Online - On the Cusp of Tomorrow: Where print journalists find themselves on the eve of 2006
Steve Klein writes about sports frequently for E-Media Tidbits. I've been exchanging e-mails with him today in seeking just such an article. He also shared this one:
CBS Serves More Than 1.2 Million March Madness Feeds In First Five Hours; So Far, So Good
The best line?
It's not a threat to TV viewing; it's a substitute when no TV is available and a supplement for those who want to watch more than one game at once but don't have DirecTV.Same principle applies to what we do online. Online news AND information done right is not a threat to newspaper readership. It's a substitute for those who live out of market, and a supplement for our core at-work audience, who utilize us as their lifeline to the outside world from their offices and cubicles.
Poynter Online - To Capture Kids, Reconsider Definition of News:
Perhaps the most striking point in her presentation, however, was this one: "I don't think companies should spend a lot of time pandering to youth."
Gary Pruitt, the head of McClatchy, has an optimistic column on the newspaper industry in today's Wall Street Journal:
We certainly have competition from Google and others. But in each of the communities where we compete, almost every newspaper has the largest news staff, largest sales force, biggest audience and greatest share of advertising in its market. Whether it's on the Internet or off the presses, we are capturing that business.
Adding the unduplicated reach of newspaper Web sites to newspaper readership shows that, far from shrinking, our audiences are growing steadily. Simply put, more people want our products today than wanted them yesterday; this is hardly the profile of a dying industry.
Spied in a roundabout way via I Want Media (as was the previous item, by the way): Gawker Stalker.
Talk about a mashup!
News flash: The celebrities don't like it.
Worth paying attention to....
And how about this factoid:
In February MySpace.com overtook the BBC site in terms of visitor numbers and grew six-fold year on year, according to internet monitor Hitwise.
Mark Glaser has a pretty humorous take on March Madness as it gets underway today (Full disclosure: As I type this I have the CBS Sportsline live scoreboard open on an alternate screen, but, Andrew, for the record, I am NOT watching video...!).
Coincidentally, I am preparing a presentation titled "Photos, Photos and More Photos (and Maybe Video)" for the sports editors from around Ottaway who will converge on Campbell Hall for a 3-day conference next week, similar to the one we hosted for the online editors. At the end of Glazer's column was this little nugget:
UPDATE: As of 12:30 pm Eastern Time on Thursday, I couldn’t even get into the site to watch live video and was 101,776th in line to get in. If I had registered earlier in the week, and was a VIP member, I would have got in within five minutes. That means at least 200,000 people are watching the tourney video, with 100,000 more watching a “Waiting Room Meter” to see when they’d get in.Now, live video is a labor-intensive and expensive undertaking. It's not likely that most of our locations could pull it off yet. However, it is fun to think about the possibilities for video clips of local, high-profile events that folks from throughout our regions and beyond would love to watch. Think Figawi for Cape Cod and Nantucket, Mavericks for Santa Cruz, or Bayshore Marathon for Traverse City. That's the message I'll be carrying forward to the sports editors: Corner the multimedia market for the quintessential events in your market, and expand from there.
Oh, the irony of the graphic and headline juxtaposition on washingtonpost.com:
More coverage of the sale, via Romanesko....
Calling Dave Winer the Blogfather was my idea, but it apparently isn't as original a moniker as I'd thought. Check out how many folks consider themselves to be more worthy of the title.
Dave Winer, considered by many to be the Blogfather, indicates today that he will stop blogging, probably before the end of this year.
Winer can claim several fames, including that he is among those instrumental to the development and improvement of RSS.
Though you might want to check this out:was our sunday top story
Love it! Anything that adds a three-dimensional quality to the storytelling is a win in my book.Difficulty in pulling it together?
It did not take too much work to pull it all together. On Friday I found out that there was a large graphic illustration of the accident to go with the story. (It ended up running on black and white vertically in print).I was able to reuse the house price map I developed last year, which cut down on the production time enormously. I resized the graphic that one of our print designers created, cut out the mini-maps and renumbered the dots so the map could be displayed horizontally.Once that was done, I dropped the graphic onto the old house price map I had. All that was needed at that point was to re-script the map for the new layers and code in the new text for each spot.Probably took about an hour to build late on Saturday night. Went live at around 3:30 am sunday.
In addition to the multimedia resource materials Lauren Hertel put together in Stockton, you'll find this page useful too. It's podcast-specific, but the equipment would work for any in-house recording you undertake. A bit difficult to take Ludington's equipment on the road, but in my experience it is a good idea to have a dedicated space and equipment for in-house recording, so that a reporter or photographer can take portable equipment on the road and you still have a place at the home office for day-to-day multimedia efforts.
Incidentally, have you checked out Seacoast's robotic podcast? I'm a little uncertain as to how long the monotone voice can hold my attention, but it's a start, right? My unsolicited suggestion: Turn that midday video update into a video podcast, a la Rocketboom.
Anyone else dipping a toe into podcasting?
Jeanne Hubbard in Traverse City points out this audio slideshow-building software: Soundslides.
Runs on Mac OS X 10.3 or higher, and costs $39.95. In use at boston.com, and elsewhere.
Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless - New York Times
Just for the record, if you want to come park in my driveway and use my wireless connection, I've got no problem with the latter. Surf away.
But if you stay longer than an hour, I'm likely to start charging you for parking.
Such is wireless life in suburbia.
OK, so minutes after my last blog post, NYT shows off its breaking news might.
I went back to find the wi-fi article I read earlier today in the print edition, and on their home page at 8:32 p.m. ET they already have the news of George Clooney winning best supporting actor, with a link to a nominees list that they're updating live by adding stars next to the winners.
House blogging inspiration comes today from Stephen Metcalf's feature in The New York Times Magazine. My wife and I have spent the last five years restoring our 19th-century Cape Cod home, so we enjoyed the concept of blogging the work and sharing lessons learned, trials endured, and costs overrun.
But even the esteemed NYT has landed in my doghouse tonight (and I'm sure they're shaking in their shoes...). Metcalf cites three blogs, one of which he names by URL. Thank you. But the print version neglects to pass along the addresses for Our Old House and Casa Decrepit. Count that as pet peeve number one. Pet peeve number two, and the bigger crime? No related links can be found in the online version either.
Why didn't I link to Our Old House above? Because it took me four tries to find the right one. Therein lies the challenge for the reader. Here's the links I hit upon in my search, with the fourth being the correct one:
Loving Len's blog. Good voice. Interesting, newsroom insider transparency. It's good stuff, Len. Hope you're finding it to be a fun experience thus far.
(Now there's some love for ya, buddy!)
Spied via I Want Media today: The State of Blogging at America's 100 Largest Newspapers: Chart by the Blue Plate Special team.
For context, go here.
They're careful to note that this was simply a look at the 100 largest newspapers. They will eventually be looking at smaller papers too.
Interesting podcast idea from NYT: Reporter James Barron describes the three most e-mailed stories every weekday.
But once the why-didn't-I-think-of-that novelty passed, a glaring weakness emerged: As I'm listening to the podcast on iTunes (or my new iPod), I can't click to read the stories.
(Surely Apple is developing wireless connectivity for the iPod, or how about a Bluetooth synch capability? Ah, what do you know... it's apparently in the works.)
Best case scenario for NYT? If I'm listening on the laptop and Barron hits upon a story that I'd like to check out, I have to go to nytimes.com, scroll halfway down their lengthy homepage to find the Most E-mailed module, and hope that the story is still there if I'm listening to that day's podcast (which won't always be the case because I am not yet in the habit of listening to my downloaded podcasts every day, though the recent addition of an iPod to my electronics arsenal may change that).
Phew! That's a lot of work.
If it's not in that module...? Well, NYT has already lost me. I've got to get back to work.
My criticism is in not intended to discourage anyone from podcasting. Instead, it's a reminder that as we experiment with such mediums, we need to be mindful of how the user will interact with it.
And you've read this far into my blog post, here's a treat for you: a direct link to the nytimes.com Most E-mailed page. Also, as a complete non-sequitur, here's a cool snowplow photo from Feb. 14.
Of course, what I'm wondering is that if Manny arrived at 9:01, why did it
take until 9:34 to send a 1-sentence alert? Maybe I'm just being picky....
-----Original Message-----
From: Boston.com Newsletters [mailto:newsletters@boston.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 9:34 AM
To: spolay@ottaway.com
Subject: Breaking sports news: Manny arrives at camp
Manny Ramirez arrived at Red Sox camp in Fort Myers at 9:01 a.m. this
morning, wearing a No. 81 Tim Brown Oakland Raiders jersey and accompanied
by his representatives, including agents Gene Mato and Greg Genske.
