Matt Bigelow - Digital Media

The Evolution of Blogging

Over at GigaOm, Om Malik argues for an evolution of blogging toward real-time, social publishing. Basically, context matters now more than ever after the rise of real-time mass messaging services such as Twitter, Facebook’s News Feed, Friendfeed, and the like. This explosion of short snippets of information and data points makes context paramount.

The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real

Anil Dash describes a new set of technologies he dubs the “Pushbutton Web,” which he says will push online publishing ever further into realtime communication. He writes for a technical audience, but it’s certainly apropos in the wake of Facebook’s purchase of Friendfeed. I say that because I’ve had quite a few friends ask me in the last few days why Facebook buying friendfeed matters (many of whom had never heard of friendfeed before the news hit). My answer is that the Web values immediacy. Facebook, which has always been more ‘turn-based,’ can better compete with Twitter with friendfeed’s technology (not to mention their development team, which includes a bunch of ex-Googlers).

Distribution…now

John Borthwick, CEO of a company called betaworks, describes the emerging Web as a stream, and offers some great analogies to the uninitiated for understanding what’s happening online.

I recently got a question from a young writer type asking how to get into the publishing industry right now. Below was my advice. I had meant to post this months ago, but got sidetracked…

Bad News…

As for getting into the industry in general (in this economic climate), I’m not sure I have any good advice. Here’s my bad news first: Everywhere you turn it seems that more and more publications are laying folks off, cutting back circulation or stuck in a hiring freeze. It’s a bad job market, and from what I hear from friends, colleagues present and past, etc., it’s not a good time to be looking. You mentioned Southern Living, for example? While there, I was told the best thing about working there was the job security because they never let anyone go. Then this…

Silver lining…

But here’s my good news. You’re young, so you don’t need to be paid as much as someone who has been there forever and a day. You’re young, so you’re more tech-savvy (I used to cringe when people said that because I thought it reflected an ageist attitude, but now that I’ve worked for a while, I’ve basically accepted it as true). And you’re young, so you’re flexible and can take on long work hours, have more time learn a lot of different skills since you don’t have kids, etc.

My take…

So here’s my advice in general: I’d look at getting involved in writing as much as possible. I’d look into a company such as b5 media (a network of bloggers). They don’t pay much, but the experience you would gain by a) writing on a daily (if not hourly) basis would be invaluable and (b) learning the vaguely defined skill of “building an online audience” is extremely valued these days. If you can head into a job interview at a more traditional media company such as the ones you described and tell them how you launched a blog with b5 media and grew it from nothing to 10,000 visits a month - well, that’s going to mean a lot to them. Also check into mediabistro & Poynter - they have good job postings.

Finally, my last bit would be to look online (as in, look at new/online media companies) in general and avoid print. Print companies aren’t hiring right now and, to be honest, I don’t think they are all that exciting to work for (that’s my “new media” bias though). At Southern Living, I was given a lot of encouragement to try different things on their Web site, because I didn’t work on the print side of things, and it was awesome! I launched a podcast, a blog, picked up some (rudimentary) Flash experience and learned a bit about Omniture’s Web Analytics software. It was a true jack-of-all trades experience, but I couldn’t have gotten it fetching coffee for the food editors like some of the other interns who worked on the print side of things.

Anything you would add, subtract, disagree with?

In the wake of multiple appointments made by President-elect Obama as he readies his transition to the White House (Clinton for Secretary of State, Daschle for Department of Health and Human Services, Timothy Geithner as Secretary of Treasury, etc.) one question still lingers in my mind:

Why wasn’t Clinton considered for the the department of Health and Human services, where she could put her experience with health care to work? Is that not the top post in the land for reforming health care? Is that not her legacy?

Don’t get me wrong, I think she’ll make a fine Secretary of State. And I think Tom Daschle will do fine at the department of Health and Human Services. My point is, I just haven’t heard anyone ask that question. Am I missing something? Is there a plain reason why a simple explanation isn’t given by any reporter’s story of Obama’s picks?

Enlightenment welcomed…

This two-day conference in Atlanta, Georgia, took place Friday, March 22nd to Saturday, March 23rd. It brought together some extremely bright people doing some fascinating things at the intersection of computation and journalism.

Here are just a few of the examples there I found particularly interesting:

Everyblock - a location-based aggregator of crime statistics, news articles, Craigslist postings, and a ton of other publicly available information sources displayed at the neighborhood level. Everyblock currently operates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

Global Voices - a global network of paid and volunteer bloggers who monitor the blogospheres around the world and report back in English on the site.

Django - an open-sourced Web framework utilized by many news organizations for more robust Web publishing. Lead developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss asserted (and was challenged on it) that with Django, journalists could (and perhaps should) learn enough programming to free them from the time and resource restraints of their newsrooms.

News at Seven - a broadcast-ish production that creates a personalized news piece. Users input a few preferences, and the program pulls a news piece, checks Wikipedia, finds video, images and blog reactions and creates a broadcast reported by avatars.

The so-called “evangelical vote,” often cited by media analysts as a crucial constituency in securing the Republican nomination, is likely to exercise considerably less influence this cycle, according to a series of interviews with clergy and political analysts conducted by HuffPost’s OffTheBus {citizen journalism project.}

I recently participated in the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus citizen journalism project, which can be read at the above link. I interviewed Executive Pastor Marty Thompson of Bethel Evangelical Free Church in Fargo, North Dakota, for the piece.

It was my first such participation in a citizen journalism project and I was both impressed with Amanda Michel, Marc Cooper and Dan Truel for coordinating the effort, as well as pleased with the final result. Although many of the issues discussed in the article fell outside the scope of my specific conversation with Pastor Thompson, I still felt my interview informed the article and helped the group arrive at a collective truth regarding the so-called “Evangelical vote” leading up to Super Tuesday. Namely, we dispelled the notion that evangelical Christians are somehow to be perceived of as a homogeneous voting bloc in the United States, a notion reflected in my particular interview with Marty Thompson.

I just wanted to take a moment and recognize the folks over at Popular Science magazine for their Web efforts. They quietly launched a redesigned site, PopSci.com, in 2008. It’s built on the Drupal platform and one way of looking at it is that, functionally, it’s a group blog. Each navigational bucket along the top represents a category, but all posts/articles/stories appear time-stamped in reverse chronological order on the home page.

If you haven’t checked it out, I recommend.

It offers a unique model for a traditional print company to leverage their assets on the Web. It also gives me hope that old media companies will come to realize that a blog is just as easily (and perhaps more helpfully) understood as a medium, not as a genre.

Each year Call to Action, a progressive, reform-minded organization within the Catholic Church, convenes a National Convention. This year the group aims to hold a few sessions on how to utilize new media technologies to inform and galvanize the laity to action. Some suggested sessions include blogging, podcasting and social networking. I had a conversation last night with an organizer, and hope to sit on a panel for the group. The convention is in November and preliminary information can be found here. More to come soon…

Jarvis posted recently over at the Buzz Machine about companies need to become more social.

I can’t agree more.

He describes how one company’s attempts to “be more social” pay dividends down the road in terms of increased creativity and good ideas. Well said.

Here’s the answer Bryan Gruley of the Wall Street Journal gave a group of Medill business reporters today:

People’s need for knowing what they didn’t already know.

People’s need for good storytelling.

Simple.

Most truths are.

If you have access to the Wall Street Journal archives, I’d suggest reading Gruley’s tribute to Tim Breslin, a former Chicago Wolves hockey player who died young of cancer - especially if you ever played hockey. It’s simply great.

Here’s a great piece on Gruley by Poynter.

The Arketi Group, an Atlanta-based public relations and integrated marketing consultancy, issued a report looking at how business to business journalists use blogs. Here is one finding:

The graph to the left shows that 84 percent of business to business journalists reported they would use a blog as a primary or secondary source.

This report kills me. Here’s why:

Blogs are defined by their medium, bloggers are not

Could you imagine a report asking whether or not a business to business journalist quoted a “speech” or an “interview” or a “written report” as a primary or secondary source? No, that’s nonsensical. All of the above, including blogs, are simply different media, across which sources of varying levels of reputability convey information - which brings me to my second point…

Blogs are not uniform sources of information

Do I get story ideas and learn about journalism trends from Jarvis and Romenesko? Sure. Do I get them from the latest blog indexed by Technorati? No. Just like I give more credence to something I read in the Journal as compared with the National Enquirer.