journalism Archives | Ian M Rountree

Journalists vs News Items – The Twofold Law of Blogging

March 14, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

Some people know what’s going on. Everywhere. All the time.

We call these people journalists. They’re the gatherers, the curators. Journalists present the facts, add value and perspective, conduct analysis.

Some people are what’s going on. We see them everywhere. All the time.

Most of the time, when considering these people, we call them celebrities. However, in the blogosphere, we call them link bait. Reference points. News items.

Which one are you?

And do you know which one is better for you? Which one is better for your blog? Not everyone who’s great at delivering information is good at delivering news for others. Not everyone who delivers news and commentary in a value-added, impossible to replicate way is worthy of news themselves.

This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s an opportunity to differentiate yourself. If everyone in your industry is trying to be well known – to be the news – you’ve got a clear opening to be the journalist, and report the news. If you can learn to do the analysis, add value, and build a consistent perspective on what’s going on in your industry – and, more importantly, deliver that news to outsiders in a voice and language they’ll understand – then you’re setting yourself up to win.

It doesn’t matter if El Bigname knows who I am.

It matters even less to anyone who doesn’t know who El Bigname is. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who in your industry knows how awesome you are – success comes from outside your fishbowl.

If you’re making yourself a news item, is anyone outside your fishbowl going to care?

And, if you’re reporting the news, are you reporting it to te echo chamber, or into the vastness of the outside world?

#TEDxMB un-Wrap-Up

February 16, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I had the extreme honour of being part of the Modern Earth Tweet Team covering TEDx Manitoba yesterday – Susan Hurrell and I spent 12 hours yesterday with our duelling laptops doing the platform journalism on Twitter for the event.

Susan Hurrell and Ian M Rountree - Modern Earth Web Design Tweet Team - TEDxManitoba — Susan Hurrell and Ian M Rountree – Modern Earth Web Design Tweet Team – TEDxManitoba

But, I can’t talk about it. Not properly. Not yet. My head is still swimming a bit, from lack of sleep, 12 hours of extreme Twitter goodness, and a number of fantastic talks.

If you want to get a sense of how it went, though…

The Modern Earth Facebook page has some pictures from the event in a #TEDxMB Photo Album.

Check out the What The Hashtag stats and see the transcript. We owned the trends in Manitoba, were number 2 in Canada for the majority of the day, and got into the top 40 trends in Canada according to Trendsmap. More than 1200 tweets were sent with the tag #TEDxMB on the day, from more than 200 participants, from 5 countries on 4 continents. We’ve got tweets from Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Ghana, and Guatemala.

To put that in perspective, that’s fully one third of this week’s #blogchat activity, or two #tweetdiners, with a very niche audience, a closed attendance list, and a livestream. Very little non-new-media promotion before the event, and mostly guidance from the Tweet Team and those on the volunteer crew who were digging in as well. Not too shabby.

The Winnipeg Free Press’ Melissa Martin wrote up a pair of great recaps, as well as an article about “Fast Flying Ideas at Conference” relating the nature of the event’s speed.

UPDATE: I don’t know how I forgot to mention, but I also met Kevin Hnatiuk, Leanne Havelock, Lisa MacKenzie, Ryan Caligiuri, Matt Shepherd, Kevin Glasier and Erica Glasier at the event, and made a point of saying hi to David Pensato again – all of whom I follow and most of whom I’ve spoken to for some time on Twitter. I’ve met many people I’ve known online before, but never so many at a single event.

I’ll say more when I can. Promise.

The Rise of Presence Media

April 8, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

Forget the real-time web, we’re skipping that entirely.

Soon, the idea of presence will become a major part of how we view communication. How do I know? Because it’s everywhere – and that’s part of the point, a big part of the mystique.

How do I know this? Because humans always outpace. We’re wired for it. No matter what’s going on, we sprint ahead, finding ways not just to cut corners and shorten process, but to make things efficient, usable, simple to communicate. As much as complexity is a necessary part of societal growth, to a point, so is precision of communication. And because precision and presence playu so nicely together, we have a natural tendancy to want face-to-face contact with our information.

The Real-Time Web is here. Like it or not, someone well enough equipped can find out just about anything with not a lot of lag time. We search, we aggregate, we syndicate and broadcast. Some of us even publish from our keyboards directly. Why? We want to connect. We’ve talked about connection, right? It’s fairly important.

One of the biggest components of connection is presence.

Amber Naslund sparked this with a post about presence journalism and immediacy that made a lot of sense – and as I responded, younger generations (younger then me anyway, being late Gen X, early Gen Y) believe rightly that without immediacy, media is uninspiring. Their worlds have never lacked the communication capacilities we now begin to take for granted.

Amber’s not alone – Jay Rosen made a comment about CNN preserving the View From Nowhere, and how that’s becoming a failing part of their business by limiting their journalistic capabilities. I agree wholeheartedly. Think back to the first time you saw a local reporter “On location” for a national news team. Did the story hit home a little more? Did it make more sense, even if it wasn’t in your back yard, to have someone intimately involved in the details reporting them?

You bet your sweet Tweets it does.

Jay and Amber were talking about reporting, but I think this argument has to extend to all manner of human communication on the web. Julien Smith just dropped a post entitled “The End of Bookstores” which talks about the immediacy of technology adoption, specifically comparing how long it takes to get a book on your Kindle or iPad, compared to the time it takes out of your day to hit the local Chapters or Borders for the same piece of text. The costs differ, not just in dollars, but in time. Yes, local bookstores have people, and a sense of community, but that’s a poor tradeoff for some people.

Presence nullifies a lot of arguments.

Did Tiamamen Square happened? If they’d had Foursquare, there would be proof beyond cover-up. Was there a second shooter on the grassy knoll? Geolocation and Twitter could have solved that one easily. In a lot of cases where details are the difference between a headline and a news phenomenon, current and emerging technologies change not only the information that’s reported, but the way it’s reported.

Look at the Iran elections where Twitter broke before CNN did. Trouble in India. The last three earthquakes. Do you remember the headlines? Probably not, as catchy as they certainly would have been. But I bet if you think you’d be able to remember what the first tweet was, or who it came from.

Presence media goes beyond making yourself available to others; it makes others available to you. Are you going to wait for a life-and-death situation before you make yourself aware and involved?

Photo by alicepopkorn

What Pay Walls have in common with Maginot's Line

December 16, 2009 by Ian 4 Comments

After the Great War, France erected a line of defence on its border with Italy and Germany, hoping that it would provide a funnel for attackers wishing to avoid the line itself, or that invaders would simply get made into hamburger by the many many guns. Unfortunately, like many reactionary measures, it was built to deal with the tactics of yesterday, and then advanced around by the thinkers of the time.

Instead of traipsing up to the line and getting cut down, the Germans who invaded in 1940 got smart. They set out decoys, picked a target carefully, even sent the Luftwaffe straight over the line (which was not intended to defend against aerial targets so much less common in the previous war). Within five days of their approach to the line, Germany was in France. Maginot’s Line failed. But not the way most people believe it did.

The common misconception is that the Germans just went around by going through Belgium. It’s a limited myth; the actual attack was surgical and presented a scenario the wall was not meant to deal with.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this.

Not just speaking of news, there’s been a big kerfuffle for the last little while about monetizing services on the internet. Subscription-only news sites, limiting traffic from non-direct sources, any number of tactics in defence of digital turf – all of this becomes inherently futile once people figure out, in critical mass, how to avoid he need for access to the turf itself. The erecting of these walls – even the really small, annoying ones lime between-page ads – is a tactic that assumes those coming your way have no other savvy, that they’ll hit the wall and behave exactly as you want them to. The trouble is, we content invaders have already found our Luftwaffe, and it’s flying over your head right now.

Jeff Jarvis talks a lot about hyperlocal news. To an extent I agree with him. The idea that anyone, anywhere near an event can riff on it and get the word out to a place where it’s ready and waiting for an audience is a big deal. It won’t always be blogging or twitter, something else will eventually evolve in addition to the tools we have now, but the behaviour is already there.

You – as a content producer – are no longer defined by what you’re trained in, or what you’ve exposed yourself to in the past. Now, you can easily redefine your knowledge and gain new perspective with nothing more than thirty seconds and an internet connection. Like the scene from The Matrix, when Trinity needed training to fly a helicopter, and all she did was hit up the operator, hold her phone to her ear for a few seconds and download. Ok, so that’s an extreme example, but the analogue is there, isn’t it? I haven’t failed to answer a question in probably a year and a half since I got my first BlackBerry, mostly because I was already search-savvy, and suddenly had fairly universal access to snackable information.

Using monetization schemes as a barrier (even if the barrier is click-it-away like with interstitial ads) is a failing prospect from the get go, for the same reason as the Maginot Line was broken. Tactics never remain the same; that’s why they’re tactics and not practices.