I had a great time presenting at OpenCamp this weekend. It was an amazing crowd for a first outing, numbering more than 600 registrants. And from where I sat, everything went without a hitch.
Below is my preso. For some reason, SlideShare isn’t picking up my notes, so I have them placed below. It’s not ideal, as the list doesn’t sync with the slides as well. I hope to get the version with notes on SS ASAP. Read the rest of this entry »
On Monday, I had the privilege of speaking to The Shorthorn (University of Texas – Arlington) newsroom and web staff as they kicked off the new school year.
Knowing how the kids are all digi-fied these days, I was at first surprised that I was asked to come talk to them about how to get more focused on their web presence. But, as I discovered, we may have erred in calling this generation “digital natives.” Instead, I might call them the “bridge generation.” For while their lives are imbued with technology in a way my parents will never understand, they have been raised in a world where the entrenched media business still operated on old-media models, even while experimenting in the New Media World.
While I was duly impressed with these students’ journalism chops and work ethic, I initially was surprised to find them, in some ways, to have more in common with the stereotypical ink-stained curmudgeons than with the bleeding edge digitalfolk. Then, on reflection, it made perfect sense: Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes I should learn to keep my big yap shut. The other day, in a fit of pique brought on by undeserved hype for the newest “hyperlocal” business du jour, I responded to a tweet from someone who should have known better raving about the product. My criticism was that this “hyperlocal” zip-code specific Twitter product was a load of junk. I knew so anecdotally by looking at my zip code’s results. After some further discussion with folks on Twitter, I generated the following analysis for the past month of this service, as relates to my metropolitan zip code: Read the rest of this entry »
Despite the heat, the summer doldrums must be giving way, as I’m staring down a really busy spate of talks and appearances:
* – Would-be burglars and harassers note that April will be home for most of that and my three big, toothy dogs will be home for all of it.
I’ve only bought one Groupon, as a test before we launched our own direct commerce services. If you want to see their downside for the merchant, just follow the comment thread.
I wound up calling in for a refund, which I got, albeit in “Groupon-bucks.”
There are lots of anecdotes about these sorts of things happening. I found it interesting that it happened on the only one I’d bought.
150 Million (Source: Engadget)
So I imagine, like me, many of you are buying your new iPhones today or at least waiting with bated breath for the New World of the iOS 4.0.
Last week, I followed the WWDC keynote, and despite all the gadget and gizmo talk, there was one thing that stuck in my head. In fact, it haunted me as nothing has since I first wrote the business plan for Pegasus News in 2004:
150 million credit cards on file from people using iTunes and/or the App Store (and now the iBooks Store). 150 Million.
As Steve Jobs said, “We have 150 million accounts — we think it’s the biggest on the web. We’re number one.”
Interestingly, he then segued into a discussion of iAds, but there was no connection.
As someone who has been obsessed with transactional ad models for the better part of this decade, this presented both a tragedy and an opportunity. That night, after mulling the problem while floating in the pool with the pups, I toddled inside and fired off an email to sjobs@apple.com: Read the rest of this entry »
Like a kid with a new toy
For the last couple months, I’ve taken great pride in pontificating that Apple had finally created a product in which I had zero interest. I sneered that the iPad was either a mere giant iPhone sans phone or a primary computer for digital idiots.
I am typing this entry on my new iPad, purchased Saturday and already my favorite gadget ever. I’ll explain the tremendous potential and impact it has, despite a couple serious-but-fixable flaws, but I suppose I should first explain why I changed my mind and made the purchase in the first place.
While I still partially chalk this up to a global conspiracy that makes me crave Apple products fortnightly, a lot of my change of heart came from reading reviewers who lauded the iPad’s use as a simple reader for Instapaper. I don’t like reading long articles on my computer at a desk, and despite my insistance that you could read just fine on a iPhone, I had literally hundreds of articles backlogged– primarily because the truth is that reading and constantly scrolling on a 3 x 4 inch screen sucks. Add the half-dozen Kindle books I’d bought thinking I read them on the iPhone or laptop to the resolution to blog more here, and I felt I had my rationale… Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, Winston Edmondson gave me a crack at guest-hosting the Innovation at Work Radio Show. I’m preserving the audio for infamy below.
Mike Orren guest-hosts the Innovation at Work Radio Show
In addition to Winston, of course, I owe big thanks to Chris Walters and Steven Thrasher who were there to talk about Dallas Startup Weekend — they made my job a lot easier.
I’m eager to try again. I think I did pretty well through the first two segments. I was tired and flagging a bit by the third, and it shows as I stumble to remember the name of the event, etc. But I pulled it back together by the end.
The toughest part was the timing going into commercial. I tended to run short for fear of getting cut off and wound up leaving lots of bumper music.
Preso I gave yesterday to the faculty of The Schieffer School of Journalism at TCU and a couple weeks ago to the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors:
Like the groundhog crawling out from his hole, I seem to be doing a lot more public speaking / appearances in the last couple months. And I’ve got a slew of stuff coming up in the next week:
Saturday night at 8:00, I’m the guest monologuist for Dallas Comedy House’s Megaphone Show. I’ll be telling some seedy stories from my bachelor days in Dallas and then the pros will be improvising scenes inspired by them. It’ll be a great time. I’m also improvising in the 10:00 PM Maestro show. Both shows are $10– get your tickets here. I’m beyond excited about this — I’ll guarantee a good time.
On Monday at 1 PM, I’ll be guest-hosting the Innovation at Work Radio Show on CNN AM 1190. I met host Winston Edmondson as a result of my Ignite Dallas speaking gig. We hit it off and he’s since become a PegNews content partner and had me on the show to talk about our launch. We’d batted around the idea of me occasionally guest-hosting and he’s giving me my first shot Monday. I’ll be chatting with the folks from Dallas Startup Weekend about this year’s event. Tune in or catch the stream online.
Monday at 5 PM, I’ll be appearing on a panel for The Media Club of North Texas with a handful of other local mediati from The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, KERA and the like trying to hash out what the future looks like…
It keeps getting smaller.
There’s a pissing match today among several InterWebs iconoclasts about Comscore‘s traffic counting methods and business models. Actually, to be more accurate, it’s a bunch of bitch-slapping about unrelated issues, but web traffic is the jumping-off point.
You can read it for yourself — be sure to follow the comment thread too, in which all the principals rebut. (Or, as one commenter deems it, “three poodles fighting over a piece of raw meat”).
But for me, the whole thing is sad because it reminds me of another “scandal” almost six years ago now. Several newspaper chains had been caught overstating their circulation. There was all sorts of hand-wringing over it, but in the midst of the mea culpas, I read one simple line in a column by Ed Wasserman that changed my way of thinking and in large part led me to create The Daily You as a major feature of Pegasus News:
“Still, there is an absurdity to the whole scam. Counting copies is a dopey way to gauge impact. The explosion of information channels necessarily means erosion of audience share held by dominant media. There is still nothing that can rivet the attention of a community the way its daily paper does.”
…
If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:
16 yr working, 15 yr InterWebs/email, 7 yr smartphone, 5 yr RSS, 3 yr social networks – finally have info mgmt system that works for me.
First, some context. On average, I:
And somehow, I finally feel like I have control of it all. I trust my system and nothing seems to slip through the cracks.
Peter Krasilovsky continues to be inexplicably kind to me and has again included me on a panel for this year’s Interactive Local Media conference in LA. I’m on Friday morning (December 11) with Neil Budde of DailyMe (formerly of Yahoo! News):
9:30 am – 10:00 am
Personalization and Local
Personalization has been synonymous with “local” from day one—in theory. Recently, several cutting edge platforms make the tie more of a reality. We’ll get deep insight into how to make personalization/local work from two of the industry’s leading thinkers and doers—Internet media pioneer Neil Budde, the founding publisher of WSJ.com and leader of Yahoo News, and Mike Orren, the founder of Pegasus News.
Neil Budde, President and Chief Product Officer, DailyMe
Mike Orren, Founder and President, Pegasus News
Funny related story: We at Pegasus News have a flagship technology called “The Daily You.” The first conference I went to after we launched that, I randomly wound up sitting next to Eduardo Hauser, the founder of DailyMe. That was my first proof that this local behavioral thing had gone mainstream.
Also, as a speaker, it turns out I can offer you (my dear friend and loyal reader) a $200 registration discount for the conference. Just click the banner below to download the coupon:
ILM is consistently the best industry conference I attend. It’s no BS; the moderators don’t pull punches; and everybody in the room is a decision-maker who is doing something interesting. Hope to see you there.
If these trends continue, heeeyy...
I went on a mini-rant on Twitter last week that I thought I’d synthesize / clarify here: The media is ridiculously obsessed with identifying trends, particularly when those trends relate to media.
So every time someone sneezes, there are a flurry of trend stories opining that everyone will sneeze soon, presumably with the same intensity and viscosity as the sneezer immediately prior.
In the market space in which I presumably operate, there were great examples at both ends of the spectrum last week. My pals at Everyblock sold their company to MSNBC, and instantly, Hyperlocal is a Business Now. Seemingly moments later, the Washington Post shuttered its “hyperlocal” site for Loudon County, VA — and voila, Hyperlocal is Dead. My friend, Greg Sterling, quickly saw the fallacies flying.
It’s not just in the hyperlocal media space, though: It can be music websites; search engines; sellers of 12th century Tahitian antiquities — if a start-up in the space is born, dies, sells or raises a nickel of capital, a trend is born. Read the rest of this entry »
My Mad Men totem, cruising through the offices of Sterling Cooper
One of the first posts ever on this blog was a recognition of work by a New York artist and actress who was making weekly stylized desktop images based on episodes of Mad Men.
The artist, Dyna Moe, started doing the illustrations after doing a Christmas card for a friend in the cast of the show. I discovered her illustrations via a fansite towards the end of Season 1. We started looking forward to them every Monday during season two; quietly thrilled for her as she met the show creators when star Jon Hamm was on SNL ; and are now ecstatic to see her creations turned into the instantly-popular “Mad Men Yourself” tool on the show’s official website.
I see this as a textbook example of how the new New Media should work: A fan / friend starts creating an homage to a brand. That brand does not sue or discourage the fan doing unofficial work, even though she might be making a few paltry bucks. Nor does it jump in and try to co-opt, compete or take over. It lets the homage play out. Once it becomes clear that the homage is successful and additive to the brand, it embraces that homage. It then hires the fan / friend to extend that homage in an official way that is true to the brand and the artist.
Everybody wins. Imagine that.
And I thought these guys had editorial standards
I have a hard-won theory on honors and awards: You win the ones you don’t deserve and don’t get the ones you think you should.
As if to prove the front half of that, the good folks at NBC DFW recently named me one of “The 25 Most Interesting People in Dallas / Fort Worth.” Read the rest of this entry »
Save us, young Britons!
It appears that when you climb to the top of the mountain of media enlightenment, you’re likely to find a teenage boy from England. Whether you find nirvana or fools gold depends on which young man you find.
Last week, the world was aTwitter about young Scott Campbell giving up his iPod for an original-model Sony Walkman. He wrote an article that was, well, articulate, funny and nostalgic all at once. Read the rest of this entry »
How am I going to find the zen not to be bitter when barely-born low-traffic local sites are getting snapped up by AOL for “less than $10 million each.”
Welcome to the local gold rush. I was here before the road you took was built. Risked a lot to get here. Enjoy…
I know I tend to spend all my rant power on broken media models, but I’ve had reason lately to ponder the relationship between PR and advertising.
PR people wonder why there’s sometimes resentment towards them from media folk — I don’t think it is actually because of anything PR professionals do per se, but rather because of the utter disconnect between most businesses public relations and advertising. And I don’t think it is generally front-of-mind for most media companies because of the church-state separation. But as someone who lives in both worlds, I’ve found myself seething lately over repeated scenarios like this: Read the rest of this entry »
Live long and prosper by pretending not to be Bruce Greenwood?
I dragged my sainted wife to the new Star Trek flick on Friday and as usual, she found the secret hidden gem that no one else ever would.
In the morass of explosions and makeup, she was initially confused over the actor-character match-ups between Sarek (Ben Cross) and Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood). Now neither looks much like the other, but that’s precisely what lays at the root of the strange (dis)connection. Read the rest of this entry »
If you don't know what this is, quit bitching about the death of print news.
As the long-predicted mediapocalypse finally takes hold, I find my annoyance level with the deathbed histrionics of many in the field — especially the journalists bemoaning their lost birthrights, way of life, etc. — rising. Here’s but one example from a movie critic suffering from the “when you’re being run over by a lorry, everything looks like a lorry” syndrome. Perhaps I spend too much time gazing into the media mirror, but the sheer volume and pathos of these pieces is on my last nerve.
Part of that is because it’s hard to feel sorry for the pig who built his house out of straw and got belligerent when one of his brothers tried to bring him some bricks. But a lot of it is because people in this trade (myself included) tend to succumb to the notion that because we are the storytellers, our stories are inherently the most interesting and important.
But as the dirges drone on; as the golden remembrance of things that didn’t really pass but we’d like to think did dominate the media — and they will for the next couple years — I find myself indignant that these muses of misery were largely silent when other members of our industry suffered the same fate. Read the rest of this entry »
blogging-and-website-creation-demystified (word doc)
I’ve been using my Xbox 360 as a media server in our house, but there have always been a few things that made it seem inferior. Based on buzz from folks I trust I’d played with alpha-software Boxee on my Mac a bit to see if it could be an alternative. Last week, Lifehacker ran a piece on using Boxee on an Apple TV. I’d thought for a while about building my own Linux machine to run Boxee, but I found myself at the mall last weekend, and consequently in the Apple store. Having not yet contributed to the Steve Jobs medical fund, I found myself ogling the Apple TV, which I’d originally eschewed in favor of the Xbox. But dammned if Boxee didn’t make it sound more viable; and damned if we didn’t have a big TV in the bedroom that would benefit from the Xbox. Read the rest of this entry »
The new refrain in business
I’m seeing an unhappy, but perhaps necessary trend in business relationships of late, one that may well be born of our troubling economic times. I can ‘splain best with an example:
Last year, Google approached my company about becoming an “Authorized Adwords Reseller.” The courtship, ramp-up and launch process was high-touch. We had lots of conference calls with lots of people. We had regular email correspondence with the support team– all real people with real names. Our business manager went to Mountain View for live training.
This week, we were unceremoniously dumped from the program via a canned email with no human being’s signature on it. I did get a response to my reply of complaint, but it came from the nameless, faceless, phone numberless “Google AdWords Reseller Team.” Read the rest of this entry »
Note: I’ve recently become a fan of the blog Stuff Journalists Like, a different twist on the style of blog started by Stuff White People Like. I submitted the following piece to them, and after more than a week of complete radio silence (during which they posted several other items), I inquired and got a polite response that they didn’t think it fit their vibe. So, I inflict it on you here:
#66: The Chinese Wall
“The Chinese Wall” is a construct by which journalists have long convinced themselves (and only themselves) that they are immune to the vagaries of advertising and corporate management. Referring to the Great Wall of China, it gives a sense of complete separation with the added bonus of sounding vaguely culturally insensitive when uttered in the patois of a crusty Lou Grant figure. It also avoids the even more problematic and provincial “church and state” analogy also used to describe the same phenomenon. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been pontificating on this subject for a long time, but today Robert Niles nailed it succinctly:
The old rule: You can’t cover something in which you are personally involved.
The new rule: Tell your readers how you are involved and how that’s shaped your reporting.The old rule: You must present all sides of a story, being fair to each.
The new rule: Report the truth and debunk the lies.The old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.
The new rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.
The whole piece is well worth reading. And I’ve got a treatise on the last couplet that I’m contributing to Stuff Journalists Like this weekend.
From one of my attorney friends, posted from Facebook with the name changed to protect the honest:
“Chelsea” offers a secret to my FB friends. We look up your FB pages during jury selection. Just sayin…
Saving the banking industry means saving banks.
Saving the auto industry means saving car makers.
Saving the free press does not mean saving newspapers.
Ever seen something that you so thoroughly knew was game changing that you couldn’t even effectively articulate how? Because the language actually changed with the innovation?
See Zoetrope.
As best as I can tell, this just started today. When I clicked on a link posted by one of my friends (hey Chip!), the resulting page, which was on a WordPress blog, looked like this:
Click for larger image
A couple notable items:
For those who’ve asked about my Facebook icon:
The Wiz
I’m usually leery when sales managers recommend reading — it’s typically brainless, feel-good plucky crap designed to motivate the unmotivated. So when our last sales manager pointed me at the Monday Morning Memo by Roy H. Williams, a self-styled “Wizard of Ads,” my eyes almost rolled out of my head.
But week in and week out, Williams’ missives are the most consistently insightful thing I read. He’s a master of human psychology and counter-intuitive wisdom. I generally find myself agreeing with him on some concept or other that hadn’t ocurred to me before: Take for example this week’s study of how most marketing is geared towards extraverts while alienating introverts.
If you become a regular reader, don’t miss the “rabbit hole,” which is an Easter Egg hidden in every issue. Click on the lead photo (and each subsequent one that appears) and you’ll be taken down some other, unrelated road. This week’s, for instance, is a series of thoughts, photos and videos on Audrey Hepburn.
I never thought I’d find a truly literate writer focused on sales, but Roy’s the real deal. You’re cheating yourself if your don’t sign up for his weekly email or subscribe to his podcast.
We’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing…
1. Tribune coverwrap on issue of AdAge that arrived the same day as their bankruptcy announcement:
"An opportunity" to dodge your bills, apparently.
I'm not alone in thinking CNN doesn't understand priority.
I’ve written before about how most media folk don’t understand how properly to use text alerts, with CNN as a case-in-point.
Here’s a checklist for breaking news alerts. Fail one and hold your fire: Read the rest of this entry »
"Look! It's so sterile!"
Whether you’re an Apple fanboy (like me) or a hater, you had to enjoy the skewering delivered by The Simpsons last night. It was some of the sharper satire we’ve seen out of the show in a while. (See video clips after the jump).
But for all the merriment rampant in Apple’s Mac/PC ad campaigns, Steve Jobs isn’t known for his sense of humor on such matters. Especially when the first ad of the first commercial break was for the Macbook… Read the rest of this entry »
Poker in the front, cheating in the back.
Great piece on 60 Minutes last night about cheating from insiders on online poker sites. What really struck me was that the bulk of the investigative lifting was done by aggrieved gamblers (who also happened to be attorneys). The point is that they piled through tons of documents and spreadsheets to prove the pattern and isolate the likely culprits. And even though the gamblers weren’t so-called unbiased Journalists, 60 Minutes and The Washington Post teamed up to follow up on their research and go ask the bad guys and their de facto accomplices tough questions… Read the rest of this entry »
Best idea I’ve seen in a long time.
Oh my god! They killed user reviews! You bastards!
I’m in my hotel after the day has wrapped at the always-excellent ILM08 and feeling like the guy in the sci-fi film whose calculations indicate the asteroid is about to hit while the rest of the rubes are blissfully ignorant.
I’m shocked its not all over the Interwebs already, so I guess I’ll be the first to say it. More than any other day since their founding, today Google quietly, nearly silently, took an action that will, for better or worse, change the media world… Read the rest of this entry »
And now, the traffic report
Andy Rooney
Andy Rooney is my least favorite commentator anywhere, ever. Generally, his senile ramblings at the end of 60 Minutes bring me to apoplexy. But this week’s paean to newspapers was just sad.
To think that a discussion of the woes of newspapers today remotely calls for a comparison to television is beyond clueless, even for Rooney. Read the rest of this entry »
Lead, follow or get out o' the way
Ted Turner has been a longtime hero of mine — It was an article he wrote about the media business that was the last push to leave a safe, lucrative publishing job to start a local media business.
I just stumbled on a nice CNN interview with him.
For me, this was the money-shot: Read the rest of this entry »
“So, when you say that I’m saying mean things, you’re violating my right to free speech, so your right to free speech by criticizing me should be shut off right now, goshdarnit.”
As a new media guy, I suppose it’s heresy to say that I find some of the en vogue (or at least formerly en vogue) services to be utterly ridiculous. Twitter’s one example (but that’s another post).
I tried really hard to see Second Life as something more than a timesuck for gullible ex-dungeonmasters and marketing consultants with enough disposable time and income that they don’t mind slow, jerky, crashing animations of their alter-fauxegos. But I’ve come up empty. I mean at least WOW gives you the entertaiment value of killing stuff.
So I find news of a real estate crisis in SL beyond ridiculous. Read the rest of this entry »
business, comments, journalism, news, notthatfreakinhard
Commentary on comment
In Bidness, Media on August 13, 2009 at 3:55 pmPatrick Thornton of BeatBlogging.org was doing a good job of bringing in best practices in a Twitter conversation that turned into a great article on Poynter today. As part of that, I sent him a lengthy missive on our comment practices that was way too much to fit in a roundup piece. So, for posterity, I thought I’d share it here: Read the rest of this entry »