The Devil You Know

Posts Tagged ‘news’

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Back to school with the digital natives

In Bidness, Media on August 26, 2010 at 2:49 pm

Back to schoolOn 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 »

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The (surprisingly bright) future of local journalism

In Bidness, Media on April 17, 2010 at 10:24 am

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:

The (surprisingly bright) future of local journalism
View more presentations from Mike Orren.

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The measurement mess

In Bidness, Media on January 24, 2010 at 10:54 am

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.”

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Commentary on comment

In Bidness, Media on August 13, 2009 at 3:55 pm

A few weeks ago, I had one of my periodic head-explosions over Journalist-types poncing about over how hard civil and substantive comment is to maintain on news sites. This is a topic that really frustrates me, because I think it’s really easy. And for any of the other myriad mistakes we may have made at PegNews, this is one thing that I think we’ve gotten right.

Patrick 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 »

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Save your tears. Please.

In Media on March 31, 2009 at 11:06 am
If you don't know what this is, quit bitching about the death of print news.

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 »

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Stuff Journalists (apparently don’t) Like: The Chinese Wall

In Media on January 28, 2009 at 1:12 pm

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

519px-greatwall_large

“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 »

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Zoetrope blows my mind

In Gadgets, Media on December 23, 2008 at 3:48 pm

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.

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CNN: Using text messaging. Ur doin it wrong

In Media on December 1, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Im not alone in thinking CNN doesnt understand priority.

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 »