Author: mattbigelow

Ravelry, the future of online communities, and what it means for journalism

Medill logoAs part of an independent study I’m doing on online communities with another Medill student, I moderated three focus groups yesterday looking at why and how students used social media. Once we got beyond Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, one student brought up an interesting site I’d heard of, but must admit I’ve never checked out: Ravelry – a knit and crochet community.Ravelry logo

The student explained that before she discovered Ravelry, she would spend a lot of time trying to find free patterns online. Now, she can log in to Ravelry and trade patterns within the community easily.

The future of online communities…?

Her insights helped highlight some of different motivations people have for joining and contributing to online communities. People overwhelmingly have the same responses for joining Facebook and MySpace: my friends are there, I want to find old friends or it helps me keep in touch. Topically oriented communities offer something entirely different.

TripConnect logoI’m sure other examples of topically oriented, niche sites abound. The only one I’m personally familiar with is TripConnect, to which I contributed reviews.

Magazines and newspapers

At first glance, it seems that Facebook accomplishes what local newspapers once accomplished, although in a more extensive and personalized way, whereas topically oriented online communities are more analogous to magazines.

What’s your take? Are there any vibrant online communities that particularly impress you? Or any old media companies doing anything particularly interesting in this arena?

This is a thread I’ll hopefully develop more fully in the future.

The future of journalistic objectivity

Chicago Tribune logoTimothy McNulty at the Chicago Tribune wrote a great article yesterday on journalistic objectivity.

Objectivity is an oft-debated topic amongst journalists. To what extent is it possible? Where are the lines drawn? Has it diminished in the age of cable TV’s talking heads and the numerous opining bloggers? Or, as McNulty says, does objectivity get reduced to neutrality? “On the one hand this” and “on the other hand this,” without any attempt to truly seek the truth?

One thing that interests me is the potential of objectivity on a macro level – especially given the democratizing potential and decentralized nature of the Web.

Continue reading “The future of journalistic objectivity” →

Dean Lavine addresses Medill graduate students over lunch

Medill logoMedill Dean John Lavine told a group of Medill graduates today, “we are aggressively looking at a set of new clients” for their graduate run Medill News Service.

As we at Medill here have started turning more towards multimedia journalism, the clients who subscribe to our graduate-run wire service haven’t been able to support some of the Flash-based video pieces we’ve produced for our Web site Medill Reports.

The Medill News Service, a wire service run by graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism has provided local coverage on Chicago politics, business, legal affairs, etc. for area publications since 1995. Basically, Medill graduate students report in Chicago, and Chicago-area publications who can’t afford the reporting pay for the stories. (Clients include the Daily Herald, the Daily Southtown, the Northwest Indiana Times, the Chicago Defender, among others.) The Medill News Service also runs a Washington Bureau. Washington clients include the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and the Greeley Tribune in Colorado.
Continue reading “Dean Lavine addresses Medill graduate students over lunch” →

One definition of a journalist: you have to get paid

Medill MagazineA Medill graduate, Ed Finkel, is working on a story for the recently redesigned Medill magazine on citizen journalism, the impact of blogs on journalism, and how we define a journalist in this new media landscape.

Money makes the title

I don’t pretend to have an answer to Ed’s question. But I did think of one interesting place to look: the government.

Recent legislation pushed through the House proposes a reporter’s privilege, or the right to protect one’s sources against court subpoena. (For more on the background of the Reporter’s Privilege, here’s a great article in U.S. News & World Report, or check out the The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.)

The Free Flow of Information Act, as the legislation is titled, defines a “covered person” as:

a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.

I think it’s interesting because it expands the definition of a journalist, for the purposes of a reporter’s privilege, to bloggers, podcasters, or anyone else who performs acts of journalism – but only as long as they make money.

Now this isn’t the only definition, and it is a narrowly construed one at that, but it could ultimately become an important one that shapes the debate from here on out.

IndyStar blogger fired for racial slur

Check out this post here for a detailed timeline of the debacle.

IndyStar logoBasically, a writer/blogger for the IndyStar.com wrote up some harsh criticism of a “city-county council president” near Indianapolis. What’s really interesting is that the writer/blogger revised his story a number of times. Apparently, he watered it down a little each time, before an editor at the newspaper read the post and took it down. Here’s the formal mea culpa.

stAllio!s wayWhat’s interesting, however, is that in the timeline mentioned above, an Indy blogger (on stAllio!s way) searched through the Google cache to find previous versions of the post, chronicling the “timeline of a slur.”

The whole situation is unfortunate, to say the least. But it brings an interesting point about blogging and the Web. Whereas it’s become popular to think of blogging and the internet as a wild, no-holds-barred, “anything goes” medium.

I’ve just never bought that.

People, and especially journalists, are still accountable for what they say or write, regardless of the medium. The ability to reach a global audience with no barrier to entry changes the way we communicate, sure. But I suspect that norms and mores surrounding that way of communication will evolve. And once that happens, we’ll look back on that perspective of the Web as a safe place for over-the-top commentary and editorial as pretty naive.

Update: It looks like some of the pages are even gone now from Google’s cache. The blogger is now linking to .jpgs he’s made of the original post

Measuring newspapers’ footprints

Newspaper footprint

Nearly 4 in 5 adults are touched by the “footprint” of newspapers, according to a report issued by the Newspaper Association of America, using data from Scarborough.

The report (PDF here) emphasizes a few key points:

  • Newspapers and newspaper Web sites (the newspaper footprint) reach 77% of adults in a given week.
  • The newspaper footprint reaches 65% of young adults (18-24) in a given week.
  • In a given week, the newspaper footprint reaches 66% of adults who have been in their home less than a year.
  • The newspaper footprint reaches 76% of food shoppers with long recipts($150+) in a given week.
  • The newspaper footprint reaches 81% of consumers planning to spend $35,000+ on a new vehicle in the next 12 months.
  • The newspaper footprint reaches 82% of adults who have made any Internet purchase in the last 12 months.

In the market for a new car…

I find the statistic on vehicles interesting. Here at Medill, where our Integrated Marketing Communications department harps on targeted, relevant advertising, we often discuss the inefficiency of car and real estate advertising in newspapers.

Traditionally, newspapers provided the only blanket coverage of a particularly geographic area. On the other hand, however, not many people are in the market for a car or a home at any given time.

On its face, that statistic affirms the traditional wisdom: if you want to reach someone in the market for a car, the newspaper will probably achieve that for you. On the other hand, you’ll be reaching a whole lot of people not in the market for a car. Not terribly efficient. And this report doesn’t seem to speak to that concern.

What happens when that number slips to 70 percent, then 60 percent? Of the population of people in the market for a car in the next 12 months, I wonder how many of them can be reached through ads on Cars.com?

Gannett & Tribune team up to launch MetroMix LLC

I first saw this come over PRNewswire, than read about it on AP and others.

At first glance, I brushed it aside because, frankly, it’s not all that exciting to me that MetroMix is expanding. But after hearing a fellow student here at Medill make a comment on how excited she would be at the prospect of working for the Chicago Tribune, I thought I’d get on my new media soapbox.

This deal epitomizes what doesn’t excite me about traditional media companies. Expanding their MetroMix brand to deliver a national advertising network targeted at young, affluent urbanites? Not exactly a revolutionary self-examination of what the Tribune is, and is not, doing well, in my opinion.

Now, I’m not saying the joint Tribune/Gannett venture won’t be commercially successful. Obviously those who orchestrated the deal believe so. And I’ll readily admit, it’s a great resource for finding events in Chicago (where I live). But it still has so many old media hangups. Such as…

Submitting a listing

Below is a screen shot of the “submit a listing” button, neatly tucked away well below the fold, so to speak, on the lower left sidebar.

Metromix Submit a Listing

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of community participation.

If you do find, navigate to, or stumble upon the “submit a listing” button, you get the screen below:

Metromix Submit a Listing

This screen comes complete with the following disclaimers:

  • Metromix only accepts e-mail and online form submissions; no mail or fax submissions will be accepted
  • We are not able to confirm receipt of submissions, due to the amount of mail we receive.
  • We cannot guarantee the inclusion of any event in our listings.

Wow, they are really inviting the community to participate.

(In full disclosure, I’ve never submitted an event or a venue to MetroMix, so I can’t speak to how well they respond).

Although there are reasons (and valid ones) that such disclaimers exist, the fact remains that MetroMix failes to capitalize on an inherent capability of the medium: its decentralization.

Traditional media companies don’t do well with that.

Okay, I’m finished.

The One Second Film parks outside Harpo Studios

If you haven’t heard of the “One Second Film,” I recommend checking it out.

The film consists of 24 frames (1 second) of 12 different pieces of art, created by hundreds of artists.

To become a “producer,” you donate $1 to the group. (All of the proceeds are then given to charity).

And it’s being hyped as the largest collaborative art project ever. (Almost 10,000 producers in more than 50 countries).

The core group of organizers have trekked all the way to Chicago and parked outside Harpo to see if they can’t get Oprah to sign on. I wish them the best.

Here’s the Intro:

What I think is interesting… is the degree to which collaboration pervades the essence of their movement, right down to the the marketing and promotion of the event. It appears completely decentralized. And, with the exception of the 1 second film and the artwork, everything is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

I’d like to get down there to Harpo and check it out.

Northwestern’s News at Seven has avatars report the news

Update: Chicago Public Radio piece on “News at Seven.”

Northwestern University’s Infolab, which is part of the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, runs an interesting project called “News at Seven.”

In the “News at Seven” broadcast, avatars, not people, report the news. (It’s already gotten considerable press, but will launch a new beta version tomorrow, Monday, October 29th.)

Here’s a preview. (And more old newscasts can be found here or you can read the project blog).

Given my disdain for the broadcast medium, you can imagine the implications I draw from a nifty computer program that can generate video of avatars spitting out news stories. (Note to my broadcast buddies, I didn’t say I disdained the people or the reporting, just the medium).

That said, the avatars, in their present inception, do seem a poor substitute for real people.

Broadcasters, do you feel your job security is threatened?