it is sometimes joked about in public relations (pr) circles, that the slashing of journalism budgets will be a boon for pr professionals. the truth is the decline in good journalism starts us down a path that neuters one of the most powerful checks and balances in a democratic society.

keeping the bastards honest

if this is the only thing that you remember about the australian democrats, etch it fast.

a democratic society exists in a state of fluid contention. one side can never have too much power, because what we do know about power is that it corrupts. to this end, most of our power structures are such that there is always a counterpoint, hence:

• a bicameral system of parliament
• separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches
• government and opposition
• prosecution and defence
• mcdonalds and kfc (i might be joking here)

if we didn’t have this system, power shifts to one group and then we have a problem.

public opinion

public opinion, and consequently consent, is where all our human institutions derive their power. much of that opinion is informed by the media (old or new). the media is where we tell our stories, and stories are told of us. these stories over time form reputation, credibility and ultimately for a basis for power. be that market power, social power or governmental power. power influences consent.

the hacks

we rely on the hacks to watch our institutions and ensure that the public are informed on what they are doing, so that we, the people, can give our consent. we rely on them to be honest, accurate and fair. as humans though, their stories will be coloured from their experiences and biases. this is often not a problem because often an experienced journalist with have insights that add value and interest to a story.

unfortunately, this is not always the case. bad news sells better than good news and a scandal is always titillating. coming at a story from a negative angle is always juicier.

the flacks

as flacks, we are the advocates for our clients. we tell our client’s stories from a positive angle and always with our best foot forward. this is neither a secret nor is it an earth shattering revelation. for us good news is always better than bad news, and a scandal is a nightmare. besides telling everyone anytime we have good news, we try to limit the damage of bad news.

this hack/flack contention, hopefully draws us somewhere to the middle of the road, and as close to the perception of truth as humanly possible. this system of story telling gives us as a society a balance of power.

the decline of good journalism

advertising revenues are drying up and media houses flounder trying to find an online model monetisation model. money is not being spent on good journalism and funding longer well researched pieces, rather journalists are being asked to churn out x number of stories per day.

this skews the power balances and this is not a good thing. In the long term, this means that the power starts to shifts to one group, the flacks.

i’m sure we’re a wonderful bunch but we are we are human and definitely not the untouchables. we are part of a symbiotic system that ultimately only works when there is equal representation on both sides.

i’m not sure what the strategy to monetise will be. there are ideas floating around. i do believe that with every media downsizing the checks stop balancing.

pr churnalism, consent, journalism, power, pr, public relations

here’s another example of how virals should be done.

via: http://nguyenduong.tumblr.com/

advertising mini clubman, video, viral

when the photograph came to town i’m sure there were people running around saying that the days of paint were numbered. then digital photography was going to wipe out film. the same was probably said about the pen when the typewriter came along. none of these things have come to pass. photographers are still using film, albeit far less of them, people are still painting, and pens still exist, although i haven’t seen a typewriter in a while.

you see where i’m coming from is…

my father is a newspaper man, i’m a p.r flack, who gets to talk to alot of editors over the course of a working week. sometimes it’s just day to day work stuff, but other times we get to catch up and just chew the fat about where the media business is headed. we talk about where the whole “print thing” is headed and there seems to be a fairly good consensus that print’s never going away. at least not anytime soon.

times they are a changing

the publishing industry is going through a big shakeup. that’s not a bad thing. some publishers are going bust, but others are adapting. others are working how online and print are going to work lockstep.

a conversation with an editor

i had the chance to spend some time with the editor of one of australia’s top tech pubs and he spoke very frankly about how his publication took a massive hit. what it made him do was cut out all of the fat in the business, almost halved his staff and had to look at smarter ways of doing things. he then had to work out who was still buying his magazine and why, and then gave them more of it. he’s arrested the downward fall in sales, and the coming quarter he thinks he’ll have an upward trend again.

it’s horses for courses

i think malcolm gladwell did a good job at ted when he tells the story of spaghetti sauce. watch it, but the gist of what he says is that because we’re all different, there is no one perfect flavour for everyone. some people plain despise reading from a screen. they like to have a paper in front of them and when you talk to some people, they describe reading from a page as an engagement of all the senses. the feel of the paper, the sound it makes, the smell of the ink, the sun on them as they read an in-depth feature about darfur or the latest production of rent on broadway.

online changes the media mix

people like to consume news online. why? because it’s the fastest and most efficient way of consuming that product. it’s like drinking water. water is water. you drink it because you have to and then it’s over. when i sit down with the a magazine on a saturday with a coffee and bacon and eggs, i want features and i want them in print.  i want to scribble on the page, i want to take as long as i need to and not worry about battery life or hotspots or any tech. i just want to slowly digest 10,000 words and enjoy it. it’s my equivalent of a scotch or a nice red wine. it is a slow process to enjoy.

it’s about the best medium for the message

or the best tool for the job if you’re old school. it will always be this way. news by print is not the best tool for the job anymore. but when people sit down with a novel, or a features mag, what need are they fulfilling and does sitting in front of a pc best fulfil that need?

“the end is not nigh!” is not as sensational

of course. the headline is not as great, but i for one am glad that online has come into its own, but give me a copy of the good weekend and a double macchiatto.

opinion features, heritage media, new media, newspapers, print

i was looking at the attendees to a a facebook event and where i showed up as an attendee the error message was quite explicit:

It’s you! But there’s like six other buttons that go to your profile, so fuck right off. Search

hmmm not sure if the facebook developers had inteded THAT particular message to actually appear, but that’s one hell of an an oops!

***update***
the message has been updated to:

random stuff error message, facebook

this is a subjective evaluation based on what’s important to me, and how i use twitter.

the short version for those short on time or attention span

the new twhirl is a fantastic improvement but the winner is still tweetdeck because it has groups. as soon as twhirl gets groups, i will switch. at the time of writing twhirl version 0.8.8f was released and tweetdeck 0.21

if you have a bit more time or attention…

background

i started using twitter some time back as a complement to my blogging. there was a vast pool of interesting thoughts flying around in the twittersphere that were useful to draw inspiration from. i was still working as a systems architect at the time and did not need to be on twitter the whole day.

when i started working as a

full-time flack

i started to use twitter more extensively because it helped me get a feel for what the big issues were and to tune in to any issues my client’s customers were having. i’ve also found that many of the journos i engage with also used twitter so the use of twitter full time became a logical progression.

the twitter website

is fine if you are an occasional user or don’t follow more than 10 or maybe 20 people, but is impossible to use meaningfully if you follow more than than that. i’m following 462 at the time of writing and it’s hard to keep abreast of the conversations from the website. it would not be a viable work tool if i had to use the website! what i found especially difficult was that i could not be responsive enough to @replies and direct messages because there is no notification from the website when you get them.

so i started hunting around for alternatives and

found twhirl

i loved the clean interface and the fact that you get a nice little pop up telling you when you get an @reply and direct messages. of course as my twitter usage increased yet again with twhirl, i found that i missed important work related conversations during the day because of an interesting phenomenon:

different people are important at different times of day

so between 09:00 to 18:00 work related people were important:

• clients;
• journos and
• colleagues.

whereas in the evenings it was more the:

• family;
• friends and
• “interesting people”. which meant that i needed to be able to tune into these groups separately.
  

  enter tweetdeck

  whose biggest selling point for me is groups. i can add the people i’m following into different groups which means i can get a separate column for each group. very useful, i can tune into the different groups depending on what is important at the time and i am not simply at the mercy of a continuous tweet stream.

  the problem with tweetdeck is

  it gives you one massive screen that you have to scroll across all the time. this is a pain (pardon the pun).

  so i tried twhirl 0.8.8f

  which was announced by seesmic ceo, @loic yesterday. some of the useful stuff for me are:

• keyword tracking
• multiple movable panes and
• tracking @replies where my name appears anywhere within the message (incidentally tweetdeck has this feature).

which is all very good for me especially keyword tracking.

but it still doesn’t have groups

so i will have to stay with tweetdeck which is not the pleasure to use that twhirl is.

the race is on, will twhirl get groups first or tweetdeck get movable panes?

cool apps compare, evaluation, groups, loic, seesmic, tweetdeck, twhirl, twitter

timing could not have been more opportune, there was some debate after my posting on citizen journalism.

so here’s the problem with selling twitter as a mainstream news source: without fact checking it’s just one big rumour mill.

see what happens when jonoh tells the world that there is a fire on a plane today in melbourne. the “news” spreads like wildfire and the twemes go crazy when in fact jonoh was not even on the flight!

twitter is a brilliant medium, but we need to still apply some rules to make it credible as a news source.

case studies, opinion airport, citizen journalism, fire, haysom, jonoh, journalism, melbourne, plane, twitter

another well executed, smart, funny, and creative ad that happened to get viral.

somebody shook up a great big can of awesome sauce and busted it out here!

thanks to my colleague kate for this one.

advertising dancing, flashmob, liverpool, t mobile, train station, tvc, viral video

this video is simply brilliant. reasons why i think it works:

• it tells a story
• it does so in a very personal way;
• it’s not trying to flog a product to me;
• the visuals are interesting and appropriate and
• it’s not trying to be a viral video.

compare it to another shoe company who gets a massive fail

thanks to @mspecht for tweeting about the blog council post

advertising asic, onitsuka, origami, tiger, tvc, video, viral

every time there is some horrible disaster the twitterati / blogosphere lights up with almost jubilant vindication. it’s starting to grate.

i was not conscious of this until i saw a Tweet by blogger @longzheng:

it’s a shame it takes an accident to “show off” the power of Twitter and community journalism. let’s just accept it works already.

first and foremost, let’s stop using disasters to sell and justify social media – it’s verging on ambulance chasing now: denver plane crash, mumbai terror attacks and most recently usair crash in the hudson to name a few.

furthermore, having had some time to watch all of these events unfold and evaluate what’s being said, i don’t think that citizen journalism is really journalism. i think at best they’re eyewitness accounts at worst they’re complete fabrications. the fact that someone captures something on their camera phone or tweets something doesn’t make it journalism.

do we call it cctv journalism when cctv footage is captured of a robbery by cctv?

it becomes journalistic when:

• someone takes that footage;
• interviews witnesses;
• interviews police;
• interviews the victim(s);
• writes / records a meaningful story and
• someone verifies the facts quoted.

i don’t dispute the value of social media tools in recording an eyewitness account but let’s not engage in social media jihadism about it. twitter and twitpic are certainly useful for feeding information back in real time about an event. a journalist or blogger can then go back over this information and use it as part of the steps above to write a piece of journalism.

the intelligent consumption of media means that you constantly evaluate what you are reading and not merely accepting it as fact. this is less likely to happen if you are reading an established publication that you already trust because of their reputation. Calling a hashtag news does not fall into the “intelligent consumption” category, in fact I would call it indiscriminate gluttony of the social media variety.

finally, just from a purely consumer perspective i don’t want to consume my news in a fragmented piecemeal fashion over 50 different social media sites. i want a cohesive account – a story. i may read several stories to get differing viewpoints but i don’t want to read my news in 1000 140 character chunks.

eye witness accounts will always have a place – as will “citizen journalism”. will it replace the millions of talented individuals who pore over the information and tell us a story? not in the next hundred years.

opinion citizen journalism, hashtags, journalism, journalists, mumbai, twitter, usair

there are possibly thousands of articles online on how to increase your credibility online. many of them are written by search engine optimisation types, others are by social media “experts”. i want to approach this from a journalism / blogger perspective.

journos as i have discovered come from all walks of life. some of them went to school, some of them did not (like my father). starting life out as a journo is hard work, if you’re good enough and lucky enough to land a cadetship for a major publication you get put through the rigours of the newsroom and start writing your first pieces. along the way you are mentored, fact checked and edited. eventually, you automatically do all those things yourself (and still get mentored, fact checked and edited).

when readers read your work they trust that the publication you are working for, by their reputation – the reputation they have worked hard to earn and maintain – means that your work is as factual as possible. when that journo has established a body of work that is credible, their reputation stands on its own.

what about a blogger?

putting aside the well worn path of tips and tricks, a search for “blogger credibility” will yield an enormous amount of results. Darren has a great series on this topic over at his blog.

the long and the short of is it has to be built up over time from a body of work. in the end, if your output is good (could mean interesting, factual or offer insight) you build a reputation. the difference is, unless you are already have an established reputation elsewhere, you have to work much harder. you don’t have the implied reputation of a major masthead earlier on.

of course, if you’ve made a name for yourself elsewhere because you’re already an established expert in another field and you blog about that field, you also bypass the extra time at the beginning.

once this reputation is established though, whether you are a blogger or a journalist is purely semantics.

it was this train of thought that led me to agreeing with @renailemay in the end.

esoterica, social media 101 bloggers, credibility, journalism, reputation