September 14th, 2009, 11 Comments »
Over the past week, we’ve been teaching a series of workshops in the Interior. We had a couple of media people in our sessions–one editor of a small town newspaper, and one veteran TV and radio producer. Both of them spoke about how they disliked the web’s capacity for anonymous comment.
Kirk makes three media people concerned about this issue:
For some reason, anonymity is acceptable — not as the justifiable shield for those who fear retribution if identified, but as a shield for those with other kinds of fears, motives or tendencies. Somewhere early in the game it became a rule instead of an exception to adopt a nickname and speak through it.
The result breaks what we were all taught rightly in school: That part of the bargain in speaking freely is the responsibility to stand up and be counted, and that part of the bargain in being criticized is to at least know who is attacking.
I’ve heard precisely the same concern from other newspaper folks in the past. This shouldn’t be surprising, for a couple of reasons.
First, when a newspaper is going to print a letter to the editor, they typically require (or at least request) validating details like an address or phone number. Second, I’m sure that most reporters have, at one point or another, been the subject of venomous, anonymous criticism. This might encourage some pretty black and white views about online identity.
Kirk is clearly a web-savvy guy, a Level 12 Web Citizen, so I don’t want to lump him in with the other media people to whom I’m referring.
We Trust the People We Know
However, I do want to extend a theory about the other complainants. They were all over forty, making them, in the parlance of demographers, digital immigrants. They never grew up crafting their one or more identities on the web.
They may not, for example, fully grasp that one can be accountable, creditable and incognito online. Over the last decade I’ve come to know and trust several online acquaintances despite never having known their full or real name. If they had, they’d know that there’s no equivalent of “getting their address and phone number” online, and that identities are fluidly built and demolished based on online activity.
I’m not making an argument for unfettered, anonymous comments in online spaces like a newspaper’s website. Mostly, I’m trying to encourage people to think of online identity as a continuum, not an on-off switch. And to point out that as the web gets more social, anonymity becomes less and less effective as a tactic. We trust the people we know, after all.
11 Comments »
March 6th, 2009, 19 Comments »
Erin pointed me at Stephen Hume’s column in the Vancouver Sun from earlier in the week. With a certain “you kids get off my lawn” charm, Mr. Hume protests a little too much about the rise of new media:
Meanwhile, blogosphere chatter responds with gleefully patronizing pronouncements on how the “old media” are toast, about to join the pterodactyl. The “new media” leads the way to a promised land of free information and citizen journalism.
Permit a few observations from the tar pits. First, the old media are the new media. The Vancouver Sun’s website, for example, generated 10 million page views in February — more than 357,000 a day. Our blogs attract more than 500,000 page views per month and have become — let me quote from the boss’s last memo — “a vital tool to gather and distribute content.” And all these numbers trend upward.
In my experience, most thinking bloggers recognize the implicit value of the news media. We’re well past the gloating phase, and are interested in helping newspapers save themselves from their own lack of foresight. That’s why I enjoy reading Mathew Ingram and Scott Rosenberg, because they do a great job of analyzing the mainstream media’s troubles and, more importantly, they discuss solutions.
Mr. Hume also takes bloggers to task for hiding behind anonymity. This is a bit of a red herring. After all, pretty much every popular blogger identifies themselves. And Mr. Hume would do well to remember the value of anonymity for bloggers in countries like China or Iran. I wonder, does he think of them as ‘cowards’, too?
The Right Metrics
If the Vancouver Sun is the new media, then Mr. Hume ought to pick the right metrics on which to report. Nobody I know in new media uses “page views” when describing their site’s popularity. In my experience, an organization reports on page views when a) they’re not measuring their traffic accurately and b) they’re just choosing the number that sounds the biggest.
And if the Vancouver Sun is new media, why haven’t more of them come to Northern Voice? In five years, we’ve had, by my count, no more than one or two reporters out to the conference. And this is one of the biggest new media conferences on the west coast, in the Sun’s own backyard. Not to mention the fact that all Mr. Hume’s Editor-in-Chief is doing with her Twitter account is posting links to her own newspaper.
There’s plenty more to criticize in Mr. Hume’s piece. The notion, for example, that newspapers offer an “assurance of quality and public accountability” is highly dubious. But what frustrates me most about Mr. Hume’s column is the lack of proposed solutions. He offers a hagiography to journalists, but doesn’t have any suggestions for how the industry might right its floundering corporate ship. Maybe that’sin another blog post, or, rather, column? He should check out Scott and Mathew’s blogs. Not only are they journalists who play extremely well with the new media, but they’re thinking about answers.
UPDATE: In the comments, Lisa rightfully points out that I should have mention Sun deputy editor Kirk LaPointe, whose blog I read and enjoy. I’d also meant to mention the irony that while I can comment on the Sun’s news stories, I can’t comment on Mr. Hume’s editorial. It’s odd that I can’t provide feedback on the bloggiest of content.
UPDATE #2: Mike Davidson of Newsvine has written a nice piece about the demise of the print edition of the Seattle P-I: “Overall, I’m not super optimistic about the future of a lot of these newspaper companies, but I really would love to see them at least replaced with something better. I still have a hard time believing that a 146-year-old company like the Seattle P-I is moving out of their own building before we are.”
19 Comments »
June 23rd, 2008, 6 Comments »
From the New York Times, things are going from bad to worse for the purveyors of ink-stained tree bark:
For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.
Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.
The article goes on to explain that the San Francisco Chronicle is losing US $1 million every week. Every week. The primary cause of this downturn is “the Internet’s siphoning away of ad revenue”.
Would I care if the physical version of every newspaper in the world went away? Nope. The real question is whether newspapers can work out a way to survive as Internet-only entities. I’d really like to see a balance sheet for, say, the Vancouver Sun, to understand how much they’d save (and how much ad revenue they’d lose) if they moved to an exclusively online format. That’s certainly not viable today, but it looks like the writing is on the wall.
6 Comments »
July 18th, 2007, 4 Comments »
Stephen Taylor has built a nifty front page viewer for the country’s major newspapers (well, major newspapers and 24 Hours). It works the same way you navigate album covers in iTunes. From Stephen’s blog post introducing the viewer:
I also designed this application as a media monitoring/research tool. A significant number of Canadians get their news from Canadian newspapers and some researchers may find it worthwhile to track the evolution of a story as expressed to Calgarians via the Herald, or to Torontonians via the Sun, to give two examples. To illustrate another example of this tool’s use, one might find it interesting to see how the National Post was covering the Conrad Black trial in comparison to other newspapers. Further, some believe that papers cheer for political parties during elections.
It’s not the slickest Flash design I’ve ever seen, but it gets the job done. My feature request: let us zoom in on the pages, at least far enough to read all the headlines and subheads.
I’ve included a photo of Prime Minster Harper throwing a snowball because, well, Stephen Taylor’s a Conservative and our man in Ottawa has lovely throwing form.
4 Comments »
