IN THIS ISSUE:

ABC NEWS MOVES TO THE MMJ MODEL OF NEWSGATHERING
NEW FEATURE: THE MMJ REVOLUTION - GETTING TO THE POINT
TWITTER USERS POST 50 MILLION TWEETS A DAY!
CHALK ONE UP FOR CITIZEN JOURNALISM
MEDIA 2.0 101: THE BEST "DESIGN" FOR THE WEB
QUOTE OF THE WEEK

ABC NEWS MOVES TO THE MMJ MODEL OF NEWSGATHERING
by Terry Heaton
ABC News dropped a bomb on the world of television news this week during a sweeping announcement of downsizing and preparing for the future. ABC News president David Westin noted in a memo to staff that "our entire society is in the middle of a revolution in the ways that people get their news and information," and then proceeded to lay out a "transformation" of the news division that will result in 300-400 buyouts or layoffs. In the memo, Westin laid out six areas of change:

1. In newsgathering, we intend to dramatically expand our use of digital journalists. We have proven that this model works at various locations around the world. We believe we can take it much further;
2. In production, we will take the example set by Nightline of editorial staff who shoot and edit their own material and follow it throughout all of our programs, while recognizing that we will continue to rely upon our ENG crews and editors for most of our work;
3. In structure, we will combine our weekday and weekend operations for both Good Morning America and World News;
4. In special events, we will rely upon our program staff through the day and night to cover unexpected events and marshal personnel from across the division to cover scheduled events;
5. In newsmagazines and long-form programming, we will move to a more flexible blend of staff and freelancers so that we can respond to varying demand for hours through the year; and
6. Overall, we will eliminate redundancies wherever possible.

Of significance to us is the decision — by a network news operation — to move to what Westin called "digital journalists" in the gathering of news. The decision has set off another round of arguing about the comparative value of "one-man bands" versus the two-person "crew" (reporter/photographer) of traditional newsgathering. Many, many people feel threatened by the concept of multimedia journalism (MMJ - our term) and see only the downside for themselves. In so doing, they can't see past the threat to embrace certain positive realities about the concept, such as individual control over every element of storytelling, more feet on-the-street to cover the news better (yes, better), and that technology has forever changed the Hollywood model of newsgathering that we've had for 50 years.

The father of the videojournalist (VJ) movement is Michael Rosenblum, who introduced the concept to European newsrooms 20 years ago, because the industry in the U.S. didn't or couldn't see the value of it. In a stinging blog post this morning, Rosenblum noted that "In the era of the Internet, ABC News is diving headlong into 1990."

Well, it's certainly a sign that VJ is becoming mainstream. This is no surprise to us, but rather passe at this point.

Far be it from me to turn down a training contract with ABC News (and as soon as I get off this ship, I'm gonna be in touch with David Westin). But my guess is that they will do it internally, and that they will mess it up.

In the meantime, at least, one of the questions that I have been asked ad-nauseum for the past 25 years has at last been answered:

"If this is such a good idea, how come no network news operations do this?"

Now, they do.

The VJ or MMJ or DJ model is going to be the standard model for most newsgathering in the years ahead. There will always be a need for "some" specialists on both the reporter and photographer side, but it just makes so much more sense — and not just from a cost standpoint — to go with the technological flow.

And because so many of our clients are moving in this direction, we're going to introduce a new weekly feature for the newsletter by the man who heads our MMJ training unit, long-time consultant and storytelling expert, Bob Kaplitz. Bob has a very useful blog with tons of video tips for MMJs, and we thought it would be useful for him to share some of them on a weekly basis via the newsletter. Below is his first.   <Link>

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THE MMJ REVOLUTION - GETTING TO THE POINT
by Bob Kaplitz
"What's the point of my story?" is one of the most important questions you can ask yourself. That's the point of this week's tip.

Sounds obvious, but it's easy to forget. Many stories meander, making viewers wonder "What's the point?" Then they ask an even tougher question, "Why should I care?"

Here are examples of "points":

"'Why do the county's water sprinklers run when it rains — like it did today?"

Or a timely one: "Where are the jobs our tax money went to fund?"

Notice how clear and simple. If you know the point of your story, you'll do a much better job of visualizing it. A fancy term for the "point of the story" is the "declarative statement". Whatever you call it, write the main point down.

Stories stray, getting off point, because MMJs have lots of information they want to squeeze all into one story. We've all been there. But great intentions don't result in great storytelling. Checklists can help. Here's one for you to use:

CHECKLIST

• What's the point of my story?
• How will I best visualize it?
• How will I make it relevant to my viewers?
• How can I put a face on the story — a person viewers can identify with?
• What's worthwhile — but would work best in another story with another point?

Use this checklist in your planning, shooting, writing, editing, and posting to your Web site and other social media.

We noticed one MMJ's stories were on point. He gave a lot of the credit to his wife. She'd frequently ask him over a grab and run breakfast, not leaving much time for an answer: "Honey, what are you working on today?" If he couldn't give a quick answer, he knew that story was mush and needed focus.   <Link>

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TWITTER USERS POST 50 MILLION TWEETS A DAY!
by Terry Heaton
In what's largely viewed as a response to criticism that its growth was leveling off, the folks at Twitter released a nice little piece of data yesterday revealing that its users post 50 million tweets each day. That number is so big that you actually have to pause to take it all in. 600 times a second, people post to Twitter. Imagine viewing that river in real time; you'd never be able to read anything.

And that's exactly the problem, one that will certainly continue to grow. In this new data is a world of opportunity for local media companies, but we must act quickly. The opportunity is that of curating this fire hose, so that people can drink from it. Technology can do some of it, but human interaction will produce even better results.

Twitter is an evolving media phenomenon, or perhaps I should say that its use is evolving. Twitter simply enables the delivery of 140-character messages into a vast database that's, for the most part, lacking an ecosystem. This is why I wrote so glowingly a few weeks ago about young guys from Salt Lake City who had built a neat Twitter aggregator, Utahtweets.com. Let me repeat what I said then that the aggregating (curating) of Twitter messages from the business community is a can't lose model for local commerce downstream.

As one of the founders of UtahTweets told me last month, the local media companies they've spoken with generally don't get what's going on.

We're trying to show some of our local news organizations that Twitter streams that are filled with direct messages don't impress readers of aggregators. I've posed the question locally: should local news organizations maintain two Twitter streams, one for news headlines, and one to interact with members of the local public? If they blend both types of information into one stream, does that damage their credibility?

Of course it doesn't hurt their credibility, but that's irrelevant anyway. We're talking about the business community's growing embrace of Twitter, something I believe is a real growth market.

Twitter is a new world media company, because it publishes content to the Web. Period. It may not "create" content, but it publishes it nonetheless. Traditional media companies can augment this content to serve their own communities, but the idea that the very definition of "media company" is changing is worth regular discussion at all levels in the traditional media world.

I had the chance to spend some quality time last week with Court Cunningham, CEO of Yodle, discussing this very thing. Yodle creates landing pages for online business websites, so it, too, is a new media company. And, as I've written many times, every business that posts to the Web in any form is also functioning like a media company, and we cannot — we dare not — ignore it.

This is why news this week that Wal-Mart is getting into the online video distribution business (Hey, isn't that what WE do?) is more important than it may seem on the surface. Wal-Mart is doing something terribly smart here — bending in the face of disruptive innovations — and it will do well for them. One day, we may be doing business with their distribution channel, and wouldn't that be a turn-about? (Aside: walmart.com is already one of the biggest advertising platforms on the Web, a media company with significant reach for the ads it serves.)

The point is that despite our best efforts, the wild west nature of the Entrepreneurial Web continues mostly without us. The Twitter news should be yet another clarion call to all media companies that social media, as defined by those applications that link us all together (can you say Facebook), are in fact becoming "the Web within the Web," and we must respond accordingly. As I've noted previously, nearly every media company now has a Facebook page, but most are just extension of their brands. That's fine, but what about "facebook.com/yourcommunity?" Who will dominate that space, or Twitter or YouTube or the next "Web within the Web" innovation?

These are the more pressing matters for leaders in our world. Who will step up to the plate?   <Link>

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CHALK ONE UP FOR CITIZEN JOURNALISM
by Ken Elmore
While the debate over the viability of citizen journalism is still being debated in traditional journalism circles, this week an unknown CJ is being awarded one of the industry's highest honors.

It's the first time the Long Island University based George Polk Awards nominated a work that was produced anonymously. No one actually knows who shot and posted the fatal shooting video of Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian student killed by sniper fire while watching a protest of the 2009 presidential elections.

The Polk Awards announcement acknowledge the bravery for the person responsible for posting the video, "This video footage was seen by millions and became an iconic image of the Iranian resistance. We don't know who took it or who uploaded it, but we know it has news value," said John Darnton, curator of the George Polk Awards. "This award celebrates the fact that, in today's world, a brave bystander with a cell-phone camera can use video-sharing and social networking sites to deliver news."

In its 61 year history, other recipients have included Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow. The Polk Awards were established to honor George Polk, a CBS reporter who was shot and killed in 1948 while covering the civil war in Greece.

Certainly this will fuel more discussion about the future of journalism. Technology has enabled millions of potential citizen journalists. All who now have the technology to shoot and publish images world wide or online with their inner circles of social media friends, an active network of the self informed.

Traditional media should take notice of the growing strength of social media. It is not unusual when a news event breaks out, so does video enabled cell phones. In minutes the story is shared, tweeted and linked.

Yet another reminder for local media to participate in the conversations that are taking place online.

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MEDIA 2.0 101: THE BEST "DESIGN" FOR THE WEB
by Terry Heaton
It's easy to recognize a media company website: it's the one with all the clutter.

When mass marketing is your world, you only get one shot to "grab" people, and so was born the home page of a media company website. The idea is to put as many links on the page as possible. Whether they are in the form of text links or images, that's the purpose of a media company website. Ads fight for eyeballs. News fights for eyeballs. Promotions fight for eyeballs. Special sections fight for eyeballs. The page is a busy doorway, with each element competing against the next. We want the weather "up top," because that's what people come here for, and so it competes with the video listings, the news headlines, and, well, you get the idea.

The thing that has always struck me about this is that we think that getting people to that page is the solution to all of our problems. This is insanity, and while I'm finding a great many digital vice presidents in agreement, we seem helpless to fix it. That, I think, is because we don't know any other way to do it.

Let's examine four pertinent facts that can help us.

1. Digital media presentation was created by the newspaper industry. In the early days of the Web, media companies could see its potential, not so much as a disruptor but more so as a way they could extend their brands into this new world. The early Web supported text, and so the written word was supreme, and that played into the strengths of the print media.

   This is why media sites resemble newspapers in form and function. There is no "fold" in a Web document, but we've convinced ourselves (and our advertisers) that there is one. The display ad model doesn't really "work" in this environment (nobody sees them), but we still sell ads based on size and placement. We tease people on the front page and drive them deeper into the site in order to show more ads (that nobody sees).

   Nearly every tactical application regarding the presentation and selling of the news online by traditional media companies is birthed in this model, and it's killing us. Even television station websites copy the model, because, well, it's the model, right? We may put a video player front-and-center, but it's treated like any other content block on a portal. Like its predecessor, the newspaper site, a TV site exists to keep people inside the advertising ecosystem that comes with the portal, and that is our Achilles' Heel.

2. The Web is a database. If I could burn only one thought into the hearts and minds of media executives it would be this one. Why? Because once you can bring yourself to this understanding, everything else about the Web makes sense. The Web is not cable TV, nor is it a distribution model for mass media. Oh it has elements of both, but at core, it is a database. Web "sites" pull from the entire database, not just those rows and columns that are run by the media company itself.

   The AP seems to have had an awakening about this, for the cooperative is now using its Twitter account to push people to its Facebook page, where it distributes full-text articles and builds relationships with its (to date) 9,400 fans. Steve Rubel calls this "brilliant" and notes his earlier references to a "headless" Web, something Paul Gillin calls "the siteless Web."

   What's happening here is that The AP appears to be discovering that publishing TO THE DATABASE is more natural for the back end of the Web than publishing TO ANY ONE (OR MORE) SITES. This is revolutionary and will lead to a much more efficient delivery system for consumers (and, one hopes, The AP).

   The AP is now changing the game for news by not only going where attention spirals are taking us but by also using their content to curate a conversation on Facebook and - above all - build relationships.

   The point is that the database is much bigger and works more efficiently than any walled garden within the database, and those of us who wish a seat at the table of news relevance in the future are going to have to get into this game. This is the major reason I've always struggled with traditional media companies' refusal to fully participate in the world of RSS. RSS was created to distribute content to the database, and yet traditional media companies only use it to "tease" people and force them to click on a link and "drive" them back to their walled gardens. In so doing, we completely miss the point of the technology, and that has cost us points with the Live Web.

3. People no longer enter sites through the front door. As the Live Web matures, we're finding that Facebook and Twitter are increasingly feeding people to our stories. However, they're going to individual stories — entering our sites through side doors — and not our home pages. Search also accomplishes this, and at some point, we're going to have to accept that our main doorway is irrelevant. Let's face it: people are hip to what they're going to find on our home pages anyway, so there's no compelling reason for them to explore beyond the story that they came to see in the first place. This is our own fault, for we're the ones who've done the educating by example.

4. The only "news" style created by the people who actually built the Web is the blog. This is the dirty little secret that traditional media companies wish to avoid, because it's just too simple for our business model. "You mean, Terry, that you actually want us to put our (precious) content on one page?" Yes, exactly. The blog format is ideally suited not only to publish to the database but also to easily follow. The latest item is up top with older items beneath in one long stream. Users scroll to get to the content, not click on links. This dramatically reduces the cost of interaction and makes for a much better user experience. The page itself also focuses attention on what really matters: the output of the news organization.

   Even if news organizations put a headline and a couple of sentences in blog format, it would still be better than what we offer today, because it would focus user attention where it needs to be and reduce the clutter that dominates media company sites. The right column in the blog format is where bloggers (and blog media companies like TechCrunch or TMZ) do their business. It follows the scroll down the page and doesn't "compete" for eyeballs with the actual output of the company.

   Anybody that wants to distribute content to users and the database efficiently should be using the blog format. It forces a 100% Web-native product or service, and alone should compel our participation. Surely we've learned by now that repurposing our "real" content gets us nowhere on the World Wide Web.

   AR&D clients are moving to what we call a "Continuous News" model of website — the TMZ model — which flows in blog format. This is designed to meet the needs of news consumers Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Some sites choose the TechCrunch model of providing only part of the story on the home page and requiring a link to the "complete" story. This is fine, but it is not Continuous News, which uses only parts of stories as items in the stream. I should also note that TechCrunch averages between 35-50 completed stories for their site every day.

Traditional media companies need nothing less than an internal revolution to not only extend their brands but also awaken to the possibilities of a database-backed Web. In reality, every element in the database is content, including the advertising, and we'll never learn how to play in that world, if we insist on the walled-garden, news portal approach. It won't be easy, but innovation rarely is.   <Link>

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK Now, the thriving organization consists of well-organized linchpins doing their thing in concert, creating more value than any factory ever could. Instead of trying to build organizations filled with human automatons, we've realized we must go the other way. Seth Godin, Linchpin, page 24. We strongly recommend this book for media leaders.