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a13network 3:29 pm on February 10, 2009 | 1 | # |

Yeah, so the meteorite has landed. Calm down. The last thing you want to do is panic, and call for all newspapers to close their websites for a week. You would have a better chance at surviving Russian Roulette. There is a better solution.

Follow me on this. Let’s look at what has found success on the Internet. In the past, we saw the birth of AOL and Napster. They provided a way to for people to create an online community and they allowed it’s users to receive benefits for participating, with free songs and instant messages. Today, social networks like MySpace/Facebook provides a way for you to connect with your friends, share media and create you own personal online community. Digg.com allows users to share your news articles with their community of online friends. Twitter helps you share your thoughts about your experiences with your followers and friends. See the trend?

Newspapers need to focus on creating and cultivating online communities. This is where they can start to rebuild their lost revenue. That does not mean journalists will have to change what they do. Not at all. It means instead of maintaining a staff working on printing presses and in delivery trucks, newspapers should focus on a smaller staff that will help provide a more profitable service in an online space.

People do pay for online services. They use Flikr Pro accounts to store and share their photos, they buy Yahoo mail accounts to store nearly anything. They buy storage space on WordPress to store audio, video and still images they use in their blogs. They will pay Skype to let them call their friend’s cell phone. They will pour hundreds of dollars into Second Life or WoW to enhance their experience, or into their XBOX to be able to connect to their friends.

News to Generation Y is not a service. It is more like a human right. So it will be a hard sell trying to make it a service once it has been established as being free. However, it is worth looking at why they choose to pay for services online. Each service allows them to build and maintain their own online communities in one way or another. To them, it is worth paying for services if it benefits them in some way. So if a service was created that would allow them to maintain their online community and serve as a meeting point for others, it could find a groundswell of support. The media company that can create a platform where people can build and maintain their online communities will reach new audiences and will be able to find new sources of revenue.

It is the groundswell that will help shield newspapers from the meteorite fall out. They can’t change the rules mid-game. They will be forced to adapt. They will have to start by realizing they are no longer just a newspaper, they are now a multimedia company. So the old rules and processes that helped them find success on paper will not guarantee their success online. The rules are different here. The sooner they can adjust to the new atmosphere the longer they will survive.
a13network 2:33 pm on February 10, 2009 | 0 | # |

The meteorite has hit and newspapers are scrambling to find shelter from it’s impact.

This week, Walter Isaacson and Jim Romesesko wrote about the direction they thought the news industry must take to find shelter from extinction. I think we can all agree, even with the best ideas, it will be hard to save every news organization, this time. 2009 may be remembered as the year that killed the newspaper.

Yes, I will miss the feel of a newspaper too, but that is not the real debate here. The real debate is how will journalism survive on the Internet if they have been giving it away for free all these years? Can they put the cat back into the bag and then expect people to forget it? The answer is no. Who are you kidding? Really. Even if every single newspaper in America used the micro payment system, I still could get the same information from other sources. (CNN, MSNBC, MHz Networks) Although I appreciate the newspaper brand, they have not cultivated me as part of their community and therefor, my loyalties lie elsewhere.

The news industry, for the most part, is a digital immigrant. Otherwise we would not be where we are today. They are treating the web the same way they are treating the analog world. What they need to do is look at what the digital natives are buying, where they are at, and were the groundswell migrates.

It is time to put the printing press in a museum. Welcome to 2009. It’s time to rethink our strategy. Things are going to be very different from here.
a13network 12:18 pm on January 31, 2009 | 0 | # |

In the past, the news model has primarily been a one way conversation. Reporters write a story and it then gets published and distributed to news consumers. The only way to be part of a conversation was to write a letter to the editor, and hope that your letter would be chosen to be published in the final pages of section A.

The next generation of news consumers do not want the same one way conversation. People today want to feel involved. They want to be a part of the process, not just a consumer of the results. Their demand for social opportunities in the news they are consuming is shaping the news of the future.

We are already seeing early adopters in the news industry moving to a more social medium. In the past few years,Current has successfully paved the way to a new model of civic journalism. Instead of relying on a staff of journalists to produce news content, Current relies on users to upload their print news story, video, and or photos. The best stories are voted up or down on its website and the top stories are then aired on its cable TV channel.

Al Jazeera English is spear-heading interactive broadcasting with Livestation. Livestation allows online TV consumers to interact with the producers, guests and community in real time on the Internet and in a few months consumers will be able to watch live TV and interact using their iPhones.

Other media companies have flirted with the social web, but they still have a long way to go to make it work to its full potential. CNN and Facebook formed a partnership early in 2008 as a way to promote online polling and brand recognition. It wasn’t until the 2009 presidential inauguration until they started to use the social networking community to a fuller potential.

Web sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, reddit, or any of the sites mentioned here for a small example are redefining how to use an online community to distribute your news. The simple model of voting for the most interesting news story has helped even the smallest news rooms find an audience for their articles that could rival the circulation numbers for most newspapers.

Twitter is closing on sites like Digg with recommendations repeated by individuals in various social circles.

Bloggers are also reshaping the media newsroom. With only a few individuals targeting specific topics, bloggers are usually able to out scoop main-stream media. In the past U.S. Election, political bloggers usually broke major headlines hours if not days ahead of the main stream media.

Although journalists are struggling to compete with a competitive salary as independent bloggers, it is only a matter of time before a social media site goes up that becomes a game changer for the news current mainstream news model.

The social web is will reverse current media strategies and it will drive content to print and television in the future. An excellent example of this is the Current.tv model. Current pays each citizen journalist whose video airs on its television channel.

Online metrics will help marketers point advertisers to demographics defined by the users. It will allow users to choose what kind of content they want to see and recommend other popular stories based on an Amazon styled model.

It is not far fetched to say how social media will change the way we distribute news in the future. It is making people like me seem a little less crazy. Especially me, because now when I talk to my TV, it talks back.
a13network 7:07 pm on June 20, 2008 | 0 | # |

Have a crack-berry? Can’t live without it? Well, come 2009, your dependence on technology is about to get worse. On January 24, 2009, the FCC will allow the winners of the 700 MHz wireless spectrum auction to begin to use the airwaves to distribute information over the Internet. You will soon be able to get more bars in more places and more information than you are used to dealing with in one day.
The Internet as we know it is about to get a major upgrade, but are we ready for it? The new spectrum will be providing new platforms for media content. The spectrum will help move Internet connectivity from our personal computers to other previously unconnected devises in an attempt to make life a bit easier. We can expect more Internet connectivity in digital cameras, GPS systems, in-car entertainment systems and portable gaming consoles. Virtual worlds will see another explosion of interest, like it did in the past two years with Second Life and World of War Craft. With more high speed connectivity in more places, you may see some users never actually log off of their accounts in virtual worlds. (Advertisers may go crazy with excitement) Social networks will thrive off of the constant technology. The high speed connections will help to increase our internet attention span. Mostly because its so much fun watching your favorite videos in HD. The media floodgates are about to open, and the early adopters to this technology will be the ones that help to shape our future.
With high connection speeds, and no “tubes” for Internet providers to whine about, users can expect high-speed connections delivering content we only dream about today. It will also change the way that content is delivered.
Photojournalists will have their images sent right to the newsroom from the moment they take their pictures. Live Internet broadcasts will become as normal as broadcasting live on Television. On demand “television” will be easily obtainable online.
The ability to connect anywhere with incredible speed, will empower citizen journalists and journalists and it will provide a more powerful media platform to reach more people on more devices. It will open up a way to reach a generation of news consumers lost with newspaper subscriptions.
Before you get all excited about what this wonderful spectrum can do for you think about this: Insurance companies, such as Progressive, already have a patent on tracking movements of your car with a GPS or cell phone.
According to Wikipedia, “The basic idea of telematic auto insurance is that a driver’s behavior is monitored directly while the person drives and this information is transmitted to an insurance company. The insurance company then assesses the risk of that driver having an accident and charges insurance premiums accordingly. A driver who drives long distance at high speed, for example, will be charged a higher rate than a driver who drives short distances at slower speeds.”
I can only imagine what kind of contraptions the RIAA is trying to patent that will be similar…
a13network 6:48 pm on May 25, 2008 | 0 | # |

The end of the old media dominance does not mean an end to quality content. It means future media will take a shift from being printed on old media, such as paper, to being published on online and fed to other devises such as your TiVo or mobile devise.

One of the largest untapped markets today is mobile media. The early adopters to this new platform will lead the news industry. So far, very few news outlets actually have a fully functional mobile web sites. Most mobile sites are text heavy, and can be difficult to maneuver with your mobile device.

Today, you can get your news on your iPhone, Blackberry, PSP, iPod, or download your favorite podcasts onto your TiVo. Technology, such as RSS feeds and podcasts, allows users to plug new content into the systems of their choice. Some companies use technology that determines what kind of browser their visitors are using, and then determined their experience accordingly. Facebook, Amazon and Google are just a few examples of companies who use this technology to determine user experience, today.

Each device will create its own possibilities. Being able to connect to interactive content on a PSP will have its advantages. The interface will allow users to be completely involved with a fully interactive website by using the built in PSP Controller. But what about news on your XBox, Wii or DS Lite? I will talk about this more in the section, the 3D web. It just helps to point out there are plenty of media devises that are widely popular and largely ignored by the news industry.

The Internet is the future. New devices should be embraced. Websites should be open to new technology and not limited in its potential to grow and adapt. I truly believe that [online] success is determined by the innovation of the content creators. The news industry needs to find their own Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
a13network 5:36 pm on May 16, 2008 | 0 | # |

Sure, newspapers are not dead yet, but lets put it this way: The meteorite is not that far away.

Journalism is not known for its quick adaptation to new forms of media. Some news organizations do not even have websites, and to the coming generations, if you do not have a web presence, you simply do not exist. Today, it is not sufficient to only cling to old media. The transition into a dependence of online media has already started. Tomorrow’s leaders will be the early adapters.

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” New York Times Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger said. “The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”

The press will face many transitions in the next few years. I believe there will be a few key transitional stages where the press will find opportunity to stretch and help to shape the development of the Internet. I will list them here, then go into more detail with each one in the coming weeks.

I am sure there are other points that I have neglected to mention, I am only doing this to open a discussion, so when the time comes, we all can survive the coming meteors.

1. new devices
2. the new spectrum
3. social news
4. open source
5. 3D web
a13network 8:20 pm on May 12, 2008 | 0 | # |

I came across one of the coolest web tools this week. It’s a simple Firefox extension that lets you look at the CSS, HTML and JavaScript found on the web. It also shows how those individual web files fits into the site’s file structure. For instance, while looking at some of the news sites that I frequently visit, I discovered, CNN.com has several style sheets, it is heavily coded in JavaScript and I am pretty sure if I had enough time, I could pull it all off Firebug and load it all onto my servers as a clone site. Check it out. I think it is a great learning tool for those who want to understand how sites are coded past viewing the source.
a13network 7:54 pm on May 12, 2008 | 0 | # |

Last weekend I set up a closed (invitation only) social network for a group a bunch of my friends started just out of college. The group, Kent Photographer’s Association, is a group of about 160 photojournalists who have, or still attend Kent State University. After six years, our group is starting to outgrow its primary source of communication: the list serve. With so many people contributing to the list serve it’s hard to keep up with all the topics and email strings. So I created a social network on ning.com. Ning is a lot like WordPress for social networks. It is easy to set up and manage, all you have to have is a good idea and a community thatis willing to make it work.

Creating the social network made me want to learn how to code it for myself. So I started coding a social network on my computer using the open source CMS called Drupal. Drupal is a powerful, scalable CMS that I believe will be the engine behind A13 Network. In the past, I have experimented with Plone, and I have recently been introduced to Django. All three content management systems are open source and have their own streangths. I plan on learning as much as I can about all of them in the next few months. I hope to have a complete social network available in the late fall. It will be my attempt to combine the power of social networking with news content creation.
a13network 2:39 pm on March 28, 2008 | 0 | # |

Here are a couple other reasons why I think YouTube will change broadcast. It allows users to reskin the YouTube player to fit the style of their personal websites, and it allows its users to track the web traffic from the videos they upload.
a13network 2:28 pm on March 20, 2008 | 0 | # |

In a few months, YouTube plans on catching up with other online services and allow their users to broadcast their own channel live on the Internet. Not only that, but they will be able to do so in higher resolution as Adobe upgrades to Flash Player 9.
Today’s Herald Sun, an Australian paper, reports one of YouTube’s co-founders claiming it is not the end of TV… yet.

“I don’t think so, I think you’re never going to have the family hover around on a Sunday night and watch this 320-by-240 screen on the computer monitor,” Mr Chen said while on a visit to Sydney this week.

“You’re not going to watch a two-hour movie that way, you’re not going to watch a 30-minute talk show, or a 30-minute news report.

“I don’t think the technology, and the ergonomics, is quite there yet to watch all this content and consume it online, rather than sitting back.”

But with upgrades coming to YouTube later this year, things can start to shift. Technology like AppleTV may help independent news makers create a global market for themselves on televisions in a few clicks. With prerecorded and live broadcasts, YouTube will start to look like an extension to your favorite television shows or cable network.

This may not be the TV killer, but it will put powerful technology in the hands of those with small budgets and big ideas. With higher resolution and new opportunities to bring the web into living room entertainment systems, web casting will slowly create new challenges as well as opportunities to well established TV channels, as the attention span for web video increases.

The early adopters to this new web tool will define the web standards that will go along with a new way of communicating over the web. The question is: how long will it take for news content creators to get involved?