No Spin PR » Uncategorized

Revisionist journalism in a social media age

ruthseeley — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:05:07 +0000

I feel compelled to blog about an experience I recently had with the online (self-described) blog of a local radio station. I, am however, going to blog about it without naming names, because I hope to inspire a bit of a discussion rather than point the finger at one mainstream media outlet that employs several practises I consider misguided, uninformed, and downright egregious (or at one reporter). I’d prefer to see what other journalists and consumers of news think about the points I’m raising.

A local radio station reported on a city council meeting in which there’d been significant discussion about the role of council vs administration in determining property tax increases. Since many current members of council campaigned on no-property-tax-increase platforms, it’s an important issue, and the fact that council seemed unsure of whether it could actually push back (administration was requesting a property tax increase higher than the inflation rate) and say, no increases or lower increases adds yet another wrinkle to the discussion.

A former mayoral candidate – someone who almost won the election – tweeted a comment, which was incorporated in the story posted on the radio station’s blog by the reporter attending the city council meeting. The station – or the reporter, it isn’t clear who manages the radio station’s feed, which is an issue I’ll discuss later – then tweeted the article using two local hashtags, one for the city itself (although not the shorter, more recently adopted airport code for the city locals have adopted), the other hashtag commonly used to report on council meetings, activities, and issues. The article was retweeted several times using all three hashtags commonly in use for the city and for council meetings. Unfortunately, the article referred to the mayoral candidate as a former aldermanic candidate.

I immediately posted – or rather submitted – a comment correcting the misinformation, saying that in fact the candidate had run for mayor and came a very close second in the race, not for alderman. I was required to provide my email address when leaving the comment (although I was assured it wouldn’t be published).

I checked the article the next day, and was surprised to discover that not only was my comment not posted on the article, but it had silently been corrected with the information I’d provided and using exactly my wording.

So I tracked down the reporter and fired off a somewhat – but not too – intemperate email about the issue. I suggested that if the reporter was not aware of what was happening to comments on the radio station’s web site, she needed to take it up with the powers that be.

The next day I got an email from the station’s news director, informing me of how well qualified the journalist was (Master’s degree, not a mere Bachelor of Journalism), of how hard she works and how tight her deadlines are, and informing me that the reporter had realized her own mistake prior to seeing my comment, had in fact covered the municipal election and had interviewed the candidate, had corrected her article, and that the correct information had been used when the story aired on the 4PM news.

My comment hadn’t been posted because it would have embarrassed me and confused other readers, since the story had been silently corrected. I was also informed that comments on the blog were supposed to further a discussion, not to correct facts or misinformation.

So let’s talk about the many many different ways in which this may not be the way to go with social media as a broadcast outlet and/or member of mainstream media.

You’re using Twitter and you’re hiding behind a corporate presence without indicating who’s doing the tweeting. @cbcbooks does a great job of not doing this by naming the four people who tweet from their account in their bio and ending the tweets with the initials of the person who’s written them. It’s not rocket science, and it’s nice to know who you’re talking to.Your reporters are using Twitter and consider tweets fair game as ‘quotable quotes’ when writing stories (the comment was not made in person to the reporter or during the course of a telephone interview – see points 6 and 9).
You have what you refer to as a blog on your radio station’s web site. But you don’t follow general social media and blog convention rules, which are that when a correction is made, strikeover mode is used.’You are about to write a Comment on this blog entry’ is the wording on the site when one attempts to comment on a story.
Your comment ‘policy’ consists of a single line: ‘Your Comment (No HTML or coarse/ hateful language).’ My comment didn’t contain either but it didn’t survive to posting stage. You allow reporters to post directly to your blog without anyone referring the content prior to posting. As a former proofreader, copy editor, and fact checker, this strikes me as a very dangerous precedent.
Your reporter him/herself reviews comments and decides whether to post them or not. And your reporter does this silently, rather than emailing the commenter to say, ‘hey, thanks for your comment – I realized my error and had already corrected the story before I read your comment – glad to see someone’s on the ball – there I go, writing too fast again! Is it ok if I don’t post your comment?’ To which I of course would have graciously replied, ‘Absolutely – no point in posting it.’ Instead I’m shaking my head and wondering what the heck they’re teaching in Masters of Journalism programs these days.
You tweet stories that have not been proofread, fact checked or copy edited (I suspect using some form of auto tweet system that auto posts when the blog is updated).
You have no social media policy posted on your web site for your reporters or the general public, nor is it possible to track one down when searching for your radio station or the parent company of your station.
You have a different comment policy from the one that is posted on your site. If you don’t permit people to correct errors of fact and only want comments that expand the discussion, say so.
You’ve made it look as if errors you make on your blog don’t matter; only what’s said on air matters.
You don’t seem to understand that Twitter and the internet count too. What you – as a blogger or as a reporter or as a news outlet – post and tweet is you reporting the news – it’s not all about the 4PM radio broadcast when you make information public prior to air time. I didn’t bother to take a screen shot of the story with the misinformation – but now I wish I had.

So – anything I’ve missed here? Think I’m being over-sensitive?

Uncategorized

100 Marketing Stats for 2011 (with some charts and graphs thrown in for good measure)

ruthseeley — Thu, 19 May 2011 23:01:50 +0000

HubSpot’s latest 100 [Awesome] Marketing Stats, Charts and Graphs – some good stuff in here – always nice to have a fact or two at one’s fingertips.

The focus on ‘earned media’ as a descriptor for marketers makes me uneasy as a PR person. But check out the 2/3 of the US of A that’s on the ‘do not call’ list, and the percentage of direct mail that never even gets open. But amount of money spent on blogging doubling in what, two years? That’s got to be good news for corporate communicators. Such as myself. Ahem….

Filed under: Uncategorized

Northern Voice 09 – afterglow?

ruthseeley — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:31:38 +0000

What’s the difference between a love-in and an orgy? While I haven’t looked it up on Wikipedia, I suspect the difference is that a love-in involves friends and friends of friends, while an orgy involves interaction with total strangers.

I’m not using these sexual analogies merely to be provocative (saucy, for my friends in the UK), but because – well – if the shoe fits, you really are Cinderella, aren’t you?

Even allowing for my widely varying moods while attending the last three Northern Voices, it’s been interesting to watch it evolve as a conference. Sadly, however, its evolution is incremental, and there was, for me anyway, a certain sense of going through the paces this year rather than genuine excitement.

Much of this, I’m afraid, has to do with the particular insularity of British Columbians in general and Metro Vancouverites in particular. Northern Voice is still not attracting a substantial crowd of out-of-towners, and without an influx of fresh voices it is becoming a little sad, slightly solipsistic, and – well – it now seems clear it ain’t ever gonna be TED. Which is fine – Northern Voice probably doesn’t want to be TED, and my longing for it to become TED, or even TEDNorth, isn’t going to make it so (hat tip to Patrick Stewart, Star Trek TNG, and the fictional character Jean-Luc Picard).

How dare I say this? Well – I dunno how I dare, but I do. I’ll recap the sessions I attended Saturday, but before I do that, here’s some food for thought. You’re not an expert merely because you proclaim yourself one. And Field of Dreams was a novel. By W.P. Kinsella. (See previous references to Cinderella and to Star Trek above, the theme is building here.)

There was a worried and subdued air at this year’s Northern Voice. While the quality of presentations seemed improved over ’08 and ’07, there was an energy lacking. I thought at first it was just the Friday sessions, but as I talked to more and more people, it seemed that many were there out of a sense of obligation that I doubt will persist for many more years. I caught myself wondering if today’s economic realities were a contributing factor – and if all the social media evangelists I met last year were getting a little frayed as the effort to make both ends meet becomes the dominant reality and escaping to Second Life’s avatar land no longer seems like quite such a viable option.

Because there does seem to me to be a fundamental lack of understanding amongst the presenters at Northern Voice (while those who share my point of view tend to murmur sotto voce rather than get out there and actually challenge not the fundamental premises of social media, but how it’s being used) of, frankly, how rarely it’s being used as effectively as it could be. And I think the fact that Northern Voice is still pretty much a local phenomenon is the most glaring proof that local social media evangelists are doing a lot more nibbling at their own tails than leveraging their reach.

What brought this home to me with force tonight was encountering a Melbourne venture capitalist (and recovering investment banker) on Twitter, Lars Lindstrom. Take a look at this little bit of his bio: “2006-2008: CFO and 8.5% shareholder in 365 Media Scandinavia, Denmark, who in 2006 launched a new concept free home distributed newspaper Nyhedsavisen which in 18 months became the most read newspaper in Denmark with over 600,000 daily readers.” Of course what the bio doesn’t say is that Nyhedsavisen ceased publication in 2008, crippled by pre-existing debt load and without sufficient investment capital to overcome that handicap.

Still it would have been interesting to have Lars on the panel of Tweeting Transformation: How social media is changing journalism. As CFO of a recent attempt to transform journalism, he would have had insights to add to the panel.

Not that Alfred Hermida wasn’t insightful. He was, despite leading with the phrase ‘paradigm shift.’ Some of us have been encountering this phrase since the early 1980s, and we’re a little tired of it. Paradigm paralysis occurs far more frequently, and is studied – and proclaimed – far less than it should be. Hermida has some serious credentials though, having been a BBC journalist for 16 years. So it was nice to hear him say some of the things I’ve been blogging here (that the 1:many model of journalism is dead, and that media that don’t yet understand that are – well – doomed now that money’s tight and debtload is crushing). He also said, very early in his six-minute presentation, that media has always been social – and he’s absolutely right about that. In a way. I had caught myself wondering last week how it is that I could have been so very deeply offended by the newspaper clippings my mother used to mail me and yet so sanguine about sending out links via email and Twitter and on my blogs. I do remember the past. Am I still doomed to repeat it? Ack!

So Hermida went on to say that as part of the 1:many model, mainstream media produced content for consumption. As part of the production process, the journalism was ‘done and dusted’ within a closed culture (or sausage factory), in which the ethos was, ‘we write, you read.’ And that in order to survive, the model would have to become participatory, one in which journalists had to become social with media, because audiences want to connect, engage, and participate. I couldn’t agree more. But I think Hermida may be wrong in a very fundamental sense and his analysis may be a little offbase. Because I’m not so sure that the ‘audience’ really wants to engage with journalists – or that it ever did. What made mainstream media social was people gathering around the radio in its glory days, people heading over to each other’s houses to see The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, people having Twin Peaks‘ viewing parties, people negotiating the sharing of a single subscription to their favourite newspaper, a transaction that involved not only who got the funnies first but various other foibles like refolding policies and the perils of living with a messy eater. Which of course links back to the comment I made about the conclusion Stewart Butterfield almost reached in his keynote: the excited, ‘did you see…?’ water cooler chat has been replaced by the ability to share information globally. Which may be an equivalence but is not identical, in the same way a pound of feathers and a pound of iron filings may be the same weight, but will rarely fulfill the same function. I’d like to see some discussion of this at some point, because it’s an important distinction unless you’re looking merely for a one-pound paperweight.

Next up was Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun, who was surprisingly funny. His six slides:

1. Build sympathy.
2. Provide fleeting insights.
3. Defy odds to build collegiality.
4. Point to the future because no one can say you’re wrong, yet.
5. Delude yourself that you’ve won friends.
6. Try to exit gracefully.

Newspapers are locked in the prism of an existing business model rather than being in start-up mode, and they’re not getting the long tail, said LaPointe (slide one, we know we’re not doing it right).

The Sun’s distribution channels reach 500,000 people in the Lower Mainland, said LaPointe, with 175,000 subscribers. I like the math here and wish I could have used these figures when calculating media reach for blue chip clients. According to LaPointe, each newspaper printed reaches more than two people. The formula I’ve always used is 1.2 readers per copy, not 2.0, for Monday to Friday publication; a maximum of 1.6 to 1.7 for Saturday or Sunday editions. Perhaps this is a combination of web site hits, subscriptions, and newsstand sales – the distribution channels weren’t specified (slide two, throw out a few numbers but try to be vague about them).

The Sun has 30 journalists on Twitter now, a bunch of journalist blogs hosted on its site, and journalists are now sending, receiving, sharing, and requesting information, while collaborating on its production through the creation of wikis with content from ‘outside’ (slide three, you should be friends with me because I don’t have many and, well, ’cause.) Journalists have always requested information of me and of my clients, for whom I act as liaison in my role as a public relations practitioner, but the reason this seems like news to Kirk LaPointe will be obvious in a few more paragraphs. The Sun also has created databases on a variety of topics (who knew? not I), such as parking and daycare inspections. I’ll get right onto searching them. Not.

On to LaPointe’s vision of the future, with the newsroom acting as curator, dismantling and revamping, with a focus on topics rather than stories and increased use of the open source process (slide four, the future is now-ish). Here’s an alternate take on that issue, and a challenge to the expertise of the gatekeepers of that first draft of history that journalism used to be supposed to be.

Next up was Michael Tippett, who founded and launched Now Public four years ago at Northern Voice. Now Public was originally designed to be the world’s largest news organization; that goal has been transformed and it’s now best expressed as a ‘global intelligence network’ (readers of Now Public will have to work – and work hard – to come up with a new definition of intelligence, because when I last dipped into the site and looked at some of the ‘top-ranked’ Now Public contributors I became more than a little queasy at the sheer lack of any writing ability, the arrogant refusal to use spell check, and sheer incredulity at how low the lowest common denominator really is when we’re talking about the general public).

During the Q&A following the presentations, LaPointe said that the Sun is moving towards an ‘increased commentary’ model of the paper providing a basic framework and knowledge of events. Frankly he was unconvincing, especially when he was later asked by a PR person in the audience how journalists want to be communicated with these days – Twitter? email? phone? fax? What??? “You’ll reach us,” he replied wearily. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” was my freeform translation, which is why he won’t be writing the 21st Century version of How to Win Friends and Influence People – lip service doesn’t cut it in The Age of Transparent Authenticity (slides five and six).

Hermida said something interesting in response to a question, which was that one of the differences between mainstream and social media is that mainstream media asks you to trust the brand, not the individual journalist, and that it isn’t widely known that one out of every two news stories contains an error. (I thought it was just me who’d noticed this! So it’s not just being made to jump through hoops that’s led to the great divide between PR folks and journalists: in fact it’s the combination of being treated like doggy doo on the bottom of media’s shoes and that 1:2 fail whale that’s made this arranged marriage leaving us so desperate for a divorce.)

All three panelists were in agreement that it’s difficult to move away from the transmission model. Frankly, mainstream media got into bed with advertising a very long time ago and with very few exceptions it’s one of those marriages that will only end when one partner dies, no matter how many affairs media has with the bright shiny bloggers who are decades younger.

What I would have liked to see on this panel:

Paul Sullivan of Orato, someone from a mainstream media background who’s embraced new media and has some exciting things to say about media business models, or had, anyway, based on the video I saw a few months ago of his presentation to the Vancouver High Tech Communicators Exchange. (It would have been nice to have had both Paul and Kirk on the same panel, since their careers ran in parallel for quite a while before diverging.)
Mathew Ingram, the Globe and Mail’s Communities Editor, who’s been mentioned here before and who’s walking the walk on behalf of his newspaper, not just talking the talk.
And someone like Lars Lindstrom, who could have talked about the very real challenges of trying to effect mainstream media transformation, what worked and what didn’t.

Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: media, northernvoice09, NV09, transforming media