Next Wednesday the Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) at UW will host an event to discuss how digital can save journalism. The panelists are well-respected journalists that have embraced digital tools and have succeeded in producing news in a whole new way and cultivating audiences. They run some of my favorite local news sources like techflash.com and myballard.com
I find it very inspirational to talk with bloggers/journalist like John Cook, Monica Guzman and Cory Bergman because the passion for journalism really shines. They work hard in finding and crafting great stories and they are devoted to their audiences. Perhaps the immediacy of the blog and Twitter makes journalists more accountable for what they publish and therefore much closer to the true meaning of journalism: servicing the public by supplying information.
While they provide great models for how journalism can live without the ink, the unavoidable question remains: how can journalism sustain itself financially? I’ve heard, “journalism doesn’t have an audience problem, it has a business model problem.” So, in other words, this crisis forces journalists to consider what they have never needed to consider before: from where, really, does the money come?
I just got a new inexpensive video camera. I opted for the Flip’s competitor Kodak Zi6, because the codec plays well on a Mac and H.264 is simply a superior format. But, I have to say the design is not as elegant as the Flip’s and I had some issues recording with it, which seemed to have been solved by putting in a better, faster SD card. So, I finally got it to work (words that ideally should not be said about a easy-to-use camera like this) and here’s my cat video to prove it (highly compressed).
Cats are in control of this revolution and you won’t understand it until you make a cat video. Why? Production costs are soooo low that we have millions of cat videos and some of them get a tremendous amount of traffic (see example below with +1.2MM views).
It’s cheap to produce and to distribute. Get it? These are the two main ingredients that the entire communication industry is built around. Newspapers are sustained by advertising because of their distribution power (advertisers want to reach lots of people, so they are willing to pay lots of money, yet printed ads are more expensive to produce than one online); TV has lots of reach and also expensive production values that once guaranteed eyeballs; ad agencies charge a lot of money for production because we thought that glossy ads were they way to attract attention; videographers and photographers based their business models on expensive production difficult for other people to make. But inexpensive technology disrupts all this. Case in point: cat videos.
Not everything is lost though. Massive distribution is not the end-all-be-all, nor is high-end production. New sets of value are emerging and we determine our trust and reliance based on quality of content, storytelling, transparency and consistency. This describes a new order: new leaders are emerging on the ‘net…and money will follow.
This comes to my last point. If you are able to grow a loyal and large audience for your blog, videos or chosen digital content–-don’t count on a standard ad model to sustain your business. Along with the crisis in journalism and entertainment goes one in advertising and PR. We’re all rethinking and experimenting with new business models and that is the beauty of this cat revolution.
P.S. One person that gets the cat revolution is my colleague Kirk Mastin. He’s a professional photographer and videographer who’s taken on the challenge of producing high quality content with low-end consumer technology. Check out his blog: Lo-Fi-Hi-style
This week I had the pleasure to talk to some of Seattle’s pro-bloggers: John Cook, Todd Bishop, Jason Preston and Michael Bean. I’m calling them pro-bloggers because they have managed to attract and retain a very loyal community that by any standards qualifies them as influential people in their circles. How do they do it? They work hard! And while we can discuss a lot about the different tools and the technology they use, the common thread is they uphold these 3 principles (oh, and they don’t sleep): Be timely, Be constant, Be useful.
If you are sick of your agency, peers, books and everyone else telling you need to do social media stuff and don’t know where to start. Don’t do anything, just start by checking what people are saying about you.
No need to do a blog, tweet or anything, just start listening to what’s out there. I posted here list of of free and easy to use tools to listen and monitor social media.
There are many (really, MANY) companies out there that provide some pretty sophisticated tracking tools for social media. Most of them cost money, though. So if you have to boot-strap, here are a list of tools I’ve used. You can use some of this and make yourself scorecard of indicators (the value of those indicators will be determined by your goals). I’m still looking around for good and free syndication tracking tools (something that you can see how content gets shared across the net). Got more suggestions? Please share.
