Brian Conley Jailed in Beijing
Brian Conley, video journalist and creator of Alive in Baghdad has been jailed in Beijing, China, according to sources. He was there as an activist and a citizen journalist, which is no stretch for Brian. He’s lobbed himself into hostile territory ever since I’ve known him: Iraq, Mexico, and now China.
The whole story is here. I received my notification by Josh, who also points out the need to bring this story to a much larger stage than our blogs.
If you can, spread the word far and wide. I’d like to see Brian again soon.
Complete side note: just before the picture above was taken, Brian and I were standing alongside the stage at Video on the Net. He leans over to me and says, ‘I think I’m going to go up there and kick the podium over as the start of my speech.’ I said, please don’t. It would be really messy and cost me money. Now, I wish I’d let him, just because he’s that kind of activist.
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Newspapers Be Warned
If you’re a local newspaper or another outlet for classified ads, consider this photo to the left of the post a warning shot across your bow. With Facebook’s ability to target us by locality, and with a fairly inexpensive ad rate, why should I look for the younger generation in your print edition *or* your hard-to-navigate online version? Go where the market is, friends. That’s the word of the day.
And if you are a newspaper, looking to stay relevant, here’s a strange thought to consider: what if you atomized and started chasing down the eyeballs, instead of asking the eyeballs to come to you? What would that look like? What if my local paper started running articles in my Facebook news stream, or in my RSS reader, or somewhere else that I’m likely to visit? Hmmm.
Atomized media publications. Might be something.
Bloggers vs Journalists and Who Cares
Inspired by this post by RichardatDell, I wanted to bring this out to you again: bloggers aren’t always journalists, and journalists aren’t always bloggers. Some of you don’t really care, and others of you care a little too much. But here’s the thing:
Journalists
Journalists, at least those who have received professional education and training, have responsibilities, have certain skills, and have certain inherent traits assumed about their conduct. The United States, as a nation, uses journalists to keep our government (and to a lesser extent, larger corporations) in check, by vigorously reporting their actions. It is assumed that journalists disclose their biases in specific reporting cases, and that they work towards reporting at least somewhat objectively.
***UPDATE: Just found this great article by Scott Karp about how journalists need to better understand the web. Thought it applied.***
Bloggers
Some bloggers tend to work with journalistic standards in mind. Others are trained journalists. Still more are professional journalists have come into blogging out of necessity.
And then there are the rest of us.
Plenty of bloggers, like me, just use this medium to write what we think and feel. You’ll note that my site is fairly light on “research” in the traditional sense. I read the bejeesus out of the blogosphere, but I don’t go out and research and ask three hundred people to answer surveys. I don’t attempt objectivity. I don’t attempt to be unbiased. I do disclose as often as I can or remember to do so. But I’m not a journalist.
I don’t want to be a journalist. I think they’re great people, some of them, and I respect them, some of them, but I sure don’t need to be a journalist to tell you what I think. I share. I inform. I query. But I sure don’t intend to represent anything as a journalist.
Who Cares?
There are times for journalists. I like that they’re out there keeping government and corporations in their sites. I’m hopeful that they continue to deliver value. I want them in our lives.
But I’m also excited for the velocity, the facility, and the ubiquity that bloggers bring to information sharing. I love that bloggers are abound, embedded in our communities, ready to share information at the drop of a hat. I’m grateful that there are networks of us sharing information, reposting information, and driving insight into the various corners of what we’re passionate about.
Without these millions of bloggers, we’d be missing some interesting things. Because we can take these tools to use for ourselves, we have a powerful opportunity to try new things, to learn about things that might be overlooked by others who are following different incentives than some bloggers have. Because of all this information, we have the ability to learn more, share faster, and discover new opportunities.
At times like that, I don’t care which hat you wear. Thanks for helping me find something interesting out there.
What do you think?
Advice for Traditional and Local News Media
Someone, a brave someone, from Boston’s local TV news scene asked a question to a panel with representatives from MySpace, Facebook, Eons, IBM, and a virtual worlds builder. She said she wanted to know the role of traditional media in this space, and what road she and her organization should get on for the future of media. Their answers were all over the map, but Jeff Taylor (former founder of Monster, current founder of Eons) had the start of a thoughtful answer, and his response blended with something someone else said earlier (either Jeff again, or Tom Arrix of Facebook): that if we observe the Superbowl ads for 2008, we’ll notice that the majority of them will point us to a web property. So, with this as backdrop, some advice.
Be Brief On Air, Go Deep Offline
The current champions of this method are NPR. They post all their subsequent materials, including longer versions of interviews, on their website for further review. For people you want to know about, watching or listening to just the snippets that make the news isn’t always enough. Having the option to go deeper is a great service that takes advantage of all the quality work a journalistic team has put into the experience.
This is a value-add for people interested in a particular story, but it’s also clever for marketing and understanding your customer base. We can track and observe and understand the behaviors of people, so that we may better serve them. That’s the first line value.
Integrate Local Social Media Types
Papers and TV are still missing an opportunity to “draft” independent media makers into their work. Move to an upstream, editorial and curation relationship with people who can go into their own communities, surface stories of interest to them, and then bring this body of work to editors and curators who can understand which of these stories are right for the air, which would do fine on the web, and which might merit further professional reporting, with a hat tip back to the original creator.
Embed Community Technology Into Your Sites
Pluck up the best of blogs and videoblogs in the area. Build community conversation sections, even if that invites critics to come out and shoot at your stories a bit. Build chat rooms for during-the-news discussion experiences. There are tons of ways to empower the voice of your audience to have reciprocal value. These are just a few. You probably have a few more.
Make Your Media Portable
Take some of the deep stories and make podcasts out of them. Give us embed codes for your media. Make a spot for metadata like user tagging. Give us ways to build your media into our sites and spread your word to more sources.
Switch Sensation for Causes and Empowerment
We put a premium on stories of what’s going wrong. Of course, it’s important to know about some of the bad news we’re getting out there, but why aren’t stories about where we can help coming to the fore in LOCAL news? Why aren’t we learning about people doing great work more often? Right now, they have that slot at the very end of the newscast, where the two or three people on desk make that weird half smile.
Push the empowerment stories up, and bring that into your deep web coverage as well.
Random and YOUR Ideas
One more thing: do we NEED everyone at a desk with monitors behind them, or sitting in fake living rooms? Aren’t there other settings? We haven’t mixed it up much for over 50 years. I guess this isn’t social media advice, but hey.
And what else? What do you think? How can we fix the news?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
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