Kiesow 7.0

What is it about new toys?

My flight back from Las Vegas this afternoon (Southwest 1159) was on one of the airline’s few planes that have WiFi hotspots. Apparently they are still testing out the system and it was free.

So – having a new iPhone, 5.5 hours of flight time and free Wifi – of course I had to check it out. First up was Qik:

http://qik.com/video/1880919

Not too thrilling – but my son did get to watch the live video for a while which was fun.

I also tested out Skype- which worked like a charm on my end – though Annette could not hear much over the engine noise. Need a noise-canceling mic apparently.

The VPN connection into my office network was no problem. More fun was the SimplifyMedia app for the iPhone – which let me stream my home iTunes library for awhile – till I decided to save my battery I can imagine the Slingbox app would be pretty cool as well.

In the end I spent a fair amount of time watching our flight progress on FlightExplorer.com mostly just to watch the weather we were routing around.

And of course, I had time to write a blog post…

An interesting quote from Jonathan Miller (once-upon-a-time my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss at AOL) talking about Kindle, the WSJ.com and the distribution problem in digital media:

I went from paying $14 to The Wall Street Journal to paying $10 to Amazon (for WSJ.com on the Kindle). Now the splits there, and I think this is relatively well known, are very, very much in favor of Amazon. So I became very much less valuable to The Wall Street Journal. That’s part one. Part two is they don’t know I exist. I went from being someone who’s their subscriber to being someone who is an Amazon subscriber, which The Wall Street Journal has no visibility back to and cannot manage that customer relationship. . . . So they’ve lost both the customer management and, trust me, the lion’s share of the economics.

So newspapers are mad at Google for creating an efficient distribution system that drives traffic back to them, but the same publishers are rushing to Amazon to give them 70% of the subscription revenue to get onto Kindle?

I sent a note out over Twitter earlier today trying to gather some additional responses to a Web Tools Survey I am working on: Doing a survey of news Web sites – what open-source and free tools and services do you use: http://bit.ly/oju #journ

Typical enough – but what was interesting was watching the traffic (via bit.ly):

I have noted on the chart the timing of each re-tweet (red) and, perhaps more importantly, the actual conversions of clicks to survey responses (green). In the first hour the survey received five re-tweets, 110 referrals from Twitter, and four people actually completed the survey.

You can check out the raw data here http://bit.ly/info/oju

If you are an online-type-person working at a newspaper.com have I got an offer for you.

I am working on a small research project that hopefully will turn into a case study and presentation at Poynter later this summer. The working title is: ’10 Things You Can do for Free Today.’

The project involves identifying 15 – 20 of the top ‘free’ tools being used on newspaper Web sites and then building short case study for each focused on ease of installation, use, successes and best practices. The tools most commonly mentioned so far range from Coveritlive to Qik.

If you are interested in helping out just answer a few quick questions here: Web Tools Survey

Thanks!

Help!

I am at a workshop at Poynter this week learning about change management and coaching/training techniques. Just for a plug for the sponsor – the event is called the McCormick Change Leadership Fellowship.

The group is working today and tomorrow on developing hour long teaching modules that could potentially be used in the future at Poynter or other journalism events and conferences. We will not be building a full presentation this week, merely creating an outline and tools that we will use during the session.

This is where I need help. My session is tentatively titled: “10 Things You Can do for Free Today.” The focus will be on finding, implementing and using free software and services available on the Web to provide internal and external tools and features for use at your paper and Web site.

As part of the session I would like to provide a mini case study from different newspapers using each of the free tools and Web services. We use most of the at the Telegraph – but having a broader cross-sample to talk about would be much more valuable to attendees – and keep me from just rambling on about myself for an hour.

So – the list of possible services is below. If you are using any of them and would be willing to submit to a short email or phone interview and share some best practices and results around these products – let me know in the comments and/or by email: damon(at)kiesow.net I am also looking for any suggestions on services or categories of services that I have not gotten on the list yet.

1. Disqus.com/Intense Debate (comments)
2. Coveritlive.com (live chat/blog)
3. PHPbb (open source forums)
4. WordPress (blog)
5. Mogulus/Ustream (live video)
6. Qik.com (live cell phone video)
7. OpenX (ad serving)
8. Twitter (SMS)
9. Google Analytics/GoogleMaps/Google Docs
10. EditGrid (collaborative web-based data)

I know there are hundreds/thousands of others out there – I am most familiar with those in terms of good journalism uses at newspapers.

Thanks!

Damon

A bunch of new Twitter accounts popped up in our newsroom recently so I put together a quick list of resources for people just starting out.  I use all or most of these services:

Track your growth
http://twittercounter.com

Get your stats
http://tweetstats.com

Get recommendations for who you should be following
http://www.mrtweet.net

Get notified when people stop following
http://twitterless.com

Find out how influential you are
http://twitter.grader.com

Look for connections among your followers
http://www.tweetwheel.com

A live map based display of everyone
http://twittervision.com

Find more friends
http://whoshouldifollow.com

Search Twitter
http://search.twitter.com

Make shortcuts for URLS (and track the clicks)
http://bit.ly

This blog post finally irritated me enough I had to rant further on it: OJR: Papers must charge for websites to survive

I intended to comment (again) on the post itself – but it has been closed. It seems like the conversation could have/ should have continued there.

Here is my original response last month:

Not to be trite but so far today I have gotten free news and weather from my TV, free traffic reports from my radio and free movie listings from a local weekly paper. Seems like charging for information might be the exception not the rule in many cases.

To be fair Mr. Storch was considerate enough to respond to almost everyone including me:

Damon, I don’t know about you but I don’t get my TV for free. I pay $123 every month to Comcast (for cable TV and Internet access). Otherwise, I wouldn’t have TV (no rabbit ears). Similarly, isn’t conventional radio fading and being eased out by the pay satellite services?

So, lets call that a ‘non denial denial.’ And perhaps further proof that Mr. Storch is not, as he freely admits, an economist. Well, I don’t even play one on TV – but I do have a set of rabbit ears available in case I need them. And, for what it is worth I don’t subscribe to satellite radio.

But, overall his analogy does seem pretty good: Comcast has built a delivery infrastructure that takes their product into every home in town. They deliver syndicated and original content and they charge their subscribers a premium for the privilege. So, why can’t newspapers do the same?

BECAUSE COMCAST IS ALREADY DOING IT! And Verizon and Roadrunner and every other ISP out there.

The exact reason people are no longer dependent on once-per-day news-on-paper is that they have an always-on broadband connection drowning them in information 24-7-365. Surely we do not all need MBAs to recognize the basic supply and demand pressures at work here?

But, lets turn the argument around. What would it hurt if we did charge for online news? To start we need to ignore two basic facts:

1) Print subscriptions subsidize delivery costs. Online distribution for news is basically free – or at least infinitely scalable at a relatively low fixed cost. In both mediums advertising has always been the revenue driver.

2) Local news is an extremely valuable product. Valuable enough that if local papers are careless, free competitors will appear in your market. All it would take is one fanatical blogger who lives for school board meetings to take a good chunk out of your newspaper’s Web traffic and prestige. Multiply that by 2 or three of your local beats and let me know how that affects your revenue growth.

Sure we can start charging for the news online. We could also double our print subscription rates or triple our advertising rates. None of those things are likely because the economics just do not make sense.

No one is arguing everything online should be free. The debate is really about who – the consumer or the advertiser -  should be paying.  Just as Comcast charges you extra for movies on-demand, there is probably a market for premium content even in local communities. But, I have yet to see the news product or feature that seems to fit the bill.

At the top of my list of New Year’s Resolutions is to NOT be this guy. Names have been changed to protect the guilty and (…) added to reduce the length.

Dear Editor Xxx

We are a vendor to some of your competitors… When I finally reached Editor Zzzz today, he hung up the phone on me immediately after I asked him to spend 60 seconds to see what we provide…

We talk to many newspapers… when we get replies like the one I received from Zzzz, it is usually a sign that the paper is either going out of business… (or the employee)… just doesnt care about the paper.

We would like to show you our product, and I want to know if we can do that by somehow avoiding Zzzz.

So hypothetically, if a vendor were to call you on New Year’s Eve, during a blizzard when there are three people left in the newsroom and try to sell you a product you do not want, how receptive might you be? Hypothetically just receptive enough to be polite, and then increasingly less so as they decline to take ‘no’ for an answer. And then, much, much less so after they immediately send the above email to your boss.

Happy New Year!

So, it is going to be a spectacle, especially during a slow news week, when one media company sues another for hyperlinking:
Gatehouse sues NYT Co. over local Websites (Boston.com)
Gatehouse Media sues New York Times Co. over copyright issues (WickedLocal.com)
(For ongoing analysis Dan Kennedy at Northeastern University is tracking the case at Media Nation – he has posted the complaint here)

They say all politics are local, and even on the Web, most business is as well. So in this case there may be a disconnect between the open ideals of the Internet and the cold reality of Website publishers trying to compete with giants such as Boston.com. To put it another way – it is easy to be high minded about such things until it is your ox being gored.

The ‘what are they thinking’ perspective is ably represented by Jeff Jarvis and Mark Potts:
When did Gatehouse become clueless
Gatehousegate

The other side of the story (What they ARE thinking) is so far represented only by the GateHouse complaint.

As someone who competes for online readers in the broader Boston market I can understand GateHouse’s concern. But – I think/hope this might be a technological and design problem, not a legal one in the end.

After all, Boston.com is basically doing what most Websites do – they are aggregating content and linking to original sources. So, it is hard to imagine GateHouse winning outright with this complaint. And, if they did it is hard to imagine the case law thus created would be 100% beneficial to anyone. Let’s all hope they get some mediation and a settlement.

As to the merits, on a first read the trademark dilution complaint appears most on target (to a non-lawyer anyway.) The design of the Boston.com Newton page seems to imply that WickedLocal.com – mixed in with Globe stories and blogs – is just another NYT property. A quick fix there might be to simply separate Globe and ‘other’ content into different news lists with different headers. Just make it clear what Boston.com owns and what they don’t. That is the design solution.

A larger problem (at least for a smaller media property competing in the Boston market) is Google juice. This is where we need a tech solution.

Many small papers have an ongoing complaint that any Web-first breaking news they publish shows up quickly on larger regional Web sites via sharing with AP. The issue is not that AP picks up Web stories, nor that Boston.com (among others) feeds them to their site. The problem is that Google gives big Web sites preference in their search rankings, regardless of whether or not they are the original source for the content.

This happens on a weekly basis when a murder or natural disaster story hits our Web site.  If we publish at 9:00 a.m. it gets to AP by 9:30 a.m. and before 10:00 a.m. Google News has Boston.com, WCAX.com, BostonHerald.com and etc at the top of the search results – while our original and ongoing reporting is in the middle or bottom of the page.

Imagine this same scenario for WickedLocal. If “Your Town” eventually expands to 125 communities who is going to get the search traffic for Newton TAB stories? One would assume Boston.com will get a high rank – and a potentially lopsided share of those first clicks. To be fair I don’t see a strong indication of this effect yet but check out this search result and you can see the beginning of it. So, if 100 readers click to Boston.com and 30 click through to the WickedLocal story is that good? And, is that a gain of 30 for GateHouse or a loss of 70?

So – the ‘simple’ tech solution: Newspaper.coms, the Associated Press and Google need to get together and agree on some ground rules. Newspapers would add metadata to links and external feeds indicating a URL for the original source material. AP would transmit this info with their wire stories and Google would respect that metadata when crunching their Google News algorithms. This would allow everyone to link and excerpt to their heart’s content – but it would NOT reward aggregators with improved search engine rankings built on top of someone else’s content. It would basically be a sort of reverse ‘nofollow’ tag for news stories – that gives credit where due.

AP already has a partnership with Google that is aimed at reducing duplicate wire stories in the index – would it really be too difficult to make this same concept serve individual newspapers? Technologically probably not, politically who knows?

UPDATE: Some more commentary from the blogosphere:
GateHouse Lawsuit vs. New York Times Co. has Dire Implications
A Danger to Journalism
GateHouse: O hai, internetz — we r fail
Gatehouse sues NYTCo over aggregation: But do they have a point?
Globe vs. Gatehouse Part I
Peeking inside Pandora’s Box
GateHouse v NY Times Co.: Not So Simple After All

Ok – so hooking an external microphone up to the Nokia N95 is not an original idea – but most of the solutions we found on the web involved some pretty delicate cable connections and adapters:

External Microphone for The N95: The Final Word (we hope) & video tutorial
Steve Garfield – video

I blogged about our solution a few months back – and then lost that post in a blog crash. Don Himsel has also covered our set-up on Newsvideographer.com.

We have received a few emails about it in the past few weeks – so here it is again:

The bracket is the Nokia DT-22 which works just fine. We are using a Senheiser shotgun mic in this particular set, but obviously it works with anything that has a stereo mini-plug. It is particularly fun using a wireless mic with the N95.

So – the key here is the custom mic cable we soldered together for the purpose. The N95 has a standard AV 4-conductor 3.5mm jack in the bottom. And despite the inclusion of a proprietary cable with the camera, any cable will work. Nokia has changed the ‘colors’ on the cable – yellow is NOT the video signal – so just keep that in mind.

The cable we built is painfully simple. We took a standard AV cable (4 conductor plug on one end – 3 RCA plugs at the other end.)

After figuring out which of the 3 RCA cables were carrying which signal – we cut off the RCA plugs, trimmed the cable down the the desired length and soldered the audio left and right cables onto a standard (3 conductor) stereo modular jack. The ‘extra’ cable is simply left inside the plug housing – it is not connected to anything. (And FYI – links are for illustrative purposes – we bought our parts at the local Radio Shack.)

I can not remember which cables were left/right audio – but there are only three to choose from so it was not tough to figure out. When using the cable – plug the mic in first – then plug the cable into the Nokia. When prompted, select ‘headset’ as the accessory to be used.

Good luck.