AOL Patch

Oh noes! Layoffs coming to Patch as they get a new CEO. The “streamlining” smells to me a lot like old media. While AOL may try to pawn off their efforts as “grassroots journalism” the people are not stupid. AOL Patch is nothing more than old media slapped with golden paint to try to appear “new” and “original” or groundbreaking. I’m not sure which.

What I do know is that the AOL Patch model for news seems a lot like the Walmart model of business. Basically, move into an area and operate at a loss until all the competitors are run out of business. They can do this with the revenue generated from Huffington Post (*cough*cough*) and other websites in their network that are profitable. (Perhaps because they don’t pay a lot of their writers? Or is it the stream of garbage their networks produce on a daily basis?)

I was told once by Google that I could only have one website in Google News because it was one website per organization. So why does AOL get to have Huffington Post and their collection of Patch sites? Probably the money.  Google letting more than one site in does show that AOL is old media not new media.  Pretty bad news any which way you look at it, but here are some links…

• Patch Gets New CEO, Layoffs Ensure – Poynter
• Three Percent of Patchers Let Go – All Things D

Your thoughts?

Good News: Citizen Journalism is Dead

The phrase “Citizen Journalism is Dead” has been around since the phrase was first coined. I should probably look up who coined the term, but I’m busy at the moment. At least I’m being transparent and honest, eh? I just wanted to take a moment to let you know that something new is coming soon. To learn more, take a look at QuantumJournalism.com or kNewspapers.com for more information. I will be bringing new life to the J-Hope blog as well, so stay tuned.

Photo Journalism as an Inexpensive Link-Building Tool

When I evaluate a method of link-building, I consider cost per link to be an important metric. While I realize that cost per link is limited in that it assumes all links are equal, I think it’s good to consider cost per link when forming a long-term SEO strategy and suggesting a client budget.

When I first considered hiring a photographer to help me create link-worthy content, my initial instinct was that the cost per link would be significantly higher than other forms of link building. However, when I compared the cost per link of photo coverage to a more mainstream link-building tactic like guest blog posting, I found the results to be favorable.

Hiring a photographer to cover that car show cost a little less than $200, with another three hours of  time to needed to organize the images, write the post, etc. If we assume writing a post and organizing photos has a cost of $75 per hour, and if we assume that we received only six good quality links, the total cost per link was just about $70.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/link-building-with-photo-journalism/28740/#ixzz1HgGR6sn7

Simon Owens

On the day the AP Stylebook announced it would change the requirement that its users refer to online destinations as “web sites” to the more widely-used “websites,” I sent a message to a person named Justin LaBerge requesting a phone interview. He responded quickly saying that he was “about to go meet up with my GF for our Friday night plans (In light of today’s event, we have much to celebrate!)” When I spoke to him a few days later he said he was mostly kidding about the celebration part (he had been planning to go out with his girlfriend already) but that they did raise their glasses to “toast” the news. “You wouldn’t believe how many emails and Facebook messages I got when people saw that,” he told me.

Source: Bloggasm

Last week, journalists reacting to the Associated Press’s announcement that it would replace “Web site” with “website” in the AP Stylebook pushed the phrase “AP Stylebook” onto Twitter’s trending topics list. (FWIW, OJR’s style for the past several years has been to use “website.”)

Most journalists approved of the news, though a few skeptics, such as the University of Florida’s Mindy McAdams, demurred. Though I disagree with her on this, I loved the snark of her Twitter response: “Everyone but me is cheering AP style change to website. I think it resembles parasite.”

I jumped in with this: “If you’re publishing online, Google style (i.e. SEO) always trumps AP style.”

And… “Really, j-schools need to ditch AP style and start teaching their students SEO instead. More valuable to their careers.”

As much as I enjoy provoking folks from time to time, I am serious about this. The newspaper industry developed a common style, maintained by the Associated Press, to meet the communication needs of a print-based industry trying to most effectively communicate with a broad audience.

Today’s online publishers, editors and reporters need a new style that most effectively allows their words to reach their intended audiences. Unfortunately for them, the print-inspired AP style is not that. Today’s (and tomorrow’s) journalists need to learn search engine optimization [SEO] techniques as much as, if not more than their predecessors who worked the print industry needed to learn AP.

Source: OJR with a hat tip to Journerdism

Recent technological developments, particularly with regard to internet technology, have dramatically increased access to information and facilitated the proliferation of information sources. The need to instantly access this information and to allow the spread of digital information on the internet has eroded the capacity of professional journalists to create and disseminate news. A significant reason for this is that a new class of journalists – aptly referred to as citizen journalists – have exploited the new medium and the new information age.

Citizen journalists are not professional journalists – they are members of the community who contribute to news production through various types of media, and participate at different levels of the news production process. They may gather, process or disseminate news of all kinds, particularly on the internet using web logs or “blogs.” Their contribution is, however, immediately controversial. In the industry they may be considered a valuable resource for more accessible news, for example the popular CNN iReport function, which relies on news and information from citizen journalists. Others consider their contribution a threat to journalistic standards, and to the industry at large.

I consider that if the growth of citizen journalism remains unchecked, the news industries and consumers accessing the news stand to lose on various fronts. A consequence may be that declining standards of news production will reduce the value and credibility of news made available to the public.

Go read the whole thing.

Two military journalists behind an ambitious NATO International Security Assistance Force project to traverse Afghanistan in one month and file daily reports in words, photos and video recapped their experiences in a March 25 “DoD Live” bloggers roundtable.

The Web-based project, titled “30 Days Through Afghanistan,” concluded, March 15. It was the brainchild of Air Force Tech. Sgts. Ken Raimondi, whose background is in broadcasting, and Nathan Gallahan, a photojournalist. Both are based at ISAF’s Joint Command in Kabul.

The complex logistics required to reach all five ISAF regional commands in Afghanistan ultimately stretched the project an extra five days. From start to finish, Raimondi said, 90 percent of the encounters they had with coalition service members and with Afghan civilians were positive.

“The whole 35 days through, we saw almost endless opportunity and good spirits out there, and it was really a morale booster for us about the whole mission,” he said.

He added that no restrictions were placed on their coverage. “There was no approval chain. What we saw, we talked about,” he said.

And they pulled no punches in talking candidly with those they met. Raimondi recalled speaking with a sergeant stationed in the south who had witnessed 117 “ramp” ceremonies conducted planeside for fallen soldiers. “It was just crushing, really, knowing that there are people out there that have seen that many ramp ceremonies,” Raimondi noted.

Gallahan said the greatest challenge to keeping up the pace of daily reports was finding Internet access with enough bandwidth to upload video material to their Web site. The easy part, he said, was finding stories to tell.

“There are so many people in this country who have so much to say, and there’s so much to talk about, that I could have spent 10 years blogging every day and could have found something new to talk about,” he said.

Both reporters said they were gratified to read comments submitted by some of the several thousand followers of the blog, which Gallahan wrote, and the video log postings, which Raimondi produced. Although they would have liked the Web site to have attracted a larger audience beyond the military community, they said, they hope their approach has opened doors for others.

The airmen added that while “30 Days Through Afghanistan” may have broken new ground in contemporary military journalism, it really represents a return to the personal, frontline interview style of famed World War II reporter Ernie Pyle.

Gallahan said his two regrets about the project are a lack of time to plan out logistics and having to wrap up after just skimming the surface of the country.

“I would like to continue to try to tell the entire story of Afghanistan so people can make their own judgments,” he said.

Chicago Sometime?

The Past Imperfect of ChicagoNow Posted by Mike Doyle on 3/01/10.

You can’t run a 21st-century blog network at the speed of a 19th-century newspaper. I wish someone would tell the Chicago Tribune. Yesterday, when I ended my ten-month run as the scribe of the Chicagosphere online-media blog for the paper’s ChicagoNow content network, I was still waiting for the roll-out of site improvements promised on Day One. I was far from the only blogger dissatisfied with the paper’s glacial responsiveness. Eventually I realized why: ChicagoNow is a blog platform that simply wasn’t designed with bloggers in mind.

What other explanation can there be for a network of more than a hundred blogs that makes it hard for visitors to find and explore those blogs? Over the past ten months, I lost track of how many times friends and readers told me how inscrutable they found navigation on ChicagoNow.

HT to Journerdism

I wonder if they will keep up the ChicagoSphere goodbye post from him? Good luck Mike Doyle.

The day started for me around 7 a.m. I was invited by the local Rotary to come speak. At least one of their members had heard about Anderson Free Press and was interested. I didn’t really prepare anything, wanting it to be truly informal and to see, I guess, if I still had enough passion about what I’m doing to talk about it in front of people rather than typing to them via the Internet. I was nervous, but a little excited at the same time.

The real story has nothing to do with this breakfast meeting, but I wanted to put into perspective how the day started – and maybe slyly put out there that the local business leaders are beginning to take notice and come to me about advertising, etc. This could be a major shifting point… In any case, my spirits lifted by that meeting, I spent the rest of the morning borrowing equipment from different people around the county.

I want to point out here as well that the week previous, I had my only computer go down. (Yes, lesson learned.) I was able to get a cheap new one, but being cheap it lacked Firewire connection. I didn’t think about that at this point in the day unfortunately. Anyway, I collected the Nikon D80, the Canon ZR something with the external mic. then rushed back to Anderson. I saw three police and a Hummer escorting someone down Scatterfield, but that’s another story, one which I didn’t have time to pursue.

I arrived at the press conference early. Not to bore you too much with the details, but a battle over a local landfill that has been happening 31 YEARS (yes, you read that right…) was reaching its end perhaps, with the landowner getting an order from a judge that he was to be issued a permit. At this point, Anderson’s Mayor, Kris Ockomon, began to become more vocal about it. (As a side note, he first spoke out against the landfill on an older Anderson Free Press video interview several months previous… the only place he’d done it in the media, I believe, at that point…)

Okay, I’m dashing this out because I have so much other work to do today/tonight/tomorrow… and I saw an old BSU journalism professor in the Mayor’s office. Dr. David Sumner. Got to chat him up a bit, but I fear he may read this quickly thrown together collection of words regarding the event and shake his head. He was excited that day, though, because two of his students were there covering the event.

Indianapolis TV news deemed it worthy enough to drive down to cover it in their own way. The local CNHI newspaper, The Herald Bulletin, had a reporter and photographer covering the event. Then there was me, with a Canon camcorder in one hand, a Nikon D80 dangling from my neck, a notebook in my back pocket, and a desire to cover the event in a way that the other media weren’t covering it.

I will be the first to admit that what I’m doing is not in any way revolutionary, but it is different and the citizens in the area seem to really appreciate it as an honestly “fair and balanced” news report. (Sorry, Fox News was there again. I have a video of them doing another interview in Anderson a year or so ago. That’s another blog post, though.) Basically, I just recorded what actually happened and didn’t edit it down to a 30 second soundbite or 10 inches of copy in the paper.

I recorded the entire press conference and got some heated exchanges between the Mayor and the local businessman (Ralph Reed) who owned the corporation that was putting in the landfill. Remember I said this battle has been going on for 31 years now? Well, there’s a reason. And there’s not enough space for me to go into it here, but the opposing organization that was formed to stop it has their information here. I did make a point to interview Mr. Reed after the press conference to get his side of the events.

Anyway, after spending an hour or so getting the raw footage, it was time to return to the “newshouse” and get it out to the public raw but branded. Upon returning, I realized I didn’t have Firewire. So, I headed back out to try to find a solution. Radio Shack had nothing in stock but could order it. I need it tonight, I said, then tried the two mom and pop shops in town. Nothing.

My only recourse was to drive about 40 minutes or so to Fisher’s Indiana to go to Fry’s Home Electronics, the most Kafka-esque store in the entire existence of the world. I got there, but instead of getting a Firewire PCI card, I was talked into a Firewire and USB hub, being told I didn’t need an existing Firewire port to use Firewire. Great, I thought. That will save a little time.

So I went through the routine of trying to escape from Fry’s Electronics (oh there’s a story coming about that experience…) then hopped on the Interstate to get back to Anderson and finally get the video encoding and uploading. I grabbed some Subway and hit the newshouse excited to get going. I got the hub out of the package and not only did it not power on (ie it was broke), upon reading the directions I realized you do need a Firewire port like I had thought. I shouldn’t have let the Fry’s people assure me otherwise.

Upset, I packaged up the malfunctioning new equipment quickly and headed back to Fry’s – another 40 minutes one way trip. At this point, I had been up around 16 hours, working most of it. Well, trying to work. I got back to Fry’s and had another HORRIBLE encounter (noticing a theme about Fry’s Home Electronics??), but I managed to escape with my life and a $15 Firewire PCI card I should’ve got in the first place. Another 40 minutes or so back to Anderson, and I was ready to install the new hardware.

I popped the case of the new, cheapy back-up computer and tried to take off the cover for one of the PCI ports. Being a cheap eMachines, they had not cut the pieces of metal all the way, so they weren’t popping out. That or there was some secret Chinese puzzle method for getting them out. A screwdriver and a little muscle forced it out without breaking anything else and the card was in. I crossed my fingers and fired up the computer.

At this point, I realized my bump up to Windows 7 64-bit made my old video editing software pretty much useless. Yeah, I coulda found some shareware somewhere, but I shelled out another $90 for video editing software from Magix. I ran into problems at first, but around 1 a.m. I finally had it installed and grabbing video from the camera. It took about an hour to get all the video off.

I was exhausted at this point, but I was close to the finish line, and I knew a lot of people who hadn’t been able to make the afternoon press conference on a Friday were interested in seeing the results. They had already seen what Indianapolis television had done and what the local newspaper The Herald Bulletin had done, but they deserved to see the whole thing and make up their own mind on how it went down.

So I plowed ahead and after another few hours, had the video edited, branded, and uploading to YouTube. From there it was just a matter of posting to Anderson Free Press. I took the time to create a thread with all the videos (although you can see them below as well.) If you have any interest in what the public had to say about my efforts, you can click through to Anderson Free Press and read the few comments that were left.

The videos only received a few hundred views, which amount to a considerably less amount than what was spent on the production of the videos, but I felt satisfied. Why? Because it’s not always about the money. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the better of the community. Like I said, what I’m doing is not in any means revolutionary, but the people seem to love it. I show them what happened and they make up their own minds. At the same time, I allow a forum for them to discuss the issue while moderating it.

The formula is working. I’m not making a lot of money at this point, but the server pays for itself. And as I said, it continues to grow. It’s gaining momentum. Coming on FIVE YEARS in the field on my own, I am very tired. But every day that I wake up and keep going, I feel that there is more and more hope for journalism. I’m not the only person trying to save it, but I am actively trying to save it. Journalism is important to the American way of life. I stand by that, and do what I can to help create a new form of media that has the people’s interests at heart.

If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, part 5 and 6 are really interesting. I’d love to have feedback from other journalists, though, whether you’re still working for “the man” or are out there on your own. I will soon reach the point where I will be able to take what I’ve learned and apply it elsewhere in the United States. Why haven’t I done this already (ala Examiner.com?) Well, there’s a reason, a few actually. For one, lack of capital means it’s hard to jump all over all at once (although, BackFence showed that even with money this can be difficult.) Also, I want to try something different. I don’t want the new boss same as the old boss.

I’ll have more on that as it progresses. Stay tuned, though, as there are big things coming up as year five ends and with it perhaps the entire “lean years” period. I still have a long way to go and I may fail at any step of the way, but I feel that I have a good number of people behind me and that helps. It’s a day to day struggle at this point, but I heart journalism.

If you love journalism, please leave a comment below to show your support. I’m not asking for financial donations (although those never hurt), but please take a moment or two to let me know you read and appreciate my efforts to help change journalism in America for the better.

Thanks.

Your friendly neighborhood publisher,
K. Paul Mallasch

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Ralph Reed Responds

Bill Kutschera, KCCA

Mayor Kris Ockomon