Day: March 30, 2009

With all the hot air, and the growing number of mind-numbing self-styled gurus you find on the InterWeb, it’s sometimes nice to celebrate a nice story.

I’m sure many of you (19,000,000 and counting) have seen Matt Harding’s video, Where the Hell is Matt? where he dances all over the world.

He contributed a nice essay to NPR’s This I Believe segment over the weekend, have a listen.

You see, sometimes you can just be nice.

Hat tip to Mark Ragan who pointed to the essay on Twitter yesterday.

BIG hat tip to Stride for their most tasteful (sigh) sponsorship of Matt’s efforts which have the simple aim of putting a smile on your face, and succeed admirably.

Postscript:

Speaking of hot air… big boo to Robert Scoble for more hot air and, in the style of Monty Python, more rash generalizations than you’d find in a rash generalization sale, at the biggest rash generalization store in the town of rash generalization.

Postscript 1:

I have found z on the keyboard over the past four weeks, but I seem to have lost u…

Well a month has passed since I arrived in the United States. Here is a meek attempt at a catch up.  You may find some interesting stuff here.

America’s traditional media challenges continue

In case you missed it, the Pew Research Center has published the 2009 edition of their “State of the News Media” an analysis on American journalism.  The findings present a challenging environment for traditional media.

Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating. The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19% in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%. Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue—the model that financed journalism for the last century—will be inadequate to do so in this one. Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining.

The report is a comprehensive look at newspapers, magazines, television, radio etc.  I plan to review this in some depth…

<Supplemental – TechCrunch reports that the US Newspaper industry lost $7.5 Billion in advertising revenues in 2008 – still $37 billion though!>

 

The problem with ghost writing

This brought a smile to my face.  Marketing 101 if you’re going to ghost write something whether it’s an op-ed, a blog, or a tweet, let the “author” know about it.  Doh. <Hat tip to Jim Horton>

 

Grooming your spokespeople – how many online friends do they have?

Andrew Smith reports a journalist using LinkedIn to check the credibility of a spokesperson.  Nothing too surprising there, however how many of us are actively managing our spokespeople’s SEO?  Very few I imagine.

 

The art (or not) of attribution

This is a great article by Clark Hoyt in the New York Times.

It would be wrong, however, to lay all of the blame with the sources. News organizations are sometimes too eager to pounce on misstatements and missteps, leaving those they cover understandably wary. Credibility runs both ways.