Category: new media technologies

What is the Future of the News Release?

How is the news release adapting to the digital environment? This is a question I have pondered a lot recently and got a chance to ask at a marketing and PR panel this weekend. Sadly, no one could give me a satisfying answer. Maybe you can ponder with me?

News releases work well in the traditional media ecosystem. PR specialists pitch stories about their clients by contacting print publications, radio stations and TV channels. Usually, they spread the same content–press releases, event announcements, interviews–across different platforms in an attempt to increase publicity for their customers.

How the News Release is Distributed in Traditional Media

But this dynamic changes with the shift of traditional media online. In the era of convergence, we see the birth of hybrid media models and the intersection of video, audio and text on the Web. Unlike in traditional media, however, the delivery platform of digital news remains the same: all content is flying on the wings of the Internet.

How the news release is distributed in new media

Distributing the same content in the same environment raises some concerns.

Readers will inevitably feel disappointed by the lack of original reporting and the way too obvious copy-and-paste. Ten years ago, a New York Times reader might not have been a BBC viewer. But today’s audiences are accessing multiple sources of information and entertainment. Why would they remain loyal to one brand if other online newspapers are offering the absolute same coverage, distributed by an old-school PR agency? And how would advertisers react to a media organization that is losing its loyal readership?

Undoubtedly, the news release has to adapt to its new primary environment. It can no longer be only a denizen of print publications, radio stations or TV channels. The digital ecosystem has demanded a different approach from PR specialists. What would their response be?

Photo credits: bestfor / richard, when i was a bird, Susan NYC, Annie Ok, Tonymadrid Photography

Expecting parents to become tech-savvy as kids: fair or not?

Since my mom joined Skype our long-distance conversations shifted from me discussing my weekly course load to me giving instructions on transferring files and making smiley faces. As this transition has been anything but smooth, it makes me fear the expanding generational gap in technology usage.

A recent infographic by PSFK showed a difference of only 23% in Internet activity between users in the 18-29 age group and those in the 50-64 age group. These stats, however, fluctuate as one adds factors such as education level and location.

Based on my age, education and current location, for instance, I fall in the most active Internet usage group. My parents, on the other hand, are placed in the opposite category, that of most dormant Web users. What exactly does this mean for us as humans? An expanding communication gap as a result of totally different lifestyles.

Each morning during my summer vacation, for instance, I would check Skype to make plans for the day. That was my way of coordinating with friends and scheduling meetings. My mom, however, perceived my behavior as irrational and unnecessary. Why would I tire my eyes sitting in front of the laptop during my break? Needless to say, our interactions suffered due to our different needs and habits.

Tech lingo has also limited my communication with people from my parents’ generation. As my relatives are no native English speakers, I am constantly introducing to their vocabularies words like online, link and click. My family sometimes pretends to know what I am saying and other times gets frustrated with these “tech” terms.

It is a learning process, I tell myself, knowing that my parents will eventually pick up the new software and the lingo that comes with it. But then I wonder—what right do I have to ask of them to be as tech-savvy as people from my age group, eduction level and location?

Photo credit: elisfanclub

Sure you can join social media as a baby

You probably have at least one friend who has been uploading photos of her baby on Facebook. Pictures appear of the toddler’s first steps; videos show the toddler’s first words. As the child grows, you might get introduced to her new outfits and kindergarten friends. Unknowingly, the baby has been on social media since her birth.

That’s the topic my college friends were heatedly discussing over lunch the other day. They insisted that every person should be allowed to make a conscious decision about whether or not she wants to participate in the social media culture. Interestingly enough, that is not what parents think.

“All I wanted was to avoid being one of those annoying parents who post photos of their kids on their own page,” wrote parent Joel Stein who created a separate Facebook account for his 3-month-old son this summer. Facebook, however, disabled the page since members under 13 years old cannot join the social utility. Naturally, Stein was angry that he had lost all the posted information and had to restore it for families and friends.

Similarly, many parents have expressed an interest in creating a social network for their toddlers. Totspot, for instance, is a Web site for parents and families to share photos, videos and milestones of their babies. Like Facebook, Totspot has a news feed and nurtures a community. “Just like Mom and Dad,” the site reads, “junior gets a profile on TotSpot, complete with status updates, real time updates in an activity stream, and a beautiful assortment of themes.”

But it is not just like mom and dad. Mom and dad can make conscious decision about what their status should be, who they want to be connected to or what pictures they like or dislike. By creating a separate junior profile for them to use, they are extending their own presence online.

Don’t get me wrong—I highly appreciate the value of community photo-sharing sites, and avidly use Picasa, Twitter and YouTube. When it comes to kids, however, don’t we have to take a step back and think about the repercussions of our actions?

Photo credit: amberlynnlane

New media for social change

There has been a lot of talk about how new media technologies can bring social change. The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, is an example of the way a local movement can transcend national borders and connect thousands of supporters worldwide through enhanced communication channels. My video below demonstrates this dynamics:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcuGdj0x_os&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

The international support network that the Zapatistas built didn’t remain only in the virtual world. It transcended the cyberspace and turned into a series of very specific physical actions–U.S. and Canadian nongovernmental organizations reached out to the Mexican NGOs; Italian governmental figures signed letters demanding a peaceful resolution between the Zapatistas and the Mexican state; American supporters organized aid caravans and collected donations and materials for the impoverished communities in Chiapas.

Though there is a lot of space for improvement and progress, the first steps have been made. The international community can raise awareness with the click of a mouse. As Zapatista’s spokesperson Subcommandante Marcos said, “The fact that this type of news has sneaked out through a channel that is uncontrollable, efficient and fast is a very tough blow. The problem that anguishes Gurria is that he has to fight an image he cannot control from Mexico, because the information is simultaneously everywhere.”

Multimedia journalism done right

When Steve Fox, a Umass journalism professor and former editor at the Washington Post, came to speak in my media class this week, he showed two slideshows. The first one was the AP’s Death of a Marine narrated by Julie Jacobson and the second one was the New York Times’ An Ambush and a Comrade Lost. Which one of them was multimedia journalism done right?

Most of us agreed that the New York Times did a better job of presenting the casualty of American soldiers losing a comrade in Afghanistan. The soldiers were recorded telling their own story while photos illustrated every step of their way. Some brief gun noise in the background captured our attention.

Jacobson’s piece, on the other hand, was distracting and opinionated. She was narrating the story of a marine’s death in Afghanistan. But what the slideshow seemed to portray was the journalist’s own struggle to take the photos she took. This definitely reduced the power of the story.

What these two examples convey is that information dictates what medium journalists should employ. Some pieces come out better as slideshows with audio while others were meant to be long articles. Some stories need to be told using the subject’s own voice, while others can be illustrated better with graphics and charts.

These were some of the questions Fox tackles in his journalism classes at Umass. What is the best way to approach a story? Often, the importance of sound and image can transcend that of text. Combined together, as in the NY Times story Climbing Kilimanjaro, these mediums can produce an amazingly interactive piece.

“Convergence is a philosophy,” Fox told us. And if done right, he said, it will be the future.

With social media, can we reunite spontaneously?

As graduation approaches, I am reminding myself how much I will miss my fellow classmates and the moments we shared together. And I am getting more and more excited about reunions when we will catch up on one another’s life stories. Or not?

With both my close friends and distant acquaintances on social networks, will our reunions ever be as eventful as I imagined?

On Facebook, the graduating classes of 2009 and 2008 are just a mouse click away from me. I follow them as they travel to Istanbul and London. I know who entered a serious relationship and who separated with her boyfriend. I know what kind of job they got and how passionate they are about it.

Similarly, I will know all about the changes my class of 2010 will be going through soon.

But I used to fantasize that, in ten or fifteen years, when we meet at Mount Holyoke again, I wouldn’t know any of that. I was expecting to not recognize some faces and to jump with surprise when hearing about weddings and adventurous trips. I hoped to experience the same stories my mother used to tell me about her meetings with former classmates.

But my generation’s story is quite different.

Technology, a 2008 article in the Scientific American argued, has led to this generational divide. “On one side are high school and college students whose lives virtually revolve around social-networking sites and blogs. On the other side are their parents, for whom recollection of the past often remains locked in fading memories or, at best, in books, photographs and videos,” wrote Daniel J. Solove.

The social networking enthusiast I am, I will be sad to empty my drawer of fading photographs. I hope that, in ten years, when my class reunites on campus, I will encounter some unexpected changes and pleasant surprises.

Photo Credit: kirikiri

Do blogs constitute original journalism?

On Dec. 5, 2002 Mississippi Senator Trent Lott outraged bloggers when he gave a startling speech at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party. Lott wished that Thurmond, known for his pro-segregation platform, had won the 1948 presidential race. Bloggers like Joshua Marshall and Duncan Black held Lott responsible for his statement and prompted the critical response of the mainstream media. Fifteen days later, Lott resigned as a Senate majority leader.

This story illustrates that professional journalists are no longer alone in watching the public sphere and reporting the news. As the cost of communication tools collapsed, bloggers have joined them in this endeavor. Citizens are covering local events and unearthing stories underrepresented in the mainstream media. They have assumed the journalists’ role of bearing witness and spreading news. They haven’t, however, accepted, the journalists’ responsibility of fully investigating and verifying their stories. Do blogs then constitute original journalism?

This question has long busied Big Media and sharpened its interest in the blogosphere. Traditionally, media has supported a one-to-many broadcasting model in which readers act as consumers of information. Now that the community wants to collaborate in the newsgathering and production process, however, Big Media feels threatened. “CNN.com prefers to take a more structured approach to presenting the news. We do not blog,” a CNN spokesman told the Online Journalism Review in 2003.

Despite this resistance to innovate, mainstream media has recognized the increasing role of blogging. It reinforces democratic values as it enables new voices to contribute a richer set of news stories. While Big Media lacks the resources to cover many local and smaller-scale events, citizen activists gladly accept this task. “My newspaper,” wrote Gillmor in We the Media, “does the best job it can in covering local news, but we can’t do it all.” Amateurs equipped with new media tools can bear witness and tell the world about their community activities. On the Web, publishing space, broadcasting time and editorial judgment cannot restrict them.

Nor do bloggers face the challenge of the standard news cycle. After Lott delivered his speech, for instance, bloggers kept the story alive until the mainstream media picked it up. Once the 24-hour lifetime of the story had passed, it became old news for the press. In the blogosphere, however, it remained just as important. “The bloggers kept researching the story. Over time, more and more instances of the same ‘misspeaking’ emerged,” wrote Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessing in Free Culture. Eventually, Lott responded to the accusations and gave Big Media the news-worthiness it needed to take up the story.

Lott’s speech wasn’t the first story bloggers brought to the traditional newsroom. In 1998, Matt Drudge broke the news of the affair between then-president Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. While Newsweek held the story to verify last sources, Drudge posted it on his news aggregation site The Drudge Report. Three days after he had written about the affair, Newsweek published the story and prompted other media to follow suit. The Lewinsky scandal demonstrates the changing dynamics between technologically empowered communities and professional reporters.

Yet, the story raises some serious ethical questions in journalism. While it follows a bottom-up model of news dissemination, blogging also overlooks the importance of source verification. In 2004, in his attempt to break news, Drudge spread rumors about a non-existent affair between John Kerry and intern Alexandra Polier. Mainstream media outlets like Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press had investigated the story and dismissed it as untrue. Drudge, however, ran with it without verifying the accounts of his source, a computer programmer known as Stephen VanDyke.

Thus, producing and disseminating news is not enough to make a reporter out of the blogger. In order to constitute true journalism, blogging needs to inherit all journalistic elements, including a standard ethics code.

Image credit: Kristina B

Ask for recommendations the painless way

Asking for recommendations has always been out of my comfort zone. But asking the same people for multiple recommendation letters seems worse than gulping a shot of honey mustard (and I equally dislike both honey and mustard). That is why I felt truly relieved when I found out about Interfolio.com, an online service for dossier and credentials.

The website enables users to store and repeatedly distribute confidential academic and professional credentials. In other words: you ask for a recommendation letter once, the writer uploads it to Interfolio for free, and you can send it to multiple institutions digitally or in print. Sounds so simple, right? Yet, the site came to existence only in 1999 and has been gaining popularity in recent years.

In addition to saving letters of recommendation, the Interfolio community can also build online portfolios and send other application materials worldwide. That is why it is particularly useful to people in higher education and in search of job opportunities.

Naturally, applicants need to pay for all these services. It costs $19 for a one-year account, $39.90 for a three-year account and $57 for a five-year account. Although I won’t pay $1 to listen to Pandora radio for a month, I am willing to pay $40 for using Interfolio for three years. Now this is an investment worth its money!

Photo credit: FotoRita [Allstar maniac]

Where the streets have Twitter names

So you think the line between physical and virtual realities have blurred? Wait until you hear this news:  a street in a Palestinian refugee camp was named after a Twitter account.street

Arjan El Fassed, a Dutch-Palestinian blogger and lobbyist, named a street in the Askar camp after his Twitter handle @arjanelfassed.

Wired reported that naming each of the 200 streets in the camp costs $146. The money goes to the Palestinian Child Care Society (PCCS) and is invested in after-school activities for Palestinian children. El Fassed was quoted as saying that his act was “a symbolic way to connect both online and offline with the children of Askar.”

To me, his act signals something else–the fusion of spatial realms and virtual spaces. Has technology redefined our concept of geography?

Photo credit: arjanelfassed

When Pandora stops, find new music

I am the type of person who can’t concentrate without music. Unsurprisingly, I exhausted my Pandora radio minutes by mid-September.  Now what?

I had at least ten customized radio stations on my Pandora account. I listened to my Sade radio station before I went to bed and to Audio Bullys as I woke up in the morning. I wrote  my papers while listening to selected tracks by Moloko and DJ ATB. Now, to access all these saved playlists, I can a) pay 99 cents and continue listening for the rest of the month or b) pay $36 and upgrade to unlimited listening. The chances are, however, I will do neither of those.

Why? Because entering your debit card information online (even if it’s for only 99 cents) does cost me an effort. It is mostly a mental barrier and if I lack the necessary incentive, I won’t do it. As much as I like Pandora, I wasn’t given the necessary incentive to complete an online transaction in exchange for music.

Instead, I  embraced another online music service, Blip.fm. On blip.fm I not only listen to customized playlists continuously, but have the opportunity to explore new performers and enrich my music taste. I meet new DJs who send me props when they like the songs I play. I share my music with non-members as well as with Twitter users. In short, I have a lot more freedom to channel my musical enthusiasm and communicate with like-minded music fans.

So, Pandora, while you will remain on my bookmark toolbar, I don’t promise to be a regular listener next month. I hope you will understand.

Photo credit: RossinaBossioB