I can smell what you've got cooking, Ms. Roy

I just read "Smell You Later, Nerds", a column by Jessica Roy at BetaBeat. It is her last column, as she is heading over to TIME to run their TimeNewsfeed.

She has a list of things she hates about the tech beat, and here are my two favorite:

7. The communal obsessions with expensive, over-brewed coffee, Nike Fuelbands and auto-tweeting scales, all of which are basically just narcissism masquerading as enlightened futurism.8. The notion that being the slightest bit critical makes you a “hater,” and the idea that providing any kind of coverage that isn’t a big sloppy BJ shows a lack of “journalistic integrity.”

The last one, of course, is pretty much a concern in every journalistic field. She's also concerned about the rampant and often ignored sexism and classism in the tech community. I think her final column deserves your attention.

Monday Media Critic: Debate Shows

Stephen Colbert takes on the "debate show" format. (Still waiting for Jon Stewart to skewer the "All New Crossfire."

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

Who To Follow Friday: @Journchat

Welcome to "Who to Follow Friday," where I offer my thoughts on who to follow on Twitter for thought-leadership on jourmalism/media/tech/etc. This isn't who out there is tweeting the best breaking news, this is my list of people who are tweeting info or links to some of the most interesting thoughts about news, as well as the technology newsies use.

Let's start with @journchat. This Twitter feed is associated with #journchat, which helps facilitate a weekly online chat (Monday 8-9pm ET) involving journalists, bloggers, public relations folks, and others. I've been participating for a few months, both as an active participant and as a lurker. Most of the time the chat will be provocative and at least remind you of a few journalistic principals. Personally, I'm always amused by how clueless the PR people are. Most weeks, I did come away with at least one good link to check out, piece of advice, and often a new person to follow.

Don't forget to follow me at @ReinvenTheMedia

Careful with those comments

Online Comments are supposed to be a crucial way to increase interactivity between media producers and consumers, but they come with dangers.

The threat of Internet trolls and their hateful and vitriolic comments that can hijack a news story are well known. This week, Popular Science announced it was dropping user comments because it is bad for science. A study led by a researcher from the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed that not only do comments have an impact on, and sometimes reverse, the reader's opinion of the issues in a scientific story, rude comments have an even more powerful impact. (The authors wrote a piece for the New York Times that summarizes the research.)

On the same day, YouTube announced changes for user comments. The goal here is to increase the usefulness of comments, by displaying more "important" comments higher in the comment list, rather than the most recent comments first. For example, if the celebrity that is the subject of a video comments, that comment is given prominent display. "Important" people in general are given preference in comments. Comments from a video's creator are also preferred. The improvements will also allow users more moderation control over their own videos.

Then there are the grand-daddies of commenting, Facebook and Twitter. Many media websites require commenters to register, often through Facebook. Facebook as a medium seems built for comments, with each wall post offering an invitation to comment. Since you pick your Facebook friends, you've essentially pre-moderated the responses, and you can always block, edit, and drop wall posts if you get comments you don't like. Twitter is simply 140 character comments broadcast to the entire world, with pre-moderation in the form of who you chose to follow.

Perhaps ending this entry with an invitation to comment is gratuitous.

Throwback Thursday for the week of September 23, 2013

I promise this occasional trip through the way-back machine will become more helpful and interesting once this blog has a little more longevity. Until then, we can still look back on the short history of pieces.

The Race to Innovate in Digital Media was my very first blog post back on August 23rd. It started as my attempt to look at the direction of innovation as the combination of previous media forms with new technological innovations. It ended up being a rudimentary history of media, from the cave wall to the Facebook wall.

All News is Local, also posted on August 23rd, looks at how a national broadcaster (The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC) decided to cover an event in one small, rural county in a big way because it illuminated a national trend.

Setting a New Bar for Journalism (August 26) shows how the business/entrepreneurial lessons of the show "Bar Rescue" might be applied to the media business.

And All Journalists should operate like entrepreneurs (August 29) was my attempt to apply some of the "self-help" lessons offered to the "start-up set" at the SxSw V2V conference in Las Vegas to the journalism community.

WashPo shows that Imitation is the highest form of flattery for Flipboard

The Washington Post unveiled a new "app" on its website called "Topicly." It is a visually-based menu for news consumers. While it will work on a browser, it appears to be targeted to the tablet and mobile platforms, where images are king. Here's a screen shot.

Look familiar to anyone? It's very similar to Flipboard's interface.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, imitate it.

Watch This Wednesday: The Jockey

The Jockey is a multimedia presentation by New York Times writer Barry Bearack and photographer Chang W. Lee. A total of 14 people are credited for the piece, which tells the story of Russell Baze, the jockey with the most races in American history. The photography and the videos that accompany the piece are brilliant, but there are not enough. Or, there is too much text. For a "multimedia" piece, they forgot the "multi" part. The video plays seamlessly within the story: you scroll down and the words from the text smoothly transform into the video part of the presentation. There is an interesting video portion detailing Baze's multiple career injuries. On the whole, though, this looks like a traditional long-read text piece with the video added on top. Notably, there are no video interviews, or "sound bites" of any of the piece's subjects within the piece. A good attempt, much better than "Snowfall" in my opinion, but still not quite reaching the pinnacle of what a multimedia piece should be.

Recomend a piece for "Watch This Wednesday" by emailing to reinventhemedia@gmail.com

Tech Tuesday: Twitter + TV = TVInteract

TV People: looking for a simple way to highlight specific tweets and put them on the air? In most places, you order up a graphic or plug it into your CG program to get your way... but there's an alternative on the way. TVInteract is an app that even the most "hired for their looks" haircut can operate. The iOS app lets you look at your stream, pick a tweet, and it is ready for display, as long as your tablet is either connected via HDMI cable or AirPlay. Social media maven Jenni Hogan is attached to the company, which is pitching to TV stations and video outlets of all sizes.

Twitter: @TVInteact

Just a "Touch" of News, Now This...

Imagine NowThisNews on your television and you've got TouchVision. Both are putting an on-the-go, less-is-more approach to video news.

Both outfits are young, hip, visual, and willing to break out of the old-school television box, by adding animations, music, and a little bit of attitude. Both are time-conscious, presenting stories in bite-sized presentations of about a minute or less. TouchVision even does it without traditional "reporters" on the screen, preferring to use nameless, faceless narrators instead. TouchVision calls its presentation "news movies," and they are a bit more cinematic than traditional tv news fare.

NowThisNews's website looks a bit like Buzzfeed. The operation launched with a focus on mobile. They are now a leader in presenting news on Vine and Instagram.

TouchVision wants to position itself as the "network" for local broadcasters, and is offering its video content for both online and over-the-air use. Like traditional broadcast networks, local affiliates are offered a portion of time per hour to position local news, and a portion for locally-sold advertising.

I think the "snack size news" trend is interesting, especially when viewed against the counter trend of "longread" on the web and CNN's decision to add more hour-length documentary programming.

Monday Media Critic: Jon Stewart and the Breaking News Wrongnado

Cable Nets and local broadcasters churn out hours of content on mundane days, but Breaking News is when they get the big ratings. Any journalist knows that the information you get from sources, even the best sources, early in a major incident will not match exactly to the information you get hours or even days later. In the modern media age, most tend to report the information as soon as they get it, and then clarify or correct as "new information" comes in. Jon Stewart says we should put on the brakes and stop what he calls the "Wrongnado."



I usually agree with Stewart, but this time he's only half-right. He's right that we need to use the brakes a little more, but I don't think we can or even should put the newsmobile into park. You can never wait long enough for "all the facts" to come out -- historians who are uncovering new facts and new interpretations years, decades, even centuries after the events they write about can tell you that. Media is supposed to be the first draft of history, but Stewart is right that the rush to write that "first, first draft" leads to errors.

Meet the New Revenue, Same as the Old Revenue

I've been watching a few shows online lately. I'm a late adopter to what looks to many like the future of video. My twice-daily viewings of a classic tv sci-fi show are interrupted every few minutes by commercials. Just like on the tv, when a commercial pops up on my computer, I turn to a magazine or amble over to the kitchen... but I've also actually watched a few.

Turns out, I'm typical. A study by online ad firm YuMe shows that traditional "spots" during an online video presentation are more effective that inline or banner ads that may appear around the viewing window. So, it looks like when it comes to online video, unless you want to pay for commercial-free viewing, it looks like we'll be living with commercials for a while longer.

Kimmel exposes journalistic missteps

Who would have thought a twerking video could have such serious implications. The video of the Twerking woman who caught on fire ("Worst Twerk Fail ever" was part of the title) was posted on Youtube on September 3, 2013. In days, the video was all over the place, and that includes major broadcasters, cable outlets, and websites of every flavor. (On the YouTube page, the poster bragged that she would "be on Jimmy Kimmel tonight" which, in retrospect, could have been a hint.)

Then, on his late night show on September 9, Jimmy Kimmel revealed that it was all a prank, and the media fell for it.

Funny right? Sure. Serious implications for journalism? Damn right. 

Listen again to Kimmel's revelation with a critical ear. He says they received interview requests, but did not respond to a single one. If Kimmel is telling the truth, doesn't that mean that every single outlet that ran the video did so without confirming even who shot it, who was in the video... and never had the chance to ask "is it real?"

The original version of this video went viral because it is amusing. But then, one media outlet let down its journalism guard. Then another. Then another. Soon, the loss of journalistic integrity is what spread virally. There's a lesson there.