Disqus - Friends of amymengel

Re: Outsource To Your Readers

Colin Mathews — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:20:40 -0000

News generation, gathering and editing can be more highly distributed--for sure. But events like the Mumbai attacks and other high-profile or non-local news stories (especially vertical news, like national politics, technology, entertainment et al.) disguise how difficult it is to get reasonably good, repeatable news content at the local level. When hundreds or thousands of people blog or contribute on one topic--the presidential race or a sensational event--then the best work can rise to the top, as Fred says. Good work tends to happen around such news, too, because it reflects well on the reporter/editor to contribute. But that model definitely does not hold at the local--or even regional--level. Yes, you can find some exceptionally high-quality hyperlocal blogs or other UGC news content, but the large numbers would demand that--among all of the hyperlocal blogs out there, some must be good. But definitely not all localities, or even most, have high quality user-generated news sources.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

Colin Mathews — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:52:05 -0000

Fred and Dave both punt on the most important question: how will news content--especially local news content--get created? "That's why everyone needs a blog and readers" is simply wishful thinking; that blog content that replaces reporting will emerge spontaneously is part of a utopian fantasy among some members of the technorati that technology will free people from the shackles of the corrupt/lazy/doomed legacy media.

Outside.in is an aggregator. It helps with the discovery and distribution of content--like Topix, but from the bottom up rather than the top down. But someone still has to create the content! SAI (any many like it) is a curator of content: that team assembles stories from the WSJ (primarily) and other publishers the way a museum chooses, and then comments on, pieces of art. They even provide some useful contextual commentary. But they're not creating 90% of the content that powers the commentary.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

Colin Mathews — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:29:06 -0000

The utopian fantasy is that citizen journalism/microblogging will, on its own, spontaneously replace the content that we now know as journalism. There has to be "something else" on the content creation side (not just the aggregation/distribution/ad-serving-monetization-technology side) to allow useful, valuable local news content to exist in some form.

Fortunately, readMedia has figured out a big part of that "something else."

Re: You Can't Take The Paper Out Of The Newstand

Colin Mathews — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:40:35 -0000

I believe the issue here is not necessarily Google v. Murdoch, or new media v. old media, or "professional" v. user generated content. Those positions have atrophied around dopey slogans like "information wants to be free" (which was followed by "it also wants to be expensive"...).

There seem to be two types of media at play here, and each is fighting for the money to finance it.

"Primary media" or "primary content" is researched or written by a person (sometimes within an organization, like a newspaper). It represents a unique piece of information, point of view, or expertise. Its value might be from its timeliness (e.g. "breaking news"), persuasiveness (e.g. opinion), or knowledge (e.g. finance or science writing), among other things. Until recently, the traditional media has dominated the creation and monetization of primary media, mostly because the means of production and distribution require large organizations for financing. However, thanks to the magic of the internet, it has become much cheaper to produce certain kinds of primary media, and distribution can cost almost nothing.

"Derivative media" relies on primary media for something to write about. Aggregators, scrapers, and news search are the most extreme type of derivative media (they couldn't exist without primary media; they derive their value from its existence), but there's a large gray area of blogs that are derivative of primary media to some extent. A Seeking Alpha or Business Insider article that simply reposts the meat of a WSJ article and says "Hmm, isn't this interesting?" is derivative in a bad way; a post by Henry Blodget setting that article in a larger context or analysis informed by his experience and expertise is derivative in a good way.

The thing is, primary media needs to get paid for somehow. Newspapers and most traditional media make lousy protagonists in this argument: their monopoly status for so long has made them fat, lazy and arrogant (as businesses). Yet there is a critical mass of primary content there that is essential to civic society, derivative media, and simple transparency that it's irresponsible to say, "something will replace these dinosaurs."

Re: You Can't Take The Paper Out Of The Newstand

Colin Mathews — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 06:58:33 -0000

Yes, except that Huffington Post, at its worst, simply expropriates content (and page views, and advertising dollars) from primary media--like at their Chicago site (http://bit.ly/7EJx)--weakening a better, "more primary" source so they can put a fraction of those dollars toward their own primary content creation efforts.

Most primary media is like the plankton in an ecosystem--easy to ignore or take for granted, but the system collapses without it. Derivative media needs to figure out the care and feeding of that building block for their own good.

Re: You Can't Take The Paper Out Of The Newstand

Colin Mathews — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:40:10 -0000

That's why I said, "their own good," and also why I said it's hard to sympathize with the newspapers. Their methods of production are too expensive for 90% of the content they produce. However, that content is the foundation for the derivative media, who can't exist without the primary media's work product.

Re: You Can't Take The Paper Out Of The Newstand

Colin Mathews — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:49:56 -0000

That's an example of "derivative in a good way" or "primary media"--the distinction I drew above.

Re: You Can't Take The Paper Out Of The Newstand

Colin Mathews — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:01 -0000

Here's where I believe you're confusing the issue. TechCrunch, Gawker, allthingsD and many other blogs are primary media of a new sort. They do have a different cost structure and exploit that to make money by challenging the traditional primary media (e.g. print media).

The issue in your original post is about derivative media, particularly the kind that sucks the ad dollars out of the air for primary media by repurposing it without adding much value to it.

Re: drop.io Gets Into PR Market With PressLift - mediabistro.com: PRNewser

Colin Mathews — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:14:59 -0000

I just don't get this product, except that maybe drop.io has a fantastic file sharing platform is is desperate to find some way to monetize it.

A few observations:

* The feature set is below the market: The big guys--PRN, BusinessWire, and Marketwire--as well as more focused players--like readMedia, PRWeb, PitchEngine and even niche-y offerings like The NewsMarket--can do everything PressLift does and more. Just speaking to the feature set I know at readMedia, we offer analytics, social sharing, SEO, multimedia, RSS, identity verification and more. http://readme.readmedia.com...
* The price is nuts: Compare $500 per release to PRWeb's richest offering (http://www.prweb.com/pr/pre..., which has everything PressLift offers, plus direct distribution to media, plus AP syndication, plus an AdWords buy, plus editorial consultation--and it's only $380.
* There's nothing special about it: All of the people I mention above have some special sauce. readMedia, for example, specializes in local and hyperlocal distribution and we include direct e-mail, fax, wire, RSS and widget distribution to local newsrooms with every release (yet our subscriptions still start at only $29/month for unlimited use). What's special about PressLift?
* No domain expertise: drop.io clearly knows file sharing and they do an awesome job at it. But they have zero experience in the PR market (the people they're going to sell to). Hiring a NYT social media pro does not solve this problem--reporters, particularly good and privileged ones from traditional big media, generally misunderstand how PR works, what the job is like, and how to be effective. Ask any ex-reporter or editor who has been in a PR job for more than 5 years if it's what they expected. So the learning curve here for PressLift is huge.

Am I missing something?

Re: Press release 2.0: technology creates localized content

Colin Mathews — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:34:11 -0000

Mark, thanks for the nice writeup.

Incidentally, we can serve this content in 15,000 zip codes nationally, not just 15 (with some variability in the density of content).

As you said, any hyperlocal blogger, news organization, or whatever can pull those stories in a widget or an RSS feed for free. Anyone interested should just drop me a line.

And I agree with Alan: we have finally mechanized the intern, the last great frontier in automation.

Re: Roundup: Foursquare, Associated Content and tools for finding cool stuff nearby

Colin Mathews — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:49:25 -0000

How is Fwix different from Topix (except for the lack of ads)? The biggest challenge for aggregators is that there's a limit to the available, relevant content that's produced in any community. Topix faced up to that years ago (http://bit.ly/cD3AaP). Fwix might add "real time" to the mix but the fact is that most people are consumers of content rather than producers, and at a local level not enough people are spontaneously producing locally relevant news content to aggregate. (They're producing plenty of content on Facebook, Twitter or their own blogs, but only a tiny proportion of that is what you'd call "local".)

Re: Press release 2.0: technology creates localized content

Colin Mathews — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:11:59 -0000

But lots of "news" is simply a fact: Company X hired Joe Smith, Amy Jones graduated from State U., the town of Anywhere is hosting a bake sale on Friday. Asking a reporter to rewrite that for the sake of objectivity is impractical and expensive, but it's definitely something people want to read. Like @jeffjarvis says, "Do what you do best and link to the rest." Reporters should spend their time creating new content (via enterprise reporting and investigative journalism), not rewriting newsy, vanilla press releases.

Re: readMedia Makes Local Press Release Delivery Easy

Colin Mathews — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:07:36 -0000

Jason, thanks for taking the time to look at readMedia and letting your readers know about what we're up to. You explained it all a lot better than we generally do!

I thought this post on Lost Remote (http://bit.ly/9sdAzs) summarizing the Pew Internet & American Life’s latest survey would add some useful context: people get their news from a lot of sources, and as you pointed out last week, traditional media is still a big part of the mix. What readMedia is trying to do is make it easy to support a successful multiplatform strategy that's focused on people publicizing "geographically relevant" (local and regional) news.

Again, many thanks for your interest.

Colin
CEO, readMedia

Re: New York Times – NYU hyperlocal partnership launches

Colin Mathews — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 09:38:50 -0000

"According to a press release..."

Hey, maybe it's not dead!

Re: Collusion

Colin Mathews — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 07:51:22 -0000

Your points are fair and I agree that any collusion is likely defensive. However, it's easy to be a good guy when business is easy, returns solid, and competitors few. It's when things get hard that people are tempted to make mistakes and take shortcuts. If Arrington's information is correct and these investors represent a sizable percentage of a definable market and were working together to fix prices or keeping out competitors, then they are breaking the law. They don't have to be successful in the long term in keeping out competitors or keeping prices down, they just have to try to do it and damage enough sellers.

You're right that most investors (and in any business) are generally decent people. But you're judged by how you behave when business is hard (or when it's easy to misbehave, like in the post-bubble days), not when things are good.

Re: Newspapers Must Consider More Free, Citizen Media Content

Colin Mathews — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:35:02 -0000

The content categories you tag as ripe for unpaid "citizen journalists" are already available to most papers. State and local government agency, education, and even local business news is written in a high quality, easy-to-use format and even sent to the newspapers themselves. They're called news releases and at a local level they're barely a whisper away from the story that is fetishistically re-worked by a long-tenured reporter and a copyeditor. I have written about the issue several times at http://colinrmathews.com

Re: What Now? Firing a Key Executive.

Colin Mathews — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 20:44:25 -0000

When do you fire somebody? The first time the thought occurs to you that you should. Then just do it as humanely as possible.

Re: Co-Curricular Transcripts?

Colin Mathews — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 10:16:59 -0000

You're right to bring up portfolios. The idea of co-curricular transcripts and portfolios (lately ePortfolios) have been intimately bound together for almost 40 years--in fact, they're basically the same thing. (See this excellent history of CCTs/portfolios in this excellent Masters thesis by Crista Coven published last year: http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu....

This history of the CCT is a solution looking for a problem, with the result that its proponents get so excited and aspirational about the problems they can solve that they totally overthink the solution. In its current incarnation, that overthinking leads to the idea that the CCT can be the sum of all learning, skills and competencies outside of the classroom--the quantification of *everything* about a student that conventional classroom hours fails to measure. That aspiration is misguided, in my opinion, and in any event runs headlong into your more serious reservations about the protocols and systems for evaluating those outcomes.

I think your comparison to a resume is a good one. So many of the people at the conference you mention are looking to get rid of "proxies" for student learning/skills and focus on some essential, quantifiable measure or credential. But just documenting the things a person did is good enough! What if students who wanted to be a community college dean could look at lots of resumes of people like you and see the clubs or activities you participated in? Maybe it's good enough to just know that you worked at the radio station and leave it at that, rather than trying to disaggregate that experience into a set of skills or competencies?

That "resume" model addresses both of the things you think are promising about CCTs, namely as a way to incentivize connections via engagement in co-curriculars, and as another piece of the advising puzzle.

Right now, co-curricular involvement is scattered and buried throughout most institutions. The idea of surfacing and documenting that involvement really could be transformational--it's the "dark matter" of the college experience. Trying to push it farther than that seems both unnecessary, and worse, unattainable.