March 2nd, 2012 § Comments Off on great debate on how & why linking from media § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
there is a really interesting discussion going on this week, whether online journalists should cite other online “journalists” who “broke” the stories. it’s actually pretty complex question and this article sums it up greatly. it actually touches some points I wrote about a few days ago – the new, self proclaimed “tech journalists” have no idea how the real media ethics works, yet they demand same credit and awe.
Why Journalists Need to Link | Epicenter | Wired.com
If it was Siegler’s article that caused Vascellaro to call Apple, then Siegler certainly counts as an online resource used in writing the WSJ story, and should therefore, by Stray’s formulation, be fully linked and credited. On the other hand, if Stray agrees with Siegler, that doesn’t mean that Siegler agrees with Stray. Siegler cited no source at all, named or anonymous, for his scoop that Apple had bought Chomp: He simply asserted the fact. “Apple has bought the app search and discovery platform Chomp, we’ve learned.†If every statement in news writing needs to be attributed, then Siegler just failed that test.
www.wired.com
it’s great to see journalists are starting to be aware of the need to link outside their own domain.
February 27th, 2012 § § permalink
the guardians...... (Photo credit: simada2009)
Roughly a year ago, we had an incident with neighbors in the co-working space in NY. They were two writers for an online magazine, fairly young, geeky, caffeinated.
Now, in this co-working space, the only thing separating the offices is a one-layer glass, so you can hear the other people if they talk a bit louder. During one of our skype meetings, when we had bad wifi reception, so our VP Sales tried talking louder to get the message trough, those two writers got annoyed and started tweeting confidential information about our clients. I learned about it when a friend from an ad agency sent me an email with screenshot from his FB wall.
It took some more shouting to resolve it and get the tweets removed, but the damage has been done already.
I’d like to believe that well-bred old-school professional journalist would never do that. Because my generation thinks that internet changed the world so significantly, they do not learn from previous generations and are reinventing the wheels. those two kids probably call themselves journalists, but in reality they are just reckless kids, who will need another decade or so to grow up and start behaving responsibly.
this article brilliantly talks about similar situation with tech bloggers:
A blogger or a journalist? Debate over the power and influence of tech writers This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 20.37 GMT on Sunday 26 February 2012 . A version appeared on p28 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Dan Lyons used his personal blog to attack Michael Arrington and MG Siegler.
via: www.guardian.co.uk
… I wholeheartedly agree with his points, but unfortunately there is no way back. the geeks rule the internet, for better or worse. and media is not the only part of the old world order that is deteriorating, all other industries that are being ‘disrupted’ are bound to this same ignorance – disruption brings more efficiency to the market, at the cost of ignoring inherent value system.
actually, i believe that the ‘gain’ of disruption is just temporary and the cost of building out value system is simply deferred for later stage of the cycle.
September 21st, 2010 § Comments Off on Press Conference § permalink
Press conferences and press releases are not about visibility or marketing, but about setting the record straight.
Sadly many marketing people and their bosses don’t understand that and journalists are left alone in finding only the relevant information in the information noise that is being thrown at them every day. And even more sad, lot’s of them don’t know that anymore as well and think that what used to be ‘reporting’ is just a game of swimming in the attention flow, and see their role in it an equivalent of eddies in the stream that ensure only the strongest survive.
I realized this recently when after long time again I read about a proper ‘use case‘ of press conference. It was held by Ljubljana nursery hospital, where they recently found one nurse infected with tuberculosis. And the press went wild, writing a lot of guesswork, opinions, catchy headlines. Stirring the waters without serious reporting really. Of course the public was worried, and after a few days even scared.
And then the director of the hospital held the conference and explained that they have everything under control, that tuberculosis is far from being  dangerous these days, that it’s routinely curable, not very contagious, and that everybody should just go home and let the medics to their job. I believe this was an example of a properly used press conference, well prepared and timely.
Now of  course there are other types of situations in which a press release and/or conference are properly used, but I wanted to use this one to illustrate the difference between news and gossip, reporting and writing, traditional and contemporary media (not new).
Wouldn’t it be great if ‘journalists’ would do their job in the first place, including the old ‘three-sources’ story verification, and tell the public that they don’t have to worry and should focus on the relevant issues.
