May 2008 Archives

The launch of Blogger in August 1999 opened the door to anyone and everyone creating media. Since then platforms to share writing, photos, video and more have enabled an extraordinary volume of content to be made available to the world. The media world has at least doubled in size this decade, adding many new content formats to the existing professionally produced media on channels such as TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers.

Despite cries from many that all user generated content is crap, that’s not true. It’s just that most user generated content is crap, and a small proportion is outstanding. Anyone who has browsed through the best photos on Flickr, for example, will see some extraordinary images they never would have seen otherwise. The best industry blogs are certainly considered on a par with mainstream reporting and analysis.

There are now some compelling examples of businesses that are based on professional-quality submissions from their users. A great article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle titled Everywhere, JPG – magazines for the future describes how these glossy magazines are compiled from people submitting their travel stories and photos, with the promise of being paid $100 and a year’s subscription to the magazine if their contributions are published. The selections are in fact made by the readers by voting on the site.

Recently the Future of Journalism conference was held in Sydney, run by the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the body that represents workers in media and entertainment, including journalists. One of the broadcast media channels which covered the event called me last week to get some ideas for their interviews with the keynote speakers at the conference.

Their first question to me was about the impact of search engines on journalism. While our conversation went off in quite different directions regarding the future of journalism, I think it's a very interesting issue to address. There are seven important issues for how search engines impact journalism:

Traffic from search engines provides a significant proportion of online media income. In some cases up to one third of traffic to online news sites comes from search engines. With the primary revenue from most online news coming from advertising, search engine optimization is not an optional activity for news sites and editors.

Headline writing is becoming a completely new art (and now science). As many have written on headline writing for search engines before, including the New York Times and an article I wrote on newspapers, search optimization, and old-school editors, publishing online requires a very different approach to headlines. The cute wordplays that have characterized newspaper headlines through the last century (Headless Body In Topless Bar; Ice Cream Man Has Assets Frozen; Two Convicts Evade Noose, Jury Hung etc. etc.) don't tend to bring search traffic. Morever, visitors will usually find the content was not what they were looking for, and will leave in seconds.

Today I spoke at the Walkley Public Affairs conference, organized by the MEAA, the peak body representing workers in the Australian media industry. I spoke on the Enterprise 2.0 panel, running through many of the issues I've raised on the Enterprise 2.0 Forum blog.

Here are a few summarized comments and reflections on what I heard while I was at the event from late morning to the end of the first day.

As I walked in, Sam Mostyn of IAG was saying, reflecting on what she'd seen at the insurer, that 'what builds loyalty and commitment is trust'. That is a fundamentally important point. Corporate loyalty is evanescent today, particularly with younger workers. The only potential source of loyalty is trusting your employees. Not trusting them automatically results in zero loyalty. This is deeply relevant to the issue of blocking or allowing social networks in the enterprise.

On the next panel, Mark Pesce commented that social networks in Australia are extremely shallow. Outrageous news travels very fast. At the Future of Journalism conference comments that Roy Greenslade made about Andrew Jaspan, editor of The Age, were immediately heard. Messages propagate ubiquitously, in this case enabled by journalists in the audience live-blogging the event. Those who were interested in what Greenslade said heard about it almost instantaneously. Mark describes Twitter as his twenty-first century brain trust, extending his capabilities by giving him access to many with complementary knowledge. He describes this as 'hyperempowerment'.