Month: January 2007

Time to delete your online department? | yelvington.com

Time to delete your online department? | yelvington.com

Amen. Steve Yelvington is the man on online-offline integration. I turn down each and every offer to join some media organization looking to build its online group. This is like playing mediator in a bad Balkan conflict. You’ll end up with a negotiated truce that will fail as soon as someone’s pig breaks out and tramples the neighbor’s crops. It ain’t a dichotomy any more. Any media org that thinks they can make a graceful cash-cow transition is whistling past the graveyard. Burn the huts, fire the old guard who profess allegiance but still pine for the old days on the lobster shift on rewrite, and put the online guys in charge. Like now.

Like pretty much everybody who’s spent a lot of time on the New Media side of the Great Divide, I’ve been leery of organizational integration. Why? Because Luddite values are deeply ingrained in traditional newspaper operational groups, and those values will lead us to defeat. Equally deeply ingrained: Utter denial that those Luddite characteristics exist. It’s a dangerous combination.But this is the 21st century, and if we continue to put up with Luddite behaviors, we’re cooked anyway.

It’s time to restructure, and clean house of the obstructionists.

What happens if you delete your online department? Is the core organization ready to face the future? It’s had more than a decade to get ready. Now or never, guys.

Dark days for the press – my advice to a middle-aged reporter

A good friend and former colleague — a person I actually worked with on our high school newspaper in the late 70s, then again at a real daily newspaper, a PC trade magazine, and then a national business magazine — in short, a lifelong friend and cohort, has been asking the question that I suspect most middle-aged journalists are asking these days: “What’s next?”

This question is not academic but being driven by a very real fear for the future of the craft.

David Carr’s excellent NYT column about his blog, his 24-hour relationship with his readers (I will not subject you to the tragedy of the NYT cost-wall — way to make yourself irrelevant Mr. Sulzberger), the rise of page views as a validation of a writer’s worth … the NPR report last night that the Tribune company is receiving anemic bids for its business … Time-Warner’s axing of 300 people from its magazine group yesterday … Ziff Davis getting bids today for its break-up ….

I went into journalism in 1980 as an interim job as I considered going to law school (I wanted to study admiralty law), medical school (surgery, I worked as an OR orderly for a few months), the military (I took the entrance exams for the Army before I graduated from college, but due to poor eyesight was given some unappealing options). I ended up getting sucked into the profession during a period when journalism was very competitive and overcrowded with other idealists inspired by Woodward and Bernstein, the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, the Gonzo Journalism of Hunter Thompson, and the investigative journalism that seemed to be changing the world.

I miss being a reporter. It is an awesome job.
I entered a world where Objectivity was stressed at all costs and there was a real sense in the newsroom that there was a higher calling to the profession that made journalism feel like it was a career that would live on for a long, long time. If I had remained in the newsroom I think I would be suffering many sleepless nights these days. I’m glad I got out when I did in 1994.

What’s a reporter or editor to do? I know a leading editorial headhunter in the Boston area who is awash with panicked resumes, who sees, first-hand, the hell of modern journalism. Those resumes are coming from my former peers — the senior editors and reporters who should be in the golden phase of their careers, but instead are flipping out looking for gigs that just don’t exist anymore.

1. First, game is over for print based products. Get over it. If your present publication is beset with cost reductions and you know the ax is coming, don’t think you can find another newsroom. You won’t.

2. Get with David Carr and hundred of other reporters and launch a blog. Screw your boss. Just launch one. Do it under a pen name, but start blogging.

3. Get ready to talk to the readers. The old ivory tower days of letting the readers in through the tiny aperture of the letters to the editor are long gone. If you can’t slug it out with the readers in a flame war then get out of the business. The guy who wrote last week that he doesn’t want to talk to the readers? Fine — but the big talent going forward isn’t your ability to get a source to talk, but how you talk to your audience. If you can’t defend yourself, then get ready for a royal flaming.

4. Think about a career change. Don’t look to your publication’s online group. If you aren’t there now, or haven’t been there over the last ten years, I can assure you they don’t want you. The old Digital Native/Digital Immigrant meme is real. You may be an old dog, don’t expect the puppies to have the patience to teach you how to be a new one. If you don’t intuitively understand the ecosystem of blogistan, the importance of YouTube and its effect on the broadcast model, if the true significance of Tivo baffles you … then don’t think you can transfer your old who-what-where-when school of reporting to the new world. It’s more complex than that.

Good luck. My heart goes out to you, but the game is over.

Web newspaper blog traffic triples in Dec: study

Web newspaper blog traffic triples in Dec: study – Yahoo! News

An interesting stat indicating the mainstreaming of blogs into the media stream. I wonder how many readers of newspaper blogs would identify them as blogs — or just more web content?

“The number of people reading Internet blogs on the top 10 U.S. newspaper sites more than tripled in December from a year ago and accounted for a larger percentage of overall traffic to those sites, according to data released on Wednesday.
Unique visitors to blog sites affiliated with the largest Internet newspapers rose to 3.8 million in December 2006 from 1.2 million viewers a year earlier, tracking firm Nielsen//NetRatings said.

U.S. news organizations are increasingly calling on their reporters and editors to write news blogs and compete with the expanding Internet format for informal analysis and opinion.”

When 10 Hours Is Not Enough To Appreciate True Awesomeness

Zen of Design»Blog Archive » When 10 Hours Is Not Enough To Appreciate True Awesomeness

I’ve been taken down at GigaGamez for slagging Second Life after a mere ten hours of usage. Guess I need to put in … what? …forty hours before I am permitted to ask questions about something being pushed on me. Guess twenty-five years as a tech journalist and countless software and online reviews don’t qualify me to express an opinion. Hey, at least I was frank in grading my “expertise” with the system as an F-minus. To follow the logic, I’m not permitted to say a meal sucks unless I’ve cooked the dish a certain number of times. Hey — like I said in my original critique: “your mileage may vary. Me: I don’t like it.”
Thanks to Damian Schubert for making my rebuttal for me at Zen of Design:

“James Wagner Au is incensed that people who have not played the game much are criticizing it. Which I suppose is would be a fair criticism, if it were true. But look at what he claims is not enough.Regarding proficiency with Second Life, [one reviewer] e-mailed back, “Mark me with an F. Make that an F minus.” He estimates his total visitations as ten hours or under, in which he more or less randomly explored a world the geographic size of an entire state, to form his assessment.

That’s right – 10 hours is not enough time to make an honest assessment of the Second Life experience. By comparison, my games rack is full of games that didn’t survive an HOUR of playtime. Electronic Arts (and most other companies) force their designers to obsess over the first FIVE MINUTES of gameplay, because most games don’t even survive THAT. Okay, someone reviewing the game should probably give it a tad more time than than but… 10 hours – not enough!”

I’ve wasted enough time on this topic as it is. I could return Mr. Wagner Au’s trashing with an in-kind slam at his methods and objectivity, but …. on to more important matters in my first life.

Why doesn’t Amtrak have wireless?

Just wondering. EVDO saves the day, but in general, wireless connectivity on the Amtrak like from Boston to NYC is terrible, with cell phone coverage spotty at best. But why can’t the train have a 802.1G signal?

Don’t get me going on the deplorable state of rail travel in the US. Two years of riding the Swiss train systems completely spoiled me to the possibilities.

Beautiful morning though, first true winter morning of the new year, with temperatures in the teens, but a bright orange sun flashing over Long Island Sound through the port-side windows of the Acela.

[update: four dropped calls on the train this morning. Yo, Sprint, build some towers along the tracks!]

The agony of Notes

My mission to get to a “zero inbox” is succeeding, with fewer than 100 emails sitting in my inbox this morning, and the hot ones being moved into one of four action folders. I have grown more merciless in deleting emails that have a questionable impact or “ask” of me. If I don’t have to reply, I don’t. If I don’t have to retain, I don’t. Delete is my friend.

But, I write to moan about the wrongness of Lotus Notes, the fact that it is the most isolated, stranded, proprietary, horrible email tool on the planet, one that offers its victims no options to migrate their calendars, their tasks, their contacts to a better alternative. Where do I want to be? Let’s start with the calendar — I want desperately to move to Google Calendar, Foldera or 30Boxes — but alas, the import/export functions of those tools don’t even acknowledge Notes, let alone support it. I am sure I could drop $75 on some third-party utility, but for now, Notes remains stuck to me like a low-level skin disease — always itchy, not quite disfiguring, a fact of life.

I know Notes is a favorite of IT administrators and I won’t slag it for that reason, but I wonder how many new hires have arrived at a new company only to discover, to their horror, that Notes is the central nervous system.

I first experienced the pain at McKinsey, where the firm depended on Notes like oxygen. Forbes was a cc:Mail shop — another Lotus product which had the weirdest icons on the planet. Then Forbes went to a strange off-brand Novell client — Groupwise — and life deteriorated until I figured out how to map the mail stream to Outlook.

I’d like to junk it all and move to POP3 run through GMAIL. But until the calendar coordination and scheduling tools get more sophisticated, Notes will remain my productivity psorasis.

Season of uncertainty for shellfishermen

Season of uncertainty for shellfishermen (January 15, 2007)

“Welcome to ”As the Oyster Turns,” the continuing saga of the beloved bivalve and the people who can’t live without them. When last we met, warm weather was flooding the flats, mostly a good thing. But could danger lurk behind the balmy days?”

Having hoped to do some clamming this weekend, but deciding not to out of laziness, I realize it’s been a while since this blog has held up its tagline’s promise of talking about clamming strategies. Today’s Cape Cod Times has an interesting article that talks about the practice of “pitting” oysters — removing them from their beds where they can be damaged by extremely low winter temperatures and the scouring action of winter ice — and parking them in a basement storage area where they can sit out the winter, dormant, out of water. I did not know that.

Not an issue this year, as this looks like the winter that isn’t.

One year anniversary

Today is the one-year anniversary of me and Lenovo. As John Lennon sang, “..and what have you done? Another year over and a new one just begun.”

I tend to take start-date anniversaries seriously. October 11, 1988 was my start-date at Forbes and every year my editor, Bill Baldwin, would sit me down with all the stories I had written in the previous 26 issues, and let me know where I stood and what I should work on.

At McKinsey start-dates weren’t important. The entire firm went into introspection mode twice a year in July and December.

Anyway, if I had to list the ten professional milestones of 2006 for me, in roughly chronological order:

  1. Assimilation: Lowell Bryan at McKinsey told me, “No one is fully effective for six months.” I don’t know when exactly I began to feel comfortable in my own skin, but the first few months were predictably confusing as I learned Lenovo’s acronyms and internal vocabulary.
  2. Metrics: I brought in Omniture SiteCatalyst to measure our online marketing.
  3. Blogs: I launched the first corporate blog. It would have been sooner, but I was out of action due to the Memorial Day Bicycle Incident.
  4. Proactive Support: I started an informal blog monitoring and service/fulfillment support program with Mark Hopkins.
  5. Interactive advertising: we shifted dramatically towards a “direct” model of advertising, using metrics to back up the expense to revenue ratios.
  6. Viral: some good viral was produced (not by me), but I think I can take credit for changing some attitudes about the role of viral.
  7. Quality of Life: recovering from the Bicycle Incident put the long-distance commute between Cape Cod and North Carolina to the test. I think I have achieved equilibrium.
  8. Big Idea: not to jinx it, but I think I am succeeding in selling the big one for 2007.
  9. IT: we’ve brought in some new thinking to the types of systems needed to support a world-class interactive marketing group. These should bear fruit this year.
  10. Influence: slowly but surely I’ve built my network and have a much better idea today about who does what, etc. than I did in January 2006.