Saturday, April 24, 2004
Loving Netflix Too Much
I'm among the legions who have learned that adding movies to one's Netflix queue is more addictive than adding items to an Amazon wish list. The New York Observer story "The Netflix Neurosis" explains how New Yorkers have become competitive even over having the right movies in their queues. Here's one of the more disturbing descriptions:
The problem is especially acute with people who feel the need to make the best decision all the time -- the people Mr. Schwartz has dubbed "Maximizers." Extreme Maximizers are correlated with clinical depression, according to Mr.Schwartz. "Assume you're the kind of person that needs to get the best," he said. "So what does that mean? It means you have to examine all the possibilities, otherwise how do you know it was the best? The alternative is someone who is satisfied with 'just good enough.' You don't have to examine all the options; you only find the one that meets your standards and then you stop looking. But if you need to have the best, the search has to be exhaustive. But it can't be exhaustive in the world we live in. At some point, you stop and pull the trigger, and there's this doubt in your mind: 'If I'd looked a little longer or looked a little different, I'd have done better.'"For the record, I haven't had more than 130 movies in my queue at any one time. Yet.
Spam or No Spam
A little administrative thing here. My Yahoo mail account is sending way more legit mail into the spam file lately. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's getting hit by this. So if I ignored your e-mail in the past couple weeks, my apologies, there's a chance I didn't even see it.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Fixing the Express Lane
If you ask me, I think this looks like a scam: (The full story is in the NY Post, via Gotham Gazette.)
Rush-hour drivers heading into Manhattan could pay a premium toll for an express lane directly to the Lincoln Tunnel, according to a study launched yesterday by the Port Authority.There already is an express lane heading to the Lincoln Tunnel on the Jersey side. It's called EZPass. But the reason it's not express all the time is because the non-EZPass drivers get in the lane (even though it's marked with purple paint for about a quarter-mile) and zip up to the toll plaza and then slam on their brakes until a driver in the non-EZPass lane will let them in. When they stop, everyone all the way up the ramp stops as well and goodbye express lane.
If the Port Authority really wanted to speed up traffic, they'd just need to add little concrete barriers only a few inches tall to prevent people getting in and out of the EZPass lane once they've entered at the top of the ramp.
No Tears for USA Today
I haven't been following this USA Today dustup very closely, but I can tell you I'm not inclined to feel sorry for all the editors who are having to resign over the fraudulent Jack Kelley stories.
I can tell you that in every newsroom I've worked in - sometimes as soon as the first day -- you start to figure out which reporters and editors play loose with the facts. And it tends to be common knowledge among the reporters, desk editors, copy editors and even the photographers. Depending on how hands-on the managing editor and executive editors are -- and that's a decision they make for themselves -- they also will know which reporters to watch. Seldom is it a secret. You find out in a lot of ways. Sometimes there is another reporter or photographer at the same event, an editor finds a reporter who repeatedly can't back up his sweeping lead and has lots of holes in the stories, a copy editor calls a reporter to clarify a quote and it turns out that quote isn't quite in the reporter's notes. Sometimes a reporter's work is frequently contradicted by every other media outlet covering the story. More than once I've seen an editor deem a star reporter's work untouchable, and in one case that reporter was later caught and fired for making up quotes.
As for USA Today, if it's like most other newsrooms, (and like Jayson Blair and the New York Times) the top brass probably knew Kelley's work needed extra scrutiny. And if they didn't know, it was their own fault for distancing themselves from the grunts schlepping over his copy every day.
On a related note, Jeff Jarvis was in Washington D.C. yesterday and attended the ethics session at the meeting of the Association Society of Newspaper Editors. The session ended with a comment from Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the New York Times: "The scariest thing of all of last year for me... wasn't Jayson Blair.... The scariest part was that the people we lied about didn't bother to call because they just assumed that's the way newspapers worked. That's scary."
AmyLangfield.com: No Longer Irrelevant
In January, I tried to place Google text advertisements on this site, but was rejected from their AdSense program with this explanation:
Personal or chat site: We don't currently accept personal or chat websites into the AdSense program. We've found that we're unable to deliver relevant ads to such pages, resulting in less return for our advertisers.Matt Welch noted that most of his favorite sites were probably "too personal and irrelevant" for GoogleAds."
Lately I've noticed a lot of Google ads showing up on blogs that are far more "personal" than mine, so i submitted my site again, but this time via my new Google Gmail account. Now, I'm in.
We received your new application and while reviewing it, we found your previous application you submitted in January. At that time we were unable to accept personal sites. As we grow, we are able to include a wider range of publishers and content. We're happy to inform you that your site, www.amylangfield.com, has been approved to run in our AdSense program.
Sept. 11 Art Talk
On Wednesday night I went to the New-York Historical Society to catch a presentation by Christopher Evans, the artist who created "In the Light of Memory." I first saw the painting (and blogged about it) about a year after Sept. 11 and was impressed with it then. On a giant Plexiglas sphere, he painted the 360-degree view from the top of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. The precision of the rendering is incredible. "I did try to be accurate. There's very little artistic license," he said Wednesday.
Evans said he worked for six months on the project. "It was 9 to 6, punching in, everyday." He said he started in the morning and would leave the radio on all day, starting with the Brian Lehrer show in WNYC. (Lehrer just started a blog.) He talked about the difficulty of representing "New York's recta-linear design onto a sphere" and described how he had to create new artist tools from foamrubber to adapt to the spherical canvas.
Evans referred to David Hockney's "Pearblossom Highway," Picasso's cubist rendering of his home town Horto de Ebro in 1909 and the techniques of the Impressionists as influences for this work.
"I was also aware that it was going to stand as a historical document of how the city once looked," he said.
Evans said he hopes the sphere will eventually be moved to an interim or permanent museum at Ground Zero.
You really do get an eerie feeling when you see it. In part, it's odd because you are getting the 360-degree view by looking in yet it's the view you would have seen while looking out. And of course, it revives all the emotions of loss. Evans read a letter he received from a woman after she and her husband viewed the work. The letter said the husband worked on the 95th floor of the South Tower and had been late for work that day. She said 87 of his firm's 650 employees were killed Sept. 11. Evans' work was "so healing to both of us," the letter said.
Thursday, April 22, 2004
North Korea Blog
I've been working on a long, thoughtful post wrapping up some ideas from BloggerCon, but it has delayed me from flagging one of the most interesting things I saw while I was there. Rebecca MacKinnon, who recently left CNN after covering Asia for them for more than 10 years, is now studying at Harvard and has created a North Korea blog. It's called the North Korea Zone.
I thought I'd flag this for you now since the big N. Korea explosion looks to be leading the news.
I was lucky enough to get to chat with Rebecca many times during the weekend. (Here's a picture of us at dinner Friday night after I drove up with Paul Frankenstein and Rick Bruner.) Her blog is extremely interesting as a clearinghouse for any shred of information she can find coming out of this very secretive country. She visited the country five times as a reporter for CNN and she knows a lot about her subject. It's definitely worth your time to check this us and think about how her format could apply to other topics.
As an aside, there was an woman at BloggerCon who said she was trying to do something similar for Cuba, but I don't know her name or URL. Can any of my readers fill me in here?
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Weintraub on Blogs
Poynter's E-Media Tidbits carries from tips on blogging from Dan Weintraub, whose blog at the Sacramento Bee became required reading heading into the election that made Arnold the governor of California. His advice (as paraphrased by E-Media Tidbits):
Blogs work best when they address a narrow, specific beat.There's also a nice quote from him: "If journalism is the first draft of history," he said, "then the blog is the note pad that leads to it."
Successful bloggers post frequently -- usually daily.
Writers must remember that the readers of a blog represent a much different audience than those for a mainstream publication. It is appropriate to assume that they are a knowledgeable audience with a large amount of background, interest, and experience in the topic area.
His blog also carries a nice "why a blog" post explaining how his blog complements his regular political columns for the paper.
Newspapers, Blogs, Technology, Speed Bumps
Picking up on my post about the issues newspapers face in adopting blogs, Doug Arellanes has a great post on his own site explaining the technology hurdles are bigger than you might think.
And to toot my own horn here, Jay Rosen at NYU called that post of mine "outstanding analysis." Nice, huh?
Hey Mister, Buy Me Some Louis Vuitton?
My friend Jason Stone is blogging about his recent move to Paris from New York. You may want to check out his posts about the differences in technology between the cities (seems Paris is actually ahead of us in some categories!) or you may be more intrigued by the French equivalent of the "Hey Mister" game that I hear teen-ageers (not me, mom, never) play to get adults to buy them booze:
We were told that if we stood outside of Louis Vuitton on the Champs-Elysees we would probably be approached by some Japanese women who would ask us to buy them bags or purses in the LV store. They would then give us an amount over 100 Euros in excess of the actual price and we would then be told to keep the change. This sounded too good to be true.
I guess the background story is that the items that are sold at the LV store in Paris are about half the price of what they are in Japan. When the Japanese learned this, they would buy several bags and purses in Paris and bring them back to Japan where they could then turn an easy profit on them. Well, once the LV store determined that this was transpiring, they somehow began to limit the number of bags and purses the Japanese could purchase.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
T-Shirt Aid for Kerry
Mike Everett-Lane and Liz Maryland Hiraldo, two of the three people behind the NYC Blogger Map, have launched a new project. It's called Designs on the White House, a T-shirt design contest for the Kerry campaign. The site just launched yesterday but the contest doesn't officially begin until May 1.
Incidentally, Mike and Liz first met face-to-face when I interviewed them together in the East Village for a story I did for the New York Times on the launch of the blog map. The whole site was up and running -- conceived and coordinated entirely by e-mail, IM and finally phone -- before they ever shook hands.
The New York City blog map now has more than 3,400 bloggers registered.
Monday, April 19, 2004
Newspapers and Blogging, My Predictions
Taking everything I know from working at scrappy little newspapers and big media companies, covering the media and online news industry, reading SEC filings and news stories, taking part in many off-the-record talks over beers and combining that finally with some things I heard at BloggerCon over the past weekend, let me tell you where I stand on how and when newspapers (and other media companies) will embrace blogs.
Newspapers will add blogs to their Web sites first with their existing columnists, through frequent community op-ed writers the paper has come to trust and through occasional "event" blogs related to things such as an election or major natural disaster. The two things that must happen before newspapers move beyond those steps are that the legal liability must be made clear through litigation and the economy must improve enough for them to hire more people to implement the blogs.
That's the nut of my conclusion. If you want the long version, keep reading.
This morning I pretended I'm the executive editor of a newspaper. I pulled out a yellow pad and made a list of all the pros and cons I would consider when thinking about creating blogs for my staffers and/or community members. Here are my lists:
CONS
What is my legal liability? What will it cost be to defend a libel suit filed against a community blogger? Since I'm the deep pocket, I'll surely be named in a suit.
What technology will I need? Will it be expensive or difficult to integrate with our existing system?
Will the blogs compete with my existing stories?
Will I look stupid if the blogs scoop my own reporters?
Will I need to monitor the content?
How many people do I have to hire?
If I put my company's logo on these blogs, I want to ensure they have the same quality as the rest of my newspaper but I can't guarantee that if their blogs aren't edited. Do I have enough money to hire more copy editors to read the blogs? What happens when I get accused of censoring the bloggers content?
Does Tylenol make enough aspirin to take care of the headaches I'll have when my community bloggers start ridiculing my advertisers?
This will open the door to all sorts of conflicts of interests. I don't want the local PTA to find out that my star education reporter is a womanizing alcoholic and if I let him have a blog that may become apparent.
Will they create more trouble than they're worth?
Do I have anyone in my newsroom I already trust who can lead this effort from the news side and understand the technology?
Will this destroy my local monopoly?
PROS
Extra content for free!
When people call up to complain we didn't cover their ribbon-cutting ceremony or their kid's play, we can tell them to get a blog.
Our Web site will become the town square, encourage more dialogue on community issues.
We will ensure our position as the primary site on the web for news of our community
Customer loyalty will increase.
We might be able to sell ads on community blogs.
Community bloggers can generate story ideas for my reporters and sometimes do the legwork by sitting through long meetings or reading long documents we don't have the resources to do ourselves.
This could be a farm system for finding new reporters or columnists for my print edition.
I could have a news assistant create a "best of our blogs" file and use it to plug news holes in the print edition.
Might my reporters actually work harder if they are afraid of getting scooped, or justifiably ridiculed by a local blogger?
Blogs could be a place for us to put information we don't have space for in print or even a logical place in our online edition.
Enough of that exercise. Let me add two comments from BloggerCon that also scratch the surface in explaining why the transition will be awkward for some of the writers. The comments are both from journalists who attended Jay Rosen's session on journalism at BloggerCon on Saturday. Dan Gillmor, a technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News who also writes a blog for the paper, said this: "Columnists going to blogs is almost seamless." Rebecca MacKinnon, who covered Asia for CNN for more than 10 years and is now studying at Harvard and running a remarkable blog on North Korea, said it took her a long time to let her personality come through on her blog. She also had a hard time learning to show "the process" -- meaning the failures to access information and not just the successful results.
And finally, here is some added detail to my nut graf up at the top: Newspapers will start embracing blogs through their columnists, op/ed writers and "event" blogs, I should make clear that these will all be edited by that section's regular editor plus a copy editor. Some newspapers are already doing these things. I predict more papers will do this and more often. And there are very few barriers to these blogs starting.
However, the legal uncertainty and economic outlook will keep most newspapers at least two years away from pursuing blogs in any serious way. The legal liability must be made clear. This will happen only after a few significant court cases make corporate media attorneys so comfortable that they can green light the project for a newspaper. And just as important, the economy has to improve in such a way that newspapers can a) put their staffs back at a pre-recession level, b) invest in the technology they think they need to support blogs in-house and c) have money to hire an extra editor and or tech support staff to handle the new work. Everyone in a newsroom is traditionally overworked and underpaid, even when the economy is good, and 98 percent of them will be loathe to take on even more work. Most are sitting on at least one empty reporting position they haven't been able to fill for a year or two (on beats such as courts, schools, city hall, cops, etc) that other reporters are picking up in addition to their own beats. When the economy really improves, newspapers are traditionally among the last to feel the recovery, so any shift here will not come before 2005.
Hamill and Hutchins on Trust and the Free Press
I wanted to throw out two quotations that were running through my mind while listening to the discussions at Bloggercon this weekend. Use them at your leisure.
"The free press is the nexus of a democracy" -- Robert Maynard Hutchins
"Trust is the heart of the matter. Publishers must trust their editors. Editors must trust their reporters. All must trust the intelligence and good sense of their readers. When such overlapping acts of trust and faith are absent or shrugged off, the newspaper usually goes downscale and keeps going all the way to the bottom of the grave. " -- Pete Hamill, in "News is a Verb"
Business Blogging Models
The New York Times has a story this morning about the Bloggercon session on blogging as a business.
It makes mention of MayItPleasetheCourt.net, a blog run by J. Craig Williams, a lawyer in Newport Beach, Calif., who writes about court cases in the news that touch on his specialty. He said the blog has been successful in luring clients to his business. Cases that range from $10,00 to $100,000 I think he said. This, I think, is a case where businesses who know nothing about blogs should pay attention. What his law blog is doing - I suspect - is showing a potential client exactly where he is coming from. You get a mix of his personality and his expertise before you even pick up the phone to talk to him. Possibly most importantly, he starts to develop trust. Brilliant.
Another case that comes to mind -- though not mentioned in the NYT story -- is the new Microsoft blog, Channel 9. On Saturday night a bunch of us were standing in a bar waiting for our tables at an Indian restaurant and I got to ask Jeff Sandquist about the new Microsoft blog. Microsoft employees get to write what they like about what's going on in the company, and anyone in the world can read it. Sandquist told a great story about why it's called Channel 9. He said that after a particularly harrowing airline landing in Texas, a friend told him the secret to feeling more relaxed on airplanes: Channel 9. That's the channel (on at least one airline, obviously) where you can plug in your headsets and hear all the chatter in the cockpit. So while the passengers might think the plane is about to crash, the pilots are calmly telling the control tower, "Yea, we've just got a little turbulence here." So the idea with Channel 9 is that the blog pulls back the curtain for the customers, giving them more information and making them feel more comfortable with the whole experience.
I think Channel 9 and May it Please the Court are two strong examples of how businesses will start using blogging successfully. And if you think about how much distrust is still in the air from the stench of Enron, Worldcom, Shell, the mutual fund industry scandal, the accounting industry scandals, etc. and so on, you figure people are hungry to find someone they can trust and blogs could go a long way to providing more transparency for honest businesses.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Notes on Blogging for Dollars
One of the sessions I attended at Bloggercon on Saturday was a very packed meeting on ways to make money with your blog. Jeff Jarvis led the group, running through a very long list of things that have been tried and a brainstorm list of things that might me. Here are a few snippets from my notebook.
By a show of hands, Cafe Press and the Amazon Associates program seem to be losers for bloggers. I think only one guy said he was making even $100 a month through Amazon -- compared with some bloggers who are already making more than $1,000 a month with other advertising. I was really surprised to hear people were making so little through Amazon considering their associate logos are on so many blogs. Must be a bevy of basically free advertising for them.
Someone mentioned that Netflix has an associate program as well -- but I was too late to get my hand up and point out that Netflix has a terrible non-disparagement clause in their contract that I think bloggers should band against and boycott.
During the session, Rick Bruner mentioned Iron Blogger, the tequila-fueled idea several of us launched at Megan McArdle's apartment more than a year ago. It may be an idea abandoned too soon. The idea was to pick a topic a week and let two bloggers face off with updates through the week. I think each side was going to have a tip jar and whomever had the most contributions at the end of the week was considered the winner. Somewhere around here I have pages of notes I scribbled down through a very bad hangover. If I can find them, I'll post the coherent bits.
You Really Like Me
Jeff Jarvis calls me "the New Yorker everybody likes." I suspect that might get me beat up in some neighborhoods.
Back from BloggerCon
Had a surprisingly good time at BloggerCon in Boston this weekend. Met a lot of genuinely nice and smart people and learned a whole lot of things. Since my 15 seconds of fame came at the end of the final session when I showed off my fancy Treo 600 and moblogged from the conference, I thought I'd post a couple links to my old posts about the Treo and moblogging. Since I'm getting some new readers this weekend, I should once again point out that Buzznet, the company I use to feed my images onto the top of my blog, is run by my friend Marc Brown.
Treo 600 at the Five-Month Mark
More Treo Possibilities
Producers Sidebar: It's a Small Blogging World
Use Buzznet
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