thoughtsignals

Jeff Jarvis has a great post on credibility, integrity and blogging:

It is fine for a blogger or newspaper or vlogger or TV show to take advertising, clearly labeled. It is wonderful for a blogger to get paid to write, editorially. But when you write what a commercial interest tells you and pays you to write, then you are no longer speaking as yourself but in the service of that marketer. That’s fine, too, but it isn’t content. It is advertising (or advertorial, same difference). See Rules 2 and 3.

This all seems simple and obvious to me. But it’s not obvious to others, who think they can buy bloggers’ opinions and with it that buzz. They don’t understand that buzz, too, is earned. And they don’t understand that once a blogger — or journalist or publication or friend, for that matter — is bought and paid for, the credibility and value of their voice is reduced or ruined.

Credibility is the cake you can’t have and eat, too.

Jarvis’ post includes his four-point pledge of credibility and transparency, which any blogger could adopt as a kind of “blogger code of ethics.” It’s important to remember that this is not simply about doing the right thing or behaving ethically, this is about retaining your audience. If people are confused about what’s paid for on your blog and what represents your true opinions, they get less value from your blog. Less value means less reason to read, less reason to subscribe. That means lower traffic. And if you’re trying to earn money from advertising, that means less revenue.

Link.

Online Journalism Review has a great Q&A with John Battelle (the guy behind Federated Media and Searchblog) about online journalism, blogging, and (most interesting to me) the business model for online journalism.

There’s no doubt that traditional media can and will continue, but it has a hard hump to get over. Traditional media is in the business of sort of corralling talent. [As a newspaper reporter], you don’t talk to readers. Your job is to talk to your sources. Institutionally, these organizations have grown up managing reporters, not talent. When I was editing at Wired, my job was to produce writers and manage 50-150 talented, half-crazy freelance writers, and I think it really got me ready to do what I’m doing now. People with influential blogs are talent and they don’t want to be told what to write about.

There’s an interesting dynamic going on in new media right now.

The big old media companies (newspapers, TV stations, etc.) are losing their audiences and their share of advertising money; they’re trying to figure out how to integrate new media (Internet, mobile, etc.) into a new business model to make up for the business they’re losing. If they’re not successful at this, then we’ll have a lot of big companies that will eventually go out of business — with all the attendent economic and social chaos that causes.

At the same time, we have scads of small new online media companies, like Federated Media and Gawker Media, trying to figure out an online-only (or online-mostly) business model. (For example, consider the issues PodTech is facing trying to balance production and bandwidth costs with advertising revenue.) The small new media companies don’t have much to lose, in a way — it’s not an industry with hundreds of thousands, or millions, of employees, investors counting on their success for their retirement investment, etc. But they have a lot to gain, obviously. (The individuals working in those small media companies are risking a lot, but it’s mostly their individual risk.)

Will the big media and little media meet in the middle? Maybe.

Will all the little new media startups get bought out by Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. and essentially become small pieces of giant media/tech companies? Maybe. (And if that happens, do we risk losing the valuable diversity that lots of small companies bring to the ‘Net?)

Will the big media companies eventually wake up and figure it out and win the battle for the fast-growing online advertising pie? Maybe.

Will the little companies outmaneuver the big companies and make lots of individual bloggers and techies, if not rich, at least as well off as they would have been if they’d worked for a big traditional company? Maybe.

Will several of the above choices happen simultaneously? Are there other possibilities?

I don’t know the answer, but I think that making a living in the media right now is, existentially speaking, both scary and exciting because of the transition we’re seeing. And I think John Battelle and Robert Scoble, among others, are both likely to be among the first people to figure all this stuff out.

Business Leader magazine, based in Raleigh, plans to go national. I used to freelance for that magazine from time to time.

Link.

I’ll be at ConvergeSouth today. I wasn’t at the famous Dave Hoggard barbecue last night, but there’s a set of photos up on Flickr.

Geneva Overholser says it’s time for people to stop fretting about the future of journalism and start doing something about it.

What could be worse than having journalism on iPods?  How about NOT having it there? Take a cruise through some of the Web sites that, say, give ethnic news a well-deserved wider hearing. Or that enable people to search crime news by type, time and location. Or that pay the sort of loving attention to what’s going on in a particular neighborhood that only an old-fashioned weekly once knew how to do. How wondrously they put us to shame, all of us with our endless reasons why we can’t possibly fit something in our newspaper or newscast.

There is a great deal of fretting these days in newsrooms about the future of journalism. Overholser is right, of course, that we need to do better. But I think her call for action on the part of other stakeholders — corporate shareholders, for example — is a little naive.

One of the new things that we need to invent for journalism is a new business model. Some day online advertising may provide enough revenues to support robust investigative journalism (or, maybe not, for reasons I won’t go into here). But in any case, the money’s not there yet. And that’s got to be a part of this new future — not just more and better journalism, but a business model that doesn’t rely on the near monopoly power that sustained so many news organizations for so many decades.

Link.

Web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen has some thoughts about how to increase the number of people participating online in forums ranging from blog comments to Amazon book reviews.

• Make it easier to contribute.
• Make participation a side effect.
• Edit, don’t create.
• Reward — but don’t overreward — participants.
• Promote quality contributors.

He’s got some interesting stats and more details about how to carry out those suggestions. Give it a read. Link.

YouTube’s managers are walking a fine line when they flag videos like the one conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has complained about being removed from the site, NYTer Tom Zeller Jr. says.

This is not to suggest that Ms. Malkin’s video would not be
particularly offensive to some people. There is little that Ms. Malkin
says or does that is not. But it is hard to imagine what YouTube hopes
to gain by punting such content, or what sort of uphill rhetorical
battle it is setting itself up for when it does so.

Link.

Google’s convtroversial Book Search is helping publishers sell more books, according to Reuters.

“Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers,” said Colleen Scollans, the director of online sales for Oxford University Press.

She declined to provide specific figures, but said that sales growth has been “significant”. Scollans estimated that 1 million customers have viewed 12,000 Oxford titles using the Google program.

This is unsurprising. There are lots and lots of books out there, most of which sell only small numbers of copies. For publishers and authors the biggest problem is simply connecting with people who are potentially interested in their books. Google, Amazon and similar services help do that. Writer and blogger Cory Doctorow has a longer, more eloquent explanation of this here.
Link to Reuters story.

Michelle Malkin says YouTube is censoring her videos: Link.

As a quick followup to my aside (scroll down to the bottom of the post) on Greensboro’s blogging/online biz startup community, a few folks have said they/we are working on it, over at Greensboroing and Billy in comments. Glad to hear it. I can’t wait to see (and maybe report on) some news out of this.

(And Beth, I’ve never said Greensboro is not a serious blogging community.)
FWIW, the folks at The Deal have a few insights from venture capitalist James Slavet on what he looks for in social networking startups.

He said he looks for an authentic vision from the founder. He also takes into account the early growth rate. And he isn’t deterred from investing in a company that is only popular with the early-adopter crowd. This was the case when Greylock originally invested in Digg and LinkedIn.

Link.

It’s probably good to note here, too, that despite all the media attention venture capital gets, that’s not the only way to start and grow a significant business.