Results tagged “journalism” from Chad

I'm less than 24 hours away from joining 14 other fellows for the Knight Digital Media Center's inaugural News Entrepreneur Boot Camp May 16-21 at the University of Southern California.

All of the semi-finalists were asked to profile a news entrepreneur as part of a "homework" assignment. This is my profile of Shoba Purushothaman, co-founder of The News Market. I submitted the following profile on March 31 after meeting with her a few weeks earlier, on the day she made the transition from CEO to Chairman. Purushothaman will be speaking during the seminar.

I would like to extend a HUGE thank you to Silvio Carrillo, Erin Sullivan Capellman, Mark Micheli, Tom Oates and Pat Washburn for their help and feedback. Some of these folks are looking for new opportunities. All are worth checking out, as they rock in their respective fields.

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Building a Business by Bridging Divides

By CHAD CAPELLMAN

Once, Madison Avenue was where the rules of marketing and public relations were made, broken and remade. Today, just a few feet away, there's Shoba Purushothaman - an entrepreneur whose company, The NewsMarket, is helping change the rules in radical new ways.

Purushothaman hadn't thought about the irony of being near Mad Ave. She's too busy with The NewsMarket, providing an online distribution channel for broadcast-quality video of newsmakers from paying clients to more than 25,000 media outlets in 190 countries.

The day we met, the company had just announced that she would be leaving her post as CEO to focus on more strategic initiatives in her new role as chairman, and she had been tied up in numerous conversations and interviews about the change.

Despite the frenzy, she was engaged and thoughtful during an hour-long conversation that covered how she had arrived at this point, what sets The NewsMarket apart, and what challenges and opportunities the company experienced and faces in the future.

No one has ever asked me to be a professor of whatever they call "journalism" online. But plenty of people have been asking me questions about various trends and technologies, and some of them are also teaching. I also had the great pleasure to work with some outstanding interns from Northeastern University over the past couple of years.

And of course, I've spent many years in and around journalism and think tanks and training institutes and non-profits that are attempting to educate.

So I got to thinking. If I were to teach a course on something resembling "online journalism" what would it look like? What would it cover? What are the essentials that people should enter the world with an understanding of so that great journalism can be done with the wonderful tools that I am fortunate enough to play with nearly every day?

This isn't everything I'd want to include, but they are some things I think are important. I encourage you to add yours as well.

And who knows? Maybe someone will read them, and think about them, and start teaching them. Dare to dream...

Wrangling RSS - Using Yahoo! Pipes to divine meaning from feeds

Geo Metro - Understanding how longitude, latitude and mapping technology can have an impact on readers

Twend reporting - Using tools like search.twitter.com to glean insight into the minds of the audience

Crowdsourcing investigations - Use the leverage of the audience to demand, and vet, answers

XBRL - Where online journalism means business

Flash - No. Not unless you REALLY need to. (One day session)

A Web of Ties - It's not just about your content on your web site, but about extending it online

Online video - Dos, don'ts and how and where to publish to have the biggest impact

I did something I had been meaning to do for a couple years. I finally watched Good Night and Good Luck, about the great Edward R. Murrow and his victory over Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the court of public opinion. The story is bookended with an appearance Murrow made during a tribute in his honor before the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

In it, Murrow was talks about the power, the responsibility and the future of television.

... Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. Good night, and good luck. 

It's pretty clear that Murrow was dead on about what television became. And this, had I thought about it 10 years ago, would have made me sad.

But fortunately I'm much more focused on the instrument of now and the future (the Internet) than of the instruments (radio and television) in which Murrow did his work.

I haven't heard a better analysis of the true power of this instrument we call the Internet than  the "cognitive surplus" talk given by Clay Shirky. I was fortunate enough to hear this in person last spring and recently watched it again in its entirety. I'm having a few people over on Saturday for what we're calling a Web 2.0S**t! party. I plan to play it for the fine folks who attend.



Had Murrow had a chance to work his craft with this instrument of the Internet, I can only imagine what he would have done and how many others he would have influenced.

I recently had an email exchange with a conservative friend of mine who works for a national media outlet. I really feel like this is something that should be read by many others because I really feel like perspective is lacking. I have had many debates on a range of issues and one of my wishes for this country is that we could all have debates that maintained the level of respect for each other as the ones I have with my friend. Anyway, here's the exchange:

As a journalist, does the "silent treatment" and the running vs. the media approach the GOP seems to be taking bother you?

It bothers me as a working journalist because if they won't talk to us, the last thing anyone needs is more journalists just talking to each other.

Also, it's a cheap applause line, and it demeans the politician who uses it. Not because we're so important and how dare they, but because it's the wrong solution to the wrong problem. By and large, the media isn't pushing an agenda -- I've never edited a reporter who did. But it's absolutely true in my experience that many journalists can't relate to conservatives, and it doesn't take much for their assumptions to flower into full-blown narratives.

The real problem is that the press doesn't understand "the other side" as well as it should, and as we discussed briefly last week, I believe this ties *directly* to the problems Palin has had since being nominated. I still believe she got a raw deal on her introduction, and the press shouldn't assume no-harm-no-foul on that just because she killed in her convention speech. I still have the McCain camp's press release announcing Bristol's pregnancy -- it was issued in direct response to a Reuters story spreading the rumor about Sarah passing off Bristol's baby as her own. That rumor has since been proven not only false but comically so, and yet I can tell you nobody is saying, "crap, you know, we only know about this kid because we dignified that rumor about the baby being Bristol's." There is plenty to challenge Palin on, quite fairly, and the media is belatedly doing so, but the Palin they introduced to America was a pure tabloid caricature, and making nice is absolutely not Palin's problem.

So, to summarize: Palin should be the bigger person, and conservative whining absolutely needs to stop, but I'm not going to say they don't have a point.

I know you'd like them to win, but does how they do it matter to you?

The campaigns are only really concerned with getting elected. Their needs and our needs don't coincide in this day and age. If we offer them no services, only liabilities, they're going to drop us like an embarrassing surrogate. It's no less true for Obama than it is for McCain

I know what services my employer provides the candidates; we know how easily a reputation can be ruined and we guard ours very closely. But what does MSNBC offer McCain? Viewers? He has those. A forum? He has it. Credibility? How could it possibly?

A dramatic foil? A-ha. Why did Obama appear with O'Reilly last week? Why did Hillary appear with O'Reilly this spring? Why was that news? This is a universal tactic. There's more for a Republican to boycott, and the larger scale means a larger outcry, but it shouldn't follow that a Democrat's boycott of Fox is principled where a Republican's boycott of everyone else is crass. It does follow for some people.

There's more primary-source material available to voters now than ever before, and in-depth analyses of the campaigns can be done without the campaigns' consent. What we're missing is a little bit of the day-to-day on the trail, but again -- we're getting that from our reporters. Blackout is an overstatement.

This feels like a dangerous precedent to me.

Eh. ;)