I’m in Toronto for the annual Online News Association conference. I’m one of the early members of ONA but haven’t been at one of these gatherings in some time. Lots of heavy hitters from online news organizations here.
In a little while I’ll be moderating a panel on community news with Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media, Jay Rosen of NYU and the PressThink blog, and Rob Curley, the multimedia guru of the Washingtonpost-Newsweek Interactive.
The future of news
Last night I went with Lisa Williams of Placeblogger.org to the CBC Broadcasting Centre downtown where Leonard Brody, co-founder of NowPublic.com;
Rahaf Harfoursh, Research Coordinator, "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything"; and Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur held forth on the future of news. The discussion was surprisingly lively and engaging. It was carried live on CBC, with a continuing discussion on the CBC website.
Some nuggets from the conversation:
Brody took exception to Keen’s thesis that we’re becoming less informed as a society. News consumption is actually on the rise, studies show. People zero in on the issues that are important to them. The personal news stream on Facebook.com is incredibly popular. Brody calls it "the triangulation of news" — people pulling news relevant to them from various sources.
More Brody: "Hyperlocality has given way to hyperpersonality."
Keen: "Craig Newmark has singlehandedly destroyed that [newspapers’ business models] by giving away local ads for free."
Keen: "The challenge for you is to figure out what local news will mean in 25 years and then make money at it."
Brody: If you want to see the future of news, look at what’s happening in South Korea today, where people are using GPS-enabled cell phones to stream news coverage from the scene of a breaking news event within a matter of moments.
Harfoursh pointed to the Toronto Transit blog as an example of a hyperlocal site that’s run by the community. She took exception to Keen’s comments about young people being uninformed about important events and said young people are latching onto a new kind of news. "You want your news to come with you and be relevant to you."
Brody mentioned a study that came out a week ago showing that 98% of errors in U.S. newspapers go uncorrected.
Keen surprised some by saying that it may not be a tragedy if print newspapers or magazines eventually go the way of the horse and buggy. "I don’t see why young people need to read print. The future is clearly digital. … The biggest challenge today is media literacy." He’s concerned that people aren’t able to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of news.
Brody agreed, and so do I.
Keen again surprised some by not agreeing with a audience member’s suggestion that newspapers ought to return to just reporting the news with an emphasis on accuracy and breaking news coverage. "Spirit and voice are what’s missing from American journalism," he said. (I agree.)
Keen took his usual cheap shots at bloggers, Wikipedia and Web 2.0, but added, "The tools of Web 2.0 are actually quite good in the right hands. … I believe in the digital revolution, but right now it’s largely a digital muddle."
Yahoo presentation
Hilary Schneider, executive VP, Global Partner Solutions Division at Yahoo!, gave the Thursday morning kickoff keynote.
A few bullet points:
• Local search online increased by 28% during 2006.
• The local ad market will grow to $12 billion a year by 2010 in local ad spending.
• In the past year, 115.6 million unique users came to Yahoo! with local intent: web search local query, maps, local news and info, social media, classified verticals, directory, entertainment and other.
• She called local advertising a huge market opportunity for publishers. Today consumers buy $120 billion worth of goods online and spend $1.3 trillion in research online, buy offline (ROBO).
She called on publishers to "give voice to your users" with publishing tools that let them elevate the news and content they find most compelling.
Schneider pointed to Mitt Romney’s campaign asking users to submit videos and photos to the campaign website. Some 5,000 supporters submitted videos, and the winning video short was "a user generated ad that is testing as good or better than an official campaign commercial."
Digital tools
I love practical tips for multimedia journalists and other media makers. At the session "Running a Digi-Newsroom on the Cheap," Dale Steinke of KING TV has a bunch of practical tips and resources.
Trumba.com is a powerful public events calendar. Put 5 lines of codes on your site and you’ve got a community calendar.
He pointed to Videozilla, which, at $30, is an inexpensive alternative to Flash ($700) for video conversion.
Want to put supertitles scrolling across the bottom of your videos? "Our IT dept said it would cost $12,000 to support supers." Steinke found an alternative, Harris Inscriber, based in Canada, that costs $50. "Type in your text and you’re good to go." Wow!
For photo editing, he said he prefers Paint Shop Pro ($70) to Photoshop ($630) or Photoshop Elements ($80-$90).
Lots of free great applications and plug-ins are available at download.com, pcmag, tucows and
pc world.
Instead of manging your project with Microsoft Project ($400), an inexpensive alternative is Basecamp, free for one project.
John Havens of BlogTalkRadio held up his way-cool iFlip. It costs $110 and records 30 minutes of digital video. Just record some video, use the USB port to connect to your Mac or PC, and upload to your favorite website.
I’ll be on John’s show on BlogTalkRadio from here Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
J.D., I thought I would mention that I live-blogged the panel here
I’m surprised Andrew said:
Keen: “Craig Newmark has singlehandedly destroyed that [newspapers’ business models] by giving away local ads for free.”
since I informed him that’s a major exaggeration, and he agreed with that on a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC in May of this year.
I also pointed out what appeared to be problems with fact-checking, which he conceded.
Ironic, ain’t it?
Craig
Yes, ironic indeed. It was a throwaway line by Keen but an unwarranted one.
Yes, ironic indeed. It was a throwaway line by Keen but an unwarranted one.
I’m on a one-person campaign to preach the evils of the iFlip camera. The video quality is borderline acceptable, but the audio is complete garbage.
You probably already have a nice tiny point-and-shoot camera that you carry everywhere. Depending on the model, it will shoot as-good-as or better-than video than the iFlip — and recent models from Canon will give you superior audio!
Here’s an example:
http://www.macloo.com/video/medieval_movie/
See also:
http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/2007/buying-a-point-and-shoot-for-video/
Unlike the iFlip, you can also shoot a Page One-quality still photo with your point-and-shoot.
Gotta agree with Mindy — the iFlip is poor. Weak video, no mic or line in for improving the horrid audio quality. It’s at best an emergency camera. Better tools will come eventually in the shape and size of the iFlip.
Trumba looks awfully expensive for little guys like me. A minimum of $99 a month? That’s a lot to try to get back in small towns like mine. We’re on WordPress and are eagerly awaiting the revision of a calendar of events plugin that will allow community submission. Due any day now.
Paint Shop Pro is more than good enough for web graphics. I like the idea of Videozilla — the price is right.
Question: You mention the Harris Inscriber. A visit to the page linked shows a raft of Inscriber products, none of which seems to me to be obviously the product mentioned in the session. Do you have any further information on which flavor of Harris Inscriber this is?