Twitter is where it’s at.
And if you don’t believe me, check this out: White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton started tweeting 28 hours ago and already has 1,400 followers. People are HUNGRY for this stuff.
Obama (et. al) vs. the media
Romenesko ran a New Yorker press release this morning outlining a Ken Auletta story about the relationship between the Obama administration and the media — as expected, the White House isn’t living up to its promises of transparency, even if they’re insisting they are. From former WH Communications Director Anita Dunn:
“For us, transparency has never meant that we put our internal decision-making on display. We didn’t during the campaign. We try not to here. Transparency is what the decision is, and why it was made. The process by which it was arrived at is not central.”
(Side note: Tommy Christopher had a column over at Mediaite that makes an attempt at defending the moves that the administration has made regarding the Recovery Act, but watching Robert Gibbs dance around technicalities always makes my stomach hurt.)
Other interesting tidbits:
NBC’s chief White House correspondent, Chuck Todd, in a typical day does eight to sixteen standup interviews for NBC or MSNBC; hosts his new show, “The Daily Rundown”; appears regularly on “Today” and “Morning Joe”; tweets or posts on his Facebook page eight to ten times; and composes three to five blog posts. “We’re all wire-service reporters now,” he says.
Suddenly that 10-clips-in-a-semester requirement in reporting class doesn’t seem that demanding, does it?
From @AaronKraut, via Twitter: “Most people aren’t Chuck Todd.”
Rahm Emanuel, the White House’s chief of staff, sees press coverage as “a political strategy,” Baker says. “He’s as relentless in working reporters as he is in working congressmen. He cajoles, lobbies, berates, and trades information because he understands it’s better to work with the media than to shut us out.”
Not in the least bit surprising, but as an unabashed greenhorn I’m very curious how this goes down.
The intent of excluding the network from a tour of five back-to-back morning shows in September, 2009, “was to send a message to the rest of the press corps,” Dunn says. This message, a correspondent at another network concedes, “has had some effect.”
Major Garrett, Fox’s chief White House correspondent, insists that he and Fox are not being punished by the Administration, but adds, “The door is not shut for me. It’s just not opened first for me.” When Auletta asks Garrett whether he felt torn between his journalism and his network, he does not answer for a full twenty-seven seconds. “The human answer,” he finally says, “is that I do the best I can.”
This isn’t the first time Garrett’s hinted at maybe not being a terrible person: Bill O’Reilly brought him on during the “Barack hates FOX” scuffle, but Garrett didn’t take the bait — maybe he just didn’t want to dig himself a hole with WH staffers, but he still acted like an honest human, which is more credit than most people give him. I’m honestly not particularly familiar with his larger body of work — how does his reporting compare to that of correspondents’ from less-maligned networks?
In some cases, the Administration has been able to circumvent the mainstream media. Beginning in the campaign, Obama’s team has had a “superior grasp of new media,” Auletta writes, and has used it to connect directly with citizens. Pfeiffer says that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube allowed the campaign to “go around the filter” of the press. But Auletta reports that, in an age of instant news, both the White House and the media have lost control.
Honestly, I don’t know how comfortable I would be getting messages that have “gone around the filter” — the only time I was looking forward (irrationally) to getting something straight from Obama was his choice for VP, which he said he would text to me first and then totally didn’t. For everything else, I’d much rather have somebody checking the facts before I swallow it whole straight from the Oval Office.
Bad Omens in the Heart of Tobacco Country
So The Diamondback let me cover the men’s soccer game against Duke on Friday. I promise I’m writing a straight-news story for the paper, but I took advantage of my fresh new password on the sports blog to publish this post before I get fired. I am so proud.
David Carr is cool.
I forgot how much I liked New York Times media and culture columnist David Carr. His column last Sunday reminded me.
Okay, so the actual column isn’t that thrilling. But I, like every other journalist I’ve ever met, really enjoy quotes that romanticize my dying profession. Near the end [emphasis mine]:
Journalists, for all their self-importance, are often a little naïve about the way the real world works. Sure, being a newsie is a grind, the hours are not great and the public holds us in lower esteem than the women who work the poles at Satin Dolls down the road from the Tick Tock in Lodi, but it beats working by a mile. Every day is a caper, and most reporters are attention-deprived adrenaline junkies who care only for the next story. Journalists are like cops, hugging the job close and savoring the rest of their life as they can.
That’s cool.
But even cooler, and the reason I originally found ol’ Mr. Carr, was the excerpt in the New York Times Magazine from his memoir, The Night of the Gun. The story (crackhead-turned-awesome-journalist) is amazing, but the way he researched the book — going back and re-reporting the events like they happened to someone else — is the coolest idea I’ve heard in a long time, and it served him well, because it turned out he didn’t remember things all that clearly.
What I’m leading up to is the book’s website. It’s thorough, interactive and deserves more than a glance — Carr videotaped a lot of his interviews and a bunch are posted with explanations, and scrolling through them is a j-nerd’s dream. And keep your eye out for Tom Arnold — true to form, he makes a random cameo about halfway through.
Your friendly neighborhood crazy person, with an as-yet unidentified killing machine
Facebook will never be Twitter — and that’s okay
They’ve got that new(ish) newsfeed that looks a lot like the Twitter homepage. They’ve got that universal search feature. They’ve got a way for people managing Facebook Pages to publish to a Twitter feed.
Now, Facebook gave users the ability to tag people in status updates using — big surprise — the ‘@’ symbol.
What does this mean? I don’t have any idea. But Facebook’s rate of evolution certainly compares starkly to Twitter’s — yes, Facebook is way more complicated than Twitter, so there are more things to tweak, but most of Facebook’s updates this year have dragged it closer and closer to the Twitter interface.
If this makes anything clear, it’s that Twitter got it right, for the very specific task that they do. They’re not stealing anything from Facebook; they’re just chillin’ out, being good at what they do.
Telegraph social media blogger Basheera Khan says Facebook should just pay the “bajillions” it would cost to buy Twitter (Robert Scoble puts it between $5 billion and $10 billion), but she’s wrong, for several reasons. The biggest issue is that the users of one don’t really understand the users of the other, and they’re okay with that. Twitter is the grown-up Facebook like Facebook is the grown-up version of MySpace — and Google Trends doesn’t mind telling us how that relationship is going. I’m pretty sure the only people left on MySpace are 13-year-olds and underground musicians. To be fair, though, Facebook is still whomping Twitter, at least in Google searches. Also, Facebook said in July that it had 250 million users; eMarketer.com predicted today that 18 million would be on Twitter this year.
But that’s not the point. Facebook just owning both sites won’t help either one, and integrating the two sites into one unwieldy social mammoth would ruin both. Just look at Facebook Lite. It’s basically just Facebook for people that get distracted by links and pictures. It’s stupid.
Yes, the Twitter-leaning revisions to Facebook make it a more effective site. But, big picture, people use Facebook for it’s profile feature, like they always did. People use Twitter for aggregating information and putting their own tidbits into the (semi-)public sphere. At some point (at this rate, probably not too far into the future), Facebook will have a LOT of Twitter-esque features. That’s okay. Tweeters don’t need the other things.
The funniest site I have ever seen.
Yes, I know I haven’t posted in a long time. Yes, I know I’m only talking to myself
But if you’re out there, clinging to this miserable blog like Kate Winslet to that floating door or whatever in Titanic, please. Check out the 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army. If I improve one life with this post… I don’t know. Maybe it won’t take me three years to make the next one.
TNTJ — Blogging and why I’m a bad boyfriend
I just joined Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists, a blogring at journalism.co.uk that has monthly discussion topics — this month’s is “Have you fallen out of love with blogging?” Here’s my answer. I’m too new to be allowed to post on their site quite yet, but hopefully that will change soon.
I’m still in love with Blogging, but I’m a very needy boyfriend.
I don’t mind taking her out, paying attention to her and giving her regular updates, but I need validation of my affections — this isn’t the first time we’ve been together, you see, and every other time we’ve broken up it’s been because I just wasn’t getting the comments, page views and pingbacks that I need. It’s nice knowing that somebody appreciates what I’m putting out there. I had thoughts and opinions way before I met Blogging, but it’s that feedback she brings me that keeps me wanting her around.
This time around, I think Blogging and I will be together for a while, but it’s a constant struggle against the temptations of that sultry damsel, Twitter — it’s instant gratification with her, and sometimes I can’t help myself.
I mean sometimes I find a link, it’s late at night… and she’s there. And right away, the retweets, the responses, all of that starts right away! How can a guy resist that? It’s easy and only needs 140 characters’ worth of thought — which is also why Twitter’s really not relationship material.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter’s great — she gives me a little bit from a lot of people and, if I’m in the mood to write, she’s a lot of fun for a quick fling. But Blogging lets me think, she lets me report things and compare things, make complex connections and real, original material. I love her.
And please, don’t tell her I’ve been hanging out with her friends Digg and Delicious.
The Associated Press is putting on its business socks
So the AP let one of their memos float out of the office window and now everyone is in a tizzy over their plan to not let customers (read: news orgs) put some AP content on their websites — the solution, they say, is just to link directly to the AP website, which strikes me as a big shift for them: they’re done just selling their info to companies to give to their audiences — now the AP wants the audience directly.
Long story short: the AP says sure, the breaking news stuff and regular articles (“utility content,” they call it) are still cool to use just like we always have, but the stuff the AP’s got the corner on (“unique content,” like info-graphics and photos) should stay on the AP website.
Nieman blogger Zachary R. Seward says Srinandan Kasi, AP’s general counsel, says it’s all about buffing up traffic to the AP website, which isn’t something I knew they were looking for. He quotes Kasi:
…the ability now to be able to make a decision that says, this is not something we want to generically put on the wire and send to everyone to publish everywhere. We instead think this would be useful for people to use as supplemental, to enrich their storytelling. But it’s available for them to be able to point to. And the reason to do that is, then you have a bunch of links that point to a particular piece of content. You have better search outcomes. You have better exploitation of the link value, if you will, to that piece of content. So there’s an ability to think of that piece of content differently because you’re trying to maximize traffic as compared to other content where the benefit is really about getting the initial engagement.
This strikes me as a bigger move than people are saying it is — it signals a huge shift in the AP’s approach to their online presence and, in trying to steer people towards their website, a literal 180 from back in April when they were ready to rumble with Google for passing their links around, thought that’s simplifying a bit.
Seward says this is a move that “upend the consortium’s traditional notions of syndication,” but I think it’s simpler than that: the AP isn’t changing how it syndicates, just what it syndicates. They’re basically creating two different product streams: the stuff they give to their customers, and they stuff they keep and politely ask customers to link to.
If this secret plan thing comes to fruition, the AP won’t just be feeding news websites, it will be competing with them. How will this affect AP customers? They’re going to have less AP content on their websites, thus less material to pull in readers, thus less advertising to sell in a world without much to sell in the first place. Also, how will this affect the link-sharing culture on news sites? Places like the WashingtonPost.com are loath to post outside links in their news stories — will they do it for the Associated Press? And, if they do, why not link out to other websites with good content too? How about me?
[Side note: Beet.tv reported today that MSNBC.com is doing the exact opposite — they want EVERYBODY to take their content.]
Update, 8/11/09 11:22 p.m.:
Blogger hotshot and all-around dude-who’s-smarter-than-me Jeff Jarvis asks another important question via Twitter:
Big ? re AP plan: Does it monetize its “unique” content & share rev with those sending links, as the link econ demands?
Update, 8/12/09 11:30 p.m.:
Seward posted the actual document [pdf]— and explains in the comments section why he didn’t do it sooner in comment number 23 on the article.
OWNAGE
Okay, this isn’t really related to anything techie, but I just had to be sure somebody preserved this brilliant photograph:
Facebook: The Scared Corporation
So Facebook just published “proposed updates” to its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, its fancy pseudonym for the “terms of service” that caused so much trouble back in February when consumer advocacy blog The Consumerist ripped into the company (“Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: ‘We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content, Forever.’” Ha.) for changing the terms without telling anybody. The original changes really didn’t seem to actually change anything important (certainly not like back in Decemeber ‘07 when they wanted to put your web surfing habits into people’s newsfeeds), but the wording scared a lot of people into thinking that all their toking pictures from 10 years ago were stuck on the internet and there was nothing they could do about it.
Now, not only are they telling people about the changes (though they don’t actually point out where the changes are), but they’re just “proposing” them — I don’t really understand. They’re a company. They run a business, not a democracy. The problem back in February wasn’t that they changed them without the permission of their all-intelligent user base, it was that people didn’t understand what the changes meant. Facebook needs to stop pussy-footing around and change the damned terms like they’ve wanted to for six months. If they explain what the changes mean, which they shouldn’t have to do because they read like they’re geared towards an eight-year-old, nobody should have a problem with it. And if they do, I mean really, they’re like, 12 years old. They’re going to argue with whatever you say.
