Okay, the AP’s taking media transparency a little too far….
Technorati Tags: ap, humor, journalism, media
Updates from April, 2009
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Headlines That Sizzle
mike manuel
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“Friday with Foremski” Coming to Chron
mike manuel
Cool, this just in, Tom Foremski, editor and publisher of the Silicon Valley Watcher and SNCR cohort, just emailed me to say he’ll be starting a new column for the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFgate.com site called “Friday with Foremski,” which will look at Silicon Valley gossip and trends, and will appear (I assume) later this month.
This news comes on the heels of last week’s introduction of the Chron’s new business tech blog (”The Tech Chronicles“), and appears to be yet another step forward for the paper’s broader social media initiative, which just in the last year or so has successfully rolled out several new blogs and podcasts, and continues to experiment with content syndication and new forms of news personalization.
It’s also interesting to watch the “watcher’s” media career continue to evolve. In the best ways, Foresmki has become the poster child for a new breed of journalist. It started with his departure (ironically) from the Financial Times in early 2004, and the subsequent development and launch of Silicon Valley Watcher later that year. Multiple links later, he started contributing a weekly column to ZDNet (see IMHO), and now this news today that he’ll be a regular columnist for the Chron. It’s nice to see the dividends of hard work beginning to pay off, good luck with this latest endeavor, Tom.
Update: “Fridays with Foremski” made its debut today (read it here), this from Tom: “It is a great thrill for me to be writing for one of the longest established news organizations in the US, and also to be working with the excellent editorial team in the business section, Al Saracevic, Tom Abate, Dan Fost and many others.”
The following posts chronicle a handful of my entries related to Tom Foremski’s moves/news the last two years. In some states, this would be called stalking;) Enjoy.
Tom Foremski, Media Trailblazer? (June ‘04)
Survey: Which Journalist Will Become a Full-Time Blogger? (June ‘04) (Results)
Tom Foremski to Launch New Blog “SiliconValleyWatcher” (Sept. ‘04)
Voce Visits with Tom Foremski (Dec. ‘04)
Why Do You Blog? The “Watcher” Answers. (Jan. ‘05)Technorati Tags: Chronicle, Foremski, Journalism, San Francisco, SVW
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The Tech Elite, PR and Influencer Access
mike manuel
The WSJ has an interesting story that’s bouncing around the blogosphere. It’s yesterday’s Portals column by Lee Gomes (“Tech Blogs Produce New Elite to Help Track The Industry’s Issues”).
I know I’m chiming in a little late on this one so I won’t re-hash all the points of this piece here other than to say its a good read and that it hits on some bigger trends taking shape right now in the media sausage making business, especially in the tech industry. One trend in particular that’s worth calling out revolves around the idea of “corporate access” and how it relates to influencers, big media and public relations.
Now, I’m not going to get into the “blogger vs. journalist” debate here, see Angela Gunn’s post today for smarter thoughts on that, but I will say that there’s a bigger trend afoot within a small, but growing group of tech companies right now that realize keeping a tight kung-foo grip on corporate content and more importantly, “who” has access to that content is no longer the only, err best, way to handle communications.
As a result, industry influencers (be they bloggers, podcasters or otherwise) are increasingly being approached and invited inside corporate walls to preview products and receive pre-briefings on announcements, and are quickly finding that the once exclusive privilege of big media — access — is increasingly being offered to them too. They are also quickly finding themselves going toe-to-toe (for better or worse) with their big media counterparts, and THAT creates all sorts of interesting dynamics for the influencers and the media and the tech PR pro who needs to maintain relationships with both.
Ultimately, I think the savvy companies, the ones embracing PR 2.0, are the ones that are willing to experiment with access and broaden their scope and definition of who the stake holders really are within an industry and how best to go about engaging in a conversation with them.
Technorati Tags: Influencers, Journalism, PR, PR 2.0, Silicon Valley, Technology
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USA Today’s Kevin Maney Starts Blog
mike manuel
Kevin Maney, USA Today’s tech columnist, has started a blog.[Via Tom Foremski/Silicon Valley Watcher]
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Journalism, Media, Technology
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The Evolution of New Media (1969-2004)
mike manuel
David Shedden with the Poynter Institute has created a timeline that tracks the history of new media journalism and the Internet from 1969 to 2004. Fascinating stuff.
[via Simon Waldman’s Blog]
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New ‘Blogozine’ Shows Promise for Future Publishing Models
mike manuel
had the opportunity recently to chat with Tony Perkins in a little more detail
about how the AlwaysOn Network is evolving, particularly with respect to its
new quarterly print blogozine.
just say this right now, I’m absolutely sold on Tony’s approach. In the span of our brief conversation, I got
a glimpse of the commercial publishing world to come, and man it’s going to be
fun. What Tony and his team are setting
out to do, both with the AO network and with the new blogozine has what some
would consider the potential to fundamentally shift the foundation for
publishing business models.
I’ll state this upfront, I’m by no means an expert on the publishing business,
but it’s safe to say it all starts with good content which helps build out a readership which
indirectly attracts advertising revenue, which ultimately — in a perfect world
– returns a profit.
also know that commercial print publishing is a tough, tough business, perhaps
now more than ever. Advertisers are
diversifying their spending and focusing less on print campaigns. The revenue loss inevitably has a trickle
down effect, particularly with respect to staffing and in the end it simply
requires editorial teams to make certain tradeoffs in the content development
process. The reality is that with
limited resources newsrooms have to be hypersensitive about what makes it into
print.
I said, it’s a tough business and one I certainly respect, but there are other
ways of approaching the problem.
in point, the AO Network is comprised of some of the top business thinkers in
the Valley (perhaps the nation), including folks from the finance and
investment communities, serial entrepreneurs, high-profile tech executives, policy
makers, academics, and the like. Most AO
members regularly contribute original content to the network in the form of
blog posts which in turn generate ensuing comment threads that can be just as
insightful as the initial post.The
beauty of the Member Network is that it provides AO with a virtual pool of quality
content to harvest and (you guessed it) feed directly into its print
publication. The AO magazine essentially
becomes a ‘best-of’ aggregation of the content that attracted the most eyeballs
and evoked the most conversations based on its performance on the Network. I have to think most advertisers would find
this interesting.
there’s something raw, yet appealing about the content coming directly from the
source – meaning, given the choice of reading Joe Beat Reporter’s interview
with Michael Powell about new FCC VoIP regulations, or Michael Powell’s personal
blog post on new FCC VoIP regulations – which would you choose? I have to think most IT/business
readers would find the later more interesting, certainly more appealing.
think of the business implications – given a much wider pool of content and
subject matter experts to tap into, you minimize a large percentage of the overhead
costs and expenses need for content development, leaving more roadway for production,
marketing, sales, etc.Without
going into too much additional detail, I think you can start to understand the
approach being taken and hopefully its potential. There’s more stuff
I’d like to share, but I need to keep it in the back pocket for now. Suffice to say, it’s something to keep your eye on.Bottom
line, this shift in publishing isn’t going to happen overnight, but over time
it will change the rules of engagement for the newsmaking business, and that in
and of itself will be one hell of an interesting thing to follow. -
Voce Visits with Tom Foremski
mike manuel
The Voce Nation recently had the pleasure of hosting a lunch
with Tom Foremski, a long-time Silicon Valley tech columnist for the Financial Times who earlier this year resigned (surprisingly)
from the paper to develop and launch a new full-time blogging venture called Silicon
Valley Watcher.
afternoon in what can best be summarized as a lively conversation about
blogging and its impact on journalism and public relations. Where we could, we
tried to walk Tom through some real-world communication case studies and
collectively dig a little deeper on the practical application of micro media strategies and tactics in these
situations.
their successes and challenges with various micro media projects to date, be it
corporate, executive or employee blogging initiatives, to influencer outreach
activities, to tracking and measurement best practices.
conversation with respect to blogging is evolving. Six months ago this same
discussion would have taken more of a tutorial slant, given the industry (at
least the tech communications industry) was still relatively new to the
blogging concept – that’s not the case anymore. Blogging, RSS syndication,
wikis, etc. have all in some degree taken foot in the Valley’s marketing
vernacular.
now moving past simple awareness and understanding to strategic thinking and
broader scale execution, and as I see it that’s both promising and problematic.
companies creatively thinking and approaching the blogosphere in the next
several months and that’s exciting. And on the flip side we’ll begin to see
more companies failing to think through their blogging and broader micro media
strategies, and that too will play out publicly for all to see and for
hopefully all to learn from.
discussion because this shift impacts how journalists and public relations folk
coexist in a rapidly changing media environment, so having someone with Tom’s
experience (meaning his background with both the macro and now the micro media)
was extremely insightful.All sorts of good ideas shook out of this meeting, some I’ll
be writing about here in future posts, others I’ll be working on quietly until
it makes sense to share them, regardless it was very cool to participate in
this conversation and personally speaking, it was even more rewarding to take
what was formally an online relationship with a fellow blogger and turn that
into an offline get together. Thanks again, Tom.Update: Tom shares his take on the day’s discussion. Also, I don’t care what anyone says about the picture, it’s staying damn it…
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Dan Gillmor Leaving Merc
mike manuel
Whoa! Dan Gillmor, blogger extraordinaire, author and long-time business columnist for the San Jose Mercury News is leaving the paper to pursue a venture-backed grassroots journalism project.
SJMN colleagues Mike Bazeley and Matt Marshall shed more insight via SiliconBeat:
Dan will be starting a grass-roots journalism venture, and says he has gotten seed funding. The plan is typical Gillmor. It reflects his appreciation of the need for news to bubble up from the masses. It also allows him to partake of the dream that he has written so much about: The entrepreneur starting something interesting. "I’m jumping off a cliff with the expectation of assembling a hand-glider before I get to the bottom," he told us this evening, in a phone call from Boston, where he is attending a conference at Harvard. "I figured the worst risk is that I’d be out of work in six months."
I’ll have to grok this because it has all sorts of interesting implications for the changing media landscape, however, in the meantime I’ll simply wish Dan the best of luck in his new endeavor.
Update: Dan blogs about his transition.
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Pogue’s Posts Examined
mike manuel
David Pogue with the NYT has a short blog post up today that addresses a handful of questions he frequently receives from readers, and while there’s nothing terribly insightful in this particular post – speaking from a PR perspective – there’s still something interesting about seeing a high-profile tech columnist using a blog to talk openly with his readers about how he approaches his work.
I’d like to see Pogue at some point take this a step further and blog about how he goes about determining which products to review and perhaps even walking us through his evaluation cycle. I’m always curious to hear what really serves as the catalyst for a review and what goes on behind the scenes leading up to the finished piece.
In fact, a little insight on the discovery process alone would be fascinating. Why did Pogue choose to write about the new Apple iPod Photo or the Palm Tungsten T5? My bat senses say Apple and Palm PR inevitably played some sort of role, but what other sources does Pogue typically use to identify cool new consumer electronics? Do press releases even register on his radar anymore and how much does his readership influence what products he evaluates? And maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be that odd to ask if Pogue’s gathering some of his hot new product leads from blogs and newsgroups?
On a related note, I have to think Pogue’s foray into the blogosphere gives him a bit of an advantage over his competitors. The obvious advantage is that with his weekly print column, plus his weekly email column, plus his weekly online video, and now his daily blog, Pogue has the competition beat in sheer volume.
Folks will argue it’s not about quantity but quality, but in the news publishing business being first almost always trumps being best – and Pogue is putting himself in a position, especially with his blog, where he can be first more often than not. With the blog he also has a vehicle now for extending the life of his columns by augmenting his weekly stories with additional info that didn’t make it into print.
Over time, as Pogue continues to generate more content, the likelihood that his name will appear higher up on search engine queries for “iPod” or “PDA” for example is an ancillary benefit of his blog and really of online publishing as a whole. It’ll be interesting to see how he continues to use this blog and whether other publications begin experimenting too.
Update: Pogue addresses some of the points mentioned above in his blog today. Cool….