a curious Yankee in Europe's court

Italy has a reputation for lagging behind in its citizenry’s embrace of the Internet (see here, for an example). It’s true that things could certainly be better online-wise, but still the country does rank in the top 15 countries worldwide in Internet users, according to a recent European Travel Commission report. And it shows online usage steadily rising.

Nonetheless, as the report also shows, the percentage of the Italian population online is only 51.7 percent (30,026 million). That compares to 68.9 percent in France, 79.1 percent in Germany, and 77.3 percent in the USA.

In Italy, one online sector where some promising new developments are underway is journalism, according to an article by Federica Cocco today at OWNI.eu (“Italian journos search for escape route in oppressive job market” Nov 17, 2010).

Cocco reports on some of the current hardships many Italian journalists are facing in traditional media. As a solution, she writes, some of them are “trying to find refuge in the web.”

According to a 2010 survey by Human Highway and Liquida, Italy now counts 1.7 million bloggers – half a million more than last year. The study also concluded that 23.1% of the 24 million Italian netizens read blogs regularly, and the majority of them focus on current affairs.

Cocco also reports on the recent launch of two notable online news reporting websites.

Read the full article here.

What I don’t know is almost everything, I admit, and that everything is mushrooming in size daily. But today I did add a fascinatingly useful new term to my vocabulary by learning the meaning of the word grok. (Hint — it’s a verb and it’s actually been around since 1961).

I came across the word in a post on GigaOM last Friday by the site’s founder Om Malik. Titled “There is No New Media: It’s All New Consumption,” the post is a bit of a two-by-four aimed at the thickish, oldish heads running most of traditional media.

Excerpt:

“For the media industry  (which is video, music and print), there has been one more, and perhaps the farthest-reaching, failure: the inability of the folks to grok that today’s audience is not tomorrow’s audience. It goes without saying there’s a whole generation of folk that has either grown up, or are growing up, on the Internet. Their consumption and online behavior is going to be predicated on a distribution medium whose basic premise is abundance. They will find, curate and consume on their own terms, on their own choice of screens and on their own time.”

Clarifying phrase, isn’t it — online behavior is going to be predicated on a distribution medium whose basic premise is abundance.

Highly recommended reading if you want some insight into a big picture perspective of media consumption trends. And if you aren’t familiar with another phrase — Generation D — it’s a chance to remedy that also.  See the full post here.

In news that startled a bit this week, two major names in journalism in the US announced their departure from their star posts in traditional media to sign on to new media.

The New York Times lost economic reporter Peter Goodman. The struggling Newsweek lost political columnist Howard Fineman. Both of these prominent journalists have just joined the staff of one of new media’s most visible success stories, The Huffington Post.

Goodman was interviewed by the Washington Post about his big jump (“Huffington snags N.Y. Times star” Howard Kurtz, Sept 21, 2010). Goodman told Kurtz, “For me it’s a chance to write with a point of view… It’s sort of the age of the columnist. With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what’s going on. This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting.”

Goodman went to to express dissatisfaction about a confining aspect of the process of reporting imposed on him by the gray lady Times.

Writing yesterday in reaction to Goodman’s statements, news media expert and journalism instructor Dan Gillmor commented  (“The second great migration to new media” Salon, Sept 22, 2010):

I’m also convinced that a big part of what’s happening is a sound one from a journalistic sense: That is, reporters want to be liberated from the lazy-journalism tyranny of the idiotic notion that there are two equal sides to everything — do a story on the Holocaust, get a quote from a neo-Nazi — and they grasp better than their old-media editors do that human voice is the heart of story-telling.

Gillmor linked to a related post on Goodman and Fineman by Salon co-founder and author Scott Rosenberg. In his post, Rosenberg voiced sympathy with some of the huge, older news organizations (“Journalists follow their voices, vote with their feet” Sept 22, 2010).

Rosenberg particularly noted the “phenomenal-sized audience” of Yahoo News, and the “blue-chip” reputation” of the NY Times.  This constrains them to be more cautious in their ways, he wrote.

Excerpt:

The challenge for their [Times and Yahoo] managers is a subtle one: How to infuse their coverage with the distinctive human voices of journalistic observers who no longer wish to suppress their personal perspectives, while also insuring that the big megaphones they own do not turn into amplifiers of treacherous rumors, personal vendettas, or partisan lies. (Fox News provides a handy negative exemplar here.)

In a blog post this week, James Bridle lays bare his optimism about humans and our doings. And this gutsy enthusiasm is a good and intelligent thing.

It’s not some pie-in-the-sky, be happy type of simpleton perspective. Bridle grounds his hope in close scrutiny of the systems we create, in particular publishing.

Bridle, a publisher and writer, is founder of the website booktwo.org. He describes the site’s focus as “the future of literature and the publishing industry”

Writing the recent post titled “On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony and Historiography” (Sept 6, 2010), Bridle reflects on a public talk he gave recently:

I talked about the Library of Alexandria, and the Yo La Long Dia, and the National Libraries of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq—all examples of cultural destruction caused in part by neglect and willful disregard for our shared patrimony.

These losses, despite their horror, will always happen: but what can we do to mitigate and understand them? In a world obsessed with “facts”, a more nuanced comprehension of historical process would enable us to better weigh truth…

…I do believe that we’re building systems that allow us to do this better, and one of our responsibilities should be to design and architect those systems to make this explicit, and to educate.

The particular system that Bridle goes on to discuss is Wikipedia.

…for me, Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It’s not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.

Read the full entry here.

(Found my way to Bridle’s post via the blog Bits at the New York Times)

In light of my post yesterday about Twitter as a news tool, here’s a weigh-in on GigaOM.com that I just saw today — “Like It or Not, Twitter Has Become a News Platform” (by Mathew Ingram,  Sept 8, 2010).

…the reality is that, for all its flaws, Twitter is a publishing tool, and an increasingly powerful one. And it can be used by anyone, journalist and non-journalist alike.

Read the full post here.

Perhaps something not fessed-up to enough by some guardians of traditional journalism (aka old media), is that its classic reporting model has an unavoidable built in awkwardness. Steps: 1) the event happens; 2) the tip or report arrives to the editor or staff writer; 3) physical bodies are (cumbersomely) dispatched to interview, photograph or shoot, and write the thing up; 4 ) publication or broadcast… finally.

So however worthy and enduring this old model of spreading the news, it seems evident that the undesirable elements of delay and artificiality are inextricably interwoven into the process.

Viewed from this perspective then, Twitter and its amazingly democratic and efficient model of access and instant publication can only be seen as a useful step forward in execution of the news reporting task.

But the errors, the errors! you hear the purists cry. Yes (perfection eludes us yet again), but this is more than offset, in my opinion, by the spontaneous authenticity, the speed, and the virtually unlimited scope of delivery of the Twitter product.

The ideal solution, as some newspapers are (a bit sluggishly) embracing, is for traditional media to utilize Twitter as a indispensable new tool that has the potential to greatly enhance journalism.

For the most recent example of Twitter winning the news race, read Katy Gathright’s paean to Twitter in a  blog post on Social Times (“Twitter Trumps Traditional Media in Discovery Hostage Crisis” Sept 2, 2010).

* Discovery Hostage Crisis

Last night over dinner with friends, one of them expressed her bewilderment about what the purpose of data journalism is precisely. And, she lamented, doesn’t it just make things worse by overwhelming us with information that most of us won’t ever read or watch?

A couple of us pitched right in and tried our best to explain and defend this fast growing development in new media, one that Wikileaks has thrust into star position in the news cycle recently.  We didn’t make much headway, I’m sorry to say. So I was especially happy today to find an article online that offers a bunch of help for the next time such a dinner table debate ensues.

It’s a terrific interview that Nieman Journalism Lab did — video and transcript — with the editor of the Data Blog for the Guardian (“How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools” by Jonathan Stray, Aug 5, 2010). The interview is thorough and in depth — with a lot of show and tell. And if it doesn’t supply you just about all you might want to know about the potential uses and service of data journalism, I’d be surprised.

Excerpt:

The technology involved is surprisingly simple, and mostly free. The Guardian uses public, read-only Google Spreadsheets to share the data they’ve collected, which require no special tools for viewing and can be downloaded in just about any desired format. Visualizations are mostly via Many Eyes and Timetric, both free.

Surprisingly for many like my friend last night, the raw data the newspaper is posting online is getting some impressive traffic, according to the Guardian editor:

“… a million hits a month during the recent election coverage.”

Read and watch the full Nieman interview here.

If you want to change the world, as they say, and still don’t understand how important social media (Twitter, Facebook et al) is as a primary tool, then you might want to watch this short video featuring digital strategist, Cheryl Contee.

Contee was speaking at the Netroots Nation conference (ending today) in Las Vegas. She highlights some important statistics about who’s using social networking media, and offers a few powerful dos and do nots for social activists and organizations.

For example, Contee explains why now “there is no digital divide.”

Though the conference is USA focused, the info about Twitter and Facebook is applicable across the globe.

Online media, hard to believe, still endures shovels full of badmouthing and tsk tsking from its detractors. The blogosphere in particular is routinely chopped up, skewered, fried and refried by its critics.

And that cyberspace represents the killing of journalism itself, well that’s a grumble still coming from some.

So the praise served up today for journalism and online media by Henry Blodget (rehabilitated) is a fine, fine thing to see (“On Our Third Birthday, Some Thoughts On Digital Media And The Future Of The Newspaper Business” Business Insider, July 20, 2010).

Excerpt:

The future of journalism, in fact, is bright.  Despite the struggles of many newspapers–and the pain that many newspaper folks have experienced in the past 10 years–the world is vastly better informed than it was only a decade ago.  Thanks to millions of blogs, experts, organizations, causes, digital media companies, print media companies, electronic media companies (Bloomberg, Reuters), Twitter, Facebook, and other next-generation information outlets, the world is now awash in primary and secondary information.

It’s true that this the information often appears in a rough, unedited, or incorrect form.  But within seconds, millions of online fact-checkers descend upon it and hammer it into shape.  This participatory, conversational journalism is certainly different than what came before, but it’s vastly more powerful…

Blodget’s praise is the summing up of a piece about the turbulent future of the newspaper business. He focuses in particular on the New York Times. There are some dismaying facts and figures that he says newspaper bosses aren’t telling their staff (read more here).

Illuminating.

UPDATE: Recent news story from Bloomberg Business Week on Henry Blodget and Business Insider (“Henry Blodget’s Risky Bet on the Future of News” by Andrew Goldman, July 8, 2010)

P.S. Really appreciate the free cartoons (see above) from Dave Walker at weblogcartoons.com

Some answers to how new media differs from old media are offered in a report published yesterday by Pew Research Center (“How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from Traditional Press” May 23, 2010). The question was the focus of a 2009, year-long study by Pew.

First answer — the differences between the new and the old are substantial, Pew reports.

Excerpt:

Most broadly, the stories and issues that gain traction in social media differ substantially from those that lead in the mainstream press. But they also differ greatly from each other. Of the 29 weeks that we tracked on all three social platforms, blogs, Twitter and YouTube shared the same top story just once…

Each social media platform also seems to have its own personality and function. In the year studied, bloggers gravitated toward stories that elicited emotion, concerned individual or group rights or triggered ideological passion. Often these were stories that people could personalize and then share in the social forum — at times in highly partisan language. And unlike in some other types of media, the partisanship here does not lean strongly to one side or the other. Even on stories like the Tea Party protests, Sarah Palin and public support for Obama both conservative and liberal voices come through strongly…

So much for critics who claim that bloggers and other social media sites are only re-cycled imitations of traditional media. And the finding that new media content isn’t homogeneous indicates that it’s less susceptible to the pack journalism syndrome. That’s good news.

Another finding from the Pew study may point to why traditional media is struggling to gain the eye and ear of new generations of  audience. Referring to content of new media sites, Pew reports:

…top weekly stories differ dramatically from what is receiving attention in the traditional press. Blogs overlap more than Twitter, but even there only about a quarter of the top stories in any given week were the same as in the “MSM.”

Instead, social media tend to home in on stories that get much less attention in the mainstream press. And there is little evidence, at least at this point, of the traditional press then picking up on those stories in response.

That last sentence packs a wallop.