New media photographer Podcast 50!

Archive for May, 2009

May

The training wheels are coming off

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

If you have been following this blog, podcast or have attended one of my talks around the country you have been listening to me cry that social media is not a waste of time. I’ve claimed the tools available today are the training wheels for how we will be doing business in the future.

Over the last couple of days Google has rolled out a preview of a new platform called Google Wave. It is everything and more that we’ve said would be coming our way.

The training wheels are coming off.

I have been shouting from the rooftops that the future of business is collaboration. If you plan on being a business person, you need to understand the best practices, social media etiquette, and how to use these social media tools.

I’m working on a big project with a marketing director of a hospital, a writer, a designer and a design agency owner. Oh, what this platform would do to improve the group’s communication and productivity on this four-month project.

All of our communications would be in one place, while still allowing private thoughts between the editors. People could be added to the conversation and have access to a full history and progression of the project to date. The marketing director and designer could edit photographs in real time. Calendars and schedules could be easily coordinated. No more lost e-mails. The possibilities are endless.

I’m sure you have or had projects that could easily benefit from such streamlined collaboration. Even better news: It will be available on our smart phones, too.

Wave will be an open-source system allowing programmers to create incredibly cool and advanced tools making business communication and collaboration easier and more streamlined than ever.

There will be other platforms like Wave that will not just change business communication, but family communication, conferencing and e-mail. (Could this be the end of e-mail?) This also will change gaming, education, blogging, news gathering , search, public social media integration and digital file management.

Thank you to Mitch Joel for the heads up that the video was available. It’s a long video, but worth your time.

Tags: Best practice, etiquette, google, google wave, Mitch Joel, podcast, Search Engines, Searching, social media, wave video, what is google wave
Posted in blogging, social media | 3 Comments »

May

Newspapers must die

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

After years of the newspaper’s decline from crown jewel of the local community to corporate investment, it is time to let the newsprint medium die. If we let the traditional resource die, we can invent the news source of the future.

The traditional media are killing themselves slowly every day with a short-sighted need to make a 30 percent profit on their product. The pressure of quarterly profits does not allow CEOs to create and develop a future for their products.

They have cut resources to the bone and little is left, except for a dire need for quality investigative journalism.

My local newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, won a Pulizer prize this year for local reporting. I’m concerned that this might be the last. How can newspapers and magazines compete against free news? It is troubling that the public seems to feel that news should be free and provided by bloggers and citizen journalists who are happy to work for the same rate.

Bloggers and citizen journalists are fine for providing opinion or breaking-news content. Any accident, police situation or public event in the range of a camera phone can be documented easily. However, quality, in-depth reporting is best done by trained professionals, supported with a paycheck, backed by an organization and legal counsel.

The average citizen journalist is not going to take the time, money and effort to investigate a city hall scandal. Bloggers tend to use personal opinion, Google, fellow blogs and Wikipedia for fact checking.

I don’t know many photojournalists willing to risk their lives to capture war images for a photo credit or byline.

Even more of a concern is who the hell is willing to sit though a local city council or board of education meeting for free?

Newspapers must die quickly.

We don’t have time to test gimmicks that might save the print medium. The people in charge only know mass media. They are doing all they can to stuff a clunky old model into a sleek new media bag. It’s not going to fit.

Once print dies, it will be reinvented out of the ashes of necessity. Once the public is without quality resources — its value will be redeemed.

Demand and value will spark an innovative person or group of people to discover the way to make news reporting and distribution a viable venture.

No matter the outcome, news distribution will not look like it does today. If it does, they didn’t get it right and we will have to kill it again.

Tags: City council, google, Investigative journalism, journalism, Mass media, media, newspaper, Writers Resources
Posted in blogging | 6 Comments »

May