From Writing
Welcome to the beta of the new saila.com. Send in your bugs.
Living Can Kill You
“Living Can Kill You” first appeared as a chapbook poems in 1994, before being the name used to describe a regular blog starting in June of 2000.
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Death and news
Every time I post about a celebrity death in this blog, I think about how its title could be badly misconstrued. Nevertheless…
All the major news outlets had choreographed their coverage of the celebrity death to the very last detail.
Ed McMahon’s passing served as a trial run.
So when the big event happened today, the mainstream was ready with pre-packaged, wall-to-wall coverage.
Then the unthinkable happened: an even bigger celebrity died.
Goodbye Farrah, Michael Jackson is dead.
Every network, every news site (including the ones I work and worked at) switched to breaking news coverage using all the tools at their disposal to cover the event. And it is an impressive force to witness first hand, akin to watching a championship team play in front of rapturous hometown crowd.
But within hours, the spotlight shifts, people move to Facebook or Twitter.
And that is where the real story emerges; that is where the news consumer shares their stories and thereby define the news as it relates to their reality.
Traditional media can enable those narratives, but should no longer expect to control them.
Coincidentally…
What follows is my reading list from this morning, in the order in which they were bookmarked. Give them a read and see what their tea leaves tell you:
- “Get Smarter”
- “Haunting video turns a woman into a martyr, and a movement into a revolution
- “Is the Iran Coverage the Future of Journalism?”
- “Time-spent on newspaper sites: not predictable from rated quality”
- “What happens when your local paper goes online-only? it loses most of its staff”
- “Microsoft’s Ballmer: All traditional content will be digital in 10 years”
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New threads for stories
Nine weeks ago, msnbc.com began work on a new story page design concept to improve the ways news events are covered.
The resulting design, which launched today, was one of seven explored by the Creative Development team during the past year, and it pushes the limits of what a site with more than 40 million monthly visitors can do. The pages also test the limits of what modern browsers can do as the designs rely heavily on client-side processing to affect the appearance of the page itself.
The primary goal is to showcase what msnbc.com has always done best: rich, online journalism. As a result, the design integrates interactives, photo slide shows, and videos directly into the page. For too long, mainstream online journalism has often come from the print mentality: text, supported by some pictures.
The new msnbc.com design concept aims to thread these elements together into one cohesive story by featuring interactive journalism in ways not previously possible. In fact, just linking to any of the media elements allows the page to change its core layout. One view might showcase the words of Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Bill Dedman, another view highlights the richly visualized Moody’s data produced by msnbc.com’s team of
renegade cybergeeks
.These designs also push the boundaries of what the Web industry typically considers “page views.” Though better than the “hit”, those in the industry have long known pages views can be inflated with unnecessary clicks while genuine content updates go unmeasured. The solution is capturing the intent of what a page view is: a substantive change of the majority of the content within a user agent’s viewable space. Working with audience measurement firms, msnbc.com designed the template to balance the needs of the business with the user experience desires of its audience.
No longer do visitors need to load an entire page just to read a few hundred more words; the page now adds it to end of the text you are already reading. Want to view a slideshow? No pop-up windows need to be unblocked; you simply view it on page you already have loaded.
The effort behind the scenes to enable all this is substantial. A number of very smart people worked many long hours to develop these templates. An entirely new JavaScript framework (dubbed Quilt) was built to allow the page to “know” what content and data was visible to the viewer. The video player was rebuilt to connect more intimately with the content on the page. The interactive producers built a suite of new tools to tell their stories more effectively in these pages. The design team continues to experiment with end-user experience.
Most importantly, though, millions of people reading the news will get a more comprehensive view of the stories of the day. This new journalism platform launched using msnbc.com’s in-depth coverage economic in The Elkhart Project as a base. Over the coming months, expect the design to evolve and spread across the site. In the meantime, your thoughts, as always, are welcomed.
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5 steps to CBC success
How to program a national public broadcasting corporation:
- Operate a respected international cable news channel.
- Create an innovative, ground-breaking television program using all the techniques of social media Web sites more than five years before it becomes cliched.
- Get praise for the former, and inspire a former vice-president to copy the model outright.
- Stop producing content for the respected news outlet so said ex-vice-president can use the channel to host the aforementioned copy.
- Wait about four years, and strike a deal to create a Canadian version of the groundbreaking news channel that resulted from those deals.
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Holy Fuck!
Ironically, I never saw the Toronto band name-checked in the title when I lived in that city yet I heard lots about them (and again missed them) when they played a few block away from where I now live in Seattle. The band got rave reviews for their two recent performances and helped raise Toronto and Canada’s reputation amongst the often jaded scenesters in that U.S. city. Not good enough for the government of Canada who cites Holy Fuck as a reason for cutting funding to Canadian artists.
Toronto itself tried to cut another art institution today, but this time it was a tree. After the famous Queen West graffiti tree at Queen West and Peter feel over yesterday, the city was going to turn it into mulch. Thankfully, it was not to be.
That being said, another institution of my Toronto Years (as I think I’ll call them) is not so lucky. The Lakeview Lunch dinner has outlived its post-Cocktail revival. For a few years it was the highlight of Dundas west Bathurst but it quickly declined in direct contrast to the meteoric rise Ossington’s transformation into a the city’s destination strip.
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CBC: near- or farsighted?
Recently Canada’s public broadcaster urged the CRTC to “reject old assumptions about new media” and claimed that the consumption of broadcast media is not being negatively effected by the Internet.
This defies the observable evidence yet manages to be based in some careful shaped facts. For example, CBC’s paper claims that:
Canadians use the Internet primarily as a communications and research tool. … These are the types of activities that are driving Canadians to spend time using the Internet. They are not activities that are substitutable with TV and radio usage: these activities are completely different than the time spent with traditional media.
Additionally, it claims one percent of Canadians watch television online. While the claims may be technically true, the arguments are on very weak ground.
True, the government’s research arm found almost everyone emails or searches for information online; but it also determined 65 percent “view news or sports” online and 28 percent listen to online radio.
In fact, in the past three years, there was a 60 percent increase in the number of people watching TV or movies online (20 percent in 2007). Seeing how people consume TV online in the U.S., I will confidently conclude there will be a similar increase in Canada after another three years.
Similar narrow-sightedness can be found in its discussion around online revenue opportunities (which is too broad for me to discuss in detail, but I will mention online ad spending continues to increase and is predicated to surpass radio advertising).
Everyone likes to shape facts to support their own perception of reality, and the CBC, like many media institutions, could be seen to be struggling to maintain its default top-down organization structure. (As evidence: people in the trenches have continually been doing some incredible things at the CBC as it relates to the online world, but the upper management seems oblivious to the realities.)
My hope is, like the Canadian newspapers before, the CBC has merely crafted a report to discourage the CRTC from regulating the Internet (or at least the Canadian media companies online) and is not merely a result of a lack of vision.
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