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Used car salesman to head Cox Newspapers :: Creative Loafing

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Jay Smith, president of Cox Newspapers, which publishes the Atlanta Journal & Constitution and 16 other dailies, is retiring.

Smith’s successor, Sandy Schwartz, is publisher of AutoTrader - one of those used car ad-only newspapers you notie on your way out of the supermarket, or after you’ve paid for your Slurpee at Seven-11.

Die-hard journalists who think those ads should properly be placed next to news scoff at the moral outrage of such publications. If ads can survive without content, then, good lord, who will pay for journalism? And why?

AutoTrader itself seems bizarly quaint, and doomed, in a craigslist world. No?

Good luck Cox.

Writes John Sugg, a senior editor of alt weekly publisher - and Cox Atlanta competitor - Creative Loafing:

Smith has presided over the dramatic circulation declines and editorial deterioration in Atlanta and most other Cox cities. The internal statement obtained by CL calls those accomplishments “distinguished service.”

What Do Teens Want? Just Ask.

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Should corporate IT ban Facebook? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

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Techmeme: In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop (Matt Richtel/New York Times)

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In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop - New York Times

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Anatomy of a ‘Blogging will kill you’ story: Why I didn’t make the cut | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

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Presentation Zen: Authors@Google presentation

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Gary Reynolds, author of the Presentation Zen blog and book, gives a presentation about giving presentations at Google.

Are Newspapers Doomed? Or am I doomed for responding to minutae in the comments? :: Britannica Blog

tags: newspapers, future

What happened to Britannica after Microsoft and Wikipedia killed it?

I have no idea - but naturally they’ve got a blog. This week the Britannica blog features a bunch of guest posts about the future of newspapers.

Jeff Jarvis and Terry Heaton quibbled with the process - a series of essays posted over the course of a week. Why, I don’t know, but I took their bait and quibbled further.

Here’s what I wrote via comments:

Jeff, Terry, fair points, but geez, lighten up. Britannica (wow - now it’s a blog!) is attempting to curate a conversation and experience, and I think that’s a reasonable and worthy goal. I’m more bored and troubled by the topic than the execution. How long can “the end is nigh” conversation go on? Apparently: forever.

Packaging and dumping, err, publishing, a bunch of content all at once is also 20th Century, also known as a book, or a magazine, or a newspaper, or an encyclopedia. Curation here seems to be about process - recruiting and guiding the key participants, which seems to me has some value that’s also old school, and packaging the experience. What’s wrong with a series? What’s wrong with time as a factor of the experience? You want every episode of your favorite TV shows posted and distributed simultaneously? Or Terry, do you feel manipulated by drama crap when you have to tune in next week to Lost or Ugly Betty or Friday Night Lights?

I don’t have time read all of this at once. I guess it would be more productive for me to have someone else, like one of you, read everything, then summarize and link to the best bits.

Sure, this may be a modest attempt at curation. Maybe publishing everything at once would have generated a faster and bigger reaction and allowed more cross-references and links in the analysis. Maybe it also would have produced a massive and intimidating tome that few would have the time or inclination to read.

See, now you’ve got me blathering on about the process - instead of reading the essays themselves. Now I’ve got to lighten up!

What Would Google NOT Do?

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Jeff Jarvis is working on a book called “What Would Google Do.” It’s a theme and idea he’s mentioned a number of times over the years in his blog, with a handy-dandy acronym: WWGD.

I have to admit, the tongue-in-cheek play on the more serious “What Would Jesus Do” irks me. Google is a splendid example of a new role for media companies - they connect people to each other. In Google’s terms, they index the world. Dale and I say Google “remediates” the world - reconnects people to each other through information. The humans create the knowledge and actions that follow - but Google is there to expedite the process as much as possible. In that sense, yes, I think WWGD is right on.

But in other ways, I don’t think Google is the ultimate test of a digital business or a perfect example of how digital businesses should function. WWGD may be a good exercise to reveal practices that others should avoid, like WWMSD (what would Microsoft do).

For instance, Google has taken a limp and amoral position on censorship, falling back on a passive “Do No Evil” outlook, which is a far cry from “Do Good.” That may suffice for technology companies, but I don’t think it suffices for any company that wants to claim moral authority or social values that support freedom of expression and human rights. It may be that such values are less profitable or more troublesome for global, borderless business models - in which case I’d say social entrepreneurs may need to fill the voids created and made more gaping by Google. How about WWGND - what would Google NOT do? They would not investigate governments, or publish the findings. They would not publicly challenge or disavow the behavior of autocratic governments with whom they maintain business relationships. They would not pay for the creation or production of any kind of information, other than press releases, user and develper guides and other internal, self-serving content. Instead, Google depends on, expects and requires others to pay for and create the information - the content - which Google then indexes. That’s fine - they provide a valuable service. But they don’t provide all the services we need fulfilled in a digital culture and they don’t reveal how those other services should be fulfilled. WWGD is instructive, but incomplete.

WWGND may be just as instructive to define niches for companies or nonprofits that place their social values at least on an equal footing with their business values, rather than passively and limply beneath them.

Anyhow, moving on … Jeff has a nice set of quick quotes here about why offering online services for free is becoming not simply a gimmick but a necessity in a digital world.

Time and Expense Tracking - A Future Twitter Business Model? :: ReadWriteWeb

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L.A. Times retracts Shakur story :: AP via msnbc

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Bike-sharing services roll into the U.S. :: msnbc.com

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Shrewd Cuban blogger wins Spanish journalism prize :: tvnz.co.nz

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Police, protesters scuffle at Olympic torch relay - Other sports- nbcsports.msnbc.com

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Elite Retreat - Take Your Business From Good To Great

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Build Your Customers’ Social Technographics Profile Now at Groundswell

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New from Forrester/Groundswell: Weekly social profiles data

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How do I get my blog to show up? - Techmeme News

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iGlasses 2.1: improved stability and more application compatibility :: TUAW

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Print, Broadcast losing ground in China :: Fons Tuinstra at Poynter

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Beta Beat: Dejumble, task management simplified :: TUAW

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Icon master launches Icon Resource :: TUAW

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Nobel peace winner Wangari Maathai tear-gassed in Kenya :: BBC

tags: humanrights, kenya

Endangered Digital Careers

tags: careers, socialmedia

This may come as a bit of a blow to anyone who’s been busy burnishing their digital street cred. What else have you got to offer?

Steve Rubel spots three tech-driven media careers that will vanish as the roles are subsumed by generalists who simply incorporate digital expertise into their workflows and toolsets.

1. Social Media Consultant, Manager

“Hiring someone just to “manage” social media is a luxury that companies will integrate into broader marketing communication roles.”

2. Internet Advertising Sales, Online Advertising Sales, etc.

“Soon all advertising will be managed via digital technology and platforms, even if they end up running in terrestrial media. This means it will become very difficult to discern selling digital ads from just plain old ads. Clients will want to manage and measure their integrated campaigns through a single point of contact or channel and figure out how offline/online work together.”

3. Digital Talent Agents

“Every agent will need to know how to identify and talent from the web. The line between digital and traditional will be obliterated as more amateurs recognize that they can market themselves using the web and will forgo going on auditions.”

OK - but a lot of companies and nonprofits are still catching up and could still use help in these areas. Or, to put it another way: there are still lots of entrepreneurial opportunities in all three, so I’m not sure I’d declare the party over just yet. Still, the general insight is important not only for career planning but for strategic thinking about HR, training and growth. Should your company hire a social media guru, or invest in a marketing/communicatinos or media leader who can add digital tactics and knowledge to a broader set of skills and functions.

A more intriguing question is: What skills or jobs might leapfrog these or be the next “it” career for media worker bees with aspirations of edginess?

Two come to mind:

Designer. Design skills, like digital skills, will be integrated into many other roles. The world will continue to be a roll-your-own, home-made We Media experience, but the experience itself will become more visual, more polished and professionals will distinuish themselves and establish trust through greater attention to the design and experience of their brands.

Entrepreneur. Self-reliance, passion and an instinct both for creating great products and selling them will become commonplace. I’m not sure this is a good thing, but it’s coming. Or already here. This reflects hype and a culture that sensationalizes entrepreneurial behavior to an unhealthy extreme. We celebrate young startup founders who get rich quick; we celebrate serial entrepreneurs who appear addicted to the rush of building and bailing out of one company after another; and, on the other hand, good old fashioned jobs for decent pay don’t seem any more stable or permanent than startups or working for yourself - so even if you work for a big company you’ve got to wonder, always, about what’s next. Journalists, nonprofit activists and anyone who seeks to exert influence will find their entrepreneurial skills are as important as their social networking and digital media skills - and those will still be important too.

Starbucks Tries Social Media  Annotated

tags: crowdsourcing, socialmedia

Muhammad Saleem in ReadWriteWeb writes:

With Starbucks’ stock beaten down from its mighty highs of $47 to recent lows of $17 in the face of strong competition from Peet’s, Caribou, McDonald’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts and a suffering economy, the coffee house chain has made many changes over the past few months. From eliminating jobs and reshuffling management to permanently shutting down lagging stores and retraining its baristas, perhaps none of these moves will be as important or effective in the long run as the development and launch of My Starbucks Idea.

Project Agape and The Point have raised more than $7 million each for online social activism

tags: entrepreneurs, social

Source: paidContent

My experiences with Storymaker | News Videographer

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Adobe AIR project via University of Missouri: Wallowr

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Wow, looks promising.

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John Sturm, CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, as reported by Editor & Publisher magazine:

Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms,” John Sturm, president and CEO of the NAA, said in a statement.

Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine
I think the proper perspective is that we are at a full-blown, slippery-slope, accelerating-fall, watch-out-below crisis for the newspaper industry and professional journalism with it. It’s time for drastic thinking.

Gore’s ‘We’ Campaign to Fight Climate Change via (US) National Public Radio  Annotated

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Series A Funding for $2.75 million: Publish2 social bookmarking for journalists

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I’ll need to learn more before I cast judgment, but I’ve got plenty of question. It’s like Delicious, or my current favorite tool, Diigo, which I’m using to write this - but you’ve got to be a journalist to use Publish2. I’d like to see how it’s better than Diigo - and if it is then I could imagine a multitude of industry-specific skins for Diigo. I also wonder how the Publish2 team defines a journalist - wouldn’t the service be more useful if sources and others could access and enhance the data? Maybe there’s a market for a platform designed specifically for journalists I like the industry-specific application of a consumer model, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this - but this isn’t an example of We Media. It’s an example of a proprietary, production tool built for THE media - which could be a perfectly good business model, and would be an incremental step forward for journalists who choose to use it.

PledgeBank blog: The Mashup to End All Mashups

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Notes a mashup project at NetSquared - and winners get to pitch their projects at the NeSquared conference May 27, 2008.

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Apple - Aperture - In Action

tags: tools

I’m looking for a better tool to manage and work with our photo (and video) collection.

Widget Watch: Freshbooks time tracker via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

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Cell phones in Cuba: Revolutionary? - Wireless- msnbc.com

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7 Ways To Create Your Own Digg Clone

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