David Akin’s On The Hill

The American Journalism Review reports that in several surveys, newspapers prosper when they pay attention to some pretty basic stuff:

• Providing excellent customer service
• Improving editorial and advertising content
• Building recognition and loyalty through stronger brand promotion
• Reforming management and culture.

Now those may sound pretty basic but implementing those kind of improvements can be trick and that's because of newspaper culture itself. Good newspaper reporters, I've found in 15 years in the biz at papers or all sizes (and egos), are lone wolves. They are contrarion by nature. They don't like authority. Rules have to make good sense to be followed. Reporters don't like to follow rules just because someone says so. Good reporters are independent types who think outside the box. Now, all of the things that makes for good reporters often makes for a poor company man (or woman). And yet, in this case at least, it would be in a reporter's own best interest to be a bit more broad in his or her worldview when it comes to the idea that
the newspaper is a business.
Most reporters, I think, will immediately recognize that their primary task is improving editorial content. But most will also think that it's someone else's job in the organization to worry about everything else. It isn't.
It's their job. Reporters, too, are in the customer service business. We meet our subscribers and our advertisers every day. And while we often meet them in the role of newsgathering, there's nothing to say we can be polite and helpful to those who have questions or comments about our business.
Similarly, we are in the brand building and recognition game. We've all seen the print reporter show up at a press conference who looks like a slob and acts like a boor. What does that do for the paper's brand? Now, I'm not somme pollyanna who believes we have to toe some corporate line, wear plastic smiles and a club tie, and perfect a firm handshake, but a recognition by newsroom employees that we're all in the business of finding and keeping readers and that we do that in a number of ways would go a long towards stemming readership declines and even reverse them.
[The AJR link is via Tom Mangan's blog]

The good folks who develop Blogware, the publishing system used for this blog, have added a couple of nifty new tools, one for me and one for you, dear reader. For me, I can post via e-mail and that's going to be much easier and should generate more posts. For you, there is a now a search function so you can find stuff on this blog. You can see it right over there to the left, underneath the Ultra Top Important Links and above the Topics category.

A modified version of a rant/opinion bit of mine below from a post I made recently to the listserv of the Canadian Association of Journalists in response to a commentary by American journalist Bill Moyers. In that commentary, Moyers said:

I keep coming back to the subject of media conglomeration because it can take the oxygen out of democracy. The founders of this country believed a free and rambunctious press was essential to the protection of our freedoms. They couldn't envision the rise of giant megamedia conglomerates whose interests converge with state power to produce a conspiracy against the people. I think they would be aghast at how this union of media and government has produced the very kind of imperial power against which they rebelled.

I wish some academics or independent researchers would challenge the fuzzy logic of the silly assumptions behinds Moyers' remark. (Incidentally, I would have liked to send these remarks to Moyers himself and engage in a democratic dialogue. But while Moyers' show NOW provides links to “Buy something” at its Web site, it provides no link where readers and viewers can engage Moyers in a debate about this issue. That, to me, is an anti-democratic Big Media flaw. Bill, if you're there, engage in the debate on this site or e-mail me.”)
It is absolute historical hooey to suggest as Moyers and many in Canada do that today's media environment is “taking the oxygen out of democracy” and conspiring against the people. There are so many more voices and choices in today's media environment than there have ever been in any historical era and this is all good for democracy. Does Moyers think it a coincidence that the Berlin Wall fell as new independent and alternative news sources started flourishing in the West?
The Internet, blogs, cheap on-demand publishing systems have put the power of the press in everyone's hands. Internet-based broadcasters are taking radio and television news wherever there's network connections. Cellphones, moblogs, text-messaging are now being harnessed to reach and excite those consumers of news who would avoid privately funded news organizations.
Compare today's media environment to that of 10 years ago (in Canada, for example, just one national newspaper, now there are two!!), 20 years ago, 50 years ago, etc. and it's obvious that democracy is infinitely better served now than it was then if only because there are no longer just a dozen 'boys on the bus' that need to bought off with a bottle of bourbon to control a story. Today, for example, labour unions are arguing for free speech and the right of a reporter to refuse a byline at House of Commons hearings. That's good for democracy! Were unions fighting for those boys on the bus and their right to tell a story 50, 100 years ago? (Actually, I don't know the answer to that question – they may well have been doing just that 50 years ago)
Think of what Matt Drudge could have done to Franklin Delano Roosevelt! JFK! etc., etc.
No sirree, today's ultra-competitive Big Media, indie media, alternative media, and issues-based outlets are impossible to cajole, control and spin. And even if they are asleep at the switch, there are dozens of watchdog groups to tell us about the biggest underreported stories of the year or campaign for Fairness in Reporting. Good for them! Keep it up. It's all good for democracy.
Big Media types have also been worried that younger media consumers are turning away from the 'corporate' mass media and are apparently able to find other sources. They note that young consumers don't read newspapers or watch network news. And yet — lo and behold — young people demonstrate time and again that they are engaged by world events and reacting to them. The very fact that these other sources exist for those consumers keen to seek them out puts the lie to the claim that today's media environment is “choking” democracy.
(What's choking democracy is the refusal of young consumers to vote. You really want to do something for democracy? Forget about the media: Take a 25-year-old to the nearest polling booth. But I digress . . .)
Survey after survey confirms that the the Big Media that critics like Moyer complain about are becoming increasingly less important. Big Media, survey after survey say, has increasingly less influence.
Not only that but news consumers are historically more aware than any earlier group of news consumers about how news is made. Media criticism is now high pop art with every Tom, Dick, and Harry purporting to be be able to deconstruct the subtext of what Big Media is trying to shove at us. More university students in the U.S. got their 2002 election news from Jon Stewart than Tom Brokaw! Slate's “Today's News” is one of it's most popular newsletters. People — news consumers — can't get enough of what's going behind the curtain. And again, I'm all for it — it's terrific for democracy! Can we really say that of any other generation of news consumers?
Welll, That's my knee-jerk view/rant — but again, please: Will some academic / researcher put this claim of Big Media conspiring against the people into historical context? I'm convinced the answer will be that democracy here and in the U.S. has never been better served by the noisy, rabble rousers that populate today's mediascape.

A little humour this evening – source unknown:

Stopping the Weapons of Math Instruction

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney General John Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.
“Al-gebra is a fearsome cult,”, Ashcroft said. “They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in
search of absolute value. They use secret code names like “x” and “y” and refer to themselves as “unknowns”, but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. “As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every triangle,” Ashcroft declared.
When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes. “I am gratified that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. Murky statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence,” the President said, adding: “Under the circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make our point, and draw the line.”
President Bush warned, “These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scalene never before see unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex.”
Attorney General Ashcroft said, “As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is uncertainty of: though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks.”

The hits just keep on comin' up here in the Great White North.
The Supreme Court here will hear a landmark Internet case on Wednesday Dec. This is from my report on this today:
Canada's songwriters will ask the Supreme Court of Canada next week to force Internet service providers to pay them royalties for the millions of digital music files downloaded each year by Canadians. The case has broad ramifications for the Internet industry in Canada, legal experts say.
“This is the big case for the Internet. This will set the position on how we are going to treat Internet service providers, whether they are going to be seen as people who are responsible in some way for content that goes through their services,” said Mark Perry, a professor of law and a professor of computer science at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont.
If successful, the legal pleadings of the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) could open the door to other rights holders — groups as diverse as software publishers or Hollywood movie distributors — who could use SOCAN's precedent to force Internet service providers You can read the full version of this story and watch my TV version of the same story at CTV's site. Or you can read a shorter version of the piece at the Globe and Mail's site.
The piece is also getting kicked around on Slashdot.

The e-governance Institute at Rutgers University and a Korean university surveyed the online presence for 100 of the world's biggest cities and determined that Seoul, Korea is the model cities should emulate when it comes to providing services and information to its citizens. New York was 4th, and Toronto was 10th. But here's something: New York was the only U.S. city evaluated and Toronto was the only Canadian city evaluated. The study's authors. The authors say they “selected 98 countries with the highest percentage of Internet users, and examined the largest city in each of those countries as a surrogate for all cities in the country.” I don't know about the rest of the world, but I guarantee you when Montrealers or Vancouverites hear that Toronto is acting as a surrogate for the rest of the country, they ain't going to be happy. Seriously, though, municipal governments are usually among the most independent of any jurisdiction, particularly in Western democracies and derive their revenues from vastly different and incomparable resources. For that reason, it seems pointless to have cities stand in as surrogates for others in as artifical a division as a country. (Why not have New York stand in as the surrogate for the northeastern part of North America, including Toronto, and let San Francisco stand in for the southwest). You can read the survey results here. The researchers claim that, based on their survey, there is a digital divide and the divide is drawn, in this case, along wealthier countries and less wealthy countries. (Apparently, they needed some research to come to that seemingly obvious conclusion.) But even if that conclusion is obvious, the lousy rationale for their city selection makes it easy to poke holes in their methodolgy and, as a result, their conclusion.
[Tip to the ITU Weblog for this.

John Dvorak, PC Magazine's high-octane columnist, writes:

Blogs, or Web logs, are all the rage in some quarters. We're told that blogs will evolve into a unique source of information and are sure to become the future of journalism. Well, hardly. Two things are happening to prevent such a future: The first is wholesale abandonment of blog sites, and the second is the casual co-opting of the blog universe by Big Media.

Dan Gillmor, who would be the opposite of Dvorak when it comes to octane, wanted to respond but instead let his brother jump in.
Here's what Steve Gillmor had to say:

The dirty little secret Mr. Dvorak is ignoring is that blogs (and more profoundly, RSS) have changed the dynamics of professional journalism, not by replacing it, but informing it with the authentic voices of the creators of the technology while it's being created. This can be uncomfortable for the embedded media — witness John Markoff's reluctance to handicap blogging's survival long-term in a recent story for the New York Times.

Me? I'm with Markoff, reluctant to handicap but when asked if he has a blog replies “'Oh, I already have a blog, it's www.nytimes.com. Don't you read it?”

The Pew Internet and American Life Project (and if that isn't a pretentious name for an ongoing research project, I don't know what is) concludes that television is on the outs as an information applicance and the landline telephone is becoming less relevant as a communication tool, particularly for people in their 20s. The Internet is supplanting the TV and landline phone in its traditional roles, Pew says.
“Although only 2% of all Americans have cancelled a wireline phone since getting a cell phone, 7% of the most enthusiastic tech users have done this,” the Pew folks reports. “Another 20% have seriously considered doing so.”

There are a number of surprises in the first ever global index that ranks countries based on the ability of citizens to access information and computing technologies. The index was prepared and released by the International Telecommunications Union. Canada ranked 10th, the highest ranking among the world's developed economies. From the ITU press release:

The first global index to rank Information and Communication Technology (ICT) access has turned up some surprises. Slovenia ties France; and the Republic of Korea, usually not among the top ten in international ICT rankings, comes in fourth. Apart from Canada, ranked 10th, the top ten economies are exclusively Asian and European. The Digital Access Index (DAI) distinguishes itself from other indices by including a number of new variables, such as education and affordability. It also covers a total of 178 economies, which makes it the first truly global ICT ranking.

Scandinavia is the place to be, the ITU says, as far as access goes. Each Scandinavian country ranked among the top 10 for access: Sweden (1), Denmark (2), Iceland (3), Norway (5) and Finland (8).

BlogTalk 2.0, a European conference on blogging to be held in July 2004, has posted calls for proposals and other preliminary information about the event.