I have nothing particularly insightful or original to add in the case against Internet censorship represented by the bills up before congress, SOPA and PIPA, but not to say something today would be too miserable an omission to live with. So when I found in my e-mail this morning an invitation from this site’s host, Siteground (an excellent provider, by the way, if you’re in search of one), to speak out on the subject, how could I refuse?

Now, if you have no clue what SOPA and PIPA are or why you should care, I suggest you take a close look at Mike Masnick’s recently updated analysis, “Why SOPA & PIPA Are A Bad Idea, Dangerous & Unnecessary.” For many more links, you can visit the one unblacked-out page on Wikipedia today (found through Rex Hammock’s likewise blacked-out site.)

No related posts.

Today I’m both pleased and relieved to announce the publication of my first e-book, the New-Media Survival Guide. (If you just can’t wait to buy a copy at the bargain price of $2.99, click here now. Not that impulsive? Then you might want to read more about it here.)

My goal in writing this e-book was to give people trained in traditional media—journalists in particular, but also people from public relations, marketing, and other areas—an easy-to-read, practical, and concise introduction to the new-media revolution. If it’s successful, readers will understand that the ways of new media are not be be feared, but to be welcomed.

If you’re skeptical or concerned about new media but want to understand it better, this is a great starting point for you. And if you’re a social-media maven, you may not need this book, but you probably know someone who does. Here are a few reasons why you may want to read or recommend it.

• It can be read in one sitting.
• Though it’s short, it provides numerous sources for further reading.
• To my knowledge, there’s nothing else quite like it (or if there is, please note it in the comments—this is an equal-opportunity blog!).
• For the moment, at least, it’s very up to date.

In coming days, I’ll be reflecting on the process of writing and self-publishing an e-book and why I recommend it. In the meantime, I hope you’ll learn more about the New-Media Survival Guide and let me know what you think of it.

Related posts:

1. Managing Your Career in the Social Media Era: Sources
2. Dialogue vs. Monologue: Six New-Media Principles, No. 1
3. Collaboration vs. Control: Six New-Media Principles, No. 2

Adam Tinworth

If I were asked to name one active blogger that every B2B journalist should follow, I would probably suggest Adam Tinworth. For more than eight years, the British trade press editor has blogged about journalism, social media, and much more on One Man and His Blog. His insights there are based on a combination of his ongoing and enthusiastic experimentation with new-media platforms and his practical experience as an editor and blog evangelist for the UK branch of Reed Business Information (RBI).

Though he frequently attends and covers new-media events like Le Web, which he’s liveblogging about this week, Tinworth is no armchair pundit. What makes his blog so compelling is the fact that he is, in many respects, a typical working journalist sharing his experiences in the exciting but often confusing and disruptive world of new media.

As he mentions in the following interview, conducted by e-mail over the weekend, Tinworth has a new career disruption to deal with. He learned last week that he will “most likely” be leaving RBI as part of a staff reduction. Though no doubt disconcerting, it is the kind of change that will surely lead to rewarding new experiences both for him and his readers.

What was the pivotal moment that shaped how you view the post-print era?

The single most important moment happened in late 2001, when I first encountered a site called Livejournal. I was freelancing for an American games company to top up my rather meager journalistic income from my full-time job, and some people I was collaborating with on a project invited me to join the early blog/journaling site. I remember typing my first post, pressing publish, and seeing my words right there on the web, with the ability for people to leave comments underneath. This was not only easier than our publishing CMS at work (where the same process would have taken hours, not seconds) but more functional—because there were comments, something most content management systems still lack.

It was a life transforming moment—I’d been involved with online communities for four or five years at this point, but they’d seemed “other”—completely detached from what I did in my day job. And now anyone with access to the internet had more powerful publishing tools than I had in work. This would change everything—the speed of the news cycles, the nature of our competitors, how news was delivered. It was a moment that defined the next decade of my working life.

Indeed, if I have any regret as I leave RBI, it’s that the average WordPress user still has more publishing power at their fingertips than the average journalist within one of our teams.

In the past decade, what in your mind were the most important new-media issues?

I still think that the most important issue is acknowledging and enjoying that you’re publishing into a more crowded, noisy, dynamic, and swashbuckling public sphere than ever before. We used to call it “blogging,” but it’s become a bit more complex than that now. The world has changed and  seeing people clinging defiantly to journalistic structures that were products of the print process—the inverted pyramid news story, and the 1000 word plus feature—as the only methods of journalistic expression is a melancholy call-back to King Canute.

The forms of journalism I find most exciting these days are those that are done in cooperation with their audience. Jon Ostrower mixing his own passion for the latest news in aircraft development with the knowledge, skill and research of his readers, for example. Or Tony Collins hitting the point where he had more leads from his blog readers than he had time to follow up. That’s journalism done in recognition that we no longer have exclusive access to the tools of publication. Instead, what we have is time and skills, to find out stuff that wouldn’t otherwise come to light, and to become a unique voice of investigation and research amongst the experts and enthusiasts publishing on any topic.

Pretty much everything I’ve done in the last decade has been exploring that idea in some sense or another. We’ve invented the single most efficient and accessible information distribution system mankind has ever come up with. It was bound to transform every information business—and journalism is an information business—utterly.

What do you think are the most pressing new-media issues facing journalists today?

Business models is, sadly, the obvious one. The old “journalism is a great way to sell advertising” model is in pieces online, and there still aren’t enough experiments that result in hard data about what journalism is actually good at achieving that makes money. I think RBI’s “funnel” model, which brings readers through social media, free-to-air news, registration-dependent services, and paid-for service is a good one that seems to work, but even there there’s plenty of work left to do to figure out what types of journalism (and content) most reliably support the underlying business model.

I have a habit of being disparaging about “serving some Platonic ideal of journalism.” Journalism has almost always been a commercial pursuit, and the trick has always been in balancing commercial imperative with journalistic ethics. Both sides of those equations are vital, and you need to find a way to balance them. The whole phone-hacking scandal is an example of the balance going wrong one way; every noble journalism endeavor that goes bust is the other.

The second issue is the competition for attention. I know precious few journalists still who have really got their head around this concept. They still create arbitrary lines in their heads between professional journalism and the rest of the content on the web, and don’t really think of the mass of blogs, forums, social networks, video and other forms of content as competition. But it is. And often, it’s winning the battle for attention.

The third is probably the need to accept we’re in a period of continuous change. This isn’t like the shift from hot metal to desktop publishing, where there were stable “before” and “after” states, but, instead, a world of information exchange where the rules, mechanism, and tools of publishing develop month by month. The rapid growth of mobile in the last 18 months to two years is just the latest example of that, and I think we can all name publishers who are ahead of—and others who are well behind—the curve.

In the early days of OM&HB you wrote “readership in itself is not something that I’m over concerned with. This blog is for me, not for you gentle reader.” Has that view of your blog changed? How?

Yes and no. It’s still my playground—where I experiment in public. And that experimentation and learning is more important to me than building a huge audience. But for the last five years I’ve been conscious of how important it is in communicating with my RBI colleagues, and I’ve often used it quite deliberately as a tool to stir up conversations within the business.

And also, with an eye to the future, I’ve been aware that it’s become a major source of my reputation outside the company. The sort of work I’ve done isn’t obvious to the outside world. You see the reaction, not necessarily the catalyst. And I enjoy thinking in public, and getting my peers and contemporaries to join in a conversation and refine those ideas.

Given recent events, it’s going to be one of my strongest marketing tools as I figure out what’s next for my career after my stint in RBI—and that’s a conversation I’ll probably end up having in public, too.

I wish I still used phrases like “gentle reader,” though.

Adam Tinworth is one of eight new-media thought leaders profiled in the forthcoming e-book, the New-Media Survival Guide. More of my interview with him will be has been published soon on the ASBPE National Blog.

Related posts:

1. Rethinking the Article as the Basic Unit of Journalism
2. Journalism, Aggregation, and Doing Things with Words
3. Can You Have Entrepreneurial Journalism without Entrepreneurs?

Yup, just like me.

After taking a day off from blogging yesterday—which seemed wrong, so very wrong—I felt the need to make a statement of some kind about my blogging plans. I just wasn’t sure what they were.

The feeling reminds me of one of my favorite movie moments, from the end of The Candidate. Having won election to the U. S. Senate, against all odds and only by contravening his most deeply held principles, Robert Redford looks at his campaign advisor in bewilderment and asks, “What do we do now?”

Less dramatically, and, I hope, in an ethically unblemished context, I found myself yesterday asking a similar question: What next?

In an idle moment, I considered several possible new objectives:

1. Try to work a reference to fellow 1970′s-movies-alluder Rex Hammock into every post I write, thereby ensuring it gets at least one reader beyond my family members—assuming he meant what he said.
2. Impress everyone with my keen insights into the state of new media today by secretly rewriting old blog posts by Paul Conley, substituting trendy terms for outdated ones, such as Twitter for AIM and Tumblr for MySpace. (But then I realized that I sort of already do that.)
3. See if I can once again piss off Brian Clark with a mild, well-intentioned criticism of his excellent blog.

But while mulling over these tempting possibilities, I remembered something I was taught long ago by an English instructor at USC, Ken Hasegawa. To explain in whatever we were reading the surprisingly unexciting effects of a momentous epiphany on a character, he told us a Zen story: A student asks his master, “Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. What do I do after?” The master replies, “Chop wood and carry water.”

Although I haven’t achieved enlightenment by simply writing blog posts for 30 consecutive days, I think the advice applies. I’ll keep doing what I’ve done all along on this blog: covering with an analytical eye the intersection of new media with B2B publishing and communications.

Related posts:

1. Thanks to Social Media, I No Longer Mistake Terrorists for Water Dispensers

The downside, of course, is that the process is messy and prone to mistakes. Behind every fact-checked and edited story is a tale of false leads, dead ends, and empty promises. Letting their audience in on that ugly and wayward process seems unwise to many traditional journalists.

But the benefits of journalism as a process ultimately outweigh the drawbacks. By turning the process itself into the product, formerly behind-the-scenes editorial judgments can be discussed and validated, news and other information can be shared more rapidly, and inevitable errors can be more quickly identified and corrected.

The controversial aspects of putting process ahead of product are obvious even in older forms of online media such as blogs. But they are far more dramatic in real-time formats such as live-blogging or Twitter. Traditionalists might contend that such real-time publishing leads to a fragmentary and confusing picture. But to new-media proponents, it is a truer picture than that painted by a traditional journalistic product like the self-contained and superficially coherent news article. Rather than imposing a neat narrative structure on events, real-time journalism acknowledges that the information is as yet fragmentary and its meaning still unresolved.

As Jeff Jarvis puts it, changes in the nature of media create effective new ways to communicate: “No longer do the means of production and distribution of media necessitate boxing the world into neat, squared-off spaces published once a day and well after the fact. Freed of print’s strictures, we are finding many new and sometimes better ways to gather and share information.”

The process is not pretty. But hiding it benefits no one. Only by sharing the process as widely as possible can we reach the closest approximation of the truth.

Related posts:

1. Six New-Media Principles: Introduction
2. Dialogue vs. Monologue: Six New-Media Principles, No. 1
3. Transparent vs. Opaque: Six New-Media Principles, No. 5

One of the ways new media encourages transparency is ethical, as represented by the popular expression, “transparency is the new objectivity.” One of the more recent considerations of the phrase came from Mathew Ingram last month. Traditional news organizations have wanted individual journalists to hide their subjective feelings and inclinations behind a veil of objectivity. As Ingram argues, this is an increasingly untenable stance in the new-media era. The only ethical strategy for journalists now is to be open about their biases and conflicts of interest, and to let readers judge their reliability as reporters for themselves.

Another mode of transparency is operational. Transparency doesn’t stop with individuals. To be seen as reliable, organizations themselves must practice media transparency in many, if not all, aspects of their operations. By showing how their process works—through methods such as sharing internal policy documents with readers, explaining how news subjects are selected and prioritized, or live-streaming editorial meetings—media producers will give their audience reason to trust them.

To work, transparency must be a committed, conscious choice. But it’s something of a Hobson’s choice. In the new-media era, there’s no long-term alternative to transparency.

Related posts:

1. Dialogue vs. Monologue: Six New-Media Principles, No. 1
2. Six New-Media Principles: Introduction
3. Personal vs. Corporate: Six New-Media Principles, No. 3

Another example of closed and open digital systems comes from software. Proprietary software programs, like Microsoft Windows, are closed. Their source code is hidden and cannot be legally modified. Open-source software like Linux, by contrast, exposes its source code to the world, and not only allows modification by volunteers, but is built on such voluntary involvement.

From the user’s perspective, closed systems are generally expensive to buy and to implement while open ones are free and can cost less to put in place. In theory, closed, custom-built systems can more directly address the needs of the users who pay for the service. Open systems may be more difficult to adapt to individual use, but allow for interoperability with other systems.

This distinction between open and closed is useful to understanding and participating in new media. In general, old media prefers closed systems, allowing entry to some but excluding others, whether through paid or controlled subscriptions, copyright, or professional restrictions on content creation.

For legacy corporations, acceptance of openness is difficult. But given that, as discussed in yesterday’s post, new media favors the personal, individuals should find the transition easier. In fact, individual journalists stand to gain much more from open systems than do their employers.

Learning an open-source CMS like WordPress or Joomla, for instance, is more likely to benefit individual content creators as they change jobs than would a proprietary or custom-built system. Similarly, while restrictive paywalls may increase revenues for some publications, editors will often find more value to their reputations and careers in having their content accessible to all.

Media businesses may fear open systems, but individual journalists shouldn’t. Openness is their future.

Related posts:

1. Six New-Media Principles: Introduction
2. Dialogue vs. Monologue: Six New-Media Principles, No. 1
3. Personal vs. Corporate: Six New-Media Principles, No. 3

Formerly, most journalists were, to readers, little more than a name on a page. But in the social media world, they have an increasingly personal and direct connection to their readers. In the terms of commerce, journalists are becoming brands, potentially the equal of their employer’s corporate brand.

Having a personal, conversational relationship with an audience inevitably means having a distinctive voice and point of view. To traditionally trained journalists, this may seem not simply unfamiliar, but unprofessional. Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook’s journalism program manager, puts it this way:

“As journalists, we often squirm at phrases like ‘personal branding.’ But the reality is that social media, and the social Web in general, have created a shift from the institutional news brand to journalists’ personal brands . . . [and] a consumption environment that encourages conversation as much as content, and the personal as much as the professional. It’s a shift from the logo to the face.”

As all forms of media become more personal, the bonds that link media professional to corporate employer become weaker. At the same time, the connections to social networks grow stronger. For journalists the implications of this trend are simple: embrace social networking, or say goodbye to your career.

Related posts:

1. The Perils of Corporate-Personal Twitter Names
2. Six New-Media Principles: Introduction
3. Collaboration vs. Control: Six New-Media Principles, No. 2

But for traditional journalists and marketers alike, the notion of giving up editorial control can be challenging. Many print veterans, for instance, have difficulty accepting the idea that good editorial content can be provided by readers volunteering their work. As one prominent B2B publisher put it earlier this year,  “people who write for free will give you exactly what you pay for in the long run.” (Ironically, he made this statement in a presentation he was giving for free.)

Behind this perspective is a bias to professionalism. In this view, journalism is a complex product that can only be produced by trained career journalists who are paid for their work. It’s their job to write, the readers’ to read, and the advertisers’ to pay for it all.

But in the social media era, roles and responsibilities are not so clear-cut. When journalism’s role is seen as enabling conversation in a community, the journalist’s voice is no longer privileged. Others may speak with as much or more authority and insight, and without needing payment to do so.

The print veteran’s tendency to discount contributions from users is amplified by the form of those contributions. In keeping with the nature of online media, they tend to be decidedly unprofessional: incomplete, unpolished, and personal—in other words, conversational.

To survive in the new-media era, journalists must not simply accept user-generated content, but enable it; they must aim to collaborate in the conversation, not to control it.

Tomorrow: The personal vs. the corporate.

Related posts:

1. Dialogue vs. Monologue: Six New-Media Principles, No. 1
2. Six New-Media Principles: Introduction
3. Publishers and the iPad: No Future in Control

Doc Searls and David Weinberger: "Markets are conversations"

In 1999, when Doc Searls and David Weinberger wrote in The Cluetrain Manifesto that “markets are conversations,” it was a fresh, radically new idea. Today, for anyone who’s thought much about social media, it verges dangerously on being trite. But however obvious the idea may seem, it remains a powerful, foundational concept for new media. We ignore it at our peril.

Searls and Weinberger were addressing their comments above all to public relations and marketing people. In the beginning of their chapter, in fact, they point to magazines as a “form of market conversation.” But the publishing industry’s advantage is only relative; it too has tended either to ignore or to dominate the conversation.

Before the Internet, journalism was largely a one-way form of communication. Publishers talked to their readers, but few readers could talk back, and in only limited ways. Digital technologies have dramatically changed the balance. Now, readers can easily and immediately comment on stories by commenting on blogs. What’s more, they can now be publishers themselves, whether through their own blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or other forms of social media. Not only can they talk back to publications, but they can also compete against those publications by talking to other readers directly.

This change means that traditional distinctions between the journalist, the reader, and the news source are breaking down.  Journalists can no longer rely on the idea of professionalism as separating them in a meaningful way from “amateur” bloggers and other kinds of citizen journalists. Now, as Storyful’s David Clinch told Mashable, “journalists must be able to pivot quickly between the idea of using the community as a source of news and as the audience for news, because they are both.”

As a result, the nature of journalistic discourse is transforming. It is no longer a one-way speech, but a two-way exchange. The journalist’s role is no longer to dominate or control the conversation, but to participate in the conversation, support it, and help a variety of other voices to be heard.

(SImilarly, the publisher’s role is no longer to dominate or control the journalist. Despite the ongoing efforts of organizations like the Associated Press to control when and how their employees speak, journalists now have the same power as everyone else to speak directly to their audience.)

As I say, all this is old hat for anyone even slightly familiar with new media. But that’s the challenge. We tend to forget that a conversation is not simply one person talking, then the other. For any participant in a communication, the most important elements are first, truly listening to what others say, and then meaningfully responding to them. As their use of a social-media platform like Twitter shows, even today journalists tend to think of their primary media role as talking. But true dialogue demands an equal emphasis on those other conversational skills: listening and responding.

Tomorrow: Collaboration vs. control.

Related posts:

1. Six New-Media Principles: Introduction
2. Social Media and the Decline of Editing
3. Be Yourself. Just Not Your Real Self: Scripps’ Muddled Social Media Policy