Tag Archives: control

Social Media and the Clash of Brands

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MUD day 10:

On his new blog today, UK journalist Tony Hallett considered a question raised indirectly by my Tuesday post on destination versus identity. His concern was with personal identity versus publication identity, or, if you prefer, personal versus corporate branding.

In traditional print or broadcast media, the corporate brand controls the personal brand—except in a few rare cases, writers are expected to adapt their voice to that of their venue, and publication editors make sure that happens. But as he noted, social media largely defies such control. Like it or not, social media tends to emphasize personal identity and to amplify personal voice.

This is a tricky issue for media organizations. On the one hand, they want to encourage the individual voices of their contributors. On the other, they don’t want to be eclipsed by them. It’s still true, as Hallett put it, that the corporate brand has the final say. But as traditional forms of media morph increasingly into new, more social forms, this may change. In chats, live blogging, and other types of instant publishing, there is no active editorial control, no formal restraint on the personal voice.

The conflict might be even more problematic for content marketers than for independent publishers. Traditional publishing brands have always been perceived, to a degree, as the sum of their individual voices. That’s not the case, I think, for most product and service brands. To control the corporate brand message, must the individual voice be restrained?

In any event, as the atomization of media proceeds, the individual voice will get louder. Media venues may become something more like an ever-shifting alliance of individuals than a stable and unitary identity. The tribe, perhaps, will supplant the brand.

Swabbing the Decks of the Titanic: Why You Should Learn Programming

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Image of the Titanic sinkingLast week journalism professor Matt Waite wrote a blog post worrying about the typical defeatist reaction of journalism students when faced with a coding challenge, whether in HTML, JavaScript, or other language: “I can’t do this,” they tell him. “This is impossible. I’ll never get this.” When I tweeted a link to the article, I wrote “”Journos: If you fear coding, you fear the future.”

That prompted a response from a practicing trade journalist and former colleague, who asked “I can see why knowing things like HTML and CSS can be helpful but do most journos need more than that?”

His question wasn’t one I could answer easily on Twitter, because for me, at least, there’s no clear and simple answer. Does a typical mid-career editor on a print publication today need to learn software programming? From that perspective, it’s hard to come up with a compelling argument for it, though I’ve certainly tried.

Waite’s blog post, however, wasn’t about veteran editors but about the journalists of the future. Those journalists, he says, must be able to “construct, manipulate, and advance digital distribution of content and information.” If they don’t have a positive, can-do attitude towards programming, they won’t succeed.

Does this mean that most journalists will need to be experts in one or more specific programming languages? I don’t think so. My guess is that while the ranks of programmer-journalists like Jonathan Stray, Michelle Minkoff, and Lisa Williams will continue to swell, most journalists won’t become similarly hyphenated. There will always be some degree of specialization in journalism. But in the new-media era, to be a good journalist, to master your craft, you must at the very least learn enough about programming to understand it.

As my former colleague implied, even for veteran journalists there’s a benefit to understanding code like HTML and CSS if they do any work online. There’s nothing new about needing to comprehend the means of your production in order to perfect your message.

As an analog example, consider how easily in the traditional print world you can lose control of your editorial content if you don’t understand at least the basics of what your art director and your production manager do. The decisions they make can strongly influence your content, and if you don’t know what to ask for and to explain why you’re asking, your content will suffer.

Likewise, in the digital medium, studying what’s under the hood gives you greater flexibility in presenting and distributing your content. If you work with web developers and programmers, you’ll have a better idea of what to ask for, and better chances of getting it. And if it’s just you and WordPress, you’ll be better able to customize the code yourself to get the result you want.

But there’s another reason that journalists of the future should want to get their hands dirty in code. The value of learning how to program is not just in better understanding their jobs, but also in better understanding the world they write about. As Roland Legrand puts it,

“Every year, the digital universe around us becomes deeper and more complex. Companies, governments, organizations and individuals are constantly putting more data online: Text, videos, audio files, animations, statistics, news reports, chatter on social networks. . . . Can professional communicators such as journalists really do their job without learning how the digital world works?”

This trend toward digitization in all human endeavors has given rise to another journalistic specialty, computer-assisted reporting or data journalism. Though it may never account for the bulk of what most journalists do, knowing how to extract, manipulate, and present data will be an increasingly valuable skill. Even today, it’s possible that you’re sitting on a rich lode of data that, if you just knew a little programming, you could help mine.

If you are well advanced in your career as a journalist, maybe you don’t need to learn anything about programming. You’re set, right? But that’s probably what the crew thought as they swabbed the decks and polished the brightwork of the Titanic.

Why not play it safe? Your job as a journalist may not require you to have any familiarity with programming today. But one day, perhaps sooner than you think, it will. Why not prepare yourself by finding out more about data journalism,  by learning some programming basics at as site like Codecademy, or by joining a cross-disciplinary group like Hacks/Hackers?

As I’ve noted recently on this blog, some journalists are worried that their role will one day be eclipsed by software. If you don’t want to become an algorithm’s slave, you have only one choice. You must become its master.

The Perils of Corporate-Personal Twitter Names

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In a post today on The Wall, Tom Callow addressed the tricky question of ownership of journalists’ Twitter accounts. If employees use a Twitter ID that combines their names with those of their employers’ brands, whose account is it? The issue is more complicated than you might think, and isn’t likely to be resolved anytime soon.  Until journalists and their employers alike see Twitter and other social media accounts as equivalent in importance to other brand channels and manage them accordingly, the friction will only increase.Laura Kuennsberg on Twitter

What prompted Callow’s post was the news last month that the BBC’s departing chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg, soon to join BBC’s rival ITV, has renamed her Twitter account from “@BBCLauraK” to “@ITVLauraK.” Along with its reporter, the BBC has now lost her 60,000 Twitter followers as well.

As Callow noted in a previous and prescient post on ownership of Twitter names, there are essentially three account-naming options for someone who tweets in connection with an employer:

  1. Tweet under a corporate name, like @comcastcares.
  2. Tweet under a personal name, like @johnbethune.
  3. Tweet under a hybrid name that combines personal and corporate brands, like @BBCLauraK.

There’s little controversy about the first option—it’s obviously a corporate brand that no sensible individual would claim. The second might seem so clearly personal that, as Callow says, “there is no way a brand could seek to claim ownership of such a profile.”

The third option—both personal and corporate—may turn out to be a rich field for litigation. If ownership isn’t specified by contract, can either employer or employee say with authority who owns the Twitter handle? Or who, more specifically, owns the right to its followers? Kuenssberg clearly believes she does. By changing the name of the account, she may not be claiming ownership of the hybrid name, but her assumption appears to be that she owns the account. Callow, however, thinks the BBC has a “decent ownership claim” to it. To judge from the fascinating variety of comments on his post, there is little consensus either way. (And the BBC itself, so far as I can determine, has raised no objections.)

In her coverage of the matter last month, The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss rightly remarked that “setting up an account that blends professional and personal is a risky move.” But blending the professional and personal is exactly what social media is all about. If a brand wants to remain relevant, and its editors want to have successful careers, both sides will have to come to terms with that risk and learn to manage it.

The first step might be to think of a Twitter account not as a marketing tool or some supplementary appendage to a publication, but as a separate channel for the brand in the same way a magazine is. Now suppose that a publisher named a magazine after one of its editors—the John Bethune magazine, say. I can guarantee you that the editor, in this case at least, would negotiate a detailed agreement on the use of and the rights to his name. I’m certain Readers Digest and Rachael Ray did just that when launching Every Day with Rachael Ray (thanks to @Glenn1126 for the real-life example).

A Twitter account should be treated the same way. While extensive contract negotiations over a hybrid Twitter name would be overkill, both editor and employer should come to a clear agreement about who owns what rights. A smart employer will not claim all of them. Without some ownership, an employee won’t be inclined to put heart and soul into it. By the same token, a wise employee will understand that part of the appeal of a hybrid identity comes from the employer’s brand, and that the employer should have meaningful rights as well.

That’s one less-than-elegant solution. A better one, I think, is this: don’t use hybrid Twitter names. Like a magazine, a Twitter account needs a clear and unambiguous identity. Brands that want total control can use functional names like @BBCPoliticalCorr, as one of Callow’s commenters suggested. Brands that want the greatest value from Twitter accounts will give up control and encourage the use of personal accounts. Trying to have it both ways is a sure way of getting neither.

Rethinking the Article as the Basic Unit of Journalism

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A spate of recent blog posts have, independently it seems, questioned the traditional preeminence of the article as the basic unit of journalism.

The first of these, chronologically, is a liveblogged review by Adam Tinworth of a News:Rewired conference session on liveblogging. In it, Tinworth summarizes a point made by presenter Matt Wells of the Guardian:

Matt thinks that liveblogs are one of the best ways of covering stories that don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. The inverse pyramid story may be the single biggest reason that journalists are mistrusted. It encourages sensationalism.

A day later, Jeff Jarvis cited a number of examples of real-time news coverage that are leading him, as he put it, to

think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process.

Then Monday Jenn Webb interviewed Cheezburger’s Ben Huh about his recently announced project to revitalize news coverage. Her final question focused on the article:

Do you think the “article,” as a form, needs to be reinvented?

Ben Huh: I think it should be augmented and, in some cases, tossed out entirely.

While Jarvis stays neutral on the value of the article form (despite Matthew Ingram’s reaction that he doesn’t), Wells, as channeled by Tinworth, sees it as a potentially misleading one. By forcing a “clear beginning, middle and end” on a set of events, Wells suggests, the meaning of those events may be exaggerated or otherwise distorted.

I don’t think that articles always mold a narrative structure onto events, but we generally expect them to do so. And it’s certainly the nature of any narrative to impose meaning on formlessness. That’s why we like narratives and use them so often.

But liveblogging, tweeting, and other real-time modes of expression don’t really abandon narrative. Rather, they give greater control to someone other than the writer or assembler in the process of creating the story. Those co-creators include the various people whose statements and data are being aggregated as well as the reader trying to make sense of it all.

As Jarvis strives to make clear, the rise of real-time formats doesn’t eliminate the article as an important mode of presentation. But it does suggest that other forms of expression or units of information are gaining power and prominence in journalism.

I’ve argued elsewhere recently that freelance writers should stop thinking of the word as their primary unit of value. In the same way, journalists in general may want to stop thinking of the article as their basic unit of output. That’s not to not say that freelancers should stop using words, or that journalists should stop producing articles. Those items are still essential to the craft. But they are not the only or necessarily the best way to help people understand the world. If journalists aren’t open to real-time formats like liveblogging and Twitter, they are failing both themselves and their audience.

 

The Decline of the Single Editorial Voice

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Later today, Keith Olbermann will make a statement on Twitter about, presumably, the circumstances of his departure from MSNBC.  Though that’s a small thing in itself, says ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, it’s a reflection of a huge shift in media.

After citing other examples of how social media allows individual voices to flourish outside of traditional mass-media outlets, Kirkpatrick writes that

“None of these are huge news in and of themselves, but together they paint a picture of dramatic change. Change away from a past where huge audiences sat passively and consumed a small quantity of time-restricted, highly-produced streams of content, delivered through a limited number of distribution channels that were secured by conglomerates at great cost. The days in which there was just one media game in town are fading fast, pushed into history one Tweet at a time.”

In a way that was inconceivable 20 years ago, social media technologies have empowered individual voices to compete for attention at the same level as  the old mass-media channels.  In fact, those channels themselves are gradually being transformed by social media from single, unified wholes into a bundle of constantly shifting and realigning voices.

For traditional media, which still expect control, this trend is difficult to accept. The discussion last week about which department within a publishing company should “control” social media indicates how much rethinking remains to be done.

In some ways, bundling voices is not a new idea for magazines. As the word itself suggests, a magazine is a kind of container for a variety of things. But for successful magazines, there has always always been a creative tension between this inherent diversity and a need to impose on it some form of unity. Through editorial control, the best magazines found a way to blend their many constituent parts into a single, distinct voice.

But as individual voices gain the power through social media to be heard on their own, the concept of editorial control and a single editorial voice has to change. There will still be channels made up of many voices, but identity will come increasingly less from an editor and more from collaboration and common interest. The individuals whose voices make up channels will leave and rejoin more frequently, and the identity of those channels will evolve more rapidly.

Though we don’t know the full story yet, it seems likely that Olbermann’s departure from MSNBC is part of an identity crisis. Like CNN with Rick Sanchez and NPR with Juan Williams before it, MSNBC let go a prominent voice because it didn’t reflect the identity management wanted for the channel.  But somehow these efforts to build identity seem only to have diminished it.

Perhaps, in the new-media world, fighting to maintain control over identity is a loser’s strategy. Success will more likely come not from stifling individual voices, but from providing a platform and environment where they will flourish.