Globe and Mail - Internet advertising is expected to grow faster in Canada than anywhere else in the world over the next five years, however countries in Asia and Latin America will begin quickly closing that gap soon after, a report suggests.
The annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook published by the consulting and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP predicts spending on Internet advertising in Canada will reach $2.03b (U.S.) by 2011.
That represents a compound annual growth rate of 23.5%. It is well ahead of the global rate of 13.4% and higher than in the United States, where Internet advertising revenue is forecast to grow 16.1% during that time.
Canadian ad spending online is being driven by the high percentage of broadband Internet users in Canada, which is higher than in most other parts of the world. Meanwhile, online advertising markets in Canada are not yet as saturated as in the United States.
"We have had higher broadband penetration rates than other countries around the world ... and we're now seeing a bigger shift in advertising revenue," said Tracey Jennings, leader of the entertainment and media practice for PwC in Canada.
Looking beyond 2011, however, countries like India and China are expected to make up a lot of ground on North America in terms of growth, Jennings said.
"What you're going to see over the next five years is the other countries' penetration rates are going to grow quite significantly. It just means we're kind of at the head of the curve."
The report predicts advertising trends between 2007 and 2011. It is watched closely by the broadcasting, print and online sectors each year as a gauge of global ad spending trends.
Over all, Canada's entertainment and media market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 5.6% over the next five years, hitting 46.8b in spending by 2011, an increase from $35.7b last year.
While Internet advertising will grow fastest, other industries will continue to expand. Radio and out-of-home advertising, such as billboards, will see revenue increase at a compound rate of 11.7% during that time, to $2.8b in 2011.
Ad spending on TV networks and cable channels in Canada is expected to increase to $4.6b, at a rate of 4.5%.
Print media will see slower rates of growth, with ad spending on magazines expanding at a compound annual rate of 1.8% to $1.5b. The newspaper industry will see compound annual growth of 1% in that time, to $3.2b.
Online ad spending to grow fastest in Canada in next 5 years
User-gen content's ad revenue to surge 4 times in 4 years: report
eMarketer - The days of giant media conglomerates controlling the creation, distribution and monetization of content are fading. An explosion of user-generated content is reshaping the media landscape, shattering the status quo and creating new opportunities for marketers. The User-Generated Content report analyzes the fast-changing new world of content ownership and distribution, where for the first time everyday people determine exactly what is created and consumed—not marketers or publishers. Led by the companies that started the revolution—YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket and others—eMarketer estimates that US user-generated content sites will earn $4.3 billion in ad revenues in 2011, up from $1 billion in 2007. 
CBCNews Partners with Technorati Bloggers
CBCNews.ca reports it is the world’s first broadcaster website to partner with leading blog and social media search engine Technorati.com.
Technorati currently tracks over 86 million blogs. In a new level of interactivity, CBCNews.ca stories now include direct links to blogs around Canada and the globe that are discussing the news. It is designed, the CBC says, to give Canadians more ways to access comprehensive news coverage of local, national and international stories.
As part of its continuous commitment to enhancing the web experience for users, the new service can be found at http://cbcnews.ca/blogwatch
The announcement comes on the heels of CBC's interactive experiment, carried out through one of Canada’s most popular social networking websites, called The Great Canadian Wishlist, where Canadians are encouraged to share their wish for the nation. CBC News also has its own “wishlist” web page at www.cbc.ca/wish, where visitors can follow the discussions through the CBC blog.
CBCNews.ca also reports launching several new features recently, including: an embedded media player highlighting CBC News audio and video; a much greater emphasis on interactive features; compilations of the most popular news stories, from the most viewed to the most blogged; wider pages allowing for more content; prominent placement showcasing original online feature stories (in-depths, columns and photo galleries) and additional on-air highlights and podcasts.
Online sales lose steam
NYT - Has online retailing entered the Dot Calm era?
Since the inception of the Web, online commerce has enjoyed hypergrowth, with annual sales increasing more than 25 percent over all, and far more rapidly in many categories. But in the last year, growth has slowed sharply in major sectors like books, tickets and office supplies.
Growth in online sales has also dropped dramatically in diverse categories like health and beauty products, computer peripherals and pet supplies. Analysts say it is a turning point and growth will continue to slow through the decade.
The reaction to the trend is apparent at Dell, which many had regarded as having mastered the science of selling computers online, but is now putting its PCs in Wal-Mart stores. Expedia has almost tripled the number of travel ticketing kiosks it puts in hotel lobbies and other places that attract tourists.
The slowdown is a result of several forces. Sales on the Internet are expected to reach $116 billion this year, or 5 percent of all retail sales, making it harder to maintain the same high growth rates. At the same time, consumers seem to be experiencing Internet fatigue and are changing their buying habits.
John Johnson, 53, who sells medical products to drug stores and lives in San Francisco, finds that retailers have livened up their stores to be more alluring.
“They’re working a lot harder,” he said as he shopped at Book Passage in downtown San Francisco. “They’re not as stuffy. The lighting is better. You don’t get someone behind the counter who’s been there 40 years. They’re younger and hipper and much more with it.”
He and his wife, Liz Hauer, 51, a Macy’s executive, also shop online, but mostly for gifts or items that need to be shipped. They said they found that the experience could be tedious at times. “Online, it’s much more of a task,” she said. Still, Internet commerce is growing at a pace that traditional merchants would envy. But online sales are not growing as fast as they were even 18 months ago.
Forrester Research, a market research company, projects that online book sales will rise 11 percent this year, compared with nearly 40 percent last year. Apparel sales, which increased 61 percent last year, are expected to slow to 21 percent. And sales of pet supplies are on pace to rise 30 percent this year after climbing 81 percent last year.
Growth rates for online sales are slowing down in numerous other segments as well, including appliances, sporting goods, auto parts, computer peripherals, and even music and videos. Forrester says that sales growth is pulling back in 18 of the 24 categories it measures.
Jupiter Research, another market research firm, says the growth rate has peaked. It projects that overall online sales growth will slow to 9 percent a year by the end of the decade from as much as 25 percent in 2004.
Early financial results from e-commerce companies bear out the trend. EBay reported that revenue from Web site sales increased by just 1 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year. Bookings from Expedia’s North American Web sites rose by only 1 percent in the first quarter of this year. And Dell said that revenue in the Americas — United States, Canada and Latin America — for the three months ended May 4 was $8.9 billion, or nearly unchanged from the same period last year.
“There’s a recognition that some customers like a more interactive experience,” said Alex Gruzen, senior vice president for consumer products at Dell. “They like shopping and they want to go retail.”
The turning point comes as most adult Americans, and many of their children, are already shopping online.
Analysts project that by 2011, online sales will account for nearly 7 percent of overall retail sales, though categories like computer hardware and software generate more than 40 percent of their sales on the Internet.
There are other factors at work as well, including a push by companies like Apple, Starbucks and the big shopping malls to make the in-store experience more compelling.
Nancy F. Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies retailing and consumer habits, said that the leveling off of e-commerce reflected the practical and psychological limitations of shopping online. She said that as physical stores have made the in-person buying experience more pleasurable, online stores have continued to give shoppers a blasé experience. In addition, online shopping, because it involves a computer, feels like work.
“It’s not like you go onto Amazon and think: ‘I’m a little depressed. I’ll go onto this site and get transported,’ ” she said, noting that online shopping is more a chore than an escape.
But Ms. Koehn and others say that online shopping is running into practical problems, too. For one, Ms. Koehn noted, online sellers have been steadily raising their shipping fees to bolster profits or make up for their low prices.
In response, a so-called clicks-and-bricks hybrid model is emerging, said Dan Whaley, the founder of GetThere, which became one of the largest Internet travel businesses after it was acquired by Sabre Holdings.
The bookseller Borders, for example, recently revamped its Web site to allow users to reserve books online and pick them up in the store. Similar services were started by companies like Best Buy and Sears. Other retailers are working to follow suit.
“You don’t realize how powerful of a phenomenon this new strategy has become,” Mr. Whaley said. “Nearly every big box retailer is opening it up.”
Barnes & Noble recently upgraded its site to include online book clubs, reader forums and interviews with authors. The company hopes the changes will make the online world feel more like the offline one, said Marie J. Toulantis, the chief executive of BarnesandNoble.com. “We emulate the in-store experience by having a book club online,” she said.
The retailers that have started in-store pickup programs, like Sears and REI, have found that customers who choose the hybrid model are more likely to buy additional products when they pick up their items, said Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
Consumers are generally not committed to one form of buying over the other. Maggie Hake, 21, a recent college graduate heading to Africa in the fall to join the Peace Corps, said that when she needs to buy something for her Macintosh computer, she prefers visiting a store. “I trust it more,” she said. “I want to be sure there’s a person there if something goes wrong.”
Ms. Hake, who lives in Kentfield, Calif., just north of San Francisco, does like shopping online for certain things, particularly shoes, which are hard to find in her size. “I’ve got big feet — size 12.5 in women’s,” she said. “I also buy textbooks online. They’re cheaper.”
John Morgan, an economics professor from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said he expected online commerce to continue to increase, partly because it remains less than 1 percent of the overall economy. “There’s still a lot of head room for people to grow,” he said.
Title tags, image filenames, headline tags affect Google rank: study
The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.
Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?
Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.
- Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.
- Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don't seem to have an effect.
- Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.
- Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.
- Keywords in the file path don't seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.
- The file size doesn't seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.
- It's no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.
Can you use that information to get high rankings for your own website?
While general advice can help you to get higher rankings, it is much better to get detailed advice specifically for your website and your keywords.
It might be that your keywords trigger slightly different ranking filters at Google and that the algorithms have been changed since Sistrix performed the study.
Keywords: speak your audience's language
Clickz By Fredrick Marckini January 24, 2005 - It's amazing how many marketers fixate on their site's HTML, believing that's where solutions to their search engine marketing (SEM) challenges are found. But they're looking inward when they need to be looking outward.
At a recent industry conference, I provided SEM assessments for Web sites belonging to audience volunteers. Participants invited me to review the sites in front of the other conference attendees and offer suggestions about how to initiate, or improve, their SEM campaigns.
Every brave volunteer's natural inclination was to immediately dig into their sites. That was the last place I wanted to look. It's as though marketers think their Web sites are the focus of their SEM campaigns. They're not. The audience is.
Many marketers worry about how they can attain top ranking without first understanding how their audience searches and where in search results they click. Consider these actual assessments I performed for the audience.
Home Healthcare Monitoring
One volunteer's company offers a system that remotely monitors certain medical conditions, allowing patients who would otherwise be in the hospital to rest comfortably at home. I asked the marketer to name the most important keyword her SEM campaign should target. The reply: "Home healthcare monitoring."
First, I searched for that phrase on the home page. Nothing. Clearly, this highlights a huge challenge.
Next, I used Overture's Keyword Selector Tool. This tool determines how many searches were performed on a keyword in the previous month. I input "home healthcare monitoring." Overture reported not one single search was performed on that term in the previous 30 days -- an even bigger challenge.
"Home healthcare monitoring" is an industry term. Sellers of these sorts of solutions use it to describe what they sell. As is too often the case, it's not how the audience describes it.
Users think about these services in terms of "medical alert," "alarms," and "systems." That the devices are installed in the home apparently isn't as important to them; they're interested in the systems' response features.
Some keywords that were searched:
- "Personal emergency response"
- "Medical alert systems"
- "Medical alert system"
- "Medical monitoring"
- "Medical alarm systems"
- "Medical alert devices"
- "Medical alert alarm"
Next I looked at Overture's View Bids tool. "Medical alert systems" has multiple bidders; the current high is a whopping $14 per click. "Personal emergency response" is selling for over $3 per click. How do we know we zeroed in on the right language? There were clues.
First, "home healthcare monitoring" had zero or low-query volume. It also had no paid search advertising bidders. "Medical alert system" was queried more frequently. It had multiple bidders and a high bid price (suggesting it's valuable to competitors).
This problem is more common than you might think. Marketers think of solutions in their own terms, not in their audience's terms.
Here's my favorite example: A major bank's executives recently asked me to ensure their site could be found on every search for "lending" because they're one of the world's largest "lending" institutions. I pointed out what I thought would be obvious: Their audience wants to "borrow." Smiles slowly formed on their faces. They got it.
Ring Tones
Another assessment I performed was for a large telecom. It's active in a number of markets, including data, cellular service, and local and long distance services. I was asked to review a wireless product's Web site.
I asked the audience what keywords should matter to this company. Someone shouted out "cell phone." Someone else suggested "calling plans." Then, I heard it. Some smart marketer blurted out, "the brand!"
Yup.
Big brands often find their branded keywords are the most important and enjoy the highest click-through and conversion rates. Again, I referred to Overture's Keyword Selector Tool. The most frequently searched term was the brand name and the phrase "cell phone." But the second most frequently searched term was a surprise to everyone. It was the brand name paired with "ring tones."
I asked the marketer if ring tones were a profitable business. He assured me they are. Yet the phrase "ring tones" was buried deep in the site. I searched Google and Yahoo for the company name with "ring tones." Dozens of other companies showed up in the search results but not this major brand.
Though the company is engaged in paid search advertising, no one thought to bid for this keyword phrase or to feature it on the home page, even though the keyword included the brand and was the second most frequently searched branded term.
To experienced search marketers, these examples seem simple and intuitive. To others, especially those new to SEM, they aren't intuitive at all.
Before focusing on your site's HTML, first look closely at how your audience searches. How they search is probably different than what you'd expect. Looking inward instead of outward can leave a lot of money on the table.
Social network advertising booming
eMarketer - In 2007, eMarketer estimates that companies will spend $900 million in the US — and $330 million outside the US — on social network advertising. Although the lead players, MySpace and Facebook, will continue their strong performance, hundreds of new social networking sites will give them competition.
The Social Network Marketing report analyzes the trends that are driving new competitors into one of the hottest advertising spaces on the Internet.
Since eMarketer published its first report on social network marketing, companies have latched with almost religious fervor onto the notion that consumers want to be socially connected online – whether on mass-appeal sites such as MySpace, on targeted niche sites and video sites or on mobile phones – almost everywhere.
However, is there enough interest among consumers in social networking to support so many ventures?
Key questions the "Social Network Marketing" report answers:
* How much money is being spent on social network advertising?
* What works and what doesn't in social networking marketing?
* How are video and mobile playing into the space?
* Will virtual worlds such as Second Life pose a threat to existing social networking sites?
* And many others…
eMarketer Reports—On-Target and Up-to-Date
The Social Network Marketing report aggregates the latest data from international marketing and communications researchers with eMarketer numbers, projections and analysis to provide the information you need to make the right business decisions—today.
'Hyper-local' news = the unmet needs
E&P - The printed newspaper is a world unto itself. Version 1.0 of the newspaper website: ditto. Today's newspaper websites (what are we at now, version 2.0? 3.0?) are less provincial, but most still don't do a great job of reaching out to tap the larger information stream that is the web.
That is, you don't typically go to a newspaper website because you expect it to point you to all that is good and relevant to you on the web. That's what Google is for, eh? ... Of course, Google isn't great at local. Sure, with the search engines you can find good local information, but it's not yet a wonderful experience trying to find fine-grain local information and news from a wide variety of sources -- especially at the neighborhood level.
There is still an opportunity for someone to do a truly good job and become the king of hyper-local news and information. You would think that the obvious candidate for this would be the newspaper industry. But I suspect that newspapers' lingering provincialism -- their reticence to link to or bring in content that is completely out of their control -- will allow Internet entrepreneurs to own this space.
Is this where it's headed?
Lately, I've been watching Outside.in, a New York-based, venture capital-backed, new player in the hyper-local news and information space. Who knows whether Outside.in will turn into the Next Great Internet Thing, or eventually join the large ranks of Internet companies in the sky. But I do think they're on to something important -- and newspaper executives should be paying attention.
In a nutshell, Outside.in seeks to bring together and finely categorize news and information from all sorts of sources online, down to the neighborhood level. It's seeking to become the place you'll go to zero in on your neighborhood and find everything that's being written or produced about it -- as well as recruit original content about your neighborhood in a social networking experiment.
The website was created in part in reaction to the "placeblogging" trend. Placebloggers, of course, are usually individuals who write blogs about a specific geographic location. There are now thousands of people blogging about their communities -- covering large metro areas, or neighborhoods within cities, or small towns, or military bases, or boarding schools, etc.
Most of the placebloggers operate independently, perhaps writing a placeblog out of nothing more than love for and passion about their communities. Some have figured out how to turn them into small businesses by attracting advertisers. Some newspapers have staff members writing placeblogs, while others may pay independent placebloggers to produce content for them or otherwise partner with them.
But placebloggers are just part of the wealth of hyperlocal content that Outside.in is tapping. There are also community groups, government agencies, schools, and numerous institutions publishing content that's relevant to a place. Aggregate all that into a useful interface, and you start to have an interesting and useful news and information service -- albeit a disorganized, and ultimately unedited, one.
An unmet need
Outside.in founder Steven Johnson (an Internet pioneer known for starting the '90s online magazine FEED and for the website Plastic.com) says he and his team recognized that there was no place online that you could go and easily find all that information and news. "We wanted to grab as much of that as possible," he says. "We said, let's organize what's out there already" because no one else is doing a good job of that yet.
The process of categorizing all content that is fresh and locally relevant is something that can be automated to an extent, but it's still -- for now, at least -- partly a time-consuming editorial task requiring humans.
For example, Outside.in can identify a placeblogger, pick up his or her content feed (RSS), and because the blogger's location is known, put that content into a specific place feed (e.g., Boulder, Colorado). But what if a Boulder-based placeblogger writes a review of a restaurant she tried on a trip to Tupelo, Mississippi? That needs to go in the Tupelo area of Outside.in, and for now that requires a human editor to accomplish.
Outside.in currently employees about 10 freelance editors whose job it is to categorize content. If a placeblogger's item mentions a specific university, for example, an editor might add it to an Outside.in page and feed about that school.
Outside.in's content is nearly always geo-coded, and the site includes a useful map interface. So you can find your house on a map, then read all the content about your neighborhood: crime reports from blogs or police departments, restaurant reviews from a wide variety of people (and media sources), even local news from newspapers, TV stations, etc.
Johnson says that this ability to drag an online map around and see the news by geographic location (what's been happening within a mile of my house, my office, my kids' school?) -- from the huge variety of sources available on the Internet -- is powerful, and is where traditional media like newspapers "have done a lousy job."
(Adrian Holovaty's ChicagoCrime.org is somewhat in the vein of Outside.in -- a small slice of this hyperlocal online information pool. That website from a few years ago allows the user to find their block or neighborhood and see recent crime reports, giving a useful and powerful perspective on the crime situation near your home or work. ... Holovaty currently is chief technologist for Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive.)
There's more to Outside.in's model, and it's in its early days, so we'll have to watch as it evolves. But other things to note are:
-- The Outside.in community is designed so that users help the categorization process, to relieve editors of having to do everything (an impossibility if the site grows significantly).
-- When bloggers tag their own content appropriately (which is becoming increasingly common), it's easy for Outside.in to categorize it automatically.
-- The concept of "citizen media" is integral to Outside.in. Users are invited to submit content to add it to their geographic location, and the idea is that they can converse with and get to know their neighbors through this process. This original citizen content is added to the content gathered from around the web, to make the site rich and deep.
-- What in theory is getting built out is a "Wikipedia of neighborhoods." Just as many, many people contribute to Wikipedia, the online participatory encyclopedia, so too can many people who live in a neighborhood contribute what they know and their news to create a user-driven guide to neighborhoods.
Partnering possibilities
How does Outside.in mesh with newspapers? Is it purely competitive, or "co-opetition," or benign partner?
Johnson, who's currently in discussions with some newspaper companies, says one possibility is for newspaper websites to license Outside.in's feeds for neighborhoods and cities within its coverage area -- adding non-staff-produced local content and making the sites much richer. Details aren't worked out yet, but possibilities include reciprocal traffic -- where a newspaper's neighborhood content is fed into the Outside.in system in exchange for using Outside.in's neighborhood feeds -- as well as more traditional licensing.
I can see that as a possibility, though I wonder if a newspaper staff couldn't do the same thing itself, by assigning an editor or editors to find and continuously monitor local bloggers and local information sources.
Outside.in is still working on its revenue model details, but local advertising certainly will be key. In that respect, the company is yet another player looking to take local ad dollars away from local newspapers. Johnson expects to develop some sort of advertising share program, so by running Outside.in content and ads on your site, you get a cut. That, of course, is a well-worn model; many publishers participate in Google's advertising program, for example, and do quite well from that.
Why pay attention to this small company?
Simply put, Outside.in represents an approach to hyper-local news that newspaper companies should be considering. It perhaps points to the future of local news, which is not restricted to those hired or associated with news companies, but includes everyone in a community who is publishing neighborhood- or community-relevant news and information.
Rich Gordon of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, put it well in analyzing Outside.in's core concept: "In the digital age, content and aggregators and consumers and media users are members of a network. The key to success in a networked information economy will be to build hubs that enable connections. So I like Outside.in's concept." Of course, for that particular company, "The devil will be in the details -- how well they execute," he adds.
As an example of the potential value of this model, my hometown newspaper seldom has news about the elementary school that my youngest daughter goes to. But a hyper-local, non-provincial approach would mean that the newspaper website taps everyone outside of its staff and freelancers who are writing anything about the school -- teachers' or principals' blogs, the school district website, even parents of students who blog and happen to mention something going on at the school. It leverages the networked information infrastructure that has evolved over the last decade-plus.
Now that would be a really useful service that would truly tap the potential of online hyper-local news.
So, will entrepreneurs like Steven Johnson be the ones to accomplish this? Or will newspapers take the bold step of truly loosening the reins of editorial control and step up to the challenge?
Lessons learnt from Virginia Tech shooting
E&P - Every time there's a hugely important or dramatic news event -- as with the recent shootings on the Virginia Tech campus -- new lessons are learned about our evolving media world. As I see it, two important issues arose during the coverage of that tragedy.
1. Traditional media have a hard time reporting outside of their own boxes, which when it comes to a really big news event is to the detriment of public knowledge.
2. The public demands everything that media knows about an event of this magnitude -- immediately -- while at the same time accusing news outlets of offering too much.
Needed: Reporting outside traditional boxes
Virginia Tech was the classic example of a news story so powerful and compelling that the public demands every tidbit of information available -- and right away. And in large part, news organizations oblige. They no longer wait till the presses roll, or for the 5 o'clock newscast. News goes online as quickly as editors can get it ready. For a breaking news event like Virginia Tech, the web is now the dominant medium, because of its speed and on-demand nature.
Some newspapers created blogs to cover the shootings and aftermath. On the day of the shootings, when the identity of the killer was not known, and details were coming in dribs and drabs, the breaking-news blog format was ideal. News consumers could learn (to a degree) what reporters were learning right away, rather than waiting for an assembled story to be produced.
Reporters latched on to MySpace and Facebook, finding entries in those popular social networking sites from people directly involved in the event. This provided not only fodder for journalists' reporting, but also leads to survivors and friends of victims, who could be contacted as part of the reporting process.
Compared to news coverage of, say, a decade ago, news media have come a long way. ... But not far enough.
Here's where I think most news organizations could have done a better job: Serving as an intelligent conduit to all the information (and "news") that flows onto the web and into digital networks during a major news event like this one.
Let's take Facebook as an example. The social networking site, which is dominated by college students, became a hotbed of activity on the day of the shootings. Students used it to ask if friends were safe, to report in, and to share news and gossip with each other. Some used the site to share their experiences with their online friends. Facebook users at Virginia Tech were on the front lines of a national tragedy, and they used the website to report what they saw and experienced.
Other students and those close to the tragedy wrote about their experiences in their personal blogs.
Obviously, Facebook and blogs provided incredibly important information to reporters covering Virginia Tech. (I'm not going to deal with it in this column, but some students fiercely objected to reporters "snooping" on their Facebook communications, which they consider to be "private" between them and their friends. I think that's naive on students' part, and that if they want privacy, they should not post in a way that makes what they publish on Facebook visible to anyone -- including reporters.)
But news organizations, I think, need to do more than use Facebook -- and all the other myriad sources of information, including personal blogs -- as reporting tools. Yes, they are that, and Facebook, et al are an increasingly important part of reporting on college-related news.
What I'm talking about is in having a news site link to and point people to all the pertinent information (and yes, gossip) that's flying around cyberspace during a major breaking news event like Virginia Tech. Instead of only having reporters digging through Facebook and the blogosphere looking for nuggets to include in their stories, and for sources, ALSO assign an editor to comb through the pertinent social networking sites and blogs. And create a section on your news website that packages and links to whatever's relevant.
Take the killer's Facebook page, or his student profile on the university website, or his MySpace page, if he's got one. I don't think it's enough just to report on what's been posted to his Facebook page and cherry-pick the best or least objectionable stuff, for example; let your audience see it all (yes, no matter how disturbing).
Did the killer show up in other online discussion forums? Are any of his class assignments online? Point your readers to those. Again, don't just use it as source material and fall into the old gatekeeper mode. The beauty of the Internet is that the public can -- and should, in my view -- have access to all the source material. For most stories, that's overkill and no one really cares about all that. But for a story like Virginia Tech, news consumers can't get enough.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that reporters change what they're doing -- finding and reporting on the important stuff, and sifting through the wheat to find the chaff. But in our age of lightning-fast communication, news organizations must supplement that with everything they can put their hands on for the big stories. Today's news audience demands it.
The end of the gatekeeper
Now we get into the "taste" issue. As in, when you reach outside of "conventional" reporting and link to information that's provided by other, unvetted sources -- especially in a horrific story like Virginia Tech -- you'll end up pointing your audience to, or outright publishing, some disturbing material.
In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, traditional media had a significant decision to make in deciding whether to broadcast and publish the contents of the killer's "multimedia package" sent to NBC News. It included a disturbing video of the killer making his "statement" about why he was about to kill several dozen innocent people. NBC and others aired parts of the video.
Predictably, a great public debate ensued -- predictably, with a good number of critics contending that the killer's video message should not have been aired at all, because it served his pre-suicide purpose and glorified his crazy ranting. That the media carried Cho Seung-hui's video, that argument goes, tells future psycho-killers that they too can become famous -- and makes it more likely that the future will see more Cho's.
I'll come down squarely on the side of the argument that supports NBC's decision, largely because I think the public has a right to know. We have a right to information about him that can help us (maybe) better understand how the unthinkable happens. To my mind, it would be unconscionable for government and media to withhold that from the public. At the least, we need this to educate ourselves to watch for and prevent future Cho's from exploding.
But what about the taste and decency issue? About offering up unsavory and uncomfortable newsworthy material where youngsters will see it? Don't news editors have a responsibility to protect the public from the worst of the world? To withhold the worst of the news so as not to upset people as they sit eating breakfast or dinner?
This is where the difference in old (one-way) and new (interactive, on-demand) media comes to play. I don't begrudge NBC News from broadcasting only selected pieces of Cho's video. In media where the material is in the consumer's face -- network and cable TV, the daily newspaper -- some self-censorship is the only rational decision.
When it comes to news websites, however, all bets are off. Just as I said above that news sites when covering major stories should publish and link to anything that's relevant, so too do I think that they should share all relevant source material (in a big story like this) with their online readers.
Yeah, that's heresy when looked at from the old gatekeeper school of journalism. But with on-demand media, it's the news consumer who makes the decision about whether to click on that disturbing link or not. The digital-era consumer deserves to make his or her own decisions.
What online news organizations can -- and should -- do is provide lots of warnings and context about what's beyond that click. Want to see a student's cellphone video that she took in the classroom during the actual shootings, which shows people getting shot? (I'm being hypothetical here.) If I were sitting in an online news editor's chair, I'd either link to that, or maybe even publish it on my site. But I'd make the people who choose to see it well aware of what's about to be seen. I'd add age warnings, and I'd insert discussion of the personal implications of watching something so disturbing. ... You'd need to wade through all that before I sent you off to that content or that link.
Say no to nannying
I realize that many traditionally trained editors will react in horror to my suggestions. They'll contend that it's their job to not only sift through all the junk to find and present the important news, but also to protect the public from the worst of the society and the world -- the most graphic.
Hey, I was trained that way too, and long bought in to the idea that we journalists served a righteous purpose by shielding the public from the worst the world has to offer. ... As anyone who's ever worked as a wire editor at a newspaper (as I have) knows, the wires services routinely send over shocking images as part of big stories. (During 9-11, I remember how the Associated Press distributed images of a severed hand, and of bodies falling from the World Trade Center.) Editors use their gatekeeping power and seldom publish such disturbing images.
The big difference now, of course, is the Internet. Those types of graphic images now get thrust out to an international audience of online users. You can easily find them, typically, with a Google search or by browsing or searching blogs. News editors can keep on gatekeeping -- being our nannies -- but it's now a hollow role.
When a major story like Virginia Tech breaks, media can serve a public service by alleviating the need for news consumers to search the web and blogosphere for raw information about a big breaking story. Online users are already doing that -- because traditional media typically won't, out of concern for pointing to unvetted information or to disturbing content. I say, get over that. Why not provide that service for them, and thus become more relevant to the digital news consumer.
The world has become a different place -- where information (no matter how disturbing) now has fast and easy channels to a wide audience.
As I see it, news organizations need to adapt to this new reality. They can best do so by being the place where people looking for news go to find it in all its forms -- from professionally vetted and digested traditional news, to raw information from untested sources (eyewitnesses, bloggers, social-networking users, etc.).
News media's new job is to offer up all that's now available about the big stories, and provide some context to make sense out of the information chaos. It's an expansion of news organizations' role. Let's get to it -- rather than let Google do a better job in what should be media's role.
