The media blogger, Jim Romenesko, long popular among journalists and non-journalists alike for his sage curation of media stories, left the Poynter Institute's site abruptly yesterday after a dozen years as a contributor.
His departure followed a complaint that his blog (of which he is but one contributor) had been overaggregating content, making it less of an incentive to visit the original source. Julie Moos at Poynter outlined the ethical dilemma involved. There were some questions, too, about the techniques of attribution and linking. These came from a journalist working for the Columbia Journalism Review, who has outlined the saga in a post today. The departure has drawn criticism for the way it was seemingly handled, and in that regard the Poynter faculty has weighed in with a variety of views. The always lively Reuters blogger, Felix Salmon, has chipped in on the matter, too, wondering about the validity of journalistic standards in an age of aggregation.But the concerns are significant in an age of content curation, sharing and linking, because they raise questions about the obligations of media to provide credit and direct traffic elsewhere as they build upon stories.This is the truly intriguing period of the development of Twitter, mainly because it's broadening its function from a combination text messaging/microblogging service to, well, whatever someone ingeniously devises.
Case in point: The recent accomplishment of Big Deal PR in generating a marketing campaign on Twitter under the guise of Peggy Olson, the second-most complex character (Don Draper still rules this category) in Mad Men.
Initially, the AMC network fumed when Big Deal fictionally began channelling Olson and others on Twitter. After all, Big Deal had no real right to do so. It wasn't sanctioned and AMC successfully fought it; Twitter scraped a lot of messages off.
Then it dawned on AMC: Big Deal was reaching a lot of people with the effort, well more than AMC could on its own. So it relented and Big Deal generated a lot of buzz --- and continues to --- by taking these fictional characters, bringing them to life on Twitter, and feeding a following.
The effort is chronicled by Barbara Iverson at Poynter Online this week. The suggestion is that journalists can learn much from this, in that a 140-character Tweet can lead people to their deeper work. True enough (although, truth be told, it's a 115-character Tweet and 25-character Tiny URL that seems the combination of best practice at the moment). Beat reporters and columnists can direct people to their content.
But another immediate and fascinating opportunity appears in the publicity-seeking realm of film and television characters. Big Deal's Carri Bugbee, who won a Shorty Award for the Mad Men initiative, is going to make a business out of Twitter marketing, providing writers for entertainment firms that want to develop followings for their characters. She tells her story to AdAge in this video (unfortunately, no embed is available, so it's a link).
I caught up over the weekend with a lovely essay written by former Atlanta Journal-Constitution executive editor John Walter, discovered posthumously by his family on his computer and reprinted by Poynter in recent days.
It's a sentimental look at the newspaper and it blames three people for their decline: essayist A.J. Liebling, who first raised the notion of newspaper monopolies; a designer in Louisville who brought about modern newspaper design; and Al Neuharth, the Gannett execuive who convinced public markets that newspapers could perennially achieve high returns.
That precis hardly does justice to the elegant tone of Walter's essay, which is a worthwhile read.
The Poynter Institute's conference on protecting good journalism and ensuring it exists in five years has produced an effective five-point guide to newsrooms and conclusions about the business:
1. Collaborate and partner.
2. Harness the energy from learning from existing experiments.
3. Target and customize.
4. Get over being jilted by the audience.
5. Defining value, then pricing it, remains elusive.
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