Category Archives: Internet

Blogs, social media and digital ethics

More on ChuffPo

Internet, Media,

I’ve mentioned before the difficulty I have in deciding what to blog about here and what to blog about at TOC. My TOC blog post on Huffington Post Chicago – or as I’ve been calling it ChuffPo – could have gone either way. But the gist of that post ended up directed not so much at ChuffPo, but at the whole of the arts and entertainment press and their blogger brethren. In our quest for page views or cover lines, we’re missing some things, or letting publicists dictate our coverage. So we – the experts – are missing the city that exists all around us, and running the risk of someone else acquiring the mantle of the most informed.

Which brings me back to a few lingering thoughts on ChuffPo…

Granted, it’s only a few days in, but I’m not really sure what the site has to offer. As I allude to in the TOC post, most of the content on the site consists of links to stories you’d see in many other places. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s nothing that distinguishes that content. Even Gapers Block‘s Merge section, which offers a quick to-the-point glance at big headlines of the day, still manages to do so with a certain style and voice.

Yes, it has some celebrity bloggers you might not find elsewhere. Unfortunately, none of them have had much to say (really, John Cusack, that’s all you got in you?). And the true Chicago voices in the mix have…well, if I want to read or hear what they have to say, I can go elsewhere, as most of them have columns, features or work in other places.

Speaking of HuffPo contributors, Steve Rhodes at The Beachwood Reporter raised an issue last week (2nd to last item) about the site’s lack of monetary compensation that’s been on my mind as of late, ever since a Gawker post on the same subject: If people are going to write for you – and you’re making money off them – you ought to be paying them. Rhodes has a point, to an extent, particularly about the lunacy of helping a competing business for free. But magazines – and newspapers – utilize unpaid talent (we call ’em interns) all the time. In fact, they depend on them. And those who excel in this grindhouse boot camp are often placed at the front of the line when there are jobs to be had at those same publications.

Disclosure time: I used to blog at Chicagoist, and while there was some monetary incentive for going above and beyond, I gave it away for free during most of my 2 1/4 year stint there (not to mention the work I did for our Ctrl-Alt-Rock events that were for the promotion of the site/brand). But all that free labor directly led to paid freelancing work, and is largely responsible for me having a job at TOC. So it’d be ridiculous of me to suggest that free labor in this environment is unethical (a Gawker blog commenting on fair labor practices would seem problematic as well, but nevermind). And since most of the critics in a TOC roundtable back in January said they’d still be doing what they do even if they had to do it for free, who am I to criticize?

It’s fine for these folks to look for more exposure (and some of the print scribes probably see it as I saw Chicagoist – as a door to more work down the line). But the whole thing has a very arm’s length feel to it right now, a sort of best-of compendium that has yet to present a real view of the city. And frankly I worry that its east coast pedigree will give it the bona fides that it hasn’t earned (especially since according to Ferdy, it can dish it out but has trouble taking it).

Yet.

Consider the following:

“With all its unfair built-in advantages, Huffington Post Chicago could actually help push one or even both of Chicago’s daily newspapers — both struggling mightily for different reasons — right to the brink of extinction. And if that happened, HPC would ultimately be shooting itself in the foot. If the Chicago Tribune disappeared, so would half of the actual news the Huffington Post now highlights.” – Will Bunch; Philly.com

To be fair, ChuffPo is blogging about stories from all over. And since sites like ChuffPo actually funnel traffic to newspaper sites, I’m not really sure how Bunch’s point follows. Besides, a site like ChuffPo ought to be filling in the blanks – particularly with content like this nightmarish account of one person’s stay at Swedish Covenant Hospital – not trying to do what a daily does. That’s now how it will become a source of real power.

Maybe Bunch just wanted to get quoted on Romenesko, and that’s why he said something so ludicrous. In fact, in the next paragraph he turns around and says that dailies and ChuffPo need each other. So there you go.

And that’s what I mean about the view from a distance. If Bunch knew anything about Chicago, he’d know the Tribune isn’t in any immediate danger of disappearing (even if some of its great talentis). The Sun-Times is doing a fine job of killing itself, with no help needed from ChuffPo or anyone else.

The question of how much to tip at the Salon just got more complicated

Internet

Salon announced this week that they’re going to start a tipping program for user-generated posts. It’s a well-timed announcement – coinciding with the Bejing Olympics this week – as we’re often reminded by many gratuity-based businesses that tipping is not a city in China.

(That was a long way to go for a groaner of a joke, I know. But tough. If you want Internet-publishing commentary without Catskills moments, go read Scott Karp.)

One point Caroline McCarthy makes in the link above is undeniable: This kind of plan won’t work for all sites. But I’m not sure she’s right in saying Digg! – “a more rabble-friendly site” – wouldn’t be able to adopt it. It smacks of elitism, or the kind of thinking that says – to steal a bit from Orwell – some user-generated content is more equal than others. The issue is not your user base, it’s about what you’re asking of them.

First of all, Digg! already has its own version of this plan. In fact, it’s the very idea on which the site is based though without the monetary incentives. And Yelp!* also has a large user base, full of plenty of rabblers, but they also have a smart, engaged group of people who are generally able to separate the wheat from the chaff, without the financial incentive.

Admittedly, Yelp! is also a good example of how a pay-for-home-page-play scheme might backfire and get abused, since they haven’t figured out how to separate their editorial from their marketing content (or rather, don’t see the need to do so). On a review-based site, I could see businesses opening accounts to “tip” good reviews of their businesses and tainting the value of the site for the less engaged members of its community (the person who just drops in occasionally to read reviews, not post them).

(There’s also a discussion to be had here about whether sites should be paying people who contribute content. Gawker recently came down on the side of “yes” which is funny for a number of reasons. Based on my own free-posting past at Chicagoist – and based on my experience in the offline world where interns are a crucial part of the economies of business with advantages for everyone involved – I’d say “not necessarily” but I’m still working it out in my brain for a future post.)

The question isn’t “Is there too much rabble on this site for this idea to work?” The question is “Will this plan encourage people to give us the kind of content we want more of?”

An idea like this won’t work if you’re just trying to generate more content. Asinine comments, silly-ass videos and eye-bleeding profile pages will sprout up no matter what. But if you’re a site that wants to encourage its users to provide something specific – say, pictures of news events or reported articles – then it has potential.

Still, I think the viability of a currency-supported system of recommendations is an open question. As McCarthy points out, people will spend money when they feel like what they’re getting has value they can’t get elsewhere, be it warrior helmets or music. Sometimes the value is the product itself, sometimes the value is immediacy, and sometimes it’s the model itself. (I’m only a moderate Radiohead fan, but I supported the idea of what they were doing, so I dropped a few dimes on In Rainbows for that reason, not because I was a rabid fan or felt I needed to hear it before other people.)

Just like customers stop spending money at brick-and-mortar businesses when the product quality is no longer worth paying for, so too will users spend their time and money elsewhere. If Salon can use this model to provide better – and easier to find – content, it will have a future.

* If I start a social networking site, I’m going to avoid the use of exclamation points. Might actually go with a semi-colon, which suggests that the real meat of the discussion is coming up. If anyone steals this concept, I will punch you in the solar plexus.

What I learned this week: Web biz edition

Internet

Any of these points would warrant a post of its own, but this has been a packed week so all I can provide here is a few bullet points:

1. It’s entirely possible to only network online, but networking offline makes the former much more effective.
2. Even the most staid business properties could benefit from using easily available online tools to create more understanding of, and inject personality into, their brands.
3. When you use online tools that make your business personal, and start networking offline, even your personal interactions will mean you’re representing your business, and become fair game for later online discussion.*
4. The only group of people who have an across-the-board understanding of the importance of the online world for business are the people who are just now graduating from college. Not because all those 24 year-olds are watching The Hills, but because it’s just now becoming a part of business and journo curricula.
5. Even the smartest geeks misunderstand – and fear – Twitter. (Some do because it makes it easier for non-geeks to work online.)

Reading back over this list, some of this strikes me as completely obvious, but I didn’t develop a true understanding of some of the points – or realize how much this isn’t commonly shared knowledge – until this week.

* There’s a corollary to this which, in the colloquial, is “Don’t get shitfaced at networking events.” And no, I didn’t violate that.**
** This week, anyway.

The problems of innovation

Internet, Media, ,


From a piece by the Trib’s Mo Ryan on the new J.J. Abrams show Fringe:

At a Monday Q&A session on the show at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, J.J. Abrams, one of the show’s co-creators, recalled watching an “Alias” episode late in that ABC show’s run.

“I watched a few minutes, and I was so confused,” Abrams said. “[I]t was impenetrable. I was like, ‘I know I should understand this. I read the [script] — who the [expletive] is that guy?’”

Glad I wasn’t the only one.

Abrams seems to me like one of those creative guys who gets easily bored. The last three shows he’s done that I liked started to go off the rails in their third seasons: Felicity, Alias and Lost. (By all accounts, Lost regained its footing in its 4th, but I’d stopped watching by then.)

This is because Abrams usually gets involved with a new project. Those projects were Alias, Lost, and Mission Impossible III, respectively. No one would argue that those weren’t all worthy projects. Alias and Lost walked a new path for network television shows (though to be fair Alias had much of the brush cleared by Buffy) and I still think Mission Impossible III is one of the smarter action movies of the past five years.

So what’s to be learned here? Three things:

People who are true innovators need to be challenged in order to keep coming up with interesting new ideas. If the opportunities to do that aren’t available in the organization, they will go someplace else to find them.

Also, innovation requires evolving maintenance. It’s not enough to create new ways of doing things. You also need the right people in place to maintain the tone and structure. In organizations, this means one or two wunderkinds aren’t enough: you need a group of people who understand the underlying goals of a project and how to make new additions serve them. You want to add social networking features to your site? Fine, good. But why? And what purpose will they ultimately serve. Not every site needs to be a new Facebook. But if those new features are used to highlight excellent content that might otherwise get ignored, that’s innovation that serves your site.

Similarly, on creative projects, there can’t be a brain trust. This is often difficult with auteur works like Abrams’s but again Lost has shown that having the right lieutenants in place makes the battle that much easier. In the workplace, maintain a knowledge base through Wikis and share evolving information throughout the group often. The idea of redundant systems isn’t just for servers. When an expert develops an expert process, note it. That way when your expert leaves for a new project, the rest of your team won’t be trying to find its footing for the next 3-6 months. And much like a television show, it’s important to have regular “story meetings” that involve everyone to discuss that year’s overall themes, arcs and possible new plot developments (Oh and do these in person so people can see each other. Even video conferencing is better than conference calls facilitated by speakerphones.)

Oh I almost forgot: Don’t add the half-sister of your leader to your crew, especially if she is related to the lead antagonist. Eventually, she’s just going to end up as an evil zombie who you’ll need to put into a coma. You might think that’s just applicable to Alias, but really that’s just a solid rule across the board.

A post for people who have jobs like mine

Internet, Music

Two online biz topics today and a third at the end that’s just silly to encourage you to keep reading. For those of you who don’t have jobs like mine – or don’t much care for Web nerd talk – come back tomorrow for a new 25 in 12 post that’s been brewing for months.

For the two of you who are still reading, here are two interesting articles from this morning’s MediaBistro Newsfeed:

Mark Glaser at Media Shift thinks paying bloggers by page views is wrong. He lays out some solid arguments as to why, though I’d note that if you’re the editor of a site these days, your job performance is going to be judged, in part, by page views even if there isn’t a direct link from your salary to your PVs. While more people are starting to recognize that the number of returning visitors you have and the time a reader spends on the site is more important, your base hits or views is still going to be a benchmark.

Glaser’s best point is this:

“I believe that a blog with 50,000 loyal, repeat visitors is much more valuable to the publisher, advertisers — everyone on the business side — than a blog that has sensational posts that bring in 100,000 one-time visitors for entertainment snacks who are then gone the next moment.”

Niche topics do really well in the online world, mainly because it’s easier for the writing to find a larger audience than it would in a print publication. I’ve found this to be particularly true at TOC with our Theater coverage. It’s a small audience, but a fiercely loyal one that returns often, and comments frequently.

Also, Wired is unveiling a Web stylebook. With so many people coming onto the Web from other mediums and industries, this is something that’s sorely needed. There’s an ethics and method to the way Web publishing works that flies in the face of what works in print. Oddly enough, a “dead tree” product might be just what the industry needs.

OK, this isn’t related to wonky Web shit at all, but I’m curious: is Eddie Murphy’s “Party All The Time” secretly good? Forget that it’s by Eddie Murphy for a moment and consider it as a Rick James song. It’s not bad, right?


Ace Frehley is back in a old stuck groove

Internet, Music


Speaking of Space Ace, Time Out New York’s classical music writer Steve Smith interviewed former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley last week (check out his blog for some backstory on it). He mentions that Frehley isn’t playing songs from his new album on the tour to prevent leaks on YouTube before its official release date later this month. This seemed insane to me, so I went looking for a direct quote and found one in
this story from Billboard:

“Every show’s on YouTube, every song…I don’t want to play any of the new songs ’cause I don’t want to give away anything. I want that magic and mystique of hearing something for the first time when you’re supposed to, so I don’t think I’m going to play any of (the new songs) until the CD’s released.”

To some extent, I understand what he’s saying: part of what’s exciting about music is hearing it within a specific context, whether it’s in a live club or on an album. And if you’re hearing or seeing it on YouTube, you’re getting a grainy picture with distorted sound that could potentially turn off the audience you’re trying to entice into buying your new record.

But with all due respect to Ace, the time for cultivating mystique has long since passed.


No one’s going to be playing Ace Frehley’s new record on the radio. That’s not a comment on the quality of his work, it’s just a reality of the biz in 2008. Rock radio has been in decline recently, and most classic rock artists – even touring behemoths like Springsteen – have a hard time getting adds.

But that audience is out there. They’ll still go to see these artists in clubs, and are chomping at the bit for new music. Steve’s post alludes to the personal connection that people have with the people who first introduced them to music. But they’re not kids anymore, looking up in awestruck wonder at the man with the makeup. They know the addiction battles, and the difficulties that he’s gone through. In fact, it’s a lack of mystique that inspires his current fandom. That kind of connection inspires a rabid fanbase, and there’s no better place to feed that rabidity than on the Internet.

The best way to beat the bootleggers has been to join them. If Frehley were to post his own YouTube videos (filmed with a decent video camera, not a camera phone) of live performances and the occasional behind-the-scenes clips, people would flock to them, and then buy tickets and the new album in order to have that same “first-time” experience again. And perhaps he ought to look into putting together his own site, so no one has to go searching for news about his latest record or tour. I guarantee that there’s a huge Frehley fan out there who’s just dying to be Space Ace’s webmaster. Probably for free.

In a world of instant nostalgia, rockers like Frehley ought to be trying to bring their audience closer, not keep them at a distance.

Same game, different rules

Internet, Music

I think I might finally forgive Sasha Frere Jones for this bit of ridiculousness (unless I can somehow prove a direct cause and effect to it and this ridiculousness) because of this post on Radiohead’s “Nude” remixes.

You know, what Radiohead did in giving away its album for free was pretty impressive, even though it’s only applicable if you’re a band with Radiohead-level status in the music industry. They were able to prove once and for all that giving away your music doesn’t automatically mean you’ll hurt your sales. But it was still just marketing. Brilliant marketing, but marketing nonetheless. It didn’t create a model that didn’t already exist, and it didn’t make anyone redundant (except maybe Doug Morris).

And the “Nude” remix idea is also brilliant. But it was brilliant a year and a half ago when the Barenaked Ladies did it. So maybe we should stop calling these moves brilliant, and just call them precedent-setting instead. Because the thing you can really give Radiohead credit for is making it easier for everyone who comes after them to do the same thing.

And if they could do it in a way that doesn’t make it seem like they were finding new ways to charge you again (five times over!) for something you technically already bought once, that would be even better.

On fooling some of the people some of the time

Internet,

By now, I’m sure you’re aware of the little prank TOC pulled on Chicago last week. Some crab-asses protested by saying “It’s not April 1st!” But since this issue fell on April 1, we had little choice but to go with the joke a little early, and I think it worked better that way as it caught so many people off-guard and really helped to “sell” the joke. We even extended it to the blog that day, with a whole series of fake posts from Trump as well as some music, film and comedy “news.”

Here’s the “problem” with all this though: the internet knows no calendar. This stuff is going to stay up in perpetuity without the benefit of context. I’m enormously pleased that a few other lazy sites picked up our blog “scoops” and reported them as actual news (seriously, does “Shane ‘Handsy’ Butterscotch” sound like a real name to anybody?) and that on Wednesday we gave the home page a Trump-centric makeover. So I wouldn’t change how we rolled things out online. But there’s a decent argument to be made for making sure that six months from now, people know we didn’t really give Sixteen an 11-star review, James Lipton didn’t actually review Wicked for us and we acted like jerks during David Schwimmer’s interview for a reason.

In the past year, I’ve worked really hard – as has the rest of the staff – to establish TOC‘s bona fides online. We still have a ways to go, but we’re now seen as a trusted source for news just like other sites. And when sites like ours play jokes on April 1, we’ve got cover for our editorial integrity. But if we report that Vampire Weekend is starting a preppie clothing line on March 26 does that end up hurting us in the long run? I’m inclined to say no, especially when we led the day on the blog with stuff like this. But again: we had the benefit of context, and Google searches strip all that out.

So today, instead of pulling another elaborate joke on the TOC blog, we’re going to be explaining the one we pulled last week, and tagging our satirical posts and articles as such. It might seem like babying our readers in a way, but on the Internet, some jokes are only funny the first time you tell them.

Not looking for a new MySpace, just looking for a new business model

Internet, Music

Fresh off his SXSW appearance, English punk-folk artist Billy Bragg wrote a guest op-ed piece in Saturday’s New York Times* about the lack of attention (and money) paid to artists whose work is published on social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo, a company that was recently sold for $850 million to AOL.

Bragg makes some rather salient points, the clearest of which is this: why is it that the contributions of artists to the value of social networking sites are not, in fact, valued in some kind of monetary way? To that point, Bragg says this:

The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?

I’m not wholly against Bragg’s point here. But offering analogies as a catch-all gets complicated in discussions like this.

Yes, websites make money through advertising just like radio stations do. And video and audio clips are part of why AOL thought Bebo was worth $850 million. But with radio stations, you’re paying to reach a certain audience segment and demographic. That’s really the service that radio stations are providing, and entertainment – whether in the form of music or talk or other programming – is the only content radio stations provide to make people stick around long enough for the ads to reach them.

But the truth is, social networking sites, as well as sites like Blogger, or feed readers or what have you function as publishing entities. And the reason why people choose one site over another – thereby giving them value, one might say – is because of who uses them to publish. I’m more likely to use one site over another if my friends use it (Facebook) or if I find content there worth checking out (Flickr).

In most cases, this comes from user-generated content. So why couldn’t I make the argument that Facebook owes me a penny every time I post something to my Wall, or Flickr should drop a nickel into my bank account when I post new pictures? While I won’t flatter myself that more people on the whole are interested in checking out a bon mot from me on Facebook than are hoping to hear a Billy Bragg song, I can at least say there’s a certain segment of my audience (meager as it may be) that IS more interested in witticisms from me than in “Old Clash Fan Fight Song” (if only because they’ve never heard Bragg’s music). So in essence, for a (teeny, tiny) portion of Facebook’s audience, I am adding more value to the site than Billy Bragg. In Bragg’s radio example, I’m just as valuable as him for advertisers who are seeking to reach the “friends of Our Man In Chicago” demographic. So why shouldn’t he and I both partake of content licensing fees?

I’m exaggerating a bit here. But it isn’t out of the realm of possibility – in fact, it’s happened a handful of times in the last few years – that an everyday person comes out of nowhere and produces content that so many people want to see that it makes a significant contribution to the site’s bottom line. It pains me to offer this particular example but Tia Tequila has 2,952,620 MySpace friends while Billy Bragg has “only” 33,121. (For a less problematic example, see Warren Ellis who has about 21,000 friends). So at what point do we say “This person needs to be compensated for their contributions to the site?”

I don’t really have a blanket solution, and I doubt most other folks do, which is why it’s applying one medium’s licensing and payment structures to the Internet doesn’t cover all manner of sins. It really is its own beast.

Having said all that, I think Bragg has a point, but he’s using the wrong analogy. Internet sites that use previously-created content in this way (meaning content not created specifically for the site like a Wall post or a Flickr picture) are a lot like bars that play music on jukeboxes or over PA systems. These bars all pay a licensing fee to organizations like ASCAP which then distributes this money to the artists (ideally, anyway). Perhaps it’s time to set up a similar system for corporate-backed internet sites as well.

* h/t to The Daily Swarm, which I’m pleased to see is regularly seeking out the work of Chicago writers and critics whether they’re writing for the Tribune, the Sun-Times, Chicagoist or the sexiest blog in Chicago.