Cit Media

I’ve had a great time in Santiago, Chile, where I’ve visited with journalists and students for the past three days. El Mercurio did an interview, and a talk this morning at TVN, the major public TV network, will run tonight — but I’ll be on a plane home.

I was honored to appear at the TVN gathering with Jorge Domínguez Larraín, founder and CEO Diarios Ciudadanos Chile, publisher of El Morrocotudo, one of the country’s pathbreaking citizen journalism outlets, and several other related online news sites. “Our network has 43,000 unique visitors per day, nearly 3,500 people writing every month and over 50 employees in 7 different regions of the country,” he says.

Here’s a report on the site about today’s event.

Other than all the great folks, and visits to some of the city’s major attractions, a highlight was the amazing Chilean food (and the nation’s wines, which the rest of the world is only just discovering). Fish, naturally, is a big deal in the menu. Then again, given the proximity to Argentina, so is beef.

I ate reineta, a local fish, at one of the city’s excellent restaurants. Another fine memory, and another reason I expect to be back here someday.

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These are journalism graduate students in Santiago — as smart and engaged in the future of journalism as any people you’ll find in any place. They also like to have a beer after class….

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NY Times: Not All Is Gloomy in Real Estate: A Blog Network Attracts Capital. In some respects, sites like Curbed are insulated from the woes of the real estate market in a way that traditional sites may not be. “We’re not just about real estate,” Mr. Steele said. “People come to the site to talk about their neighborhoods and about life in the city.” This wide focus has helped Curbed draw advertisers like American Express and Volkswagen, Mr. Steele said.

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NY Times: Murdoch, a Folk Hero in Silicon Valley. But on the left coast, Mr. Murdoch is truly among friends. The attendees at the Web 2.0 conference know him as the ultimate market timer, the guy who swooped in out of nowhere and bought MySpace for $580 million two years ago, before its audience doubled and before social networks became the platform of the future. And this was before Facebook got a valuation of $15 billion via an investment from Microsoft on Wednesday.

He’s not my hero. And he’s no hero to anyone who gives even half a damn about the future of honorable journalism in this world — which I’m willing to bet includes plenty of folks in Silicon Valley.

Murdoch is brilliant. He’s a genuine risk-taker. He’s more visionary than almost anyone in traditional media. So far so good.

But his publications and broadcast outlets have done more to poison the public sphere than any other media empire, by far. This is not heroic, not as any dictionary I’m familiar with would describe the word.

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I’ve arrived in Santiago, Chile, for several days of talks and workshops at Universidad Mayor, a local university, and TVN, a television network. It’s a busy schedule but should be fascinating.

In a brief walk around the center of the city with some local residents, we stopped at the presidential palace. It is a site that resonates history, including what Americans probably know best about Chile’s recent political happenings: the 1973 military coup that brought down an elected (though deeply troubled) government and put into power a brutal regime.

The president of Chile, Salvador Allende, died in this palace, probably by his own hand. For 17 long years thereafter, Chile was ruled by Augusto Pinochet, the army chief who led the coup.

Chile is South America’s most developed nation, in part because Pinochet liberalized trade in the 1980s, forcing companies to learn to compete in world markets. But it’s at least arguable that the dictator’s harsh rule slowed this vibrant people’s economic rise more than he helped it — and nothing justifies the horrors he and his regime forced on their people.

The press was a state lackey during the Pinochet years. It is free today. And a new generation of Internet journalists is rising to enhance and challenge the traditional media. I hope some of them will be among the students I meet here; they, as everywhere else, are the hope for our future, in whatever land we call home.

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(This is the fifth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

Not every business model includes the direct exchange of money. A blog or other website can have an economic impact in more indirect ways, such as branding and promotion. While such sites can use affiliate links, banner ads and other means to raise money, they’re much more about playing a supportive role in boosting the career of the author.

Let’s be clear first what we’re not talking about: pure marketing or sales sites. Almost any business’s web site that exists solely to sell a product or service fits into this category.

One group that has learned to use blogs and other conversational media effectively is lawyers, who’ve even created a clever word for the genre: blawgs. The term, which, by most accounts, was coined by Bag and Baggage’s Denise Howell, refers to any blog about law (usually by a lawyer). While the majority of “blawggers” do so in some part for enjoyment, a great professional benefit comes with a well-executed blawg. An ideal situation would have a lawyer so proficient at running her blawg that it was popular enough to directly attract clients. Indeed, Howell says her blog reinforces her expertise, and that people can easily find her via search engines; the result is significant business derived from the brand she’s created in part via the blog.

As Eric Turkewitz explains in his own blawg: “If someone published an article in a legal journal, will that gross them any money? No. Except as an indirect form of marketing as they become known in their field for what they do. Blogging is conceptually no different.” The benefit of blawgging comes from building a personal brand. Such can be seen in examples like MassLawBlog, GrokLaw, and PrawfsBlawg.

The last of those, PrawfsBlawg, is a blawg written by professors of law. Blogging by academics, once widely regarded as professionally dangerous (see Ivan Tribble’s 2005 article “Bloggers Need Not Apply”), has trended towards widespread use as a showcase for ideas and research, not to mention an avenue for getting one’s name out. Just as getting one’s name out could mean more clients for a lawyer, it could mean more (or higher-profile) consulting gigs for an academic. One of the earliest and best threads on the subject is from CrookedTimber in a post that asked academics if and why they write or read blogs. Some of the common themes from the numerous answers involved the idea of personal branding, but other reasons included writing practice, class preparation, sharing and getting feedback on research, and using their blog as a platform to discuss or start work on a publication of some kind.

Eric Gordon, Assistant Professor of New Media at Emerson College and author of PlaceofSocialMedia, says:

While [books and academic journals] are still essential for career building, increasingly, scholars are looking to blogs to assess “what’s going on.” Beyond the assumed affordances of blogging - immediate, networked, participatory - it has taken on a new function of stake-claiming. For instance, I’m working on a book about location-based media and situated computing. If I were to simply write it and wait for it to “hit the stands,” it wouldn’t be until mid-2009 that I could join the conversation. Through my blog, I am able to join the conversation right now by opening up the research process to readers. This is good for two reasons: 1) I can join the conversation, and 2) I can begin building a reputation based on a work-in-progress. With the rapidity in which technologies change, this rapid-prototyping of academic ideas has become essential to intellectual and cultural life. [Disclosure: Eric Gordon is one of my professors and advisors at Emerson.]

Writers of all kinds are using blogs to promote, research, and develop their books. Several examples of this can be found in the comments of this thread on Global Neighbourhoods, which is, appropriately, a blog started in 2004 to promote a book that is still regularly updated today.

Professionals and academics are not the only people using blogs to enhance their careers. AlmostDailyBlog is run by an animator who, since making the switch to computer graphics, found he missed drawing and so created a blog to post doodles. As it became more popular, he started to sell prints and eventually put out a book of them—all stemming primarily from his blog and networking with other animation bloggers.

Business blogs have a similar purpose. Technology companies such as Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have launched a variety of blogs, including a popular CEO blog by Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz. Smaller enterprises benefit, too. ClearAdmit runs a very detailed blog as part of its site dedicated to providing information about MBA schools, programs, and the admissions process. These all serve to build the ClearAdmit name and reputation so that, when the time comes, interested parties may think of ClearAdmit for its off-line consulting services and events.

A word of caution, however: Just as a great blog can build personal brand, a rarely updated smattering of nonsensical or thoughtless entries or a page that looks like it came direct from a public relations department can be more of a drawback than aid. The best blogs have human voices and/or relentlessly useful information; they don’t sound corporate or like a sales or PR pitch. Also, with the rate at which blogs are increasingly aggregated, archived, and referenced on the web, an unflattering moment has the potential to haunt you.

For anybody passionate about what they do and with enough time to commit, blogging is a way to not only develop your own knowledge and skills, but also to share them, get feedback, and (most importantly in the context of this series of postings) to build a personal or business brand. If your only goal is to market yourself in the short-term, you may want to consider other avenues.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

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NY Times: Fox Bars Candidates From Using Its Images. The Fox News Channel sent notices to the campaigns of the leading Republican presidential candidates ordering them to stop using images from their Fox appearances in their campaign ads. The notices were sent out after the network was criticized for singling out only Senator John McCain’s campaign in barring use of the images.

I’m baffled that Fox can get away with this. Doesn’t fair use cover the candidates’ use of images of this sort?

Beyond that, why is Fox shooting itself in the foot so stupidly? The network is dishonest — “fair and balanced,” uh huh — but no one has ever called its executives stupid.

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In the Business Week article I point to in the posting below, Steve Hamm quotes me (very) briefly. Here’s our full exchange (I’ve combined two emails):

Question: Could the Mercury News or Knight Ridder have done a better job of keeping their readers or gaining new ones? If so, how?

Answer: The trends — demographic, financial and technological — have been working against the newspaper industry for some time. The Merc and KR were caught in a particularly bad bind given the collapse of not just the tech bubble but also the tech-advertising bubble.

That said, there’s always room for improvement. For example, the paper (and company) didn’t take advantage of the vertical-market opportunity offered by SiliconValley.com, a truly baffling misstep from my perspective.

And I continue to think that we should have jumped harder into conversational space with readers, offering a variety of initiatives such as reader blogs and a much deeper connection to the communities. (Not, of course, that this has happened in many other papers; the industry is only now getting why this matters.)

Question: The newspaper is trying to reinvent itself now. Is it too late?

Answer: Probably, but not definitely. Newspapers could still become the places that are community centers. Pretty late to get going on this, however.

As for the Merc, some terrific folks are still there despite the bloodletting. They understand (I think) that they’ll need to get radical about adapting to the new reality.

What I don’t know is whether the new owners are basically in business to milk the thing dry or (at least try) to create a sustainable and serious operation for the new world.

Question: When and why did you leave?

Answer: Early 2005. It was time; for one thing, I didn’t want to be one of those columnists who gets predictable and tedious. I’d done the book on citizen media (”We the Media”) and had an opportunity to put some of the ideas into practice. The first experiment didn’t work out, but I’m working on a bunch of projects (and investing in or advising some others) that are at least promising. I do sometimes miss the gig, which was incredibly fun and satisfying (not to mention the extravagant compensation), but I didn’t want to look back in 10 years and realize that I’d missed my chance to make a difference in the infancy of something genuinely transformative.

Question: When you were still at the Merc, did the staff warmly and aggressively pursue the opportunity to publish online, including breaking news and exploring new forms like Blogs? Can you think of an anecdote from that time that illustrates whether they went after this or not?

Answer: Remember that the Merc was quite early in all this, going back to the AOL days. Was the staff universally enthralled with the new media? No way. But enough folks were experimenting that the operation was a clearly a leading light for a time.

I suspect that most of my newspaper colleagues never even glanced at my blog back in its early days (1999). But keep in mind that SiliconValley.com had a daily online column even then. It took a long time for the Merc to launch its second blog, but again, that was true of the industry in general, too.

The horrible software mess at Knight Ridder Digital (I’m sure you’ve been told about that) slowed down all of the newspapers’ forays into the digital realm. Maybe it was a good business decision, for getting national advertising, but it was a total hairball for people doing the journalism — and they ended up removing years of my blog archives from the Web. That was demoralizing, because it proved the company hadn’t learned the values of the Web in any serious way.

At the same time, I was able to use the blog in pretty much any way that felt right. We were first, I believe, to take posting from the blog and put them into the paper, reversing the usual “repurposing” order. We also used it to break news, such as the Google buyout of the company that created Blogger.

Question: Is TechCrunch to the Mercury News Business section what MTV was to Rolling Stone?

Answer: I don’t think so, though both are about disruption.

MTV came into being in a world of (relative) media scarcity, even though it was part of a somewhat opened-up ecosystem. MTV took relatively deep pockets to start and get onto cable systems.

TechCrunch can rise because there’s no barrier to entry, at least not at the moment. (The “broadband” duopoly is working hard to fix that…)

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Business Week” A Cautionary Tale for Old Media. The collapse of Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper is in many ways the story of American newspapers in the 21st century. The industry has reached a near-crisis point. Many dailies are losing circulation at an alarming rate, and local newspaper ad spending fell 3.1% last year, to $24.4 billion, while Internet advertising rose 17.3%, to $9.8 billion, according to Advertising Age.

But the shivers rippling through the Mercury News also serve as a dramatic example of what happens when industry leaders get complacent in the face of fundamental shifts. Andy Grove, who helped sow the Internet revolution when CEO of Intel (INTC ), says that cross-industry disruptions follow a predictable course: Executives ignore the challenges. Then they try to resist. Only when it’s too late do they make radical changes. Grove, who now teaches a strategy course at Stanford University’s School of Business, summarizes the newspaper industry’s prospects: “Your doctor says you’re going to die, but if you don’t smoke, you’ll live a little longer.”

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I’m on the board of the California First Amendment Coalition, which is holding its annual “Free Speech and Open Government Assembly” this week in LA. This afternoon I”m moderating a panel with some prominent bloggers.

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