LA Times: CBS layoffs signal a financial squeeze on TV stations. CBS insists that the quality of its (local) news won’t suffer because of the cuts, which hit three-quarters of the company’s 27 stations.
Right, because local TV journalism is already pretty much at rock-bottom.
The irony was deliberate when Steve Outing and Steve Kearsley soft-launched their new online comic strip, techGRL, a week ago yesterday. It’s a humor site, yes, but the goal — “not just a comic strip, but also an online community” — was no April Fools joke.
Reinventing comics online is an expanding arena. Mark Fiore and other talented folks have been blazing digital paths to revive a once-tired form. Adding online community is a natural extension of going digital.
Before I continue, several disclosures: Steve Outing (pictured at left) is a longtime associate and friend in the online journalism world. He’s written about my work, and vice versa. I also was an investor in his now-closed company, the Enthusiast Group.
Needless to say, I empathize with Outing, having had a business letdown of my own, a failure that taught me more than just about anything I’ve ever done. Steve has jumped back on the horse, I’m glad to see, with this new project.
In a conversation about the new comic site and other current work — which includes consulting on an as-yet unveiled venture to help newspapers regain some of the classified advertising revenues they’ve lost in recent years (ahem, good luck…) — Outing described some of the ideas behind techGRL.
He and Kearsley worked together on the San Francisco Chronicle years ago, both in the art department. Their collaboration on techGRL is classic comic-strip talent-sharing — Kearsley draws it and they work together on the dialogue — plus social dimensions.
The look of the strips, currently published Mondays and Thursdays, is what you’d see in any newspaper, and that’s no coincidence. “It would be great if we got syndicate deal,” Outing says. But the syndicated strip field is “incredibly competitive, so we’re not counting on it.”
The innovation, he hopes, is in the team’s adding of conversational and social media to the mix. A Facebook application is in the works, for example. And each strip has its own blog posting, “written” by Lexie, the 15-year-old lead character. “This gives readers a way to get to know the character. beyond just the 10 seconds they might spend looking” at the strip, Outing says.
Which raises the obvious question: What do two middle-aged men know about the lives of teenaged girls? That was the first question someone named Jill asked on Outing’s personal blog when he announced the project. Here’s part of his response (from a third-party commenting site that serves comments on his blog):
Despite the name, the comic is not just about “techGRL.” “Lexi” is our 15-year-old main character (coincidentally the age of my oldest daughter), but her dad is a David Pogue-like tech reviewer who brings a lot of technology into the household, and he’s an equally important character. So we think it’s broader than being “just” a teen girl comic. We’ll have both teen and technology themes.
Some of the characters are “real people in our lives,” Outing says. And visitors to the site are invited to become characters themselves via a survey, and to help create other new characters.There’s much more at the site; take a look for yourself.
What’s the business model, assuming there is one? It’s unclear. Certainly advertising may play a role, especially if the site takes off in any remotely serious way; teenaged girls spend a lot of money in this country and are a much-favored demographic. Perhaps tech-oriented dads will also become faithful readers.
But this time around, bootstrapping, not investor financing, is the way of making it all happen. It doesn’t cost much to try these days, and that’s a big advantage for creative folks.
As noted, Steve Outing’s last venture didn’t work out financially. When he and his partners decided to shut down the business, he posted a long and extraordinarily thoughtful analysis of what happened from his perspective — and, vitally, his lessons learned about citizen media — on the Editor & Publisher website, where it now languishes behind the E&P paywall. (Read it here instead.)
(Photo from steveouting.com)
Ted Gup: So Much for the Information Age. It is time to once again make current events an essential part of the curriculum. Families and schools must instill in students the habit of following what is happening in the world. A global economy will have little use for a country whose people are so self-absorbed that they know nothing of their own nation’s present or past, much less the world’s. There is a fundamental difference between shouldering the rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship — engagement, participation, debate — and merely inhabiting the land.
ZDNet: Anatomy of a ‘Blogging will kill you’ story: Why I didn’t make the cut. I read the New York Times’ take on how the stress of blogging and how it can kill you with great interest: I was interviewed for it. But I pretty much knew I wouldn’t make the final story as my take was different than Matt Richtel’s.
My own reaction to Matt’s piece was similar: I find the premise breathtakingly shallow because the data are so breathtakingly shallow. As Dingan notes in his piece:
Yes, blogging is stressful. Yes, it can be insane. But is it any worse than being a corporate lawyer? How many of those folks dropped in the last six months? How about mortgage brokers? Hedge fund traders? FBI agents? Any job where you gnash your teeth together? We write for a living, yap all day and don’t have to wear suits. You could do worse than blogging.
A truly extraordinary example of journalistic malfeasance is playing out right now. Attorney General Michael Mukasey told a San Francisco audience last week that the Bush administration was aware in the days before the 9/11 attacks that an Al Qaeda official was making calls from a “safe house in Afghanistan” to U.S. but that our government failed to act on that.
Mukasey said the U.S. lacked the legal authority, a flat falsehood as legal commentators have pointed out. But why aren’t journalists pursing what Salon’s Glenn Greenwald explains is a huge question:
Mukasey’s story is either true or false — and, more importantly, nothing like it happened. He can’t claim that he just misspoke or was confused because not only was there no such call from Afghanistan (at least according to everything that is known, including by the 9/11 Commission’s version), but FISA could never possibly have prevented interception of any calls remotely like the one Mukasey described.
He just made this up out of whole cloth in order to mislead Americans into supporting the administration’s efforts to eliminate spying safeguards and basic constitutional liberties and to stifle the pending surveillance lawsuits against telecoms. That isn’t hard for anyone — even including those who play the role of journalists on TV — to understand and convey.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s article about the speech at least raised the issue:
Mukasey did not specify the call to which he referred. He also did not explain why the government, if it knew of telephone calls from suspected foreign terrorists, hadn’t sought a wiretapping warrant from a court established by Congress to authorize terrorist surveillance, or hadn’t monitored all such calls without a warrant for 72 hours as allowed by law. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for more information.
As far as I can tell, however, the paper hasn’t pursued it further. That’s bad journalism if so.
It’s vastly vastly worse journalism that virtually the entire media establishment has failed to pick up on a story of real significance. Why are journalists not hounding the Justice Department, White House and Congress for answers? (The failure of Congress to ask obvious questions is nothing new for that weak-kneed crowd, sadly. And it’s scary that the presidential candidates don’t care, either.)
Who’s asking, besides MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann? Bloggers, for the most part. Oh, right, blogging is just a trivial activity, unworthy of journalistic recognition.
This kind of thing is why traditional journalism is forfeiting its soul.
At a conversation site where I spend some time, someone noted a Twitter posting from earlier today — well worth repeating:
“What I like about April Fool’s Day: one day a year we’re asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365.”
For a number of reasons I’m now using a Blackberry Curve as my main phone. But its email system is beyond dreadful for anyone who’s not locked into a Windows-Outlook-Exchange environment.
Mainly, the Blackberry IMAP connection is pathetic, a kludge that is almost worse than nothing. It doesn’t understand folders. It doesn’t reflect answered messages on the server. All this is because Blackberry pretty much makes you go through its own servers to use email, and because its maker is only seriously interested in working with Exchange.
So I’m looking for an acceptable IMAP mail client for the Blackberry OS, one that connects directly via the Internet to my personal mail server and others. I don’t need fancy, just usable — and I’ll be delighted to pay good money for it.
Send me an email if you know of anything useful.
The excellent MAPLight.org has an opening for a research Director:
MAPLight.org illuminates the connection between money and politics in unprecedented ways. Our groundbreaking website links campaign contributions with how legislators vote, revealing how money and politics affect the specific issues people care about. The Research Director position is central to MAPLight.org’s work.
An extremely cool gig for the right person…
New York Times: Citizen Huff: According to one person who was briefed on discussions but was not permitted to speak for attribution, the company has at least looked at the value of the site if it were put up for sale, and a figure around $200 million was used. That would put the price at more than $50 for each visitor, a high valuation. Using the site’s internal figures, 14 million unique visitors for the most recent month, the price would be closer to $15 for each user.
Even at $15 per user that’s still many millions — and it’s all built essentially on the labor of others who’ve volunteered to post their thoughts for no compensation. They have their reasons, including the site’s growing influence and their own vanity. Will they still volunteer their labor when just a few people get rich from it?
I admire what Huffington has done in many ways. I do not admire business models like this.
I hope some of you can join us May 15-16 at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society for the Berkman@10 Conference: The Future of the Internet. This gathering, marking the center’s 10th anniversary, is shaping up to be an extraordinary affair.
As a Berkman Fellow the past several years, I’ve had a chance to spend (not nearly enough) time with some great people who are doing some of the best work on understanding the Net’s already powerful impact on our lives. The May conference will, in part, offer a summary of where we are and where we may be going. As the conference home page asks: “In tracing the trajectory of the past and attempting to lean into the future, what are the contours of the moment we find ourselves in? What are the most important questions that will propel us into the next decade?”
Among the many, many great speakers will be our lunchtime keynoter on Friday, May 16 — someone who’ll need little introduction to regular readers of this blog. He is Joshua Micah Marshall, founder and editor of Talking Points Memo and several related political blogs. What he and his team do each day has become essential reading for people who care about politics and policy, and he recently was honored for his work with a truly high honor in journalism, the George Polk Award.
I’ll have the honor of introducing Josh Marshall. He has been a touchstone for my own work, and has shown one way forward for the journalism “by the people, for the people,” in which I so fervently believe.