“To give you a sense of the strong personalities that populate our Master of Communication in Digital Media, one of our graduating students updated (Brook Ellingwood) his Facebook status with this today.

Today, after years of struggle and hard work, I will at last achieve my lifelong dream: To wear clothes based on what priests wore in the 12th century.

Our students appreciate and respect the institution that is granting them this well-earned accreditation today.  But we also recognize the seismic changes that are occurring across every institution as technology continues to disrupt business models.

Including the time-tested business model of the university.  Maybe that’s why I’m wearing a suit instead!

The MCDM is a rigorous master’s degree for accomplished communication professionals who want to navigate this disruption and seek out the opportunities that are emerging every day.  The graduating students who will walk across this stage represent the very best of their fields and have exerted true blood, sweat and tears to earn this degree.

During their time in the program, they’ve produced social media strategies for non-profits like the United Way, video campaigns for the Pacific Science Center, strategic communication plans for startups.  They’ve pushed themselves intellectually to understand where communication is going with regards to mobile platforms, gaming and in emerging markets.  They are leaders in every sense of the word, and we applaud them wholeheartedly for their achievement today.   Especially during this tumultuous time.

Indeed, just today, we announced that we will recognize two Puget Sound-based initiatives of national impact that embody our philosophy of disrupting traditional communication models with innovative digital solutions.  One is Starbucks, for its innovative new Digital Network, which is in essence a media outlet available to everyone who frequents their stores across the United States.  The other is Dan Savage and Terry Miller for their groundbreaking “It Gets Better” Campaign on YouTube, as a beacon of hope to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teenagers.

We’re granting each of these initiatives the Anthony Giffard “Make The Change” award.   And that’s exactly what our graduates have done by achieving this degree, and what they will do as they engage the world with their talent and vision.  They will all, “Make The Change.”

Join me now as we recognize the largest graduating cohort in the history of the MCDM.  My colleague Anita Verna Crofts will read the names.  Scott Macklin will capture the digital media.”

Tomorrow, at our Screen Summit event,  we’ll be honoring Dan Savage and Terry Miller for their “It Gets Better” campaign to support gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender teens (connecting to two of our Four Peaks of “Community” and “Story”). See our Flip The Media post with Savage last year.

And after hosting Adam Brotman in our Strategic Research class last fall, we recognized the “game-changing” nature of his Starbucks Digital Network (representing our Peaks of “Innovation,” “Entrepreneurship”).

We intend to seed our nominees earlier this coming year, and hope to engage our community in the process as we move ahead.  Until then, join us in congratulating our award winners. GeekWire just published their story, and thanks to our relationship with Weber Shandwick, we’ve pushed out this press release throughout the state:

*****************

Related Posts

• January 26, 2011 -- Social Media Fuels Egypt’s Largest Protest in Years (6)
• January 12, 2011 -- Mobile News Apps – Ross Reynolds (4)
• December 5, 2010 -- Niche apps: A future for newspapers? (13)
• March 19, 2010 -- Good News for News? (0)
• February 4, 2010 -- Online Media Democracy Is Still Under Construction, or Why Engadget Had to Flip the Switch on Comments (14)

According to Al Jazeera, Egyptians began organizing protests through Twitter and Facebook on Tuesday morning. In an attempt to quell the unrest, the Egyptian government blocked Twitter around 6pm Tuesday night, but by then protests had begun in several Egyptian cities, including Cairo, Suez, and Alexandria, among others. A Facebook group garnered 80,000 members pledging to protest on January 25.

Protests turned violent after sunset Tuesday night as police used tear gas and powerful jets of water to contain the crowd, and the crowd threw rocks at police. Police chased an estimated 15,000 people off the Cairo streets around 1am Tuesday night. Dozens of alternative news sites have popped up in response to the Egyptian government’s blocking of Facebook and Twitter. According to some news outlets, Twitter was unblocked today around 8pm Egyptian time, and unblocked Tweets are becoming available to the world.

At this point, four people are confirmed dead, hundreds are locked up in jail cells, fires are burning throughout the city of Cairo, and despite government warnings of severe repercussions, the protests continue.

The Economist ranks Egypt 138^th out of 167 countries in their annual Democracy Index, and between 20%-30% of its people live below the poverty line. In an interview for Democracy Now, Egyptian independent journalist and blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy called out the influence of Egypt’s “Tunisian brothers,” for without their courage and social documentation Egypt may never have organized the protests. Furthermore, “Hacktivists,” or hackers devoted to social activism, have called for “cyber attacks” on websites run by the Egyptian government. For more information on that story, visit http://bit.ly/fQjwKJ.

Follow the hashtags #Jan25 and #Egypt on Twitter for breaking news on the protests via Twitter.

For more information on the Egyptian uprisings, Al Jazeera English (http://bit.ly/ekJYJV), Democracy Now (http://bit.ly/gq8xDI), and the BBC news (http://bbc.in/eJeJC4) are all providing good, up-to-date coverage and blog posts.

Flip the Media will continue reporting on the Egyptian protests as more information becomes available.

Related Posts

• February 1, 2011 -- Update on Egypt: Day 7 (1)
• February 24, 2011 -- The Arab Revolution and Social Media (16)
• November 9, 2009 -- An Ode to Contemplation (32)
• June 1, 2009 -- Only Retweet What You Like (0)
• March 10, 2009 -- TwitterFall: Twitter on crack, on roller-skates… in a jumpsuit (1)

AP MOBILE – Fast and comprehensive, it’s a quick way to follow up on the headlines and see photos while on the move. It allows you to designate one or more locations under the ‘Local’ tab. Seattle users see headline from the Seattle Times and Seattle P.I., but the story list is incomplete. Many top Seattle Times stories are withheld. It has an option to send photos and video, but that’s buried  under the ‘More’ tab. It’s got the best weather option I’ve seen but developers could add more categorization to the ‘Local’ tab. Under the current configurations sports, tech and breaking news are bunched together.

CNN – Like AP, it’s a good first stop for an overview of national and international stories. The ‘My CNN’ tab includes local stories from KING5 TV and local blogs, but lacks the depth the Seattle Times and P.I. stories provide. The big draw is watching the TV stories and live feeds from breaking news events like presidential press conferences. Prominently featured is the ‘I-Report’ tab, an entire section of user-generated videos and stories. You are encouraged to report by uplinking video and there is even an assignment page where the day I looked users were assigned winter news reports.

NEW YORK TIMES – It’s the pre-eminent U.S. news source for compelling global news coverage. This app does not add much to what you can read in the paper, but it allows you to access that information anywhere for free, a significant advantage because paper distribution is far from universal and increasingly expensive. This mobile app is essential for anyone who wants to stay up on the news. As a prime example, the cover of the Sunday, December 19th New York Times Magazine featured an innovative mobile feature. It was a Quick Response (QR)  code made of balloons that sent you to a series of clever and artistic short videos about ‘The Year in Ideas’ articles.

KING5 — This Seattle-based NBC affiliate is the strongest local TV station for news and this mobile app is the best local source I’ve found. It also features a ‘Video’ tab enabling low quality but adequate images that stream easily over the 3G network. The ‘Traffic’ tab is also thorough and useful.What it lacks is location-based features. A map which includes the information about news/traffic/sports/weather in the vicinity of the user would add immediacy.

NPR NEWS – Full disclosure, I work at an NPR affiliate station KUOW in Seattle. With that noted, I found this app outstanding for several reasons. It contains rewritten transcripts of the radio stories and links to audio versions of the stories from the program. The audio can be stacked on a playlist; links to specific NPR programs (All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Car Talk); a link to your local NPR station to hear their programs and a station locator tab to find the nearest NPR affiliate. One desirable improvement would be an app that would learn from the stories you select what kind of stories you like. A tab called ‘For You’ could include stories recommended by an algorithm extrapolating from your previous choices.

This final feature on the NPR app points to a weakness in all these news sources – they do not exploit location based mobile phone features common with Yelp and Foursqure. News apps should include on a map of your vicinity with flags linking to news stories and features. For example you could find The New York Times ’36 Hours in…” travel feature about a place you’re visiting, but why should the app make you search? It could recognize where you are and provide you with a list. These news apps could also integrate other databases to show nearby bus stops and arrival times, crime stats, and deals from nearby businesses. For example, under an ‘Entertainment’ or ‘Deal’ tab, the user might see that a play starts at a theater in an hour and deeply discounted tickets are available right now. Or a flower shop around the corner has a closeout deal on roses.

While the best news apps are doing a good job getting what they do to the mobile phone user, there are glimmers of the potential.

Related Posts

• January 12, 2012 -- Your Phone Was Probably Made in a Sweatshop (5)
• December 5, 2010 -- Niche apps: A future for newspapers? (13)
• April 10, 2010 -- Checking in and Cashing out on Location-Based Social Networks (2)
• March 6, 2009 -- Journalism on the Brink: Video (11)
• January 28, 2009 -- Web Innovation at the New York Times. Really. (2)

I have a journalism degree and daily newspaper experience, but I’m also a digital media nut and a huge Husky football fan. Imagine my euphoria when I first saw the Seattle Times was launching a Husky football app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Their Husky football blog is like the Bible to me, and an iPhone app sounded too good to be true.

But how useful would it be? Would I trust the content? How about the functionality? I didn’t want this to be a giant advertisement for the Seattle Times.  I wanted it to be all Huskies all the time. One season in, I’m happy to report this is purple and gold nirvana. It’s the most immersive, accessible and, of course, portable Husky football experience I have ever known. Thank you, Seattle Times!

OK, OK. Enough gushing.

I respect this app. It’s a big step for journalism and the newspaper industry in general. Readership is down across the country. Revenue is shrinking, and newspapers are struggling to reach new audiences in a digital age that crippled their business model long ago. Enter the niche app. This is a new dawn for newspapers.

I could already find the information and stories featured in this app on my iPhone using mobile Safari. But I don’t always want to tap dance through various bookmarks and zoom in to the content I want to read. The app puts it all in one place. It costs $2.99 for a one-time download, but I would pay $2.99 a month for this. I’m not the only one, either. Managing Editor Heidi de Laubenfels told Lost Remote the app reached “20 percent of our total expected sales in the first two days and continues to do quite well.” The Times’ latest app, one for the Husky men’s basketball season, currently ranks on the iTunes list for top paid sports apps.

My question initially was whether or not I would trust a similar app released by a non-objective news source. The UW Athletic Department did just this, releasing a Coach Sark app not long after the Seattle Times released its football app. The content, not surprisingly, was not as deep. The interface was wonky, and it wasn’t objective in the slightest. Not even the fact that proceeds from the $2.99 purchase went to charity could rescue this app from the bottom of the league standings.

Time and trust are in limited supply these days. The Seattle Times is an organization I trust and provides me with content I believe in. Newspapers everywhere should take notice of this endeavor. Find a market—foodies, concertgoers, American Idol-lovers—and meet them where they are. Smartphones are growing exponentially and apps such as this are, hopefully, a sign of things to come.

I love free stuff, but this is the kind of content I want and will pay for. Are you listening, newspaper executives? I would pay for this. I would pay monthly. And I would pay a lot more than $2.99.

Related Posts

• April 10, 2010 -- Checking in and Cashing out on Location-Based Social Networks (2)
• June 4, 2009 -- YouTweetFace (1)
• October 24, 2008 -- Blogs fostering a golden era of journalism? (0)
• October 4, 2008 -- The dark side of citizen journalism (3)
• January 17, 2012 -- Why I think CES matters (3)

The Politico newsroom inside News Channel 8

Every time that I step into a newsroom, I remember what it was like to live off of that electricity in the air when I was at NBC News.  It was the human buzz of stressful inquiry as events incessantly unfolded before our journalistic eyes.

We’ve come to believe that this buzz is much diminished in the waning days of traditional journalism.  But I’m seeing some signs of life as I travel around the northeast this month.

Local TV (Americans’ number source for news) has long been criticized for considering their web presence as an afterthought.  At Washington D.C.’s Newschannel 8, they’re launching a new website in June that will merge their cable news channel with their local station.  And rather than having TV feed the web, the station manager, Bill Lord, told me that the web will feed TV.  It will be text plus video plus citizen journalism all in one place,” he said.  They’ll also be hiring 100 local bloggers.  “We’re flipping the model.”

Lord has a head start in enlightened thinking about journalism’s new business models.  The successful political news blog Politico operates out of his newsroom.  Three years into it existence, the site (owned by the same family that operates Lord’s station) is making money.

Ironically, a good portion of that profit comes from the daily print edition of Politico.  The newspaper is delivered to 25,000 subscribers in the Beltway area.  Print ads still command higher prices than their online counterparts, especially when they’re the centerfold spread for the Boeing aerial fueling tanker.  I can’t imagine we’d ever see an ad like that in a Seattle newspaper (where the tanker will be made).  But Washington DC has the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress and the President as potential Politico readers — in other words, powerful influencers that allow media outlets to demand an advertising premium.

“People want to hold it in their hands,” Lord told me.

So Lesson #1?  Digital can fuel analog (and vice-versa) where news has value, and where advertisers see a plausible ROI (and analog still brings in big bucks).  Heck, in the nation’s capital, news is a always-in-demand renewable resource, kind of like solar energy, which will never go away.

That value proposition leads to Lesson #2: you can put up a pay wall around your online information, but only if you can afford to do so.  A recent Pew Foundation study on the State of the News Media discovered that just 7% of Americans are willing to pay for news content

Bob Merry pioneered sustainable online strategies for specialty newsletters, such as his Congressional Quarterly.  He was recently named publisher of Stratfor, a source of independently-reported global intelligence news, which charges $349 a year for its online subscription.  When I asked him what he thought about Pew’s 7% figure, he said, “That’s good for us!”

That’s because Austin-based Stratfor is a lean-and-mean operation: no printing presses, no satellite control room, with a good number of corporate and governmental subscribers who see value in the organization’s research.  Seven percent may not be enough to sustain a general interest news outlet like the New York Times (which is about to erect a pay wall), but it seems to be more than enough for a niche product like Stratfor.

Meanwhile, back at News Channel 8, Bill Lord admits that everything he’s doing these days is an experiment, as they try to settle on a sustainable business model.  But they’re feeling a whole lot more hopeful now than a year ago when advertising revenues were plummeting across the board.  And Bill says he actually likes the quiet hum of the blogging side of the newsroom, compared to the traditional buzz of TV news.

Originally posted to Storyteller Uprising

Related Posts

• January 26, 2011 -- Social Media Fuels Egypt’s Largest Protest in Years (6)
• December 5, 2010 -- Niche apps: A future for newspapers? (13)
• February 19, 2008 -- Learning to do this ourselves (0)
• November 25, 2011 -- To Connect or Not to Connect? (11)
• August 9, 2011 -- More Hyper-Local Radio for Seattle (1)

Engadget columnist Michael Gartenberg expressed his discontent with the comments that followed his recent iPad editorial in a Tweet: “Amused. Bash me on @Engadget column. Suggest my parents were not married prior to birth, suggest I be fruitful & multiply. enclose your CV.”

With traditional news outlets declining and enthusiast blogs like Engadget on the rise, the implications of closing comments reflect how the stampede of online discourse can sometimes be too much for even mature, full-time blogs to endure. According to Alexa, Engadget today ranks 195 in the nation and 384 in the world for Internet traffic. It recently launched mobile applications for iPhone and Blackberry. It produces its own weekly podcasts and monthly TV shows (Edited per Zack’s comment). This is a full-time media company in all respects and an influential one at that – The AFP wrote a story on Engadget’s comment disabling.

Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky explains why things got out of hand in a Tweet: “I don’t think it’s about the class of the readership, it’s about scale.”

Scale is certainly an issue, but it shouldn’t excuse community behavior. Especially for a technology site like Engadget, you’d think that its die-hard community would be populated by primarily educated (either by trade or academically) and at least civil readers. Surely most are, but what caused Engadget to call “time-out” demonstrates how online media-enabled free speech can unveil the worst in us.

Defamatory or threatening reader feedback is nothing new. Print media has dealt with it from the beginning (and the feedback inspired new publications with alternative views), but there was some effort required to write the letter and put it in the mail. Editors had choices about what they wanted to publish. On the contrary, online media provides a fantastic opportunity for people to share their thoughts and opinion with little barrier – Just ID yourself with a pseudonym, write your thoughts and they will be published immediately. Instead of rising to the occasion of opportunity, participants in a massive community like Engadget have failed over and over: Engadget also shut off comments in 2005; competitor Gizmodo warned its readers against poor commenting practices in October 2009. (Thanks to Gizmodo’s Wilson Rothman for clarifying that they have never turned off comments.) Surely some of this is due to spammers, but some of it is also due to the immature. Both threaten productive, democratic discourse.

I don’t blame Engadget for taking drastic actions. I don’t know if it was the only way to settle the circus, but it seems to be effective so far. The unfortunate lesson here is that the good comes with the bad. Yes, we have more opportunity than ever to express our opinions in online media, but not all of us exercise the best judgment or honor the opportunities that are afforded to us.

Sure, we’re talking about a tech blog today, but as we progress toward more transparent, democratic discussions online for other topics – politics, education, healthcare – we have to consider if it’s worth a scenario where the comments can’t just be turned off.

Paolo Mottola is a UWMCDM student and digital comms extraordinaire at PR firm Weber Shandwick. He can be found @paolojr and at his personal blog, Word Is Born.

Related Posts

• March 13, 2009 -- The Potential of the Crowd – The Case of Kutiman (1)
• June 4, 2009 -- YouTweetFace (1)
• May 2, 2009 -- Twitter & Skype classroom coverage of Paul Gillin (4)
• March 21, 2009 -- “The current (news) meltdown is just a warm up act.” (0)
• March 6, 2009 -- Journalism on the Brink: Video (11)

You can watch the video here.

In its heyday, the Fireside Room at the Sorrento Hotel served as a civic hub, where thought leaders convened to exchange ideas about the arts, culture and politics, and the community gathered for music performances and poetry readings. As part of ongoing programming to celebrate its centennial, the Sorrento is collaborating with Reynolds to hold a series of monthly Fireside Chats.

The public is welcome to attend the free chats, which will be taped and then excerpted for broadcast on KUOW the next day. The event will be held at 6 p.m., Monday, Aug. 17 in the Sorrento’s Fireside Room, 900 Madison St. Reserve free tickets by e-mailing fireside@hotelsorrento.com.

Related Posts

• June 9, 2011 -- Making The Change: Graduation and Awards to Savage, Starbucks (1)
• January 26, 2011 -- Social Media Fuels Egypt’s Largest Protest in Years (6)
• January 12, 2011 -- Mobile News Apps – Ross Reynolds (4)
• December 5, 2010 -- Niche apps: A future for newspapers? (13)
• March 19, 2010 -- Good News for News? (0)

Matthew Robson, I believe that the execs at Morgan Stanley used you as PR fodder. (Which succeeded, probably beyond the wildest dreams of their marketing/PR folks.) Enjoy your 15-minutes of fame!

In the “I can’t believe that they really said this” category (it may explain the sorry state of banking in the U.S.), Morgan Stanley execs reveal their total disconnect with reality:

The US bank said the report was “one of the clearest and most thought provoking insights we have seen”, and published it.

Morgan Stanley folks, I point you to Pew Research, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, Generation We: How Millennial Youth are Taking Over America And Changing Our World Forever, Millenial Makeover, The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media, anything by Yochai Benkler (@yochaibenkler) or Larry Lessig (@lessig) or Jeremiah Owyang (@joywang). Oh, and I’m pretty sure your corporate library has access to either Gartner or Forrester research. Check it out.

The Guardian (bless them) published the teenager’s “research note” in easy-to-read HTML. (Bloomberg didn’t even link to the Financial Times, which published a pdf of the report.) I ask you – are there any references for the sweeping generalizations in this “thought provoking” report? [Hint: no. A subsequent report asserts intern Matthew Robson queried a few friends via text.]

We can’t really call this “news” because assertions that might have been bolstered with research citations, like this one … “consumers are using more and more media but [many] are unwilling to pay for it …” are, umm, old news.

Although Twitter is the hook (Bloomberg headline: Morgan Stanley Intern Says Teens Don’t Twitter, Prefer Events), there are insights that are reflected in more nuanced research on millennials and validated by my experiences in the higher ed classroom. One of those:

“Teenagers are consuming more media, but in entirely different ways and are almost certainly not prepared to pay for it,” Morgan Stanley analysts Edward Hill-Wood, Patrick Wellington and Julien Rossi said in a note, citing Robson.

Note that the Bloomberg reporter was acting more like a transcriber than reporter (lots of “he said” quotes). The reporter could have spent an hour or so doing some online research and written a report putting the bank’s fluff piece into context.

Then there are inanities like this one:

Every teenager has access to the Internet, be it at school or at home.

Really? EVERY teenager? I can assure you that there are a lot of teens in Washington who theoretically have internet connection at school, but the schools have blocked YouTube, Facebook, et al. And there is certainly not a computer for every student (even if social networking sites were not blocked).

Serendipity is one of the reasons I participate in the Twitter space. And serendipity got him the two-week internship:

In January Rudolph, a three-year-old whippet, was being walked by Matthew’s mother in Greenwich Park when he became friendly with the dog of Patrick Wellington, a senior financial analyst at Morgan Stanley. His mother and Mr Wellington began chatting about her son’s struggles to get a work experience placement.

“We had tried many places, mainly in the local area,” said his mother. Matthew had written to local businesses, solicitors and banks including Lloyds TSB and all had turned him down.

So he wrote to Morgan Stanley, which offered him a two-week internship and two weeks ago on Monday he set off for the bank’s offices in Canary Wharf.

The Morgan-Stanley PR effort led to headlines like these (head-shake):

• Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert
• Why Teens Aren’t Using Twitter: It Doesn’t Feel Safe
• Twitter ‘uncool’, teen researcher tells investors
• Teen who doesn’t tweet reveals how he became top dog in the City
• Morgan Stanley’s teenage star: ‘I understood banking within a week’
• Twitter and teens: Challenging the idea of the young digital native
• Twitter is for old people, work experience whiz-kid tells bankers

Sidenote: my just-turned-16 year old niece joined Twitter late last month. She is following an eclectic group (including her aunt – and no, I didn’t suggest this!). After she’s been on Twitter a while, I’ll ask her for an assessment.

Cross-posted: this first appeared at WiredPen and twitter09.wordpress.com (aka #uwtwtrbook)

Related Posts

• January 26, 2011 -- Social Media Fuels Egypt’s Largest Protest in Years (6)
• June 30, 2009 -- MCDM Spotlighted At Seattle Wine Awards (1)
• June 18, 2009 -- What Do We Really Know About Iran’s Election (4)
• June 1, 2009 -- Only Retweet What You Like (0)
• March 10, 2009 -- TwitterFall: Twitter on crack, on roller-skates… in a jumpsuit (1)