adam newman

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve landed in a new position at TampaBay.com. I am now the Events Editor, overseeing all the Times’ calendar and restaurants listings and the online database. I’m also now a manager, which is a bit intimidating, but very exciting.

This is the end of my second week and I’m starting to get the hang of things. It is a new position, with no road map, so a lot of it is made up on the fly. I’m mostly working within the EventTracker database and publishing through the Times’ Escenic CMS.

I’m really glad to be finally working full-time online, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is where I spend a lot of my time!

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Thanks to the magic of Google Reader - my online best friend - I’ve added a cool new feature to my blog, the shared items. Below and to the right you can see all the posts I’ve read elsewhere that I’ve found interesting. I don’t always have time to repost things here myself, but you can get a good sense of topics I like.

Check it out!

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The buzzword among many young journalists these days is “branding.” With the number of newsroom jobs across the country quickly shrinking, anything you can do to stand out from the crowd is encouraged. Some dig in at message boards and various associations. Others blog, bombard social networking sites or maintain larger-than-life persona’s. A few of my friends in the under-30 crowd- who I shall refrain from naming here - have been quite successful creating “brands” of themselves through these practices.
The New York Observer recently… um, observed this practice is being encouraged at the New York Times, where superstar branded reporters like David Pogue are being complimented with young hires like 21-year-old TV critic Brian Stelter. The Times even has a My Times section where staffers share their “picks.” Turns out, David Pogue is reading The Onion and Amanda Hesser, food critic for the Magazine, is reading the Times’ golf section.

What does your brand say about you?

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I really enjoyed this multimedia presentation by Fort Worth on the haunted Rogers Hotel. The intro was a bit long, but the click-able exterior was cool. Bonus points for including a “share this project” form (even if it is a little big). After all, not everyone is lame enough to blog about this stuff like me!-

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The World Association of Newspapers recently asked 22 futurists where they thought newspapers would be in the year 2020. Their thoughts will be collected in “Envisioning the Newspaper 2020″ which will soon be published by the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project, exclusively for members of WAN.

Two thoughts that stood out to me:

“Oh, printed products may well continue and in some countries still grow. But I wouldn’t mourn their deaths so long as we find ways for their journalism to live on and prosper. A newspaper mustn’t define itself by its medium. It isn’t just paper. Its strength and value do not come from controlling content or distribution. And protecting those dwindling advantages is not a viable strategy for growth - or survival.” - Jeff Jarvis, media consultant, blogger and head of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York, USA

“Newspapers are going to survive. Will we be doing things the way we’ve always done them? Absolutely not. In the United States, there are two types of newspaper publishers - those who think the most important part of the word newspaper is ’news’ and those who think the most important part of that word is ’paper.’ …We can’t be afraid of reaching our audience in new ways. It will be one of the keys to our industry’s successful future.”- Rob Curly, Vice President for Product Development, Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive, USA

Also, check out this article by futurist Richard Watson of Future Exploration Network titled Delivering Tomorrow’s Newspaper, written from the perspective of 2020.

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It sure seems useful. Twitter allows instant, short messages to be sent to your RSS reader, cell phone, IM client or Twitter site. It knows where you are and how you want to be reached:

I’m using Twitter more and more, because of how context sensitive it is. I have it set up to deliver updates to me via Google Talk IM when I’m online, so when I’m at a computer, it’s just like regular IM. When I’m not online, the updates go to my cell phone as text messages (you can post messages via IM, text message, and the Twitter website, too). And I have it set up not to send text messages at night, but I subscribe to the RSS feed Twitter generates for all of my friends, so I never miss an update - I can read up on all of the wild parties the morning after. Updates are always delivered to the right place at the right time. Never intrusive. Feels nice.

Someone has created feeds from CNN and the BBC. It was used to get the word out fast after the Minneapolis Bridge collapse.

I’ll admit I don’t use Twitter right now for social networking. It’s just a little too much information for my taste. But this breaking news application has me rethinking how to aggregate my content. I’m already thinking about how I can integrate it into my routine when I get my mitts on one of them Jesus Phones.

UPDATE: Poynter has some great examples of how one station in San Diego is using Twitter and other online apps to cover the fires in Southern California.

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Just dumping some of my recent notes to myself here:

• Dump the classifieds. There is no way a print classified can compete with ebay and craigslist. Unless you can reinvent the mousetrap, don’t bother. One way to reinvent it: Real People Real Stuff.
• Give away the paper. A subscription to the New York Times costs hundreds of dollars a year. The website is free. Which one do you think people are going to choose? In 10 years the print paper will no longer be the backbone of your institution. The current model will invert. The print product will become the secondary focus.
• Do not focus implement any technology or idea without first considering “How can this make money?”
• The Web site is not a dumping ground for all the stuff that went in the paper. Stop fighting your CMS. Automation is not the answer. People are your CMS. Editors should control the content that is published in their section of the web site in the same way as print. They choose what they want from the collective resources of the organization.
• As a story evolves it builds (or loses) steam as it courses through the tubes. Stories swell and bloom like biological structures. A sharp eye can pinpoint these trends ahead of time. Rumor is this phenomena is something Digg is studying closely. What if readers chose the hierarchy, not news editors?
• Ask ourselves, do we supply ALL the news, or do we manage and moderate what IS news? Is there a top level of entry points that we should be creating from which users choose “more like this?”
• Advertisements ARE content: “Fillet O Fish” and “Will It Blend” What if there was a Second Life-style universal avatar we created. One profile/login/username for all the web. We could customize our own interaction model. Some would want the news in text format, some would want 3D VR. “media” could take any form.

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“Everyone knows about the big news sources such as Google, Yahoo, BBC, and so on, but there is a whole world of customizable news sites and news aggregators out there. We’ve gathered 30+ sites to help you wade through the enormous amount of information that comes your way on the Internet.” — Mashable

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In Taylor Owen and David Eaves’ column in The Tyee (a British Columbia alt-daily) entitled “How We Educated The New York Times” they mention how newspaper.coms rarely link to outside content:

To most newspapers, the idea of directing traffic away from their news site remains an anathema. Newspaper websites contain virtually no external links. Ironically, this follows the design parameters of a Las Vegas casino — the goal is to get you in, and not let you leave. Does anyone really believe that all the news and perspectives relevant and important to a community can reside on a single website?

In this manner, newspapers are fighting the very thing that makes the Internet community compelling: its interconnectedness. Like Potter’s blog, the Internet’s best sites are attractive, not simply because their content is good, but rather because they link to content around the web. And if that content is compelling, readers keep coming back for more guidance.

Newspaper.coms are disconnecting themselves with their communities by failing to include outside links, they argue. I often read newspaper.coms and wonder how wonderful it would if someone manually went through each story and applied as many relevant links and multimedia as they could. I would personally love a job like this. And the more I think about it, maybe we won’t even need professionals to do this kind of thing. Hmm… actually, sounds kind of familiar.

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Kourosh Karimkhany is the director of business development for Conde Nast’s CondeNet unit. He told MarketWatch that he sees a bright future ahead for newspapers and magazine’s success online:

“I’m still fairly young, so I can’t claim to have lived through a journalism-business golden age,” he noted, “but I would compare what’s happening now to the early 20th century, where there were 15 daily newspapers in New York City and each was pushing printing technology, telecommunications, design and distribution to the limit to gain a competitive advantage. Just as vast fortunes were made then, I think there will be a whole new class of digital ink-stained media barons.”

So what will it take for a company to win on the Web?

“Making bold bets, not being afraid of taking risks and putting money into Web projects,” he said. “If you stick with print for too long, you’ll be in trouble.”

The early 20th century over-saturation of newspapers analogy is an interesting one. I think it will come as no surprise when the pretenders begin to be weeded out by the success stories of Internet 2.0 or 3.0 or so on.

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