media

Found: An interesting article from Gladden J. Pappin on Liberty, Technology, and the Advent of Social Networking. It's a bit tl;dr, but I've read through once, and hope to sit with it a little longer sometime.

The article (and many like it) makes me think a bit about the theme of personhood on the Internet, and how our use and overuse of social media, blogging, etc. in building our own self-image is something about which we must always be cautious.

I recently watched the Star Trek TNG Episodes 'Booby Trap' and 'Galaxy's Child', and while I'm no supporter of the strange philosophies that guide Star Trek morality/ethics, I wonder if we are becoming like Geordi LaForge, who fell in love with a projected image of a person on the holodeck.

One of the keys to using social media effectively is to keep a proper separation between one's true self-image and the image one projects on the 'holodeck' of the Internet (and make sure you know that others are not defined by tweets and avatars).

I didn't have much time today to post this earlier (I was driving home from a trip which took me through five states in six days, and had to do this on the road), but this afternoon I was on the excellent 'Catholics Next Door' radio show on the Sirius XM Catholic Channel.

I was happy to speak with Greg and Jennifer Willits about flockNote, about parish communications, and about helping Catholic organizations get connected to their flock in various ways.

Then I continued driving home from Chicago :)

I don't know if they have an online archive of their shows, but if I can find a link to the audio at some point, I'll try to provide it. I'm also not too familiar with satellite radio, since I've never subscribed (Pandora + free radio has worked for my musical tastes), so I don't know if there are any rebroadcasts or ways of listening to past shows...

...this is a question posed by KMOX Radio's Mark Reardon, who hosted an hour of some of the most confusing arguments for the Pope's resignation I've ever heard.

His basic principle was this: Accepting the facts of the New York Times' recent article bashing the Pope, should the Pope resign, as would any other head of an organization accused with being an accessory to a crime?

Unfortunately for Mark, most Catholics do not (and likely will not ever) accept the Times as a credible source of information when it comes to Catholic-bashing. There have been numerous posts on the problems in the NYT piece (some are linked to at the bottom of this post), but Mark would not for a moment entertain these problems, or any other arguments against the basis of his question.

Rather, he blamed a couple people for being insensitive to the victims of these crimes. Mark: nobody is arguing that the crimes should be shuffled under the rug or covered up. Rather, people are arguing that, in the specific instance of the NYT piece (and in most media reporting of the issue, by and large), there are serious flaws and inaccuracies that cause most rational people to discount the entire article!

Anyways, here's some good reading on the issue:

• To Whom Shall We Go? (article by Archbishop Timothy Dolan)
• Clocking the Times (article quoted by Whispers in the Loggia, dealing specifically with the U.S. case mentioned in the Times' article)
• Pastoral Letter of Pope Benedict XVI to those in Ireland (straight from the Pope!)
• "A Well-Oiled Campaign Against the Pope" (mentions some important info from different sources)

Petty and infantile, that's how I'd sum up the handling of a recent situation on the stltoday.com website (the website for the St. Louis Post Dispatch).

Kurt Greenbaum, after getting an anonymous commenter to resign his job [Ars Technica] when he looked up the commenter's IP address and ratted out the commenter to the school for which he worked, posted a little self-congratulatory post on the Post's website, as well as his personal blog.

Excerpt from the post:

I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.

I'm not sure if Kurt understands the concept of anonymous posting and spam comments... on this little thing called the 'Internet,' people spam blogs and such with annoying, crass, rude, insensitive, and pointless drivel almost constantly. Even if you require people to be registered users / subscribers, you will get spam. You learn to deal with it. I could care less about the identity of anonymous commenters—and they should know they can always be tracked, to a certain extent—but the idea of selectively calling out certain commenters detracts from the idea of an 'open forum.' I've seen much more insulting and crass comments on the Post's website, so I don't know what got Mr. Greenbaum's feathers in such a kerfuffle.

You'd think the Post, a sanctuary for Catholic-bashing comments and radical vulgarity (in my experience), would either grin and bear the vulgar comment left by an anonymous commenter on the earlier post, or at most delete the comment and move on. Such should be the policy of a large news organization that leaves all their postings open to droves of anonymous commenters (a bad idea anyways, in my book).

Ah well. At least it provides the Internet with a little entertainment, and some good lessons for how not to handle a similar situation. Here's a follow up post by Kurt on his personal blog - excerpt below:

Have I set some sort of precedent for STLtoday? We don’t routinely, and would not routinely take the steps I took in this case. For particularly bad cases of abusing our guidelines with vulgarity and obscenity, we would not rule it out.

So he acted on a whim? So it seems. Such is the way on the web, quite often.

Did I overreact? Maybe I did. I am constantly frustrated by the difficulty of dealing with this kind of language. And in this case, I was motivated by three things.

I like the 'maybe' here - you did. Sorry, them's the brakes. Being constantly frustrated is par for the course if you're dealing with social interaction on the web. You have to take it in stride, even when you're at the brink.

First, this came from a school. I didn’t know if it came from an employee, a guest or a student. But I viewed it as a “teachable moment” and a chance, perhaps, to nip something in the bud, to engage the community to help me. I didn’t anticipate that the reader would resign. 

I'd like to know how this would help 'engage the community.'

Second, the comment was posted, deleted and intentionally posted a second time by the same person. Too much time had elapsed between posts for it to be a mistake or an accident. The reader was determined to post it.

It's called spam. Deal with it :-) [Note: I get maybe 5-10 spam comments on the few sites I run on a daily basis... often three or more are posted within minutes of each other, and actually look like legitimate comments. My policy is, delete first, ask never. Basically, delete the comment and move on.

Third, it was easy. As I said, I didn’t have to dig for the school’s information. It was readily available on the e-mail alert. Had it not been there, I may have deleted the comment and moved on.

"It was easy" is always—always—a poor justification for action.

Hopefully we've all learned a lesson from this incident. People, spam bots, etc. will spam any way they can - whether it be to advertise a product, to ruffle feathers, etc. This is especially the case when you leave your posts open to anonymous commenters. Just ignore them, and be on your way. The Internet will thank you.

After reading a few articles mulling over the implications of Rupert Murdoch's purported move to pull out all News Corp content from Google News, I thought I'd share a few thoughts, especially since the 'pay wall' issue is something I deal with from day to day with a local news publication...

Online Ads - a Faltering Art

With the popularity of Google Ads and other similar ad networks, where impressions are free, and clicks cost money, it's no surprise companies are hard-pressed to make any real money with this traditionally-based advertising medium. Heck, only 16% of Internet Users actually click on ads—that's not something the accountants and marketers are excited to hear, when all their business models are based on CTRs (click-through rates). Impression-based pricing is problematic, as well, especially considering the many different techniques people have for tricking ad-impression trackers.

There are a plethora of problems with online advertising metrics, and with revenue from online advertising. There are a few areas where online advertising is extremely effective (YouTube and other video sites have a successful pre-video commercial model, which works well). But for simple news and blog pages, the flashy, arrogant and often irrelevant ads that display in and around the content are largely ignored.

I don't propose any solutions to this huge problem—especially for news companies who, in the past, received more than half their revenue through advertising dollars. However, it's necessary to acknowledge the problem.

The Google Generation

Bing, Google, Yahoo - whatever the site is, online search and aggregation is the way of the future—I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have any particular website besides the three above (or one of their sub-sites) as their homepage. The fact is, people don't use the Internet as a replacement for the morning newspaper and bagel. People browse topics that interest them, then follow a topic around to different sources, and gather more information about this topic than was ever before possible in such a short period of time.

Google News, RSS feeds, and links from popular blogs are the main ways members of the Google generation receive news from around the web. If you cut off your content from these sources, your site will be inaccessible to the Google generation. (See another post of mine on this topic: Why Your Diocese or Organization Needs News Feeds).

You can create a 'pay wall,' but you have to be prepared to become a niche player. For certain entities, this is okay. I pay to receive Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Our Sunday Visitor, and the St. Louis Review (and their online editions/content), because all four of these publications give me access to a niche of news and information that matters to me. Heck, if Whispers in the Loggia or Mac Rumors became pay products, I might even pony up for news from these sites, since it's worth reading for me.

Crowd-Sourced News

"Mr Miller admitted News Corporation could not make the bold step alone but was prepared to lead other media companies in this direction. “We will lead. There is a pent up need for this. There has to be a resolution for the free versus pay debate otherwise we cannot afford to pay for things like news bureaus in Kabul.”

The problem I see is that, with the Internet helping remove many international barriers to communication (albeit slowly, in many areas), many people don't see why News Corp should need a news bureau in Kabul, when news from Kabul's local papers can be aggregated in the same place as news from Zimbabwe, China, Russia, and the United States. Translation issues aside, what's the point of a New York-based paper having an office in a foreign country, when one can connect directly to the foreign country online?

Crowd-sourced sites like Now Public are becoming much more popular, and, as the saying goes, 'content wants to be free.' Of course, niche markets and fields might be able to use pay walls to keep the revenue flowing—but even then, they have to be careful to (a) not lose relevance, and (b) remain the best in their field. The St. Louis Review is the best and most comprehensive Catholic news source inside the Archdiocese of Saint Louis, so they can afford to use a subscription model.

But is the New York Times the most comprehensive general news source on the whole planet? Nope. Why pay for it if you're living in Talahassee or Seattle? No news entity, in my opinion, can be a comprehensive general news source anymore, besides, perhaps the Associated Press (or similar agencies without a particular publication). The USA Today is the closest thing, but they are not really as relevant or as popular online as they have traditionally been in their print product.

Solutions?

If every general news source on the planet, including all the 'open' and 'crowdsourced' news sources, closed its doors to Google and set up a pay wall, that might work to bring revenue back into their idyllic gardens of journalistic endeavor. Even so, the second this happens, I would be the first to set up a new open platform for news sharing... even if it had the worst/most fallacious content on the planet, it would be read and visited, because people like getting something for nothing. Just stick a few Google ads on it, and I'd have a nice, free revenue stream :-)

It's time for innovation in news media. Solidifying niches, finding new ways to utilize subscriptions or micropayments, and considering alternate ways to increase ad revenue are certainly on the table. I, unfortunately, don't have any really amazing or groundbreaking ideas in this regard. But, for news organizations' sake, they should definitely keep this on the front burner for a while.