Tuesday, April 21, 2009

2009 Pulitzer Prizes Winners

2009 Pulitzer Prizes Winners were announced yesterday. These are the journalists who still give us "glimmers of hope" for the future of journalism.

Public Service
Alexandra Berzon, Las Vegas Sun: Construction Deaths

Breaking News Reporting
New York Times Staff: Eliot Spitzer's Resignation

Investigative Reporting
David Barstow of The New York Times: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hands

Explanatory Reporting
Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of Los Angeles Times: As Wildfires get wilder, the costs of fighting them are untamed

Local Reporting
Detroit Free Press Staff: Kwame Kilpatrick: A mayor in crisis

National Reporting
Staff of St. Petersburg Times: the coverage of 2008 election

International Reporting
Staff of The New York Times: Special coverage: Pakistan and Afganistan

Feature Writing
Lane DeGregory of St. Petersburg Times: The girl in the window

Commentary
Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post: Eugene's winning columns

Criticism
Holland Cotter of The New York Times

Editorial Writing
Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY
Editorial Cartooning
Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune

Breaking News Photography
Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald

Feature Photography
Damon Winter of The New York Times (photo above is one of the winning photos)

Monday, April 20, 2009

Online Advertising: We Have The Basics Ready

The idea is brilliant: If the ads start to increase revenue, advertisers will be willing to pay more. Haven't advertising agencies figured that out years ago?

Maybe they did offline, but not online, yet. The frustrating thing for advertising agencies are: The market is there and it's huge. Twenty billion dollars are ready to be spent in online advertisement as of last year and over one billion Internet users (potential buyers) are there hanging out on social networks. But the creative advertising agents are stuck. They can see the cake is there, fresh and tempting, but they just don't have the "silver bullet" to break the glass and get it. But some people said they might have figured it out. It's called Behavioral Targeting.

“We don’t guess, we figure you out and know what you want and how much you want to pay,” said Sheldon Gilbert, 33, CEO and founder of Proclivity, a data tracking system that provides the clients with their customers' shopping interests, purchasing likelihoods and level of expenditure.

Behavioral targeting not only records the purchase information, it also traces every step of someone’s online activity. “The massive change is to track micro behavior, such as the blogs you read and the community Web sites you browse. We collect the data, and based on your behavior, we analyze you and know what you want before you actually make the purchase.”

“It’s the whole new level of targeting that makes Behavioral Targeting a potentially successful online business model,” Lars Perners, professor in consumer psychology at University of Southern California, L.A., said.

Gilbert said clients of Proclivity systems have seen an average of 26 percent increase in their revenue and 100 per cent increase in click rates. Datran Media said in its internal survey that its clients’ ads click rates doubled or tripled after adopting behavioral targeting.

Let's see how it works among three players in the game: technology providers, advertisers who have the money and Web sites who have the platform.

Technology providers like Proclivity make money through subscription. Advertiser's revenue increases given the data provided by Proclivity and Datran Media are credible. The Web sites are the losers. It seems like we have sugar, flour and butter to make a cake. Now we need is a good chef, someone who could put all the ingredients together and bake it at the right temperature for a right amount of time.

Kenneth Wilber, professor in online marketing of University of Southern California, said “it might be harder to build database as big as Facebook or Yahoo than people think,” Wilber said. He agrees Behavioral Targeting has a clear proposition. But it is a very young technology and advertisers have a long way to go before using it on a regular basis. “If I were an ad network, I won’t be thinking about how to increase my revenue now. I would think how to merge with social networks,” Wilber said.

If the model is moving towards success, we should expect to see a lot of merges in the sector soon. Technology companies merge with social networks to combine their massive database; technology companies should also think of themselves more than technology providers but ads networks, who are brokers who put ads on most of the Web sites.

“I think behavioral targeting will become a successful business model but it will take three to five years to really take off, longer than most people think,” Wilber said.

The science part is done. Now it's art to make it work.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Who Are Those People Familiar With The Matter

Since when have newspapers started citing unnamed sources over and again --- according to people "familiar with the matter"? Does that bother you? It bothers me.

LA Times reported earlier this month that "a person familiar with the matter says IBM intends to pay $9 to $10 a share" to acquire Sun Microsystem; February's Washington Post started its story on SEC's investigation into Stanford as "a range of federal agencies... have been investigating allegations of fraud and possibly other illegal activity at R. Allen Stanford's companies for at least two years, according to people familiar with the matter;" Today's Wall Street Journal front page story brought the whole matter to a new level:

"More than three months into a medical leave from Apple Inc., Chief Executive Steve Jobs remains closely involved in key aspects of running the company, say people familiar with the matter. Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook runs the day-to-day operations at Apple, these people say. But Mr. Jobs has continued to work on the company's most important strategies and products from home, they say. He regularly reviews products and product plans, and was particularly involved in the user interface of the new iPhone operating system that Apple unveiled last month, these people say."

Who are "these people"? Why should readers believe in THEM? Speaking from experience, I admitted that sources ask to be anonymous, or on-the-background, for sensitive topics. But abuse of such leeway can lead to lazy reporting and incredible stories.

John Paczkowski's Daily Digital blog mentioned a New York Post story last year that got facts dead wrong by citing people who claimed to be familiar with the matter:

" The reason Microsoft hasn’t announced the slate of dissident directors it plans to nominate to Yahoo’s board isn’t that it’s already too deep in negotiations with Yahoo to bother–it’s that it can’t find any dissident directors to nominate. This according to “sources close to the situation” who tell the New York Post that Microsoft hasn’t managed to line up a single candidate for Yahoo’s board. Not a one.

Huh. That said, there is one little caveat.

Other sources–“sources familiar with the matter”–tell the Post that Microsoft does in fact have a slate of 10 board candidates and two alternates locked and loaded and will pull the trigger on nominating them if it must.

Holy Shiite … what a story. Incidentally, sources with knowledge of both “the matter” and “the situation” tell us that the Post has got this one dead wrong–the first part of it, anyway."

So it is unsettling to see increasing number of reporters from major publications, especially business and Wall Street coverage, are citing such anonymous sources. It is particularly alarming in a time when blogs and online news sites are eating up traditional newspapers. Credibility is one of the few things that newspapers still hold onto in the battle against uncensored online content. If newspapers give up its credibility, they give up the battle.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Social Media Coordinator Wanted

Newsday.com is hiring, thanks to social networks that have been taking the blame to be killing newspapers like News Day.

This might be the most ironic but encouraging news today: Newsday.com has an opening for Social media coordinator. The job description, a first of its kind, I believe is to get Newsday.com viral using Fark, Digg, Facebook and other social networking sites.

Smart move. Newspapers have finally figured it out: The secret is not to alienate the Internet, but to work with them, or, even better, to take advantage. Newspapers need to think in a win-win scenario. Social networks are good tools for marketing newspapers, in Newsday's case, even created media jobs. In return, successful newspapers might be financial sources for the online sites. Work together, we might find out a new business model. Didn't they say: Prosper together and die alone?

Twitter Traffic Explodes by an Annual 1382%

Do you know over 60% of the 7 million unique Tweeters are, surprisingly, not teens who gossip about school and prom dates, but adults between 35-65 years old?

Well, this recent demographic shift has caused an explosion in Twitter's traffic, a staggering increase of 1382% from 475 thousand just a year ago. See chart on the left.

Not only its traffic soared, Twitter has also been in the spotlight.

Computer World said "Twitter traffic skyrocketed thanks to middle-age tweeters," USA today exclaimed Twitter's surging traffic is deafening. BlogPulse, an online traffic metric site, followed up with a chart to show that in March 2009, the number of blog posts about Twitter has taken up 1.2% of the total blogsphere.

In a time where everything is pointing downwards, the uptick is definitely a confidence booster for the founders of Twitter as well as anyone else dying for good news.

So here comes the ultimate test: Now Twitter has made it in expanding its user value, we can't wait to see whether user value would eventually translate into greenback.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Twitter's Biz Stone on the Colbert Report

In response to the readers request, here is the video of Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, on the Colbert Report of Comedy Central about why we twitter, who twitters, and where Twitter is going.

That's what he said exactly: "We are recognizing the differences now between profit and value... Right now, we are building our value. That means we are expanding our service worldwide."

I have heard complaints from Twitterers that the website's service has become instable recently. Maybe expand your bandwidth first?


Monday, April 6, 2009

Twitter Is Over Capacity















Two minutes ago, I was trying to log onto Twitter to post my new blog entry, but I was having difficulty. Twitter says on its front page that:

Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.

A few days ago, Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone said on The Colbert Report that they were not at the stage to worry about revenue now. The goal is to catch the momentum and drive up the traffic. Well, they just officially made it!

Video Revolution

One person, one camera, one day, no stand-up. We just try to tell a story.

A veteran video reporter Michael Rosenblum, the founder of Rosenblum TV, is reshaping traditional TV production by replacing high-cost television crew with one journalist with portable cameras and much affordable editing software.

The cost of a portable camera and editing software has gone down from $1 million to $1,000 when televisions used on-the-shoulder cameras and traditional editing suites. Not only the prices have fallen so much, the gadgets are also much easier to use. Ten years ago, it was necessary to have a production team with a cameraman, a sound man, a producer, reporters and a van. Not anymore. "Any 9-year-old can shoot and edit a video now. Time has changed," Rosenblum said.

In 2006, Rosenblum, a former CBS reporter, started a video training program in New York and Santa Barbara. Most recently, he teamed up with Jeff Jarvis, director of the journalism department of CUNY (City University of New York), to give one-day workshop of video shooting.

People with no experience walked in the studio taking courses from "one-day introduction" to "one-week professional training." In a 4-day program, students learn everything from video shooting, scripting, tracking, editing, producing to uploading. The course charges $2,500 per person and are booked up through 2009, according to the registration desk at its New York office. "It's the public that wants to join in. It's like blogging, video blogging, or vlogging, is become a very powerful process," Rosenblum said.

"I always told cameramen that they were in an archaic job that doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't make me the most popular person in the world, but I could not care less." Rosenblum restructured BBC a few years ago. As a result, BBC cut its cost by 70% and the number of cameras covering the news on a daily basis has increased from 85 to 750.

Some critics say "they are trading quality for lower cost." The fact that Rosenblum would choose a cheap $200 Flip camcorder over a $5,000 one speaks for itself. "What Rosenberg is doing is making affordable housing," Adam Najberg, an editor of the Wall Street Journal who oversees its video branch, said.

"What we are comparing here is between raw footage on the web and excellent story telling," Najberg said. What Rosenblum is doing is a jump-start to push people into the area, but even a godfather can only do this much. "It is up to everybody to go ahead," Najberg said: "It is like in baseball, even though few will make it, everybody eventually wants to play for the Yankees."

But some productions on Rosenblum TV say the opposite. The Healing Fields, a documentary done by Alexandra Garcia, a student of Rosenblum TV workshop, won this year's Washington Post video grant. Websites like travelchannel.com have solicited Rosenblum TV to use its productions on a regular basis. They pay $250 for one-minute production they use.