It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a media professional for decades, or how young or old you are, understanding the changes going on in the media industry comes from experiencing it first hand. You can see what I like to call the “trajectory of ideas” in the mediasphere, how media is consumed and shared.
And it is that understanding that Dan Farber brings to his new job, as editor-in-chief of News.com, one of the first online news organizations.
“I have to restrain my blogging these days, because we have writers with beats,” he says. “But everyone now blogs at News.com, it doesn’t matter who you are, even if you are in production, you blog.” (Dan’s new blog at News.com is Outside the Lines.)
Tom Waldrop, over at Intel (Intel is a sponsor of SVW) told me an interesting story about the launch of News.com. He said that the corporate communications team at Intel had an emergency meeting to discuss whether online journalists were real journalists and how they should work with them.
When I left the Financial Times in mid-2004 to become a journalist-blogger, about a decade after News.com launched, Intel had another emergency meeting. Tom Foremski has left the Financial Times to become a blogger. Are bloggers real journalists? How should we work with bloggers?
When I met with Shelby Bonnie, the former CEO of CNET, in mid-2004, he told me that the company had 5 different publishing systems, and two large data centers. It was trying to reduce the number of publishing systems.
CNET tried to create one publishing system, Project X. However, this was later abandoned, at a cost of about $60m according to one of my sources. This was not atypical, many media companies were trying to crete their own content management system. The Financial Times was shifting to a new, never before tried publishing system, when I was there. It broke down several times a day, it cost millions of dollars to develop. Some days it was a wonder that we managed to produce a newspaper.
All of this meant that News.com was not leading the next big change in the media industry: the adoption of the blogging platform as a two-way publishing platform linking journalists and readers.
Bloggers take the lead…
Mike Arrington recently to deliver a “crushing” blow to CNET by building a “dream team” of bloggers and rolling up prominent blogs into one organization.
CNET could potentially regain its lead in pioneering the new media world. And that’s what Dan Farber can provide: the blogger publishing experience from the front lines of the business.
Among the changes Dan Farber has already made:
-Different CNET departments now publish using the same template.
- Publish a story as quickly as possible, edit it later.
- Stories are updated constantly.
- Adding the right keywords and tags to make stories discoverable by search engines. About 40 per cent of CNET traffic comes from search engines.
- Use Internet standards whenever possible.
- There is no end to the work day, you are always on call.
- Everybody blogs.
- Create synergies between news, reviews, analysis, and blogs.
- Getting journalists to put in web links to non-CNET publications. “It’s about being part of the web and not separate from it,” he says.
- Carrying a pad of paper and pencil is not enough. Journalists also take photos, videos, and make podcasts.
You can certainly teach an old dog new tricks, Dan and I are living proof of that. I’ve got nearly 25 years under my belt as a journalist and Dan has a few more than that.
As I like to say: These are the best times to be a media professional because we will never ever be at such an amazing and disruptive change in our industry in our lifetime.
The trick is to make sure you are on the right side of the disruption, and not on the sharp pointy end of it. Can CNET become a disruptor? That’s part of Dan’s challenge, and that’s what makes his new job one of the most interesting jobs in media.
Share This
Random Posts
