Why the press should pay attention to Dr. Horrible

There’s one day left. One day left to watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog for free. At midnight, July 20, the streaming miniseries will be gone.

So, why should the media care about a fictional singing supervillian doing his laundry and writing blogs? Because, this experiment in broadcast proves how popular some innovations can be.

Consider this: I can watch these free episodes as many times as I want, as long as the site doesn’t crash or my internet doesn’t lag. However, there are also iTune downloads available for a couple dollars each. Being a huge Whedon fan, I had a couple of choices. I could watch the show for free until Sunday then buy the DVD when it comes out. I could, of course, watch the show for free and then never see it again. Or, I could buy the downloads from iTunes and have them to watch whenever I like and keep them after the free viewing period.

Instead, I chose a fourth option. I watched the episodes for free, downloaded them for $2 each, and I plan on buying the DVD when it comes out.

Why? I love Joss Whedon. I love that he gave me choices in how I consume his content. I love that he gets this age. Instead of hemming and hawing about how he might lose money, about how he needed to get a range of opinions and advice before he started, about how the quality of his product would go down if he created something for the web, he did it and was successful. And, yet, all of the papers and studios mired in the old way of doing things are going to continue to spin around in circles until they all fall down.

Whedon even makes it painless to find graphics and other resources for people like us to post content in our own blogs about Dr. Horrible’s blog. Of all the director’s I’ve ever been a fan of, Whedon has always been the most fan friendly, using the internet and anything else available to get fans involved in his shows. (I still have prizes I won for participating in the Browncoats when his movie Serenity came out. Years later, and there’s a still an online community rallying around the film and keeping each other updated on news and events.) Why can’t we do this with our own brands?

After reading the post about the musical episodes on Changing Way, I decided to add my own two cents.

The internet’s Wild West Show and how it pertains to journalism

Welcome to the July Carnival of Journalism, hosted by Doug Fisher of Common Sense Journalism.

Doug posed a question about the future of media law and how it pertains to journalism. My response here focuses on copyright and Fair Use, and how I think laws will relax when it comes to posting other people’s work on the internet. While I deal specifically with photos and writing, I think the same is true of audio and video content.

When the first newspapers appeared in the U.S., it wasn’t uncommon for editors and publishers to take famous poems, essays, and articles and even articles from competitors and dump them on their publications’ pages. As journalists, we like to bring up the rich, ethical tradition of journalism and talk about the internet and popular culture in less than glowing terms, but the truth is media ethics has always been a malleable, changing entity. And, the internet is bringing back a Wild West, outlaw mentality that, at best brings an innovative bent to a struggling industry and at worst hearkens back to days of blatant plagiarism and yellow journalism. At the same time, it’s making us accountable for our actions to a degree never seen before.

In a way, it’s best to see the internet as a foreign country where people from every other country come to work and play. I think this is how it will soon be seen in legal terms. The internet will be a tax free and free speech zone where ideas and content are exchanged. Because the online world has permeated every nation on earth, it is impossible, say, for the U.S. to make the rules for what someone in India is doing on the internet just as it’s impossible for the Chinese government to decide what kind of commerce a British citizen can take part in.

The internet should remain a place where everyone, from celebrities to the kid down the street, has the freedom to publish and sell their ideas. I think the biggest changes, when it comes to the law, will be in copyright and Fair Use. The days when publications (now think blogs and websites) take the words of other people and dump them on their own pages are back, and we should accept this.

I’m not saying we should let our words be published under another writer’s name; thanks to the web it’s almost impossible for someone to get away with this. However, we have to start making allowances for people who take our content and post it with our names and URLs attached. If we do our jobs and write interesting articles and editorials, those two digital compromises will equal more page views and readers for us, even if the audience turns back to the site that took our content at the end of the day.

The digital world can bring people of similar mindsets together in a way never seen before. It’s time to stop guarding our content with a shotgun in hand, waiting for someone to run off with our words. It’s a double-edged sword for both parties; if you write a blog you know how easy it is to grab a chunk of text and a few photos, and how easy it is for the originators of those words and pictures to hunt you down if they don’t want you using their media.

It’s time to relax and ride out the webstorm. There are only two questions you need to ask yourself if you find your work on another webspace: “Do readers know I made this, and can they find me?” If the answer to both is yes, then sit back and wait for increased views. If not, then start using our current legal system to your advantage.

Digital reporting: How local should it be?

Welcome to another Carnival of Journalism.

This month, the carnival is being hosted by Andy Dickinson.

Sorry I missed out on last month’s carnival. I had a stomach virus or food poisoning, and things got pretty nasty around here.

This month, the carnival’s main topic is whether or not digital reporting best serves a local audience.

My answer is no. However, digital reporting does best serve a niche audience already interested in what you have to say. Digital done right will support the growth of an organization, but done wrong will just waste space on the internet.

Let’s say you start a news site, meant to be your community’s modern answer to the small, hometown paper. You plaster local forums and blogs with comments playing up community involvement in the site, write out press releases and send them to local organizations, and even paste up flyers around town. You equip the site with comment boxes, spaces for real people to upload their own stories, videos and photos, and ask for community journalists to help out the small staff you already have. You even set up an events database and invite local businesses to list what’s happening.

You sit back and wait for the stories to come in. You wait for locals to start hitting your site to get their local news written specifically for them and, in some cases, by them. And, nothing happens.

You send out a digital reporter to cover the high school football game. He takes video, photos, and audio to piece a story together. You invite readers to post their own photos and memory of the game. The only comments on the story are of the “Go Bulls, Patriots suck” kind, written by fans of both teams that played. There were about 500 views and three uploaded photos, but one was of a cheerleader that had to be taken down.

What’s going on?

The problem with digital reporting on the web is newspapers still don’t know what’s going to work. And, when they try to come up with ways to involve readers in the process, they don’t go out of their way to really understand their readers; they look to see what others are doing and then emulate it. Even worse, some newsrooms still think of their readers as “those cute little readers who have to be saved by their base desire to read stories about puppies and celebrities.” Also, there are few national resources available to papers right now that would help the quality of digital content.

If you look at multimedia reporting, complete with slideshows, and video interviews, it works really well with niche subjects. It speaks to people who are hungry for information about a particular subject. So, think about the above football game example. You’ve got, let’s say, a town of 50,000. You’re hoping that somewhere around 10,000 will read the story. (To add a little more weight to the event, let’s say it’s Homecoming.) The 500 views on the story are a crushing disappointment. The problem with the story isn’t the scope, it’s a local story that primarily attracted local readers, once you look over the story’s stats.

The problem with the football story is that no one was hungry for the information the next day. A handful of the story’s views probably came from people looking up the score because they missed the game. Another handful might have come from alumni of the school looking to see what they missed. Most of the views probably came from coaches, players, friends, and family looking for pictures and stories of themselves and loved ones. Everyone who had a stake in your story was at the game. There is no mystery. There is no intrigue.

That’s why entertainment news does so well. That’s why digital entertainment news is one of the best examples of how to do digital right. It’s niche. Stars are constantly trying to control their public faces, and celebrity reporters and regular Pauls and Peggys on the street are constantly trying to throw their secrets out into the open. When fans find a new video of their favorite starlet’s drunken caper or their favorite beefcake’s night at a stripclub, they’re sucking up information they didn’t already have or even know they were hungry for. Even a short controlled interview with a few glib outtakes can do very well for this reason.

One of the downfalls of placing national digital media on your site is that chances are Yahoo, Google, CNN, MSNBC, or another national powerhouse has already grabbed their attention.

What you have to do is grab their attention back. But, you can’t think like a newspaper any more. Newspapers are dying, and this will be the last decade of the “Just the facts, ma’am” form of newspaper coverage. The future looks more like tabloid and magazine news coverage. In other words, the future of news is the old guard newsman’s nightmare.

If you’re going to stick to local stories, make sure they’re local stories people want to read. Keep sports coverage, but the old “get in, get out, get a couple of quotes and pictures” style of reporting isn’t going to cut it any more. This is true with all stories. One of the biggest problems with modern journalism is stories are stripped away until there are no compelling elements.

Find them. Write them. Add your own style and flair, because the old school journalism we’ve been told to stick by is failing. Write to your own personal quirks with glee, imagining all the times your professors marked up your stories, taking all of the vestiges of your personality out and replacing them with bland copy. Because you’re adding interest to the story, make sure to keep media law principles in mind, because a million page views aren’t going to help you if you’re fighting a libel suit.

Give yourself time to edit video and think of your clip as a mini movie. It would be a good idea to think of your photo as a mini movie, too, and get as many as you can. A 15 second photo slideshow with captions and music is much more compelling than five minutes of shaky video footage thrown onto the site with no foresight.

Find links to blogs and other articles and link to them. If you can’t trust most of your readers to come back to you, it’s not the fault of your readers. If they like what they’re reading or viewing, they’ll come back. If not, you have to find out what they like and give it to them.

And, if you do want to go national, don’t take the lead of most newspaper sites who take AP text articles and dump them onto a site. Find multimedia content that will engage people. Because, chances are, most of your audience can find the big stories without you, and they’re not going to be impressed by the AP logo next to a bland, boring 300 word blurb about an important event.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is to stop seeing your brand as something your audience wants to be part of. I think we forget that most of our readers and viewers don’t want to be journalists. If they did, they would have gone to Jschool. So, when we ask them to be community journalists, they usually think we’re asking them to do our jobs for us. (The exception is when breaking news hits and only members of the public on hand with their camera phones and personal video recorders.) And, when we ask them to submit content to our sites after making them read a ten page agreement about how we now own their stuff and can use it for our own gain without paying them, why should they join our community and start posting?

We need to stop seeing Web 2.0 as a way to create a community we control but as a way to join a greater community. Recently, I noticed that Channel 10, a local Tampa station, was trying to promote user blogs through their newscast. My first thought was that their viewers who blog are already blogging and this probably won’t be a popular service. After 10 minutes of stumbling around the site, I couldn’t even find the blogs they were talking about, besides on a link asking me to join to comment, blog, and share photos.

Promoting a banner exchange with local bloggers would be a much simpler way to build a foundation of blogs around a brand.

I think that’s about the end of my ramble for today. Any thoughts or questions, please leave a comment or two.

The sky is falling and a room with a view

Spring, summer, and fall are always fun times for Florida weather coverage. I’ve especially noticed this in the past few weeks, where drought conditions brought the Hillsborough River, a major river that runs behind my house, down to the point where there’s a large sandbar smack down the middle of it, and there is now a sandy beach extending at least fifteen to twenty feet past my dock. And, thanks to the beginning of hurricane season and summer rainy weather, we’ve been having regular storms pass through for the past two weeks.

The drought (which happens every year) is fun, because the local news outlets panic over which towns and counties are sharing water resources and which are mooching. They cover water restrictions and give a list of local officials and how much their households use in water each month. Now, the big story has been filtering reclaimed water and turning it into drinking water and whether or not the regular folks in Florida would stand for that kind of thing. If it worked in Waterworld, it could work for Florida, right? Instead of drinking other people’s filtered debris, I could just buy a filter and make my own.

Now that it’s raining again, I’ve noticed my local news stations running stories about the horrific storms. I think the local CBS station actually did a story the day after one storm, cataloging the storm damage in a neighborhood, which amounted to some downed branches and lost shingles.

I’m sure Tampa isn’t the only local coverage area where the stations make a mountain out of a molehill on a slow news days.

And, I’m going to apply for the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Gift of Freedom grant and the scholarship they give every year for a writer’s workshop. If I win the grant, I will focus on my freelancing and a novel I’m working on. If I win the scholarship, I will be going to Georgia O’Keefe’s ranch in New Mexico to attend a workshop for women writers. I’m excited!

If there are any women writers out there who read this, I would suggest you apply.

Back in the saddle

I think my post-graduation burnout is officially over. I’ve updated my resume and have some ideas for new blog posts. I’m getting the hang of this “life” thing.

My first writing gig after college

In addition to doing those things I do at the travel video store I work for, I will now be contributing to 411 Magazine. And, they’re going to pay me! Actually, by the hourly wage, they’re paying me almost 10 times what I’m getting paid at my 40 hour per week job.

Time to really start working on building up my clips and resume.

Times are a’changin’

I finally graduated with my bachelor’s in news editorial journalism, so I’ve decided to reorganize some things in my life and online.

My Blogspot blog is going to revert to its former glory as my feminist and nerd blog.

My Web site’s blog is going to be reserved for updates on my writings and literary nonfiction, like book reviews.

This blog will remain the same, whether I find myself freelancing for the rest of my days or land my dream reporting job.

My writing goals are to post one blog a day on a revolving schedule, work on my novel, and scrounge up freelance articles until someone is willing to pay me to write full time. Then, I will write more.

Advice for college journalists: Online portfolios

Over the past few years, I’ve watched dozens of classmates and friends wait until the last moment possible to prepare for the big job search after graduation.

Now, I’m not talking about the job search itself; it’s bad enough waiting until the the day before a graduation ceremony for a student to start thinking about looking for the start of their career (and, yes, I’ve actually seen this happen).

Time and time again, I’ve watched people my age try and fail to find industry jobs because they never took the time to build their portfolios. And, in this internet age, there is simply no excuse not to have a large body of clips to choose from when the time comes to dip into them.

Here are some tips to build up your portfolio before you’re expected to spread your wings and fly into the future on your own.

Start your own blog.

Many industry leaders advocate buying your own web space. While this is a good idea, it’s hardly necessary for poor college students with little means. Instead, think about getting a Blogger blog if you’re a blog newcomer or upgrading to WordPress if you already know the ins and outs of posting. The programs are free, and you can give potential employers a link, so they can check out your clips. It also gives you the freedom to choose what you write, and with WordPress you can easily add pages, which allows you to add items like your online resume and portfolio. There is also a new social networking blog site called Uber I just checked out, and it looks like it might be an even better arena for students looking to work with design.

Don’t let HTML and CSS intimidate you.

Okay, I admit most HR people think students in our generation could build a webpage in our sleep. Here’s a secret: I wasn’t even blogging until Fall 2007. I didn’t know anything about HTML, and WordPress was over my head when I started. Take baby steps if you’re worried about the technology involved. Blogger is very user friendly, and if you pick up a few HTML tags while using it, soon you’ll be ready to move on to bigger and better things. With the blogging software available today, you shouldn’t have too much trouble figuring things out.

Write for newspapers and magazines.

Chances are, they’ll post your content on the web. Then, all you have to do is link to their site. Just check your links often, so you don’t have an interested employer navigating to a dead page.

These are actually good tips for any kind of writer, whether it be a budding conventional journalist, a blogger, or even a novelist or poet. If you have any suggestions on more sites students can use to build a portolio, please let me know.

More on Anonymous vs. Scientology

I attended a protest last Saturday, and I wrote a post about it for Sticks of Fire. You can find it here.

I also have exciting news. After years of dabbling in fiction and winning a few awards, I finally have an acceptance letter from a magazine. A little vampire yarn I wrote called “Monica” is going to be published in Arrhythmic Souls. Today has been a good day.

The dangers of RSS feeds

I think my self-imposed exile from blogging is finally over. I only have one week of classes left, and I’ve finished most of my final projects.

Today I’d like to talk about RSS feeds. They’re great. I’m a big fan, and I think I’ve managed to sell most of my schoolmates on to the joys of Google Reader, which is what I use. However, I have one problem with online news readers.

I subscribe to so many feeds that, after a few days of inattentiveness, I usually end up with over 1,000 entries. It’s even worse I count in all of the subscriptions I have of people who blog the RSS feeds they read. At this moment, I have no idea how many entries are waiting for me, because I haven’t logged into my reader in weeks. I do know that it’s 1,000+, because that’s what my reader says.

I’m thinking somewhere around 10,000 entries, and I’m going to delete most of them without reading them. Does anyone have a better way of managing feeds?