Brendan R. Watson

Perhaps the most interesting presentation from the Knight Center’s latest seminar. More to come soon on http://specializedjournalism.org.

A ‘cure’ to aging from Knight Center on Vimeo.

As I get ready to move again, I am debating the merits of getting a smart phone. I don’t want to spend anymore money. However, there is some advantage to getting mobile information, especially in an unfamiliar place. Also, I will be taking the bus to work and now that I will be spending more time commuting above ground where there’s reception, mobile Internet isn’t so ridiculous.

A coworker told me today about the new Google phone. What rock have I been living under? I have to admit, at first it sounded appealing. I love Google’s ability to integrate features into easy to use interfaces, and I already rely on Google for a number of services, including e-mail.

However, there is an important motivation that separates Apple and Google. Apple wants to sell high-end, high-design, digital life-style accessories. Google: It wants to sell advertising, including geo-advertising. Google is positioning itself not only to serve up mobile search advertising, but to sell data on your location to advertisers and other top bidders, woes interests in knowing such information may not be innocent. The company has been pretty mum on this aspect of their business plan, but it hasn’t gone unnoticed.

I am a proponent of this type of content strategy, both for editorial and advertising content. However, as I have stated before I think a successful model needs to be based on it being user-initiated. That’s a feature, though, that Google is unlikely to add because it diminishes its potential advertising revenue. But hopefully customers will think long and hard about what they’re potentially giving up before falling for this lower-priced, high-functioning competitor to the iPhone.

Yesterday in my mass media theory class there was some confusion as to my attack on academic publishing and academic scholarship. I wholeheartedly endorse the latter.

I only take issue with the means of distributing that scholarship, particularly where it attempts to reflect the rapidly changing, contemporary communication landscape. Text books in particular, and academic journal articles and annual conferences to a lesser degree, are not an efficient way to disseminate timely research, particularly if there is hope that it might influence professional practice.

Electronic publishing, open-source research, crowd sourcing and online networks are all potential improvements for distributing timely research. Imagine, for example, if there was an academic Digg site. I write an article, but instead of publishing it for a lengthy review and printing process, I post it to academicdigg.com. My colleagues — screened to make sure they’re legitimate academic colleagues with appropriate expertise — read it and then “digg it.” The best research quickly floats to the top, just as if it had been published in a leading journal.

Unfortunately, the university tenure policies aren’t set up to reward such electronic publication. This particularly hurts young academics, who are more likely to take on these contemporary communication questions. This is why I think this is a good conversation/debate to have in classes of aspiring Ph.D.’s.

This is why academic text books suck, and should be banned from online journalism courses:

“There have been numerous empirical studies of online ‘communities’, usually based on some common interest, for instance fandom for a music group, or on some shared characteristic, such as sexual orientation or a particular social health situation. The typical conditions for the formation of a virtual community seem to include minority status, physical dispersal of members and a degree of intensity of interest.”

For some reason, I doubt everyone on Facebook is a queer with leprosy (though I hear angry teens who wear all black still love MySpace).

This line comes from Denis McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory, 5th edition (published in 2005, quoting opinions more than a decade old). By the time these books are written, reviewed and edited ad nausea, my 97 year-old grandmother knows more about the Internet. Textbooks are what McQuail would refer to in this chapter as “old media.”

The academic publishing model — at least for online journalism — needs to shift to a more open-source model, which allows information to be more rapidly published and revised. Until then they need to be banned, or at least greatly eclipsed, by more up-to-date texts in one’s teaching.

In defense of this text, though, it is about theory, filled with quaint ideas.

One of the conversations at ONA was how to fosterer greater collaboration between academics and “the industry.” Never mind that journalism schools can’t even settle the tensions between academic and professional faculty who like to use the lack of understanding between themselves as an example of how the other “doesn’t get it.”

Personally, I think we’re too far in the hole to even engage in such squabbles. Certainly, academics are doing research that can inform industry practice and vice versa. And there are interesting individuals on both sides eager to exchange ideas to foster better professional practice and more relevant research.

I am starting a new project JournalismAbstracts.com, to help those individuals connect with one another. The tagline for the website will be: connecting ideas and practice. The website will hopefully synthesize research that is relevant to challenges facing the news industry in a way that makes it accessible to professionals, as well as help professionals share questions and data that might be of interest to researchers. The site will also feature jobs in academia for working journalists, and jobs in journalism for those with a research background; a widget for comparing academic programs offering master’s and doctorate degrees, with a focus on serving professionals interested in advancing their education; and other features I am still developing.

I am looking for partners in this endeavor, who have both academic and professional interests. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks I will launch a website where interested parties can register. I hope to assemble a team in the next couple of months to start creating content and adding features, with the hopes of having a beta launch before the spring semester.

I ran into Christine Montgomery, managing editor for tampabay.com, my former employer, this past week at ONA, following Amy Web’s presentation. I joked with her that I don’t envy her position of having to make sense of all of the ideas Amy was throwing at us, especially since the common theme of the conference was that despite a lot of creative ideas, few if any have yet arrived at a long-term, sustainable business model. The Las Vegas Sun, who is doing some of the most creative web journalism I saw, describes itself as being in “start-up mode.” A former colleague of mine who now works at a news-related start-up said his employers business model was “TBD.”

A bright spot of the conference, though, were the discussions about “geobrowsing” and services like Where, which enables GPS-enabled searches to find people and places located near you. If I were a local news publisher or editor, this is where I would be focusing my attention. Success for publishing local news (and advertising) is delivering that content at the height of interest, which is heavily determined by one’s location. I want to know why there is police tape outside my house, or which bar near by has the best drink specials. Imagine if I told a publisher I was shopping for shoes, and they could deliver relevant advertising to me based on the mall I was shopping at. The potential is almost unlimited for delivering breaking news, advertising, using staff and user-driven reporting.

Geobrowsing is scary stuff. It looks and feels a little too much like big brother. But if such services were user initiated, where I chose to tell you where I was and what I was looking for, I think publishers could overcome users’ concerns.