Artisan Journalism & Marketing Project Link Blog

Voice and Personality Hallmarks of Participatory Media

I've republished this post to give credit to right folks (as per comments). The snippet below is from the paper, We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information, was written by Shayne Bowman, and Chris Willis for The Media Center at API (American Press Institute):

Voice and personality are also key hallmarks of participatory media. Several observers have argued that the informal style found in many participatory forms free the writer from the "official voice" of the media company, and that makes for better storytelling. The official voice of journalism is usually formal, often drained of color and attitude, and written as an objective and balanced account. In contrast, weblogs and discussion groups thrive on their vivid writing, controversial points of view and personality-rich nature — traits that many readers find compelling.

Columnist J.D. Lasica goes so far as to argue that newspaper webloggers should not be subject to the newsroom's routine editing filter. On his weblog he called for a form of Editing Lite: "Perhaps the chief appeal and attraction of weblogs are their free-form, unfiltered nature. You get to hear people in their natural dialect, writing from their gut with a voice and tone that too often can be filtered into a homogenous blandness after passing through the typical newsroom's editing machine. A lightly edited, hands-off weblog would show journalists as human beings with opinions, emotions and personal lives."¹²

Adrianna Huffington Huffs On Celebrity-Studded Blog

LOL Funny Bonus (yeah, bonus upfront. Eat dessert first): Guardian's parody blog From Doc Searls: In A Boldface Name Invites Others to Blog With Her, Katherine Q. Seelye snarks at blogging in both her opening paragraphs:

LOS ANGELES, April 23 - Get ready for the next level in the blogosphere.

Arianna Huffington, the columnist and onetime candidate for governor of California, is about to move blogging from the realm of the anonymous individual to the realm of the celebrity collective.

We're anonymous here, she (and therefore the Times) says. We operate at "levels," none of which (so far) are the "next level" (up, right? where else?) occupied by celebrities.

Note that crapping on what 8 million bloggers have already done isn't Arianna's game:

Having prominent people join the blogosphere, Ms. Huffington said in an interview, "is an affirmation of its success and will only enrich and strengthen its impact on the national conversation." Among those signed up to contribute are Walter Cronkite, David Mamet, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, James Fallows, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Maggie Gyllenhaal, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer and Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

The game is Seelye's.

New Values For New Age of Journalism

Snippet from "New Values for a New Age of Journalism" by Tim Porter. There are definitely parallels for marketing and business communications too:

Old Value: Authority. Journalists have access to powerful institutions and officials the public does not. Many journalists confuse this entry into the backrooms of policy for authority or expertise when in fact it is only a day pass granted because the powerful find the news media useful. From authority comes arrogance, and from arrogance disregard for the opinion and, eventually, the goodwill of those journalists are supposed to serve, the members of the community.

New Value: Interaction. Don't cover the community, be the community. Get the reporters and editors out of the building; bring the citizens in. Enable community participation online and in print. [Read: Don't Reflect the Community, Be the Community.]

Old Value: Objectivity. The standard for the last half-century of journalism, objectivity emerged as an antidote to the partisan press but grew to become a cherished recipe for blandness and a form of stenographic story-telling that eschews passion in favor of the emptiness of he-said, she-said, one the one hand, on the other and yet on another constructions.

New Value: Truth-telling. Get the fact, yes, but foremost tell the truth. I'm borrowing from Dan Gillmor to say: Replace objectivity with thoroughness, accuracy, genuine fairness and transparency.

Where Will Journalism Come From?

OLD QUESTION: From where will journalism come?
REALLY ASKING: Do we really trust other citizens with journalism?
SHOULD ASK: How will a generation of talented storytellers use multiple forms of media to create and share stories that are relevant to the citizens of an always-on world?

Via Jeff Jarvis, http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2005_04_26.html#009530

BBC Facilitates Grassroots Storytelling & Journalism

Richard Sambrook, Director of the BBC World Service and Global News Division, talks about the BBC's multiple efforts to put storytelling and journalism tools into the hands of thousands of people around the world and the challenges that arise from enabling so many to tell their own stories. He spoke during The Media Center's Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good seminar. Download audio as MP3 file.

From Media Center, http://www.mediacenter.org/content/6282.cfm?FLASH7=1

Why We Buy the Celeb Story

Why we buy the celebrity story…according to Seth Godin it's part of the "lie" (All Marketers Are Liars is his new book). Snippet:

So, otherwise rational and intelligent men spend hundreds or thousands of dollars extra to buy a watch endorsed by a fictional character controlled by anonymous film producers and embodied by an actor. Because it makes them feel good. They buy the story.

http://blog.sethgodin.silkblogs.com/Do-you-believe-Paris.4207.entry

Authenticity is All, Says PR Firm Burson-Marsteller

Authenticity is All

• Blog writers often have very personal motivations and passions – these are the voices that rise above the noise
• Real people write readable, credible blogs, corporations don’t
  • If I’m only saying, ‘Use Microsoft products, rah rah rah,’ I lose all ability to have a conversation,” said Robert Scoble, prominent blogger and Microsoft software evangelist. Fortune, January 10, 2005
• Openness is essential
  • Be as candid as possible; be clear about what you can’t discuss and why
  • Respectfully acknowledge dissenting opinions
  • Marketing “hype” will be evaluated with skepticism and cynicism, or worse ridiculed and treated with sarcasm.

From Guideposts for the New Communications Ecosystem a.k.a. The Blogosphere Survival Guide" (PDF) via Constantin Basturea’s weblog, http://blog.basturea.com/archives/2005/03/02/burson-marsteller-is-blogging-folks/

Blogs Connect People to (Gasp) People

From Constantin Basturea’s weblog:

And this is the best part (no offense to marketing consultants!):

"Cultural change is lurking behind the fancy tag-lines of the increasing number of blog-marketing consultants - behind the hype and hiving."

The whole appeal and success of blogs comes from giving people a simple communication tool that allows them to connect to others as people. This brings inside organizations a factor that is subversive — because organizations are not designed to accomodate it. As we know, people (a.k.a. employees) are supposed to have professional (not human) relationships, both inside and outside the corporate walls. - http://blog.basturea.com/archives/2005/02/27/blogging-will-change-organizations-from-inside/

Online Writing: You Don't See PR Firm's Fingerprints

Excellent essay (as usual) on spin, where media stories come from and why online writing is different from Paul Graham. Here's a snippet:

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week.

I was talking recently to a friend who works for a big newspaper. He thought the print media were in serious trouble, and that they were still mostly in denial about it. "They think the decline is cyclic," he said. "Actually it's structural."

In other words, the readers are leaving, and they're not coming back.

Why? I think the main reason is that the writing online is more honest. Imagine how incongruous the New York Times article about suits would sound if you read it in a blog:

The urge to look corporate-- sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve-- is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace.

The problem with this article is not just that it originated in a PR firm. The whole tone is bogus. This is the tone of someone writing down to their audience.

Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. It's people writing what they think.

I didn't realize, till there was an alternative, just how artificial most of the writing in the mainstream media was. I'm not saying I used to believe what I read in Time and Newsweek. Since high school, at least, I've thought of magazines like that more as guides to what ordinary people were being told to think than as sources of information. But I didn't realize till the last few years that writing for publication didn't have to mean writing that way. I didn't realize you could write as candidly and informally as you would if you were writing to a friend. – http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Real Celebs or Real People Blogging for MLB?

Could MLB have guys like Derek Jeter blog? Or will it be blogs by baseball nuts like me. (Apparently…. its going to be both!)  -

From Om Malik's blog: http://www.gigaom.com/2005/04/21/major-league-baseball-six-apart-deal-in-the-works/