• Homepage
• About
• Sponsors
• Testimonials
• RSS

Mumbai and Social Media: Data is Not News

The flurry of tweets on Twitter following the terrible events that developed last Thursday in Mumbai have many New Media proponents once again promulgating the notion that Twitter and other social media services are not only changing the face of news media but are dramatically improving it.

One of my favorite New Media news hypesters, Michael Arrington, provided perhaps the best demonstration of the rift that exists between those who understand what news is all about and those who don’t.

In his post, “First Hand Accounts Of Terrorist Attacks In India On Twitter, Flickr,” Arrington writes:

Why is Henry Blodget Fixated on the New York Times? Perhaps a Conflict of Interest?

Henry Blodget’s Silicon Alley Insider has spent a lot of time discussing the New York Times’ woes lately:

• New York Times (NYT) Running On Fumes
• New York Times (NYT): September Awful, We Could Default On Debt
• How The New York Times (NYT) Can Save Itself
• Cash Crunch At New York Times (NYT): $400 Million Due In May

If I didn’t know any better, I might assume that Blodget’s curious new pastime is calling “Titantic” on one of the world’s most storied newspaper companies.

New Media Types Have It Wrong About Newspapers

The growing troubles at The New York Times Company have bloggers talking. Henry Blodget, who used his mathematical genius to demonstrate that Apple stock was a buy at $127, wrote that the New York Times is “running on fumes” and “appears to be burning more than it is taking in.”

Nice to see that Blodget can still do basic addition and subtraction even if he still doesn’t know when to buy and sell a stock.

I wrote about the newspaper industry’s woes in a recent post on E-consultancy, but it’s Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins’ discussion of the topic that I wanted to address here.

Inc. Magazine Reprints Long Lost Copy of 2006 BusinessWeek Digg Article

In 2006, BusinessWeek put its credibility in the hands of Sarah Lacy and came out a loser.

The business magazine’s fluffy portrayal of Digg as a potential “new New York Times” and of its founder, Kevin Rose, as the “‘It’ boy among a new wave of entrepreneurs running the hottest of the top 100 Web 2.0 companies” was quickly criticized by many. BusinessWeek’s choice to throw credibility out the window by headlining Rose’s cover “How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months” certainly didn’t help an already lacking article.

Flash forward to today.

Mashable Takes the BiztechDay Bait, Shills with Promotional Text Provided by BiztechDay

As I detailed this past week, I was contacted by one of the individuals behind the BiztechDay conference in San Francisco that I am not attending (Andrzej Buszko was unable to provide airfare, accommodations and escorts) offering me a free media pass in exchange for a promotional post on The Drama 2.0 Show.

Although I was extremely tempted to hop on a plane and to rush out to San Francisco to meet Tim Ferriss, I decided to stay home and get some work done instead. I also couldn’t help but feel that promoting something I wasn’t interested in, and for compensation in the form of a media pass that is supposed to be offered freely, would have been dishonest.

Favor for a Favor: BiztechDay Offers Drama 2.0 a Media Pass in Exchange for a Write-Up

The Drama 2.0 Show has made it.

After blogging for more than a year, I’ve never been offered anything that wasn’t innocuous. You know - coffee, a lunch, an invitation to party, an introduction to a single girlfriend.

But when I opened my email this morning I was greeted with my first “favor.” Here it is:

From: “andrzej@biztechday.com”
To: drama20@hush.com
Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:31:24 -0700

Alan,

I would like to offer you a media pass to BiztechDay October 25th in
exchange for a write up.

Would you be interested?

Fast Company Publisher Cuts Jobs, FastCompany.com Looks for Really Cheap Labor

The job cuts have arrived.

Mansueto Digital, the company that publishes the hype-filled magazine Fast Company (and employs Robert Scoble), decided to make some fast cuts Valleywag reports. According to Valleywag, this “economic move” will not impact Fast Company’s print division. Instead, most of the cuts are apparently slated for the Mansueto Digital division.

I found this interesting given that I last week came across a Fast Company posting for “expert bloggers” through PRNewswire’s ProfNet.

The posting:

Changing My Tune: NYU Sucks

Thanks to Nicholas Patten (who, by the way, is looking for work), it came to my attention that the estrogen-intolerant Alana Taylor responded to my recent post with a thoughtful and well-written rebuttal.

Her response has convinced me that I was wrong. Taylor was right: NYU definitely sucks.

Why the reversal of opinion? Taylor apparently graduates soon yet she cannot construct a proper sentence. In particular, she appears to have a real problem using personal pronouns correctly. In the six “paragraphs” of her post (all but one containing a single sentence), I count no less than three instances of Taylor demonstrating an inability to use the correct personal pronouns.

Note to “New Media” Morons: It’s About the Message, Not the Medium

A bit of drama flared after Alana Taylor, a journalism student at New York University and self-described “social media maven,” went undercover for PBS’ MediaShift to expose New York University’s stodgy and outdated School of Journalism.

The drama arose not only because Taylor had some pretty harsh things to say about her school, classmates and professor but also because she never disclosed to them that she was going to be an “embedded” reporter for MediaShift as she attended her first day of the class “Reporting Gen Y (a.k.a. Quarterlifers).”

Is Disclosure Meaningless in the Blogosphere?

Disclosing conflicts of interest is standard practice for professional journalists. And it has been a real problem for bloggers (amongst other things).

Yet the news that GigaOm founder Om Malik has become a venture partner at venture capital firm True Ventures has made it quite clear: disclosure is increasingly meaningless in the blogosphere.

As part of its his post on Om’s new job, the New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller spoke with Lee Wilkins, a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism who edits the Journal of Mass Media Ethics. He observed that Om’s promise to be disclosure conflicts is almost entirely irrelevant:

keep looking »

• Recently Written

  • Silicon Valley: The Only Place Where Getting a New Job = “Acquisition”
  • Romans vs. Barbarians
  • Mumbai and Social Media: Data is Not News
  • Happy Thanksgiving
  • Best. Invite. Ever.
  • Wall Street Journal: Google To Lay Off Contractors
  • What the Fuck is Wrong with People?
  • Sponsor Shout-Out
  • P&G Marketer Questions Social Media Scientology, Asks “Is Social Media Really Media?”
  • Tim O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Media = Spammer

• Categories

  • BS-Free Advice
  • Bubble Watch
  • Commercial Interruptions
  • Culture & Technology
  • Drama News Network
  • Drama's Roundup
  • Dramanomics
  • Easy VC Money
  • General
  • Letters from Mark Zuckerberg
  • Marketing 2.0
  • OMG! Old Media is Dying!
  • Social Media Stupidity
  • The Scoble Experiment
  • The Wisdom of Drama
  • Unjournalism
  • Valley Drama
  • VC Insanity
  • Web 2.0 Kool Aid

• Archives

  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007

Sponsors

• 
• 
• 

About

Drama 2.0 spikes the Web 2.0 kool aid by providing critical analyses of Web 2.0, its people, its startups and its impact on the world of media. Other topics are explored when Drama 2.0 has been drinking too much 1975 Dom Perignon. Read more about the Internet's version of Keyser Söze and find out what people are saying.

Ads

Subscribe

•   Drama 2.0 by Feed
•   Drama 2.0 by Email
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•