For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

The digital revolution has driven another stake into the heart of the old world. And as a journalist who’s entry into the field was as a photographer, this one hurts.

Kodak announced on June 22 that it was ending the production of Kodachrome slide film, it’s oldest film product, and for many photographers, the gold standard for capturing life-like color.

This comes on the heels of other bad news in the photographic world.

Nikon, probably the world’s most famous manufacturer of cameras, now builds only two flim cameras, both SLRs, one pro model and one for amateurs. It makes no point and shoot film cameras. None. This contrasts with the nine digital SLRs it builds and the 17 digital point and shoot models it carries.

As a photography buff and a student of the art, this is a low moment indeed.

Sure, digital cameras make images instantly available, and I doubt the growing clamor for instant gratification in the United States will ever be slaked, but whatever happened to the good things that come to people who wait?

And yes, digital photos can be e-mailed around the world at the touch of a button, and yes, digital photos can be printed in the comfort of your own home, but hasn’t this level of convenience cheapened the value of a photograph? Are they still even worth a thousand words?

Of course, the quality of digital prints is still lower than what comes from 35 mm film. Even the best digital cameras only capture a fraction of the amount of information that’s enclosed in a single frame of 35 mm. That, coupled with most people trying to print digital photos on poor quality paper and using as low a resolution as possible, means that many, many digital photos barely qualify as snapshots.

But the worst thing about digital photography is that it kills the magical alchemy behind photography. It used to be an art, something that required skill, innate talent and time spent working in an apprenticeship role to someone who could pass on years of knowledge.

Photography classes must still teach composition and exposure, but with ever-more-automatic cameras and computer programs to fix nearly any photographic glitch, how long will it be before we are looking at nothing but perfectly composed, perfectly cropped and perfectly exposed — yet utterly lifeless and soulless — photographs?

Yes, I’m talking to you, Photoshop.

The days of students learning how to mix chemicals and how to work an enlarger in total darkness are long past, and the art is certainly poorer for it. Photography no longer requires a knowledge of chemistry, mathematics and physics. Everything is reduced to little ones and zeros, like so much else in the world.

I still yearn to have a darkroom in my home, a place filled with trays of acrid chemicals and kept in soothing darkness much of the time. A place where the right combination of science and artistry can still yield magic, magic in the deep blacks, the bright whites and the countless shades of gray of a real photograph.

—Jonathan

Photo by michelphoto53 en Rénovation

New iPhones hit the stores last week, and consumers—weak economy and two-year contract with AT&T be damned—went home with more than one million of the devices.

Despite the name, iPhones are not phones; they are powerful handheld computers. I own a first-generation iPhone and it can do things that early cell phones could never dream of; in fact, it can do things my first Apple product, a Macintosh SE purchased in 1990, never dreamed of.

Sure it can do all the standard smartphone tricks—texting, calendar, camera, maps with turn-by-turn directions, etc., but where the iPhone really excels is in it’s expandability through The App Store.

There are more than 36,000 apps available for the iPhone and those apps will do just about anything. Apple maintains tight control over the types of apps approved for distribution, but that has not stopped a flood of fart apps from spewing their effervescence throughout the App Store.

Without further ado, here’s a glance at the apps—good, bad and ugly—that grace the iPhones here at Eat Media:

Britta
My five favorite apps:
1.    Camera (Blackberry didn’t have one. Don’t know how I lived without it.)
2.    Maps
3.    Facebook
4.    YouTube (for playing Sesame Street clips to a cranky baby in the car)
5.    Amazon.com

The most disappointing app: Twitteriffic

The app that likely no one else in the office has: iPregnancy

Wendy
My five favorite apps:
1.    History Lite
2.    Wikipanion
3.    Facebook
4.    Pac Man
5.    NPR Mobile

The most disappointing app: UrbanSpoon is a great idea, but always recommends me to go to restaurants in St. Pete and Tampa. None of the suggestions are helpful, and Sarasota seems to be off the map.

The apps that likely no one else in the office has:
1.    The “Festivals” app, which lists every major religious festival this year and next, for eight major world religions.
2.    ”Snow,” which features snow falling across the screen while “Snow!” flashes. For some reason, I haven’t deleted it.

Jonathan
My five favorite apps:
1.    Oakley Surf Report: With a five-year-old obsessed with his Boogie Board, a good surf report is essential each weekend.
2.    Flashlight: Simple, but useful.
3.    YouTube: Time-kill central.
4.    Stars: I love the seasonal ballet in the sky and Stars helps me keep track.
5.    3banana: Note taking that syncs with my desktop computer at home.

The most disappointing app: Adventure. Thought this would be a fun trip down memory lane, but it was just sad to see what used to pass for quality entertainment.

The apps that likely no one else in the office has: Tracking the Eye. Hurricane season is on here in Florida.

—Jonathan (@bentpiton)

Despite being a self-professed non-tweeter with a twitter account, and an avid follower of tweetingtoohard.com, I have been fascinated by Twitter’s role in the disputed Iranian election.

Today, between 2:00–2:01 p.m. eastern standard time—10:30–10:31 local time in Tehran—104 new tweets were added to the #iranelection thread, the primary national news source for Iran since Iranian press coverage was suspended last Friday. Between 2:00–2:10 p.m., 671 tweets were added to #iranelection.

A tweet heard round the world, repurposed by countless major news sources, reads

“We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Mousavi’s message. One Person=One Broadcaster.”

I am excited by the power of a raw human voice without photos, videos or sound clips.

I am excited by the initiative of people to spread the news that is nearly impossible to spread.

I am excited that the rest of the world is listening and taking action.

This is bigger than Iran and the Iranian election.

What does the Iran election mean for the future of social networking?

—Wendy Joan

A lot of the discussion in the content strategy Twittersphere has the feeling of a group of blind people trying to describe an elephant.

There’s a lot of talk, all of it descriptive, some of it incisive, but it falls far short of describing the elephant.

And that’s the problem: talking about content strategy isn’t going to answer any of the problems at hand: if you really want to know the elephant that is content strategy, you need to talk to a zookeeper.

The content zookeeper has a base of knowledge that may have come from textbooks. But the reality is, those textbooks were written by professors who spent little, if any, time in the field. The theory of content-keeping differs widely from the dirty reality of it all.

No, the content zookeeper has gained much knowledge the old fashioned way—he has earned it. The lessons were frequently visceral and, as such, unforgettable. They often contradict the textbook, and sometimes, go places the textbook author has never even imagined.

So who are today’s content zookeepers?

• The content zookeeper has learned the hard lessons of information architecture and user experience from the daily maintenance of a web site. He has dealt with the limitations and woes of various content management systems and knows how to make them dance.

• The content zookeeper has learned the intricacies of SEO and SEM by digging deep in the stinkiest piles of metadata.

• The content zookeeper has learned the care and feeding of freelance writers and bloggers, because he not only writes his own blog, but has written hundreds, maybe thousands of articles and edited at least that many more.

• The content zookeeper has sketched wireframes on a cocktail napkin and turned them into a website.

• The content zookeeper has learned unanticiapted lessons about how content interacts with other content and either creates synergy or anarchy.

• The content zookeepers is nimble, adaptive and can see to the root of a problem quickly and efficiently.

• The content zookeeper’s mantra is: “Test, Assess, Repeat.” What’s working? Keep executing the content strategy, keep monitoring the metrics and keep cleaning up the messes. The content strategy may be static, but the tactics keep changing to meet the conditions.

Ultimately, the content zookeeper is there to cultivate the tension between what people do when they visit a website and what we want them to do there.

Being a content zookeeper isn’t rocket science, but it IS science. Hire a trained content keeper for your next project.

Here are a few other places to look: Brain Traffic, scatter/gather, Predicate.

— Jonathan (@bentpiton)

Photo by thinboyfatter

With all the talk about “content strategy” I tracked how it trended on Google for 31 days. Is there enough data to determine an absolute—no. Is there enough to extract some interesting details—I think so.

Data Details:

-Over the course of 31 days “content strategy” came up as a result (for that day) and average of 480 times.

-The overall high was on 5/14/09 with 718 instances.

Of those 718:

• 321 (month’s high) were for “content strategy” + jobs
• 251 (month’s high) were for “content strategy” + events

-”Content strategy” + SEO  is mentioned almost 10x as frequently as “content strategy” + IA

-”Content strategy” + SEO  mentions never dropped to the single digits for any single day.

-”Content strategy” + IA was mentioned in single digits 71% of  the days tracked.

I have my thoughts what this means. What are your takeaways?

—Ian (@eatmedia)

OK, so let’s say you are managing a website. It could be as simple as a blog written by one person on one general topic or something complicated that weaves massive amounts of content into an eCommerce matrix. Either way, it’s a large interconnected web of content—your content ecosystem.

Bottom line: your content already rocks, but it’s not bringing in the readership and without the readership, you are failing to deliver what you promised the CTO (sales leads, widget sold, butts in seats, whatever metric you are beholden to) when you were given control of the site.

So now what? How do you spread the word? How do you evangelize for your content without being obnoxious?

New school versus joins old school
This is going to require a blitz that’s at once comprehensive and low key. It’s going to require the latest social media savvy as well as traditional marketing tactics.

Navigating social media
Do you have a Facebook page? Are you still using MySpace? Who’s tweeting about you? Have you snagged the obvious domain names and Gmail accounts for your brand? (For a mighty herd of social media marketing tools, go here, or for a counterpoint on the value of social media for business, go here.)

Social networking
Facebook is growing explosively and has recently accelerated past MySpace in several key user metrics. Continue to ignore Facebook at your peril. This is not to say that Facebook in three years won’t be in the same tailspin that MySpace is currently experiencing, but you can’t afford to give those years away to your competitors.

Content promotion tactic: Establish a Facebook page. Do not let anyone who doesn’t have a personal Facebook page operate it. Give the operator free reign to update the page with the appropriate multimedia content and use the status update as an additional outlet to promote new content on your main site.

Micro-blogging
Twitter is something that makes no intuitive sense to many people before they start to use it. Once they do, however, its utility as an instantly updated and instantly responsive news and information kiosk becomes abundantly clear. How is your brand being talked about on Twitter? Are you tweeting, or has some impostor hijacked your brand for nefarious purposes? If your brand has yet to be sucked into a Twitterstorm, consider yourself lucky and be prepared.

Content promotion tactic: Establish a Twitter identity for your brand. The person in charge of your Twitter account should already be a Twitter user as they will know the etiquette as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the medium. Encourage them to start tweeting, but more than anything, encourage them to listen, monitoring what is being said about your brand and using Twitter to respond to customer relations issues. A little good will is going to go a long way. Then start using Twitter to promote your content.

Social aggregation
Search engines are just one gateway to online information. While SEO is important for now (but is likely to be made irrelevant by semantic search very soon) there are ways to avoid the deep dark pit of the Google algorithm and promote content through other types of search.  Social aggregation sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and Delicious all offer some variation on the theme of sharing stories.

Content promotion tactic: Post a story to Digg and get some colleagues to Digg it. If it’s good content, it will gain its own traction and move up the list. Don’t overdo this. Same deal with StumbleUpon and some of the others. Be selective and use your best content.

Old School
Yes, you still need to be writing SEO friendly copy, entering appropriate and comprehensive metadata for each piece of content, sending out email newsletters, blogging, posting videos to YouTube, posting photos to Flickr and more. No one said all this free promotion wasn’t going to be time consuming.

Happy curating. Your content ecosystem will be all the healthier with a little care and feeding.

—Jonathan (@bentpiton)

Photo by baxterclaws

Simon Dumenco has a great interview with David Carr of the New York Times on Advertising Age‘s Mediaworks blog. Carr talks about his new book (now out in paperback) and the rapid decline of media fortunes of late:

“I think one thing that people do not understand is, as recently as four or five years ago, to be a member of Manhattan media, you weren’t rich, but you lived as a rich person might. You went to the parties that a rich person would go to, you ate the food that a rich person would eat, you drank the vodka that a rich person would drink, and you’d end up in black cars, and you’d end up sometimes on boats and in helicopters. We lived as kings, and it convinced us, I think, that there was a significant underlying value to what we did. And I think we’re finding out now that the real, actual value of journalism in the current economy is not that high, and that what the dot-com bubble did and Tina Brown and others did to boost the value of journalism and writing to the point where some people were being paid $5 a word—well, I think there are a lot of people right now, really talented people, who are working for 50 cents or a dollar a word, and you know what? It’s pretty hard to make a living doing that.

So that’s one tier, and the other tier is I feel as if media has become a kind of reverse roach motel, in that once you’re out, you’re probably not coming back in.”

Read the rest here.

—Jonathan

As unassuming column, hidden in the corner of this morning’s New York Times (A15), has incited a message board race riot.

The article, “Made in India But Published in New Haven,” by Peter Applebome, chronicles a recent experiment by the New Haven Advocate. For a single edition, the alternative weekly recruited Indian journalists and content writers to report on news, art, film, dining, music and sex. The idea wasn’t to cut costs (à la Orange County Register), but to find out what happens when local stories assigned to writers halfway around the world.

The articles aren’t bad. They’re appropriately and knowledgeably written for an alternative press audience. Cultural taboos aside, a sex advice column, is generic in its inherent question and answer format, and doesn’t require any firsthand reporting. Neighborhood restaurant reviews and local news, on the other hand, raise an eyebrow, because you know in advance that the writer has never set foot in said restaurant and, arguably has never set foot in New Haven, Connecticut.

In their editorial, the New Haven Advocate staff explained the outsourcing project to their readers. Ultimately, the experiment boils down to a “what if” on a global scale. In a cheeky voice the alternative media knows all too well, the Advocate staff present their experiment as a word of warning to the news industry—it’s not that hard to outsource local news.

I thought outsourcing local journalism was subject enough but, delving deeper into the Advocate’s message board, a new story became overwhelmingly apparent.

Comments from the community reflect a vastly different story than the one Advocate editors are telling. The first commenter on a thread of many denounces the project as journalistic “betrayal,” “ludicrous” and coins the term “Slumdog Journalism” that is used over and over again throughout the thread. One or two commenters praise the project as an interesting exercise, while another criticizes the editors’ lack of knowledge on the business of outsourcing. The majority of the commenters bypass the Advocate editors’ intentions, and turn the conversation into a pro- or anti-outsourcing argument. Fair trade is brought in, as well as China and fluctuating global currencies.

And no one even mentions the fact that “journalists” have been doing online, rather than in-person, research for years.

Maybe these commenters are angry because American jobs are being replaced overseas. Maybe workers who telecommute feel like they aren’t taken seriously enough. “Outsourcing” has an extremely negative connotation. “Outsourcing” is linked to the idea of more work for less money and less quality.

The Takeaway
How knowledgeable are your journalists and content writers? Are they the most knowledgeable and qualified writer for the job, do they have the capacity and flexibility to become the best writer for the job, or should you expand your contact list?

—Wendy Joan

Photo from the New Haven Advocate