Media
Media
Heavy.com and the dangers of social network investing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/04/2007 - 04:26Wednesday’s Tri-State Tech Wire newsletter had an article about Heavy.com raising $12.8 million in its fifth round of venture capital. Over on Don’t’ Go South, they claim the number is $12.3 million and question the wisdom of the business model. “Working your ass off to run a content portal that does $10M in ad revenue and costs $11M to operate is not exactly the golden ticket to paradise.”
Yet there is a bigger problem for Heavy.com. Over on a mailing list of videobloggers, Casey McKinnon, Executive Producer of Galacticast writes, “We found out today that MyHeavy.com has been re-posting our videos with a huge pre-roll banner ad and a second huge ad surrounding the video when it plays (all without our permission or knowledge).”
to help people find their voice
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/01/2007 - 11:32(Originally published at Gather)
I hadn’t really thought much about a New Year’s resolution until I worked on some of my thoughts for the Journalism That Matters conference in Memphis while flipping the channels to see different stations coverage of the New Year’s celebrations last night. The PBS broadcast was sponsored in part by resolutions.gather.com.
These days, New Year’s Resolutions can seem a bit daunting. Instead, I tend to think of simply making it through the next day and trying to find a way of making my interests financially sustainable.
Yet at the same time, I’m doing all kinds of things that make for good resolutions, especially around politics and media. I wondered if there was some unifying string theory of what I what to do.
It seems like the resolution that ties it all together is “to help people find their voice”. That is what my discussions with Gina about her class were all about. She was doing marvelous working helping her students find their voices. That is how I think Opportunity Rocks and citizen journalism around the Edwards campaign will be most effective, by helping people find their voice to talk about what is wrong in our country, and finding ways to fix it.
It is my hope that getting people involved in local politics will help them find their political voices and be heard by their local leaders. It is my hope that NewsTrust, as well as emerging regional news councils and hyperlocal journalism efforts will provide a platform for people to find their voices in a way to constructively analyze the media they encounter. It is my hope that the Journalism that Matters conference will help others find ways to enable people to find their voices.
I suspect that many of the people reading this have already found their voices online and hopefully in local and national politics as well. Hopefully you will take on some of this resolution for your own.
Journalism That Matters prep
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/01/2007 - 00:31The following is a message that I’ve sent to various friends, reformed into a blog post. I hope it will help all of you get a greater sense of where I hope to see citizen journalism going, as it relates to the Edwards campaign and beyond. It captures some of my thoughts about how we as OneCorp participants can help change our country through our writing.
I am participating in a Journalism That Matters conference in Memphis later in January. As part of the prep work, participants have been asked to interview each other. Below, you will find my answers to the questions asked. As you read through them, it will help give you context of some of my journey to where I am now in supporting Sen. Edwards. It will also help give more complete context to my blog post about the first blogger meet and greet I attended with Sen. Edwards back in October 2005. (Details of that are here).
With that, Happy New Year everyone. 2007 is going to be an exciting year.
Adding a NewsTrust Rate This button to your site
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/31/2006 - 14:09NewsTrust is a site where users can submit stories from the news and blog sites to be reviewed for their journalistic qualities. Numerous people have asked about adding links to their stories so that they readers can submit a story directly. There is a link that can be used for this, and with a little work, can be incorporated nicely into one’s content management system.
I am using Drupal for my websites, so my first example is how to do this with Drupal. It is likely to be different for different systems, so hopefully people can use this example to incorporate a NewsTrust link into their own systems. Time permitting, I will try to add a NewsTrust link to other sites that I run and provide examples for those types of content management systems.
The Media Heating Tunnels
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/18/2006 - 09:01I don’t often write blog entries based on dreams that I’ve had, but one of my dreams last night seemed very applicable. It metaphorically asked, where to ‘hot’ stories come from in the media?
Back when I was in college, I led groups of students on tours of the heating tunnels on campus. The school had a large plant on the south east side of campus that among other things provided steam to the buildings across campus. There were tunnels all over the campus where people could go down and work on the pipes. If you knew where the entrances were, wanted a little bit of a different type of excitement on a weekend evening, and weren’t afraid to get a little dirty and sweaty, you could see a different side of campus that most people never saw.
This wasn’t a sanctioned activity and the heating tunnel spelunkers were known to show up at unexpected places, sometimes resulting in requests to show up at the Dean of Student Affairs office as well.
In my dream, I was showing friends, particularly from groups like the Media Giraffe Project or the Action Coalition for Media Education the heating tunnels of the media establishment. I don’t remember the details of the dream other than there were tricks about turning on more powerful lights as well as helping one person remove a spider that had gotten stuck in her hair. I’m sure that these were all symbols for something bigger going on, but I’m not sure I know exactly what it is.
So, what makes one story hot and another one get almost no coverage? I’m not sure I know, but let me provide a couple illustrations. Last week, Fox News ran a story (NewsTrust) about possible terrorist threats related to the health of an imprisoned terrorist. The story noted “the FBI said there is no credible indication that a plan for retribution is in place”. What makes this report important?
Meanwhile, news about police taking cameras from citizen journalists in New York or information about a forum on fair elections in New Hampshire gets little coverage.
Yes, it was just a dream that people start looking at the dirty underside of how stories become hot in our media, but dreams our powerful things. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream has inspired millions, and this little dream is perhaps not as far from becoming real as people might think. After all, you are Time Magazine’s person of the year. You are changing the media landscape.
