… at the intersection of media, technology, business and the web

There are so many people spending their lives in front of video cameras — not just on sites like YouTube but on thousands of discussion forums and chat rooms across the Internet — that the surprising thing isn’t how many people choose to die in front of their webcams, it’s how few. Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee has the story of a young man who was talking to other members of a chat-room on a bodybuilding forum and said he had taken an overdose of medication, posted a suicide note and then collapsed on his bed. Several concerned viewers called police, who broke down the door and found the young man, and friends later confirmed that he was dead. A tragic end to a young life, all captured on film. It used to be that killing yourself on camera meant doing it on the evening news — when I was in journalism school, I remember a state official in Pennsylvania putting a gun to his head during a press conference and pulling the trigger, and our class debating whether TV shows should have run the film. Now anyone can have a camera, and broadcast their death to as many people as choose to watch.

{ Comments }

I’m cross-posting this from my blog at the Globe and Mail, as part of my ongoing attempt to talk about what we’re trying to do at the newspaper when it comes to comments, blogs, forums and other ways that we interact with readers. Feel free to respond here or at the Globe blog — where (naturally) I encourage you to read the comments :-)

In my new role as the Globe’s “communities editor” (you can find more details on that in this post), I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about comments — that is, reader comments on news stories, columns, blog posts, etc. The Globe and Mail was the first major newspaper in North America to allow comments on every news story when it launched the feature in 2005, and judging by the ever-increasing numbers of people who use them, they are hugely popular. On some major news stories, we can sometimes get as many as 500 comments.

Comments aren’t popular with everyone, however. Some readers (and even some Globe and Mail staffers, to be honest) complain that too often our comment threads are filled with what might charitably be called “noise” — everything from bad spelling and grammar all the way up to partisan political in-fighting, ad hominem attacks and all-around rude and boorish behaviour. Some say they don’t really care what most people think about a topic, and don’t see the value in having public comments on stories at all.

This view isn’t confined to Globe readers, by any means: in a column in the National Post, author George Jonas said that the Web is like “an elegant restaurant with garbage on the menu,” and that “a huge blackboard on which anyone can write anything doesn’t mean much for those with nothing to say, i.e., most people.” Similar feelings have been expressed by various writers about comments on blogs, and some prominent Web writers have turned theirs off completely. Even the director of BBC News said in a recent speech that while she values comments, they are the work of a “vocal minority” and therefore shouldn’t carry too much weight.

Just for the record, my view — one that I believe the Globe shares — is that the ability to comment on a news story or a column or a blog is a fundamental requirement of any modern media entity. In the past, reader feedback was limited to a handful of letters to the editor or perhaps a phone call or a comment to an editor or writer at a cocktail party or coffee shop. The Web allows us to open that ability up to virtually anyone, and I believe that doing so, on balance, has a lot more positive results than negative ones – not just for us, but for society in general. Yes, we get nasty comments; but we also get many others that are smart, insightful, touching and useful.

[click to continue…]

{ Comments }

It’s a long read, but there’s a thoughtful piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about what newspapers should be doing to not just survive but prosper in the current media environment, and if you’re interested in that kind of thing I highly recommend it. It isn’t the usual obituary, with details about newspaper layoffs and so on — instead, it makes the argument that the essential duty of any kind of quality media publication right now is to help people filter the vast amounts of information that they are exposed to every day, and to interpret it, provide context, etc.

The central thesis, as I see it, is that there are already enough sources of instantaneous information, whether it’s Perez Hilton and TMZ or the Drudge Report (which 37signals recently posted a nice analysis of). Competing on that basis, the author says, isn’t the way to add long-term value or to create a successful new media industry, nor is simply scrambling for as many eyeballs as possible in order to sell them to advertisers. Instead, media outlets should be trying to find ways of adding more context, analysis and tools that help readers make sense of the information around them.

[click to continue…]

{ Comments }

As my mesh conference colleague Mark Evans has already pointed out on his own blog and at the mesh blog, we are trying to get a jump on things a little this year (or rather, next year) by putting mesh ‘09 tickets on sale a little earlier. Every year we’ve had people say that they didn’t have enough time to get it into their calendars or to get approval or whatever, so this time we’re giving everyone lots of advance notice :-) The dates are April 7th and 8th. We’ll be announcing some of the keynotes and other content soon, and we’re also launching meshjobs, a mesh-based job site where you can list open positions your company might have and take advantage of some of the awesome talent that’s out there in the mesh-o-sphere. We’re having meshU again this year as well, the day before mesh proper, so if you know any developers or technical Web types, let them know that it’s coming, and that tickets for this one-day event should be on sale soon.

{ Comments }