Four Wednesday

1. Platinum Equity is exploring a possible sale, er divestiture, of the San Diego Union-Tribune. UT

2. The Associated Press releases new social media guidelines. AP (via Romenesko)

3. Simon Dumenco says punishment of Huffington Post writer for "over-aggregating" copy obscures the fact that over-aggregation of copy is a central Huffington Post strategy. Ad Age

4. Feeling claustrophobic about this weekend's Carmageddon carpocalypse? JetBlue had a solution - for $4, the Car-mageddon fly-over would have taken you from Long Beach to Burbank, or vice versa, allowing you to avoid all ground congestion. The trip would have taken 45 minutes, not counting security checks, but the flights are sold out anyway. JetBlue

Four in the afternoon

1. Using social media to report on Egypt. Mashable

2. The Burbank Leader has followed through on its pledge to sue the city of Burbank for merit-based bonuses paid to city employees. Burbank Leader

3. The nonprofit California Watch has launched a new partnership with several newspapers across the state. CFIR

4. Facebook is making an aggressive push to get in the comments game on media websites - especially startups. CNET

Social media and the social consequences

Most people involved in social media are trying to create a social network large enough to realize a meaningful payoff. But some, like political analyst Marc Ambinder, formerly of the Atlantic, have a network that's large, engaged and sometimes brutalizing. C.W. Anderson explores the upside and downside over at Nieman Journalism Lab.

The social and the anti-social networks

Why go to an entertaining movie when you can listen to an informative radio program? On today's "To The Point," we discuss the rise of online social networks, starting with Facebook, and consider the ways our logged-on lives are changing society and culture. With Judith Donath of Harvard's Berkman Center, Walker Smith of The Futures Company, Fred Vogelstein of Wired, and Michael Kaiser of the National Cyber Security Alliance. Listen to the show here.

Pay with your publicity

The rise of social media could make pay walls for news sites unnecessary, according to Felix Salmon, who argues that advertisers will pay more if they can target their ads to consumers with Twitter or Facebook accounts than consumers who merely subscribe to the site.

From his post:

The fact is that if I sign in to a free site using my Twitter login, I’m actually more valuable to advertisers than if I paid to enter that site. That’s because the list of people I follow on Twitter says a huge amount about me, and a smart media-buying organization can target ads at me which are much more narrowly focused than if all they knew about me was that I was paying to read the Times.

He goes on to say news sites would be smarter to let readers register through their existing social-media accounts, rather than use their own registration systems:

At that point, they’re not “useless tourists” any more: they’re highly valuable and targetable news consumers. And the question of whether or not they’re paying for their news becomes much less important to advertisers. And, therefore, to publishers as well.

The success of such a system depends on whether news sites draw a large enough crowd that advertisers actually do find the information useful. The New York Times probably does, but are there enough Twitter users in Pasadena to make this registration system profitable to the Pasadena Star-News?

(Found via Recovering Journalist)

Ferro on the future of KCRW

Newly anointed KCRW General Manager Jennifer Ferro talks about her vision for the public radio station:

... one of the challenges that all radio faces is this idea of relevance. There are so many other ways that people get information. And there are a lot of people (especially young people) that don’t really listen to the radio anymore. They listen to other devices. So one of our goals is just trying to get our programming where people are – mobile interests, being online, on social media. But the other thing is that – if you want to stay relevant, you just have to keep delivering great programming, whether that’s on the air, online, in-person, or through these really great events that we do.

We have this idea of this “independent producer lab.” In public radio, there are people who put together these amazing pieces. They’re like journalists, who are telling amazing stories &…they’re struggling to make a living. Like this one guy Joe Richman (who I love), did this thing called “Prison Diaries,” where he got prisoners to carry around these tape recorders. And everyday, they’d just talk into them, tell these stories and talk about their lives. And he edited them together and made these really powerful vignettes of people incarcerated that you’d never hear otherwise. He spends a lot of his time trying to raise the money to be able to do that. And I think that’s just a shame. We should be doing that. So that’s what we want to do at KCRW – be the distribution partner, go out and raise the money, support these people and commission them to go do stories about Los Angeles.

I just want us to continue to act as a sort of community center. I really love this idea of membership. We have members who contribute anywhere from $5 a month or $5000 a year. But it’s sort of this pledge that says “I’m down with what you guys do.” And we have 52,000 people who do that. I want it to be like 100,000 people. That’s my big goal. It’s a huge goal but were working on reducing all the barriers to being a member – whatever donation you can give…makes you a member. Just being able to say that there are 100,000 people, who want to be a part of it…would be really amazing.

Out to make friends, or to dominate the grid?

The Facebook/Twitter social divide, as explained by Gene Weingarten, of the Washington Post:

Twitter is about competition. It is about one-upsmanship. It is about an endless race to accumulate devotees, or followers. Note the term, "followers," not "friends." On Facebook, the people who read what you write are your "friends," and they are the same people whom you read. Not on Twitter. On Twitter, there are two distinct groups: Your followers, and people you follow. Some Twitter people (me, for example) have thousands of followers, but follow only a few dozen. The more clever you are, the greater this disparity...

As I long ago pointed out in a tweet, Twitter assigns a Human Worth Value to every participant; this is never actually stated, but it's there for all to see: All you have to do is to subtract the number of people you follow from the number of people who follow you. The higher the number, the greater your Human Worth. If the number is negative, you are pathetic.

The "like" revolution

Facebook users probably have noticed the recent explosion of "like" buttons on various Facebook pages, and now a new "like" plugin is popping up on other media sites. When clicked, the reader's interest in whatever he's reading or seeing will be automatically posted to his personal Facebook page.

From Time:

Facebook wants every page on the Web to have a "like" button, which they released at the conference. Each time you indicate you like something, that information is fed back to Facebook and then to the website you're on. Enough of your friends like the same restaurant on Yelp? You'll see that on Yelp.com and when you login to Facebook. Like this article? Click the like button on it and your friends may see your recommendation when they come to time.com.

What you "like" will also be shared with other databases, giving the web a way to read your preferences. This, of course, raises concerns about privacy. From the Atlantic:

Facebook will allow website developers to collect and use our information when we connect to a site. When I press the "like" button, that goes into a social clearinghouse of information. Other sites can see the articles I like on CNN, the music I like on Pandora, the food I like on Yelp ... and that's in addition to any information I make public on my Facebook profile. The Facebook team calls this application "Open Graph." You can call it the future of marketing.

Given Facebook's preeminent popularity online, this web within the Web could have Google-like implications for how information is shared and online ad dollars flow.

And since every website wants to be liked, expect to be inundated with overtures to share your attention and approval... Like this one I just got in my email box from ABC News: "Like ABCNews.com? Like Facebook? Check out our new integration: http://bit.ly/bEmqQ8"

All the world is a popularity contest.

Getting your Twitter on better

Twitter has launced the "Twitter Media" site to help journalists make better use of the social-media tool. TechCrunch

Investigative reporter wanted for press events

Mashable, a social media website, has a job opening for a "seasoned" investigative reporter to cover the Bay Area. The job comes with three key responsibilities, only one of which strikes me as having anything to do with investigation or reporting. See if you can guess which one:

*Sourcing original stories about the tech and social media world
*Taking regular meetings with companies in the area and going to press events
*Speaking at events and participating in press interviews

To get the job, candidates must have at least two years "at an established news organization doing investigative reporting."

Quieting the chatterers of doom

A lot of social media advocates have already shown up for the newspaper industry's wake, and the latest circulation numbers gave them another reason to cheer/mourn. But the industry has yet to die. Except for a relatively few newspapers in troubled markets, papers continue to pull in revenues that dwarf those of even popular online news sites.

That's not to say newspapers aren't in trouble, or that revenues aren't shrinking, or that shrunken revenues haven't left newsrooms stretched too thin, crushing the morale of reporters still on the job. But, to paraphrase Dan Gross of Slate, the grave dancers need to chill the f#@k out:

So in the past six months, according to ABC, the New York Times' daily circulation fell 7.3 percent, while Sunday circulation was down 2.7 percent. Horreur! And yet, the New York Times Co. reported that in the third quarter, "circulation revenues rose 6.7 percent, mainly because of higher subscription and newsstand prices at The New York Times and The Boston Globe." In the quarter, circulation revenues were larger than advertising revenues for the first time—$175.25 million, compared with $164.5 million.

By the way, you can still make money publishing newspapers—even in a period when advertising has plummeted. Check out Gannett's third-quarter earnings report. Its newspapers pulled in more than $100 million of operating income on revenues of $1.04 billion. In the first three quarters of 2009, advertising revenues were off 31.6 percent, but circulation revenues were off less than 5 percent, even though many of Gannett's flagship papers lost subscribers.

In the last year, Gannet bled its newsrooms of journalists - not a healthy long term strategy. The New York Times announced another round of buyouts in hopes of trimming 100 newsroom jobs. Clearly this isn't a growth strategy. But the fact that an economic meltdown, a massive technology change and a multitude of self-inflicted wounds have yet to destroy newspapers is something to consider. Again from Gross:

This is the new emerging model—cutting costs, raising prices. It may still fail in the end. But we shouldn't act as if the online-only crowd has it all figured out. Every month, several million Americans pay to have newspapers and magazines delivered to their homes—a trick most online publications have yet to pull off. In fact, in some regards, print-online hybrids like newspapers and magazines have outperformed online-only publications. The Web operations of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal aren't exactly slouches when it comes to selling online ads. And as poorly as the stock of the New York Times has performed over the past decade, most people would have preferred owning it to the stock of Salon.com, or TheStreet.com.

This blog brought to you by...

Bloggers who plug products on their blog or provide product reviews in exchange for free swag will have to report what they're up to under new rules laid down by the Federal Trade Commission.

From the New York Times:

The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement.

For bloggers who review products, this means that the days of an unimpeded flow of giveaways may be over. More broadly, the move suggests that the government is intent on bringing to bear on the Internet the same sorts of regulations that have governed other forms of media, like television or print.

“It crushes the idea that the Internet is separate from the kinds of concerns that have been attached to previous media,” said Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University.

The story does not say what constitutes full disclosure. Time will tell if the tougher rules will send advertising dollars back to legitimate news sites.

Social government

Rick Cole, former Pasadena city manager mayor and now Ventura city manager, offers his view of how social media networks will change local government in this month's Public Management magazine. One consequence is more direct democracy, he argues, and less reliance on elected officials to decide things - and less reliance on newspapers to report those decisions:

A crowd-sourcing approach to local government resembles a barn raising more than a vending machine as a model for serving the community. Instead of elected leaders exclusively deciding the services to be offered and setting the (tax) price of the government vending machine, a barn raising tackles shared challenges through what former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith calls "government by network."

Citizen groups, individual volunteers, activists, nonprofits, other public agencies, businesses, and ad hoc coalitions contribute to the designing, delivering, and funding of public services. The media compatible with this model are not the newspapers—the local newspaper reporting yesterday's council meeting, for example. The new media are the instant Facebook postings, tweets, and YouTube clips that keep our shifting body politic in touch.

Four in the evening

1. The Washington Post reaffirms its allegiance to impartial journalism with a new social media policy. WaPo

2. Tehran Bureau has teamed up with Frontline to expand coverage of Iran. NYT

3. Read a banned book, it'll be good for your soul. Scott Martelle

4. Given the challenges we face in Afghanistan, it's time to take a closer look at Yemen. Time