• The Internet Is No Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet
  “We live under the happy illusion that we can transfer news-gathering to the Internet. …Nearly all reporting is done by newspapers and the wire services. Take that away and we have a huge black hole.”
  (tags: buildtheecho death_of_journalism)
• Anatomy of the Right Wing Noise Machine: Maliki and Withdrawal | Election 2008 | AlterNet
  “the response from the right-wing noise machine is…almost a microcosm of how they’ve reacted to any story that punctures their narrative over the last eight years.”
  (tags: bias buildtheecho election)
• The Most Public Index | The News is NowPublic.com
  (tags: buildtheecho impact)

Two interesting posts at Advertising Age in the last 24 hours–both taking different angles on how to deal with the fracturing media and marketing markets. The first, looks at how media properties must create partnerships, specifically communication and marketing partnerships that have specific audience reach, that together can wrap and intersect across the collective audience.

This requires a well-organized set of partnerships with the collective experience to extend a brand idea across a spectrum of disciplines, audiences and media channels. And identifying the best way to strategically align all respective talent will require new ways of thinking about business integration, new ways to approach brand management and new ways to collaborate with marketing partners.

What do you think Obama did?

Political campaigns, for example, employ many strategists, each honing “brand” communications to resonate with the issues, values and social culture germane to a particular constituency. In a great collaborative effort, Barack Obama partnered with Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, to develop a web presence and better employ the social networking that helped engage younger voters and clinch the Democratic nomination. The campaign also had a very well-organized grassroots effort with first-hand knowledge of the political climate and voting protocol in each state and the expertise to resonate with local communities. The collective skills of these local partners helped the “Obama brand” connect with its audience and raise capital in record proportions.

Embedded in the article, is the notion that these partnerships might not be with expected national partners, but might be a niched interests: local partners, representatives of specific audience segments, etc.. And last but not least, technology is the major tool to support that effort.

The internet, social networking and related media technologies have introduced many new media channels that permit audiences to group according to their vertical interests and to share and react to information in real time. Marketers need to harness the same technologies to combine resources and form marketing partnerships that can develop engaging conversations with these very specific audiences and realign quickly to maintain the conversation as the target, media or subject change.

The second post is actually a three minute video podcast (did you know Advertising Age has those? I just found out!) containing reflective and future looking perspectives on the impact and opportunities of vertical advertising networks. Vertical advertising networks are a response to to the fragmenting business and advertising markets for advertisers, publishers and hey, even consumers.

Will Morrison of ThinkPanmure noted how the VAN space was already cluttering up in the last few years. “Back in 2000, 2001 there were roughly 15 to 20 ad networks. Latest count, this Spring, we have got over 300.” Morrison also noted he saw the creation of a new high end, secondary market in the form of mobile ad networks and video ad networks, making it a more complex and overwhelming market for marketers and publishers.

I won’t go back to transcribe the whole thing, but I can say, you won’t waste your three minutes watching/listening.

• Pew Research Center: The Changing Newsroom: Gains and Losses in Today’s Papers
  More hyperlocal news, fewer pages, less foreign coverage…the gaps in the newspaper industry are creating new openings for progressive news projects.
  (tags: buildtheecho death_of_journalism)
• Wordle - BTE
  Fun tag cloud of the BTE site
  (tags: cool_maps)
• PressThink: The People Formerly Known as the Audience
  “The people formerly known as the audience would like to say a special word to those working in the media who, in the intensity of their commercial vision, had taken to calling us “eyeballs”…”
  (tags: csm buildtheecho web_20)

• Daily Kos: State of the Nation
  Interesting and somewhat bitter reflections on the evolution of Netroots Nation from DailyKos diarist Hunter. Have we done all of this, he wonders, just to get back to pre-Bush equilibrium?
  (tags: buildtheecho impact web_20)

• Cracking Code Pink | Salon News
  “It struck me how necessary pink tiaras were in the informational black hole that enables the inscrutable machinations of Washington to move forward without public scrutiny. A successful movement depends on a media that will grant it public legitimacy.”
  (tags: buildtheecho impact)
• CJR: Yglesias: Totally in the (Think) Tank
  Interesting…Yglesias moves to CAP
  (tags: buildtheecho rebirth_of_journalism)

• In House, Tweets Fly Over Web Plan - NYTimes.com
  (tags: web_20 csm buildtheecho)
• Progressives Have a Big Tent at the Dem Convention | Election 2008 | AlterNet
  “a 9,000-square-foot, two-story, fully wired platform for alternative coverage and a stage for newsmakers….will be a counterpoint to the usual convention activities.”
  (tags: buildtheecho election)

Kurt Anderson has an interesting article on the Post-Russert Era at New York Magazine today. Some of the most salient paragraphs:

Until the mid-nineties, the pages and airtime available for reporting and explaining the news were scarce and precious, and middle-of-the-road high sobriety was the default mode for American journalism; to devote more than a tiny fraction of one’s mass-media platform to explicit opinion-mongering or mischief-making was literally unthinkable. But after cable TV and the Internet mooted that scarcity, attitude-laden takes on the news were permitted to propagate madly. The blithe post–Cold War unseriousness of the nineties helped as well. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, as The Daily Show had just started to achieve serious cultural traction and Fox News was about to overtake CNN in the ratings, the new paradigm had become unstoppable. Today, the strictly humorless big-time pundits—Paul Krugman, Charles Krauthammer—are the outliers. And so, perversely, thanks to modern technology, America has returned to its nineteenth-century roots: political discourse as entertainment, and almost everybody, from know-it-alls to wiseacres, mouthing off around the cracker barrel.

The commentariat has never been larger. But for all the new pundits, my hunch is that it possesses no more aggregate power than it did in the past. Instead, the same pie has been cut into smaller slices, with many more people scrambling to claim their little piece of visibility and influence. It’s a version of Warhol’s twisted insight, twisted a little more: In today’s commentariat, everyone is famous not for fifteen minutes but across fifteen micrometers of the bit of the celebrity bandwidth reserved for journalists.

What does this mean for the progressive media? Well, clearly we’re up against not only the dog-fight among the “mainstream” media to get attention, we’re up against each other as we seek to find a foothold in this new media world–from our celebrity journalists (that can be placed, linked to, talked about in the progressive, “mainstream” and conservative media world, to actually producing media that’s going to get placed, linked to, talked about–you get my picture. It’s also not just about what’s the click-through rates on our articles, how high the traffic is on our web sites (although it doesn’t hurt)–it’s about WHO is reading, watching and listening to our media. Who are we trying to mobilize/inform? Who are we trying to influence? Targeting our audience (or intended audiences) becomes harder and harder as the landscape becomes more and more saturated with more media and more systems to deliver media.

I’m just going to say it. The individual efforts of the progressive media are crucial. Everyone (well, mostly everyone) is hitting a particular sweet spot for their audience. Everyone can claim they are producing media that no one else is doing. For the most part, that’s true. But that’s not enough. The audiences are too small. The long-lasting impact is too disparate. It’s hard (I know from experience) to look beyond the daily survival of your media organization. But it’s time to get more collaborative and creative with our thinking in terms of partnerships and organized strategies.

We are not going to do this with the same old mentalities. I think we need to start applying some of the principles of grassroots organizing (ongoing campaigns, targets, strategic communiciations, alliance building, getting our hands dirty) to the media system. I think this will have have an impact on how we’re structuring and distributing the media as well as how we engage with our audiences (who now in my mind, are fellow media makers.) I think the basic tenets and principles of journalism will and should survive. In other words, while the internal organs will remain the same, the face needs some major plastic surgery. (Does that analogy make sense? I’ll keep working on it.)

• Henry Farrell: What Do Blog Readers Look Like? (Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence and John Sides) - Business on The Huffington Post
  Research on blog readers and political activism
  (tags: buildtheecho impact web_20)

Trolling through my tweets I saw this gem from the Washington Editor of The Nation. Just who, I wondered, was the magazine pummeling in a dark alley?

Well, as it turns out, they’re taking on the federal government, with a bit of help from some friends:

A few hours after Bush’s signing [of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008], The Nation joined with the ACLU in a lawsuit filed in the US District Court (Southern District) of New York challenging the constitutionality of the Act. The Nation is suing on behalf of itself, our staff and two of our contributing writers–Chris Hedges and Naomi Klein. The defendants are the Attorney General of the United States, Michael Mukasey; John M. “Mike” McConnell, Director of National Intelligence; and Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency and Chief of the Security Service. We filed suit along with a coalition of other plaintiffs including Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, Global Fund for Women, PEN American Center, Washington Office on Latin America, Service Employees International Union and several private attorneys.

Is it the role of a magazine to join such a lawsuit? Well, as editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel argues, warrentless wiretapping is not just an ominous form of creeping surveillance, it’s also a threat to investigative journalism. In the course of gathering information, independent reporters regularly communicate via phone and e-mail with political dissidents, activists and foreign journalists around the world—exchanges that could be classified as “foreign intelligence information” under the new act. Reporters like Hedges and Klein—who write about sensitive topics in conflict zones—will find it difficult to maintain the confidentiality of their sources under such conditions. “We are proud, then,” she writes, “to join with other patriots who understand the government’s legitimate interest in protecting the nation against terrorism can be fulfilled without sacrificing the constitutional liberties that make the US worth defending.”

F*ckin’ A! Way to “take it to the hill”…

Tags: buildtheechoimpact

• Is nonprofit newsroom’s shaky start an omen? - 07/07/2008 - MiamiHerald.com
  Why is ProPublica subsidizing already-rich outlets?
  (tags: buildtheecho csm rebirth_of_journalism)
• MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Charles Lewis Tries to Solve — Not Bemoan — State of Investigative Journalism | PBS
  (tags: csm buildtheecho re)
• New York Times Salutes Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films | PEEK | AlterNet
  (tags: buildtheecho impact)