Author: Jim

I’ve talked about nano-news in the past, and how consumers (read: the public) have taken to digesting news in smaller bites. Well, like all good things in a free market society, as a market is identified the entrepreneurs follow.

My first example blows my mind. I’ve talked about short-form video a couple of times on the blog, but I hadn’t heard of how one organization, NowThis News, has used the 15-second long Instagram video tool to pass along news. Mashable reviewed the service here:

Since the launch of Instagram Video in June, media organizations have experimented with 15-second video as a news vehicle. However, there is a clear divide between the strategies of legacy news organizations and newer startups.

Traditional media organizations more often use Instagram Video to promote news content, rather than to break actual news. But startup NowThis News is flipping the social media/PR model upside down by using Instagram Video as its main vehicle to deliver breaking news and featured news briefs.

NPR, though, to their credit, are doing something similar.

The second half of the shrinking media story is about the scope of the stories. As 24-hour news networks came online, it allowed news organizations to broaden the scope of their operations and cover LOTS of stories. As time progressed, the coverage of those stories got more and more shallow. A mile wide and an inch deep, as the saying goes. But as the public got access to more sources of news, the blush of coverage that most national organizations could provide wasn’t enough anymore.

So we’re starting to see organizations like Syria Deeply, that is cataloging the depth of a humongous story that could potentially affect us all. Utilizing content scraping and crowdsourcing, they’ve managed to bring a closer look from the international world onto the conflict in Syria. And the model seems replicable:

“We want to figure out how to make one topic in-depth financially viable,” Setrakian said. ” I’m not going to lean on ad revenue because I don’t want zit cream ads next to our refugee content I’m not going to lean on ad revenue because I don’t want zit cream ads next to our refugee content.”

Beyond working with enterprise clients, Syria Deeply receives support from The Asfari Foundation and the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Setrakian believes Syria Deeply has the opportunity to recreate the revenue model because it treats up-to-date information as insight, rather than just news. So far, she said, the cost of content has been pretty low, partly due to the high-volume of free content its been given from high quality news and information providers.

Traditional media, in case you haven’t heard, is scrambling to take adapt to the changing landscape. They get ridiculous computer screens and make hashtags and try to appear differently. The problem isn’t the veneer, though. It’s the change in the underlying contract between news consumer and news producer.

We no longer want to be subjected to what the news Producer (the job in the newsroom, not the general production machinery) thinks we’ll be interested in. We want our news, and we want it crammed into the real time constraints that we live with, not some half hour tripe full of teasers and commercials for programs later on that evening. Getting back to our free market example, once you stop producing a product that the public doesn’t have a need for, they stop buying it. Changing the packaging doesn’t change the fact that you’re no longer addressing a need.

It’s a funny thing when government and politics get tangled up. Funny in an, “omigod, are these people adults or just seven-year-olds in suits,” kind of way. (Source: I live in the United States.)

Political leanings aside, these folks aren’t seven-year-olds. They are men and women who run the country. All of them have advanced degrees, extremely successful backgrounds, or the ability to successfully represent tens of thousands of their neighbors concerns and needs. They aren’t dumb people. So why is there such a disconnect on what should be a pretty basic point? The point I’m talking about is the debt ceiling. (Full disclosure: I am poor at maths, and poorer at financial maths.) This article from USA Today perfectly encapsulates the difference:

Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., even argues that reaching the debt limit could help the economy, by showing the world the U.S. is serious about its debt problem. “I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets,” he told The Washington Post Monday.

Versus

Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the free-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said …”I do not believe that past Oct. 17 the country’s going to hell,” she said. “But I agree that failing to pay interest on our debt has very serious consequences.”

Is breaching the debt ceiling a good thing or a bad thing? This shouldn’t be this hard, but it is. And lest you think this is just a politician bashing post, it’s not just them, it’s us, too:

A new Pew Research Center poll shows a majority of Republicans and many independents are just fine with the idea of not raising the debt limit by the Treasury Department’s deadline of Oct. 17.

…

Slightly more than half of Americans — 51 percent — say it is essential to raise the debt ceiling to avoid an economic crisis. That’s slightly more than the 47 percent of Americans who said the same last week.

There is a huge partisan split on this questions, with 37 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats in the new poll believing there would be an economic crisis.

But it’s not just this topic. The difference between Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act should be, well, nothing, but thanks to Jimmy Kimmel, we see there is confusion even there:

I have a theory of why this is. Our politicians are getting very good at branding. And they brand everything: the PATRIOT Act, Obamacare, the Help America Vote Act. Each is named to conjure specific images, particular feelings that are fanned and encouraged by the particular cable news channel viewers they are intending to reach. They are intended to sow discord and side-taking. Which inevitably leads to confusion.

So what can we, as career government communicators, do about this state of affairs? Plain language. We might not be able to rename that thing in the news, but if people understood where we were coming from, and who we were and what our job was, think of the confusion we could avoid. Heading back to our original area of confusion, there are already calls for the Fed and the presumed new Chief to do a better job explaining what they do:

Since 2010, when Congress pivoted first to deficit reduction and then to gridlock, the only large, influential institution in Washington focusing on reducing unemployment and getting this tepid recovery up to speed has been the Federal Reserve. Yet the beneficiaries of those actions know very little about them. Outsiders like myself can help, but it will take a commitment by the Fed itself to really change that.

Do the people you work to help know what you do? Or are they swayed by political, divisive, rancorous names and cable news fights?

Courtesy of Carolyne Mitchell, who is a fantabulous Information Officer with the South Lanarkshire Council, we’ve been treated to a great story about the naming of winter storms. It also gives us the opportunity to see what happens in real life when government isn’t paying attention to the terms the public uses. With that, I cede the floor.

Jim’s Winter is Coming post about the naming of winter storms resonated strongly with us Scots.

Back in December 2011, Scotland braced itself for one of its worst storms in living history. The Met Office had forecast the storm and issued alerts. In Strathclyde, local emergency groups had been set up in most councils to discuss school closures, social care provision, flood alerts, road closures, tree removal and general contingency planning. On December 7, the day before the storm, the Scottish Government recommended that councils should close all schools. The Met Office not only prepared the public for the weather, the media was also prepared for a busy news day.

In the end the storm resulted in widespread disruption including 60,000 houses left with no power, travel disruption, storm damage to homes and cars due to fallen trees and airborne debris and police forces around the country had advised against travelling.

But the storm provided a challenge for emergency responders and many other organisations. As the social media lead for my council, I watched the day unfold and managed the council Twitter account from home as my daughter’s school was closed. By mid-morning the public had nicknamed the storm Hurricane Bawbag and it was this hashtag that was adopted by the majority on Twitter causing #hurricanebawbag to trend, not only in Scotland but around the world.

For those not sure about the Scottish vernacular, bawbag is slang for scrotum and is usually used as a derogatory term. It’s a mild swear word that children would be told off for using. Basically us Scots were throwing down a challenge to Mother Nature – bring it on wind, if you think you’re hard enough!

However, the police and most local authorities decided that bawbag was a wholly inappropriate for them to use on their Twitter streams and they, and the Scottish Government, went for the straight #scotstorm.

What did this mean? Well, most people were reveling over in the #bawbag camp with photos of the River Clyde bursting its bank in several places, film clips of journalists on sea walls just about getting swept away, a now infamous film of an escaped trampoline rolling down a street, an enterprising Glasgow T-shirt company printing #bawbag T-shirts before the day was over and American TV news stations reporting about Hurricane Bawbag without knowing what the word meant.

Meanwhile over in the #scotstorm camp, the authorities were publishing news of closed roads, closed bridges, how to report fallen trees and other important messages, mostly to an empty room.

And the moral of the story? Go where the people are – don’t try to shoehorn yourself into a hashtag of your own making because you don’t like the one that grew organically in the heat of the moment.

I recently spent a year researching the growth of the use of Twitter during emergencies by both the emergency responders and journalists in Strathclyde for my Masters dissertation. Although things have moved on a pace since I wrote it, it still makes for interesting reading. Lovingly entitled, From John Smeaton to #hurricanebawbag: The development of social media use during emergencies by Strathclyde’s media and emergency responders, it sits on my blog which sadly I haven’t updated since August, something I promise sort out asap.

You’ll also find me on Twitter and LinkedIn – let’s connect :-)