From Rework:

“I don’t have enough time/money/people/experience.” Stop whining. Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. There’s no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.

This a common complaint in the media world—I’m even guilty of it myself—but not having enough [fill in the blank here] should never be an excuse. It doesn’t take a lot of time/money/people/experience to:

Produce a well-designed, user-friendly site – Wordpress, Drupal, and other open source products have eliminated the need for outside vendors. So why are so many publishers still using them? The open source stuff is easier to use. Big publishers are often distracted by a vendor’s glamorous sales pitch. But what usually happens when the deal is done? You’re left with a cookie cutter site that none of your editors know how to use. It doesn’t take much to make a site functional. Users care less about the bells and whistle and more about functionality and content.

Produce quality content – Journalists are used to getting paid little to nothing. It may not be right, but it’s the truth. So don’t act like hiring someone to write a 300 word article at 30¢ a word is going to break the bank. Try taking it from your salary. If you believed in your product, you would. There are a lot of well-trained writers out there who are happy just to get a byline.

Market your brand – If you produce quality content, that’s marketing enough. If readers like what you have to say and you produce enough of it on a regular basis, they’ll come back and they’ll tell their friends. It’s that simple. Despite the distractions of the Internet, humans are still creatures of habit. Make yourself part of your reader’s habits by giving them what they want and need: good content.

Connect with your readers – Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook are great ways to get feedback from your audience. Implemented a new product on your Web site? Ask your fans. Want to know if a story was well received? Ask yours followers. Believe me, they’ll tell you. And if they don’t? You have your answer.

Clay Shirky at Pop! Tech 2008 (Creative Commons License via Pop!Tech)

I’m currently rereading Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky, a must-read for any journalist who wants to remain employable/understand what the hell is happening to our profession. The book chronicles how Web 2.0 technologies are revolutionizing our world and the way we socialize with one another via these technologies. Flipping through the pages, pen in hand, it’s hard not to have an “ah-ha” moment with every sentence. Shirky gets it; why can’t the rest of us?

With this last read-through, Shirky struck me the most by comparing today’s journalists to the scribes of the early 1400s. Back in the day scribes did something that was rare; they wrote. They were the keepers of our society’s memories. “The scribe was the only bulwark against great intellectual loss.” Yet the invention of moveable type in the late 1400s made scribes nearly obsolete over time. The ability to write was no longer rare.

This comparison isn’t shocking. In fact, many other professionals have alluded to similar analogies in the past. What I find interesting and somewhat comical about Shirky’s comparison though, was his reference to Johannes Trithemius, the Abbott of Sponheim and defender of the scribe. In 1492, the Abbott published a book entitled De Laude Scriptorum, which outlined the benefits of the scribal tradition.

The Abbot’s position would have been mere reactionary cant (“We must preserve the old order at any cost”) but for one detail. If, in the year 1492, you’d written a treatise you wanted widely disseminated, what would you do? You’d have it printed, of course, which was exactly what the Abbot did…. The content of the Abbot’s book praised the scribes, while its printed form damned them; the medium undermined the message.

This example is both funny and sad because the mentality/fear behind it still holds true today. Although the example I’m about to describe doesn’t fit Shirky’s example exactly, it does call to mind a certain mentality among some journalists. On April 21, 2009, New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd poked a little fun at Twitter. The article was centered around her quest to find out “if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention.” Dowd asked the company’s founders to limit their answers to 140 characters, and questions ranged from “Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls?” to “Why did you call the company Twitter instead of Clutter?”

Dowd’s opinion and the Abbot’s are similar in the fact that they both used technology to express their hatred for technology to end users. Ok, so Dowd didn’t use Twitter, but the story was posted online, which is the technological platform that allows Twitter to exist at all. She also poked fun of bloggers who bash the micro-blogging site by stating, “Isn’t that a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?” This comment proves that not only is Dowd afraid of Twitter, she’s afraid of all technological change that disrupts the status quo.

But this story isn’t about Dowd. Her comments have long passed. But it’s just a matter of time before another journalist replaces them with their own fearful words. I can think of more than a handful of  journalists who have damned technology while at the same time used it to promote their work. Print snobs claim that the Internet is destroying good journalism. This point is somewhat valid, however, just because something is in print doesn’t make it good journalism (Us Weekly). Good journalism can be done across multiple platforms. And great journalists should be able to recognize this. What print snobs refuse to see is how these new technologies could truly benefit our profession in the end, and dare I say, mankind. We need amateurs to keep us on our toes, because let’s face it, many journalists think their shit is amazing. But listen up shit lovers; no one’s shit’s amazing. We are the new scribes. But we should be acting more like the new printing presses.

KLUGE from Northern Lights on Vimeo.

The comment came from a fellow journalist, and I couldn’t help but think that this person is a) living in an alternate reality, and b) may soon find themselves without a job.

I agree with this person, to a certain extent, that Facebook, Twitter and Myspace may die off in the years to come. “May” being the operative word. But they will only to be replaced by something else. True, the Internet is always evolving, but that doesn’t mean that social media will cease to exist. It will just change its form. And it is ignorant to think otherwise.

It is this type of mentality that has brought journalism to the place that it is right now. When will fellow journalists learn that we no longer control what is important, what is newsworthy? The general public, now more than ever, decides what they want to know about and when. And don’t for one second think they will get tired of that control. Don’t think for one second that social media is just a fad. This is just the beginning.

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Over the last few weeks I’ve seen this commercial for the Knowledge Generation Bureau at least 10 times. Clearly their advertising strategy worked because I went to their site www.kgb.com and as far as I can tell they are just a sleeker version of Wikipedia but with less information. I tested out their search function and this is the message I got:

Who Unplugged the servers to charge their phone again?

Someone forgot to feed the running hamsters that power the site (we’re Green like that). Don’t worry. We’ve ordered more food. Seriously though, we know about the problem and are working hard to fix it. (At least we didn’t have an image of a construction worker digging)

Not sure if their ambiguous commercials are helping. It got me to their site, but their commercials seemed a bit cooler than what they really had to offer. Or, maybe they’re just new to the scene and figuring it out.  Oh, and I can’t help but think about the Communist Party of the Soviet Union every time I hear the abbrev.