A photographic imagination

Dark little secrets
IHT.com

The dark little secret of European journalism is the practice of corporations to subsidize trips for journalists in hopes of generating publicity. But the custom always raises questions about the independence of resulting stories.

This generosity is now extending to the planet of blogging. Earlier this year, the Netherlands tourist board hosted about 20 bloggers from different regions of the world in Amsterdam, with the aim of creating buzz about Dutch vacations.

Next month, France 24, the new television channel that is the French counter voice to CNN and the BBC, will host a dozen bloggers, hailing from the United States to Jordan, to visit their newsroom (and Paris, of course).

When these bloggers start weighing in about France 24 (after we French taxpayers have subsidized their Tour de France through government financing of France 24), they should also be transparent about what they were given.

PIXEL POINTS
Last post

Nowadays none of us needs to log 14,520 miles (!) to learn about the Rural Studio, or Rocio Romero's modernist prefabs, or Dan Rockhill's Studio 804, or any of the estimable enterprises Jacobs visits. Nowadays all we need to do is to log on, and follow Google wherever it goes.

I've been thinking a lot lately about this tension between real and virtual, between on-the-ground and online—a tension that seems to me inevitable and ongoing as our culture migrates more and more from print to web, from public theater to private screen, from communal connection to micro-niche market.

Advertising: Old-School Sponsorship From a Digital-Era Company
NY Times

The sponsorship is another example of an advertising technique that is being revived, decades after fading from the media landscape. Known as branded entertainment, it recalls the days when announcers intoned at the start of TV and radio shows that they were being “brought to you by” some name-brand consumer product.

Branded entertainment is returning to television because of its ability to interweave product pitches into the story lines of the shows that consumers want to watch. The goal is to counter viewers’ increasing ability to ignore or avoid more interruptive advertising like traditional commercials.

New Media: When to Innovate, When to Wait
iMedia Connection

.... all media serves to introduce, engage or remind. So, defining new media's role in this continuum will involve these issues.

Defining the role of each medium
Most bleeding-edge media opportunities fall into two of three of these core responsibilities within the media mix. Though all media vehicles have a responsibility in this mix, digital media is the only format that spans multiple responsibilities.

Innovation's back, but does that change anything?
Simon Caulkin

Of course, traditional media companies are pitching in to buy up anything with Web 2.0 pretensions, however remote. But as the AOL-Time Life debacle graphically showed, there is no necessary synergy between old and new media, and unless attitudes to customers change radically, they may find that the benefits of innovation are not easily bought.

The irony is that opportunities to make things better for customers are all around. In yet another recent HBR article, the owner of a noted restaurant explained that it had built its high reputation by carefully managing mood as well as food. 'We have to assess and understand how our customers are feeling right now... and then do whatever it takes to make them feel better'... not by hovering over the wine or asking how the food was at each taste but adjusting service - speeding up, slowing down, being conversational or leaving well alone - according to the mood of the table. The aim is that each table should score no less than nine out of 10 for mood, and as staff work discreetly to push the score up, 'they develop a wonderful confidence in their ability to handle difficult situations as a team'.

Newspapers’ Civil War
Below the fold

Today newspapers fight not for supremacy, but for survival. They are still at war – but this time, the fighting is internal.

Individual newspapers are embroiled in their own civil wars, pitting reporters against management and shareholders against owners. The community is caught in perpetual crossfire from drive-by decision making such as staff reductions, content overhauls and consolidation. Newspapers are killing themselves and they don’t seem to care if they take the rest of us down with them.

Technology is part of the equation – we are living through unprecedented change and we must expect and even welcome transition, especially when it comes to us via transformation and a public’s desire for participation. But for newspapers to blame technology for all their problems is like blaming cell phones for causing you to rear-end someone on the freeway. The issue is not with the technology but with how you choose to use it, and in this regard newspapers, with some notable exceptions like the Washington Post and the Houston Chronicle, have failed.