Three ways Al Jazeera is changing communication

No one knows what the future of media will look like. Are tablets and devices going to save the day for paid content? Are legacy media companies doomed? Is Facebook the new newspaper? Will Twitter bring democracy to the furthest, most repressive corners of the world?

I don't know, but I will venture a guess. Al Jazeera will be there at the end.

The Qatar-owned news network is at the center of a dizzying swirl of worldwide trends right now. Just to run down a few:

1. The role of social media in the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia has been widely debated. But whatever the actual influence is, Al Jazeera has been at the center of it.

A TechCrunch post detailed the surges of traffic to Al Jazeera outlets when former Egyptiain rule Hosni Mubarak resigned. And it turns out that during the heaviest surge, more than 70 percent of Al Jazeera's web traffic came as referrals from social media. And where did most of the referrals come from? Not Facebook, but Twitter. This is interesting because I've read that Facebook was the big driver for local organizers in Tunisia, not Twitter. But for Western news consumers, Twitter seems to be in the vanguard.

2. And Al Jazeera may also revolutionize the moribund US news biz. Demand is sky high for Al Jazeera English - even though it is available in only 3 million homes in the US. But people are finding it through its website, through YouTube and through set-top boxes like Roku. From the Guardian:

The Qatar-based channel's acclaimed coverage of the Egyptian crisis has been referred to as the broadcaster's "CNN moment", doing for al-Jazeera English what the first Gulf war did for CNN, pushing it to the forefront of the public's consciousness. Put simply, must-see TV. Now the challenge is to translate the plaudits into the major cable or satellite distribution deal the channel has long sought without success in the US ...

With China investing $7bn in foreign language media, we may also be witnessing the beginning of a shift, albeit slight, in the nature of global TV news and debate.

In a landscape dominated by partisan talk - see Fox News (right) and MSNBC (left-ish) - and with CNN seen as largely ineffective, Al Jazeera seems to be finding the strongest niche of all - the good reporting, hard news niche.

That this is happening in a country that demonized Al Jazeera during the Iraq War, in which its public perception was that of terrorist accomplice, is really something. It either speaks to changing American attitudes or a serious void in the American media scene.

3. There is another component to Twitter and Al Jazeera - the English one. As English becomes more and more widely spoken, it provides a larger platform for a tweet from Tunisia or a news outlet from the Middle East. I discovered this in a comment by statica from another Guardian piece:

How much more powerfully would international support for the protests in Tianamen Square, those crying for help in Rwanda or Sarajevo, have been raised if individuals around the world could have had access to specific images & statements put out by people on the inside?

I guess we're finding that out now.

Much of this is relevant to us here as communicators in Sweden. The English bit. The global platform (opportunity for people up in the far north). The role of technology and news in ordering our societies.

I wonder what more we will find out tomorrow. No matter what it is, we'll probably see it on Al Jazeera.




Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Is Facebook the future of the newspaper?

It is easy to put even new forms of social media into boxes. Twitter good for news. Facebook for friend updates, social games, maybe marketing. But isn’t that just more of the same old thinking? In other words, could Facebook replace the local newspaper?

I worked at a local newspaper in the US for five years, first as a beat reporter then as a regional editor. This gave me a front row seat to the slow implosion of newspaper journalism in the US. Even at my paper, which avoided huge layoffs, reporting slots were constantly lost, even as we were expected - with little strategic thought - to put more news on the web faster and faster.

Yet local news is the one thing that can’t be outsourced to huge conglomerates like Google, right? Even though local newspapers have lost advertising and business space in every conceivable business and journalistic segment - real estate, cars, classified ads, personal ads, national news, international news - there is still no one else to cover the local high school basketball team. There is no one else keeping a watch on the city council, on the school board, or even with community reporters compiling lists of pancake breakfasts at the local volunteer fire station (I know I just dived deep into American, not international, cultural institutions, but I hope you get the idea).

So if local newspapers no longer had the money or the will to dive deep into the local market, I thought Patch.com, from AOL, was a great idea. AOL has hired up to 1000 reporters in the last year, each one attached to a website devoted to a single town or neighborhood. The idea is to make money by scale and going hyperlocal. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sees local news “as the last great white space” on the internet, a space still in need of gatekeepers to filter the relevant news for us..

Alleluia.

But the thing is, it might not be working. Turns out, not many local news sites have made it, says the New York Times. And, it turns out, both Yahoo! and Google are moving in on this space, Yahoo! with news aggregation and Google just in ads and recommendations.

Oh, and according to Ken Auletta in the New Yorker, the Patch content is, ummm, uneven at best.

But the idea I find the most provocative is this from The Business Insider, that Facebook may already serve as a local newspaper. And sites like Groupon, with their daily coupons, give you a great sense of what to do. From the story:

Patch is supposed to be a local news outlet, but Facebook is already giving people the local news they actually care about. It has the local events Armstrong wants Patch to report, but also observations from friends, and photos that are better than any society pages …

Turns out Facebook is already giving them something that's "good enough" but at even cheaper cost. Facebook has just 2,000 employees to Patch's 800.

It’s just another reminder that communication is changing faster than most of us can keep track of, that our supposedly expert visions of the future may be obsolete by, say, next week.

But at least you can find out about it on Facebook.

Nathan Hegedus

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Are you influenced by a cup of coffee?

In my first class in journalism school, the professor walked in carrying a brown paper bag. He told us that in our future lives as journalists this brown paper bag should carry our lunches, even if our sources wanted to take us out, or if the company provided a buffet, or even free coffee and some buns.

This hard core line against outside influence caused much debate in our class. Many scoffed, many - including myself - became true believers. I think all of us slipped once we hit the real world. You try telling a restaurant owner that you won't eat their food or refusing a cup of coffee from the retired figure skating judge.

But I still have held true to the overall belief. Even the cup of coffee makes us predisposed to like the person giving it to us, or at least not resent them for not offering the coffee.

In journalism, this is a bad thing, supposedly, to be influenced like this. And I agree. Even if objectivity is a myth that should be tossed out, you also do not want to be so obviously beholden to people. Independence is perhaps the better ideal to shoot for.

But in communications, you want to be doing the influencing. You want that journalist to write the story, or the customer to buy the product, or the employee to just love our company magazine.

And apparently, we can make that happen, if we're smart enough, which is more than a little scary. Via Six Pixels of Separation, I came across this article from psychologywriter.org.uk, which basically destroys any notion of our free will in the face of outside stimuli:

From the effect of mirrors and the subliminal presentation of happy faces, to the sight of a briefcase and the power of mimicry, the range of factors influencing our behaviour without us realising it is overwhelming. Taken together, the research undermines the notion that our conscious selves are in control, and points instead to a sophisticated nonconscious mind, wide open to outside influences, as the real source of our decision making.

And then there is this from PsyBlog, just on coffee:

Eighty per cent of adults in the US and the UK are moderate users of the psychoactive drug, caffeine ... Of all the effects it has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion ...

The reason that a lot of persuasive messages pass us by is simply that we're often not paying much attention to them; our minds easily wander and we prefer not to think too hard unless it's unavoidable. By increasing our arousal, though, caffeine makes us process incoming messages more thoroughly, potentially leading to increased persuasion.

It seems my professor was right. So fire up that coffee pot and pour me a hot cup of joe.

I like you better already.

Nathan Hegedus

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Old media habits die hard

"Hotshot new media companies do not have a higher creativity quotient than older ones, they simply place fewer obstacles in the way of seizing the potential of technology transitions."

This comment from Lucy Küng, a professor in media management, got me thinking about my own experience. It's true, as a journalist in the traditional media realm, my day-to-day work was always about being credible; about being seen as reliable. The victim was often creativity.

For years though I clung to the "old ways" determined that the path I knew was the right one, and new media was nothing more than fluff and bubble that gave every tom, dick and harry the right to create their own brand of news. And the worst thing, people would believe it, despite the lack of credibility or reliability.

Clearly the fact that I'm writing this blog, and found Lucy's comment on another one, shows that my thoughts are changing. But what does that mean in regarding to my personal "technology transition." Well for one, I would never have got approval from my news editor to write this piece, and short of funding my own print run of news flyers would never have gained an audience for my thoughts.

Whether this post falls into the realm of creative is for you to judge. The opportunity to make it however has certainly changed the way I think about social media. I'm actually glad now that it exists.

Michelle Walkden
Communications consultant

Related links: Lucy Küng's original post

So, who’s JG Communication? We’re Sweden’s largest and, we think, ‘leading’ communications agency in Sweden. We help our clients have conversations with the people that matter most to them using the tools that matter most to us, words, sound and vision.


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation