Digital Banff is a website that aggregates news about the picturesque mountain town of Banff, Alberta. It’s also the future of journalism.
Jim Swanson is the creator of Digital Banff. A bit of an early adopter, he created the site in 1994 as a way to keep track of websites that he was interested in. He developed his own content management system from scratch using Filemaker.
Running DigitalBanff has always been a part-time job for Swanson as he is the Communications Director for the Banff Centre, a globally respected arts and cultural institution.
If you go to Digital Banff you’ll find a very clean site with links to stories about Banff, weather conditions, events, movie listings and Banff area webcams.
To find content Swanson has a routine every morning where a script that he created opens up 20 different web pages. These are mostly Google searches about Banff and Banff related subjects as well as newspaper homepages. He subscribes to about 200 different RSS feeds and uses Google Alerts to gather content as well. From this pool of information he decides what he wants to link to.
The only advertising on the site are Google ads.
“I’m not interested in drumming up ad sales,” says Swanson. However he estimates he makes about $100 a month from Digital Banff. The money covers his web hosting and web connection expenses.
For a small local site that does nothing but link out Swanson attracts a large amount of traffic. About 1000 people a day, with 600 of those being locals.
“The page is more aimed at locals. People who are already here.”
He gets a ton of direct traffic, people who have either bookmarked Digital Banff or have it as their homepage. His largest referrer is Google by far where he appears on the second page of search results when searching “Banff”.
He doesn’t consider himself a journalist. He describes it more as “aggregation and I’m somewhat of an editor.”
Doesn’t attend council meetings or do other original reporting. However in the past he has posted local election results to his site.
I asked Swanson if any of the newspapers had said anything to him either positive or negative about his site. While there was an offhand comment from a former editor at the Crag and Canyon (the local Sun Media weekly) that he was making his bones off the brunt of their hard work, Swanson disagrees.
“If I wasn’t linking their stories they’d get less traffic. People aren’t going to go the Crag and Canyon site or make it their homepage because they only update once a week. Any traffic they can get pointed their way why would they not like that. My links point directly to the pages. I send people to the original sources.”
While Swanson hasn’t expressed any interest in monetizing his audience someone like Matt Drudge has. The Drudge Report is one of the most popular news site on the internet and has incredibly high engagement from its audience. The audience comes back again and again to see what Drudge is linking to.
And all the Drudge report is, is a collection of links to other stories (with a dash of original reporting now and then from Drudge).
What’s the point in all of this? Major mainstream media is just now figuring out that linking out to outside content (not written by them or contained within their own walled gardens) is a good thing and builds credibility.
Why is there no Digital Calgary? Why is there no Canadian Drudge Report? These portals are incredibly useful to their audience and potential moneymakers for the mainstream media.
I am probably stealing this but a big part of journalism going forward is going to consist of taking the fire hose of information that is available on the web and distilling it down to a water fountain for the consumer.
Local news aggregators like Digital Banff are part of the future of journalism.
Posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago at 11:58 am. Add a comment
Local Media in a Post Modern World: Failure at the Top is one of the best articles I’ve ever read. It breaks down why newspapers, TV and radio are all losing money left and right. They think they’re in the newspaper or TV or radio business, they’re not, they’re in the advertising business. Every media executive should read it.
In many ways, it’s almost too late to be saying this, but if you run a television station, a radio station, a newspaper or any other form of local media company, your online competition is Google, not the guys you’ve been competing against all these years. That is a simple fact. We may not like it, but to deny it is to ignore the heavily-armed battalions slowly surrounding your position.
In order to compete with Google, local media need to develop a local advertising system that is better than Google’s. There’s your magic bullet.
Rob Curley over at the Las Vegas Sun has a tremendous post detailing how they got their own sports show on local television. Curley is someone in charge who gets it. It’s innovation and new products that are going to save newspapers not layoffs. It’s attitudes like these that are needed to move forward.
Things like “All In” aren’t strategies that are likely going to pay off over the next three months. If you’re doing this as a big payoff for the next fiscal quarter, I would tell you stay as far away from doing something like this as possible.
I’ll be the first to admit that what we’re doing might not work — just like it’s completely obvious to most folks that the current system/economics for print newspapers no longer works.
Whether “All In” ends up working — from both a financial perspective and a brand-marketing perspective — I can guarantee that it won’t be the last chance we take at Greenspun Interactive. And if it does fail, I can guarantee it won’t be our last failure.
This type of entrepreneurial attitude in upper management is what’s going to move media forward.
And lastly I can’t not mention Canwest’s recent woes. It’s now a penny stock, trading at $0.88.
That’s from a 52 week high of $8. However I wouldn’t worry too much about Canwest folding in the next little while. Large portions of it’s $3.7 billion debt are due until 2011.
With Canada’s largest English language newspaper publisher and largest television company trading at such levels it kinda punctures the whole convergence thing idea that was so popular awhile ago. Convergence hasn’t protected Canwest from the credit crisis or declining ad revenues.
I’m not much of a business analyst so you should definitely check out these other articles on the subject.
Why Did I Buy Canwest Stock?
Advice to Publishers: Go Private
How does Canwest survive the credit storm?
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago at 10:03 pm. Add a comment
The proposition is Blogging is not journalism.
Before I answer the question we should define both blogging and journalism.
Blog - A contraction of the term weblog, a blog is a web site with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, links to other websites, graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order with the latest entry being the highest.
Journalism - Journalism is a business that produces content for an audience to consume, it then sells advertising bundled with that content. Journalists are expected to use facts to describe events, ideas, or issues that are relevant to the audience.
Asking whether blogging is journalism is like asking if a newspaper, magazine or newscast is journalism. Journalism isn’t defined by its format. Great journalism could be carved into stone tablets.
A better way to frame it is like this; blogging can be journalism just as newspapers, magazines and newscasts can be journalism.
Let’s bring up some of my fave blogs from the Technorati Top 100;
These are some of the most popular blogs on the internet. All except icanhazcheezburger could be classified as journalistic in nature.
As a format, blogging is proving to be quite popular. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report;
- 95% of newspaper web sites have blogs
- 133 million blog records indexed by Technorati since 2002
- 900,000 blog posts in 24 hours
Blogging is not only journalism, it is one of the most important developments in the history of publishing ever.
To quote Jay Rosen who is part of the Faculty of Journalism at NYU (Click his name to check out his bio)
“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, and blogging means practically anyone can own one.”
With the means of production in the hands of the audience the power has shifted and Big Media has yet to realize and embrace this concept.
Big mainstream media companies ignored the internet as long as they could. When they finally realized that this whole internet thing wasn’t just a fad they were way behind the curve.
Bloggers embraced the new medium and as a result found a way of producing content that works with the medium. Two major things that bloggers and the blogsophere do well that the mainstream media do not are linking and commenting.
LINKS
Jay Rosen of Press Think calls it the ethic of the link. Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine calls it the link economy. Other people call it the link layer. Watch this video and find out what I’m talking about.
Jay Rosen of NYU on the ethic of the link
Bloggers embraced this idea while the mainstream media still pretty much turns its nose up at it. Who do you think serves their online audience better?
The most popular news site on the internet is the Drudge Report. All the Drudge Report is, is links to stories.
COMMENTS
If you go to any blog at the bottom of each entry is the ability to comment.
If you go to the Calgary Herald, you cannot comment on stories, only on opinion pieces or specialized blogs. However in my limited research the community is sparse and comments are few and far between.
Dan GIllmor, the founder of founder of Grassroots Media Inc. famously coined the phrase (and I’m loosely quoting here); news as a conversation instead of a lecture.
David Siffry, the co-founder of Technorati sums up how the blogosphere works.
“People trust The New York Times and Washington Post and link to them,” Sifry says, “but there are a huge number of people who are going outside the bounds of traditional media to these new media forms to get their information and, more importantly, to participate in the discussions around news and topics.”
He says we shouldn’t be too surprised by the results, which reflect a shift in user behavior that has been taking place for some time. The idea of the Web as a place where we randomly surf for news or conduct task-oriented hunt-and-peck Web searches has given way to a new metaphor: the Web as virtual corner bar, where community and conversations reign.
“The Web is not chiefly about a library or a news stand,” Sifry says. “You have to start thinking about the Web as this humongous event stream. The Web is a set of ongoing conversations that weave together into this new kind of omnipresent social fabric.”
From J.D. Lasica @ Social Media
However the proposition begs the unnecessary and useless question: are bloggers real journalists. Jay Rosen addresses this ultimately pointless exercise.
“To put it that way is unnecessarily antagonistic. But it’s worse than that. It’s reductive, and smart people have been calling it that for years. Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon and a technology-aware writer, said it back in 2002:
“Typically, the debate about blogs today is framed as a duel to the death between old and new journalism. Many bloggers see themselves as a Web-borne vanguard, striking blows for truth-telling authenticity against the media-monopoly empire. Many newsroom journalists see bloggers as wannabe amateurs badly in need of some skills and some editors.
This debate is stupidly reductive — an inevitable byproduct of (I’ll don my blogger-sympathizer hat here) the traditional media’s insistent habit of framing all change in terms of a “who wins and who loses?” calculus. The rise of blogs does not equal the death of professional journalism. The media world is not a zero-sum game. Increasingly, in fact, the Internet is turning it into a symbiotic ecosystem — in which the different parts feed off one another and the whole thing grows.”
Mark Hamilton is a blogger and journalism instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver, BC. His blog is called Notes From a Teacher. Mark started it as a way to connect with students and as extension of his classroom. However he quickly realized that his students weren’t reading it and starting writing for a more general audience.
Mark has been blogging since 2003 and he gets about 150 unique visits a day and has about 300 subscribers.
Mark is an excellent aggregator and filter and he quite frequently posts what he calls squibs. A collection of links to sites or posts that he has been reading.
Here’s a short Q & A
DK - Are bloggers “real” journalists
MH - “Some of them. The vast majority of them no, most of them don’t want to be journalists. There are some bloggers who do journalism occasionally, some who do it more regularly.”
Since Mark mainly reads media blogs he brought up examples of bloggers who could be considered journalists; Jay Rosen, Scott Karp, Allan Mutter.
DK - What do blogs do well that newspapers don’t?
MH - “Not a question of well but different. Blogs connect with readers in a different way. Media connects with readers mostly because of authority, blogs connect with readers mostly because of their voice.”
Mark doesn’t believe there is a single answer out there. He doesn’t look at the internet as a new medium. Instead looking at it as a collection of mediums. He believes in a new mediascape where there is a combination of things we are very familiar with ie. newspapers, newscasts, etc. and innovative new web technology ie. Twitter, Youscreen etc. What we have now is a whole new idea of what mass media is.
DK - Do you believe that the freedom of the press belongs equally to the amateur and the professional?
MH – “Definitely. We all have the right to free speech. What goes with that is the ethics that professional journalists adhere to should also apply to the amateur journalist.”
DK - Why do blogs link so much and newspapers link so little or not all?
MH - Newspapers still have this fear of driving people away. They still have this concept as the publication as the voice of authority. The link is the basis of the world wide web. There was a recent report out there that stating that the Drudge Report is the most popular news site on the internet. All he does is link and he makes millions of dollars”
DK - Why do blogs have comments while most Canadian newspapers don’t?
MH - “That comes back to the link economy. Dan Gilmour’s phrase “news is a conversation.” On most stories there isn’t a definitive end point. Most newspapers that understand the web are doing comments now and in some ways that just an extension of letters to the editor. That’s still something that newspapers are trying to figure out.”
DK - How do you deal with comments on your site?
MH - I will go in and remove the obvious spam and the ones that are tasteless.
DK - What’s the learning curve for blogging?
MH - The learning curve is one of the shallower curves out there. Through a service like Wordpress or Blogger you can literally be blogging in minutes. The hardest thing is finding your voice, finding your topic and sticking with it. For journalists, in particular young journalists blogging is great, it forces you to write all the time, to defend, to sharpen, to network. It also gives you a body of work. It’s also a dangerous thing if you maintain a blog full of party pictures or rants and raves”
He added;
“It’s the most exciting time to be a young journalist despite the uncertainty. Mainstream media might be in decline but journalism isn’t. The tools we have to tell our stories are amazing.”
LINKS
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/07/28/the-imperatives-of-the-link-economy/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIMB9Kx18hw&eurl=http://www.publish2.com/about/what-is-link-journalism
http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/
http://www.socialmedia.biz
Posted 2 months, 4 weeks ago at 12:06 pm. Add a comment
This is a post so I can generate a tag cloud to use in my header.
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Posted 3 months ago at 1:03 pm. Add a comment
I got a last minute call to be the event shooter at the Monster Madness World Finals. That’s right, monster trucks. It’s also the first time that the Grandstand on the Stampede Grounds has had a show like this ever.
Never having been to a monster truck show it was loud, obnoxious fun. I even made a picture that I really liked. It’s a feature shot from the pit party with a little boy with a toy monster truck in front of the real thing. It’s too bad about the rubber neckers fouling up the shot but what can you do.
There was also Freestyle Motocross. It was kind of funny as whenever a truck flipped over or broke they’d whip out the bikes to entertain the crowd.
Freestyle Motocross
There was also Tuff Trucks, regular trucks tricked and stripped and outfitted with roll cages. They got some pretty mean airtime.
Unfortunately with the layout of the Grandstand the late afternoon sun didn’t fall on the trucks but still fell on the infield seats. This made taking pictures of the freestyle (the part where they jump the highest and do the craziest shit) difficult. I still got on frame though, the bus jump was still in the light, but just barely.
And lastly I’ll leave you with the lines from the classic Simpsons episode “Bart the Daredevil” where a classic bit of TV, the monster truck show commercial, makes it mark.
“This Sunday, for one night only, your life will be changed forever.
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday at the Springfield Speedway! Speedway! Speedway! Don “Crusher” Woodard, John “The Skunk” Trumane, and the Team Tomomatsu Dirt Riding Dunk Masters in the year’s biggest MONSTER TRUCK RALLY!
One night only. One night only. One night only at the Springfield Speedway this Sunday. If you miss this, you’d better be dead or in jail… And if you’re in jail, break out!!”
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 10:05 am. Add a comment
