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SPJ Western Washington is kicking off its 5th Annual Fall Continuing Education series this month. Thanks to a partnership between the SPJ chapter and AAJA Seattle, our members can attend these workshops for free. Non-members pay $10 per session or $40 for the whole series.
All classes are from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in The Seattle Times auditorium. Pizza and bottled water will be provided.
The Seattle Times is located at 1120 John St., Seattle, WA 98109. Free parking is available in the visitor’s lot across the street.
Seating is limited so RSVP to Hilary Reeves, hilary.j.reeves@gmail.com by noon on the Friday prior to the class you plan to attend.
From the SPJ Western Washington website:
The schedule:
Oct. 11 The Portable Journalist: Using smart phones for reporting
The smart phone in your pocket is now your most important mobile reporting tool. Learn about how video stream direct to the web from your phone, maximizing twitter while live streaming, the best iPhone apps for journalism, mapping iPhone photos via rss and other practical advice.
Tiffany Campbell, senior producer, Seattletimes.com
Oct. 18 Branding yourself: Tips on how to stand out in today’s changing media landscape
Hear how some journalists and their news outlets or social media sites are making themselves stand out in a crowded environment. Learn from the local experts.
Josh Feit, PublicCola
John Cook, TechFlash
Monica Guzman, Intersect
Oct. 25 Improve your photography
A fancy DSLR or a simple camera phone is a tool. It is up to the photographer to understand light, composition, framing, moment, and the ability of a photograph to convey information. We’ll helps you understand what that tool can do for you.
Josh Trujillo, Seattlepi.com visual journalist
Cliff DesPeaux, Seattle Times visual journalist
Nov. 1 Entrepreneurial journalism: The nuts-and-bolts of starting your own web venture
Learn what it takes create and maintain a journalism web business, with tips on everything from financing to drawing an audience.
Sarah Stuteville, Common Language Project (moderator)
Tracy Record, West Seattle Blog
Caroline Li, Earthwalkermag.com
Michael McCarthy, LocalHealthGuide.com
Nov. 8 Build your own website
Learn how you can use WordPress to quickly get your own website up and running without a ton of technical experience.
Dale Steinke, co-editor of PhinneyWood.com; former Interactive News and Operations Manager at KING 5 TV
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Have you launched your own company recently? Do you have a story to share about your media company?
Our AAJA Seattle membership has many talents, and more and more of them are pursuing their passions as a business. These entrepreneurs are working day and night, seven days a week, to get their ventures off the ground and achieve profitability.
It’s time for them to be recognized for taking a risk and trying to create a new product, service or adventure they can call their own.
Let’s meet three of them.
Calvin Tang, AtlasOmega
Calvin founded social media news web site Newsvine.com in 2005. Two years later, MSNBC bought Newsvine for an undisclosed sum, marking its first acquisition ever. He continued to serve as chief operating officer of Newsvine for the next three years.
From 2005 to 2010, Newsvine grew to over 4 million users, 15 million monthly pageviews and came to power virtually all of interactive features across the MSNBC Digital Network family of brands, including properties such as the NBC Nightly News, TODAY Show and The Rachel Maddow Show.
He also is founder of the Northwest Dive Club, a passion that turned into his next career move.
Earlier this year Calvin left MSNBC to launch AtlasOmega.
Here’s how the site describes its value:
“As we enter the virtual age of ‘the real-time web,’ where stories are packaged into successfully smaller sound-byte sized units, repurposed and republished with little value added – AtlasOmega swims against that current, by producing original, feature quality stories and images about the wildest and least known parts of the world.”
“All of our explorers and adventurers spend enormous amounts of time and energy in the nitty-gritty details of preparation, equipment selection, technique and safety. Yet, these critical aspects are oftentimes never known by the person who enjoys the final result, be it an in-depth story about a pioneering expedition or a stunning set of images that bring to life a lesser known part of the world.”
“AtlasOmega tells the story behind the story, and sets out to answer the question, ‘How did they do that?’”
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Caroline Li, EarthWalkers
Caroline is founder of social media travel web site Earthwalkersmag.com and its print edition, Earthwalkers Magazine. She is also vice president of events for AAJA Seattle, freelances stories and works for TD Wang Advertising Group, a full-service marketing agency that helps companies reach the Asian-American market.
Here’s what Caroline says about her venture:
“I started Earthwalkers because of my love for journalism, travel and international issues. It’s also my answer/vision to next generation journalism.”
“Earthwalkers Magazine and the Earthwalker Community were created so that travelers could make the most out of their travel experiences and continue learning when not traveling. Earthwalkers’ mission is to educate and inform readers about the world through in-depth features and first person stories from the Earthwalker Community. We’re not only building a network for travelers, but a magazine that writers and local bloggers can call their own.”
“The website is a hybrid of user generated content and social network where members are encouraged to share their appreciation for travel by sharing their stories, joining groups and being available to other like-minded travelers around the world.”
“The content on the Earthwalkers website and in the print edition is written by members of the social network. Most stories are written by Earthwalkers that are local bloggers and travel writers while more in-depth features are written by freelance journalists and our Common Language Project team.”
“Through our travels and the people we meet, we hope to unravel the wonders, the forgotten, the shadows, the beauty and the truth about our world. We believe that the world is about more than trade negotiations, poverty and luxury vacationing, but full of people just like you and me that are celebrating, surfing or struggling through life – because in the end, we are all just passing through.”
Who does Caroline expect will use her site?
Journalists & Bloggers: Earthwalkers Magazine is a platform that bloggers, journalists and travelers can use to promote their writing, photography and video. Your user profile is your writing resume/history with Earthwalkers. Writers also have the opportunity to be published in the print edition of Earthwalkers, receive paid writing assignments, and join our Earthwalkers core reporting team on stories around the world.
Like-minded Travelers: So you’re an Earthwalker. You’re going to visit another country but you don’t know anyone there. You don’t want to do the typical toursist thing while you’re there. Get on Earthwalkers, search for other Earthwalkers around the world and connect with them to get insights, advice or even plan to meet up.
The Curious Learner: Just browsing? The stories on Earthwalkers are insightful, informative and inspiring. Regardless if you are traveling or not, it’s important to be informed about world issues.
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Christine Chen, Chen Communications
Christine is founder of Chen Communications and frequently requested moderator of business and community events.
Christine is an 18-year veteran of broadcast journalism, launching shows on FOX and PBS in Seattle. She launched her marketing consulting group in January 2007 and has built an impressive list of clients in a relatively short time, including Microsoft. She was a speaker at the 2010 AAJA National Convention in Los Angeles.
“It’s more important than ever to tell an engaging story, define relevance and pick the right places to share that story,” according to her site.
Christine is in great demand as a moderator of community events. In October 2009, she moderated TechFlash LIVE: Women in Tech, an event that brought together a who’s who of women in technology.
And this past August, Christine moderated the Seattle Chamber of Commerce’s Young Professionals Network Event on the Eastside, an event that drew more than 300 people. The panelists included Kirk Nelson, Washington President of Qwest Communications; Bob Donegan, President of Ivar’s; and Anne Fennessy, Partner at Cocker Fennessy.
Christine says her marketing communications consulting firm specializes in connecting companies and communities for business through strategic thinking, messaging and outreach.
The firm offers these consulting services:
* product and service key messaging/positioning
* presentations and media training
* content production for web, print and video
* social media messaging/strategy/tactics
* traditional PR strategy/pitching.
What differentiates her firm from other PR/MarCom consultants?
According to Chen, her firm “fuses traditional and new media approaches at a senior level, with an editorial eye and unique perspective on branding. Practical experience and tactical execution power a virtual team that is called on for projects, as needed, keeping overhead down and passing the savings on to the client. We are able to work with C-level executives as well as larger teams, as an outsourced service provider or as integrative team members.”
She’s also the creator of the blog xboxbride, which catalogs what happens when a non-video gamer weds an avid video gamer.
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I’d like to have AAJA Seattle host a workshop in the not-too-distant future on entrepreneurship.
We led the way in January 2009 by holding the Choppy Waters workshop at the University of Washington in association with its Communication department.
And several of you have joined startups in our area, like Patch.com. We want to hear about your experiences too. Send your story to us.
If you would like to become more involved in new experiments in journalism, you can!
AAJA Seattle participates in Journalism That Matters, which meets once a month to discuss current startup ideas in the region and to support their leaders. If you’d like to participate in JTM, please email me at sbhatt[at]seattletimes.com.
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The “Sea Beez” ethnic media project is holding a roundtable on best practices in journalism from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sept. 23 at KOMO’s Fisher Plaza.
In May, AAJA Seattle and the Seattle Association of Black Journalists (SABJ) co-hosted the launch party for the Sea Beez project, which aims to build the capacity of Puget Sound area ethnic media and empower them to strengthen their business and journalism practices.
Julie Pham, managing editor of Northwest Vietnamese News, directs the project. Pham invites AAJA and SABJ members to the event on Sept. 23. The project’s website is seabeez.com.
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The Online News Association has a link to all the presentations from its daylong Parachute Training session held during the convention.
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On Thursday night, I attended a panel discussion on mobile advertising put on by TiE-Seattle, a not-for-profit group dedicated to fostering and supporting entrepreneurship. TiE-Seattle is part of a global network born in the early 1990s when Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of South Asian heritage decided to hold regular meetups.
The panel discussion certainly had some noteworthy speakers, but more on that later.
First, the WHY.
As in, why might mobile advertising be an important subject for journalists, especially those in print media, to think about?
Even if more people than ever are consuming what journalists create, the revenue that pays for the people, the equipment and the overhead is shrinking. (It’s no surprise publishers like the New York Times are planning to erect paywalls for their content starting next year.)
I thought newspapers might be stabilizing in 2010 after two terrible years, but the former media executive and bearish pundit Alan Mutter recently raised alarms again that the newspaper industry is still in trouble, having missed out on the recovery in advertising spending in the first quarter of 2010. His chart says it all: “Newspaper and magazine [ad] sales in the first quarter dropped respectively 9.7% and 3.9% at the same time television expenditures advanced 10.5%, Internet rose 7.5% and radio gained 6.0%.”
Auto and retail advertising historically have been important sources of newspaper ad revenue, so it’s disturbing to hear that even as auto and retail sales rose in the first quarter, spending on newspaper advertising for these verticals plunged. Clearly, some big car advertisers (i.e. Ford, Mercedes) are testing other ways to deliver ad impressions to potential customers.
Motor Trend magazine earlier this year launched an iPhone app with Mercedes-Benz sponsorship. According to an article in eMarketer, the iPhone app was part of an integrated marketing campaign in which Mercedes wanted to convey the message that the E-Class represents the next generation of Mercedes-Benz design and technology.
Advertisers like Mercedes-Benz are eager to deliver their messages to the booming number of mobile customers. Get the stats here.
Publishers are branding themselves too with apps. The alternate weeklies in Seattle, The Stranger and Seattle Weekly, have happy hour apps.
The question is can newspapers, most of which have weak engineering capacity and change-resistant cultures, come up with apps compelling enough to make the upfront development costs payoff? The Miami Herald’s iPhone app for baseball fans has been a hit. My own employer, The Seattle Times, has an iPhone app.
The challenge for media organizations is not simply migrating their content to mobile devices (just as they migrated it to the web), but leveraging the unique strengths of mobile for content AND advertising.
Mobile devices offer multiple “sensors” — such as location (GPS), touch, balance (accelerometer), visual (camera) and aural (mic). Unlike PCs, mobile offers advertisers a unique end-user; most of us don’t lend out our cell phones. All of these factors create interest for advertisers, who want to deliver a message to a specific audience that is going to stand out and be memorable in today’s information glut.
That brings us back to the TiE-Seattle event on Thursday night.
TiE-Seattle’s panel was composed of marketing and business types:
(Interestingly, the panel moderator, Kevin Keating, was a former journalist for the Spokane Spokesman-Review and is now founding partner of Lucid Communications, a strategic marketing firm based in Seattle. Keating opened the discussion by noting that research firm Garnter forecasts mobile advertising will reach $1.6 billion this year.)
Google and Apple are staking claims to mobile advertising by controlling the platforms that serve up mobile ads.
“It’ll lend a lot of credibility to the space,” Jordan said.
Similarly, Ribera views 2010 as the first year that mobile is seriously considered part of the marketing mix. Two-thirds of the campaigns his group is doing now, he said, are “integrated media buys,” with ads deployed on three marketing channels — mobile, web and keyword search.
Publishers, take note: The CPMs for mobile ads are higher than banner ads on websites, Ribera tells me.
But Bryan is skeptical of claims that mobile will eat the lunch of television, the dominant media for brand awareness advertising. (Think Super Bowl.) “Advertising is not an infinitely large bucket of money,” he said.
There’s consensus that mobile is gaining advertiser interest by delivering targeted messages through text messages (SMS), keyword search, and interactive apps.
But marketers are learning that user behavior is not the same on the mobile screen as it is on a PC. Mobile users have more urgent demands for information when it comes to search.
For example, Ribera noted, most mobile users of the Bing search engine complete their task within an hour or a day, whereas most PC users take up to a week. Mobile search keywords tend to be more conversational and abbreviated than PC search keywords.
(I love the fact that audience members added their knowledge to the discussion: C.N. Chiu, a consultant for MobileWebGo in Portland, Ore., said Spanish-speaking users are six times more likely than native English speakers to use mobile search.)
What does all this mean for news organizations and journalists? Based on what I learned from these speakers, here’s a few thoughts.
1. News organizations should charge for their apps, but they should be sure the apps do more than simply copy what is delivered on the PC screen. Get creative and offer something that’s entertaining, educational or utilitarian. Give the user a satisfying experience. This is not unrealistic as mobile payment use is growing. (If it’s a sponsored app, then obviously the news organization wants to make it a free download to maximize its distribution.)
2. Text messaging still has the greatest reach on mobile devices, but location-based services are the hot new thing. (Uh, Foursquare, anyone?) Could news organizations license to location-based services their news stories about a location, so urban explorers can not only find deals on shoes but also learn more about that neighborhood?
3. There’s great demand for quality video on mobile devices but a whole host of technical issues need to be worked out. But once those issues are worked out (and it won’t be long), inventory will sell out quickly. The new iPhone takes 720p high-def video and the $5 iMovie app turns the device into a video editor. Start to build mobile video into your multimedia workflow so you’ll be in a position to sell ads with them. Think Webiscenes, not Webisodes.
4. Because mobile users’ information needs are typically more urgent, certain kinds of content will be a better fit for the mobile device: Movie and restaurant reviews, breaking news alerts and sports stats. But news apps, because they must be downloaded by the user, involve intention and thus can also be designed to appeal to a niche editorial interest — and carry higher advertising rates.
Please add your comments! And contact us at aajaseattle@gmail.com if you have ideas for speakers for our next Innovation Salon, which will focus on monetizing digital news content.
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