Andrew Golis

Part 2 of my interview with the Niemal Journalism Lab at Harvard.  This time, the reporter focuses on TPM’s work in video.  (Last time we focused on ad development in DC).

I’ve argued in the past that going forward, newspapers are going to have to embrace aggregation (linking out to the best content in the world, not just their own) to compete with the likes of Drudge, HuffPo and TPM.  They need to not just be a source for news, but a portal to find it.

Today they took a big step by beta-launching Times Extra, a widget that algorythmically generates related stories for their main headlines.

But the execution here is pretty terrible.  It’s basically a plug-and-play widget with teensy links in a scroll box. An outside link could never be a headline itself, they’re ghetto-ized to the widget box.  They’re auto-generated so they neither augment the core story with new information nor gel with the editorial direction of the headline itself.

Compare this package with the Times, CBS and Fox headlines all telling the same story in different, somewhat contradictory ways:

To this one that uses outside links to fill out the story and create a coherent editorial package:

There’s value to having different takes on a story, but there’s more value in having the Times’ take (with their story, or the story they think gets it best) with other important background and historical information included.

I suspect that their execution will improve as they suck it up and dip more than a toe into the link economy.  But this is a good example of the ways in which old media’s failure to succeed online isn’t technical, it’s cultural and conceptual.  They still want control and clear differentiation, and they still think of outside content as something that shouldn’t be handled by their editors.  If they want to get the hybrid model right, they better drop that fast.

Jay’s description of our model is spot on:

The point about inflow and key, and something that a lot of people miss. We focus a lot of attention on cultivating a good inbox. Emailing back readers who have helpful things to say to keep them emailing, pushing back on or ignoring lame stuff, filtering out spam. It’s as important as managing our RSS feeds. When you combine the two, if you do it right a lot of the information just comes to you.

Jeffrey Cole, the director of the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, gave a fantastic keynote talk at the “Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis” on the future of the news business.  Notice specifically his point about the film and music businesses losing audience without disappearing or even ceasing to be a prominent part of our information culture:

Via Nieman Journalism Lab.

Josh Levy of Change.org and Bertha Lewis of ACORN discuss the future of community organizing.  This is such a vital conversation and Josh and Lewis are a great combo and contrast to hash it out.

We just got this in the mail.  The photo has the headline “Joe finally gets a signal on his iPhone and breathes a sigh of relief”:

This is pretty strange and wonderful.  Ana Marie Cox (of Wonkette fame, but more recently of Time and Radar) has been asking readers to fund her travel with the McCain campaign.  Time stopped paying when they had to tighten their belt, and Radar stopped paying when they, well, died.  SO, she’s asked the 5,000 people who follow her on Twitter and reader her personal blog to help her make up the costs and stay on the trail.  

Apparently she’s now taken that to a new level, creating a subsciption only Twitter feed.  Hilarious:

Business Week’s “Where to Get Live Election Night Coverage Online“:

If you’re looking for election night coverage by and for people like you, there are plenty of sites to turn to. The left-leaning blog Talking Points Memo, for instance, has really thrived this election season, raking in a record 16.3 million YouTube video views in September.

For its election night coverage, the site will be live-streaming (most likely using the cell phone-based service Qik from Obama’s Chicago headquarters) and providing live election results via a map created in partnership with Google (GOOG). It will also be live-blogging and posting TV news clips it records off network TV. 

The Wall Street Journal’s “Politics Sites Prep For Game Day“:

Talking Points Memo, in conjunction with Google, is updating an interactive results map while two editors shoot video in Chicago. “What we’re really trying to do is to present full-service news coverage of Election Night and not just commentary and isolated reporting, which is what some people might expect from an outfit that started as a blog,” says TPM editor Josh Marshall.

The Times Online’s ”The Top 25 websites for US election obsessives“:

7: Talking Points Memo Talking Points Memo will be livestreaming from Obama’s headquarters and posting results with a map created with its partner Google.

I did an interview yesterday w/ a media reporter for the BBC.  She’s got a piece up today about what new media outlets are doing for election day.

Looks like she turned her notes into one big quote from me, but I’m not complaining:

The High Profile Political Bloggers

Andrew Gollis of Talking Point Memo

Andrew Gollis is the deputy editor of Talking Points Memo, a well known political network of blogs produced by practised journalists and reporters. 

 We’ve been covering the lead up to this event for 22 months now.  

We started using the live streaming video site Qik as part of our coverage of the Republican and Democratic party conventions.

We had people on the floor of the conventions there sending video back live.

For election night we are in Chicago with the Obama campaign. A mix of people will be recording interviews and crowd reactions there.

We’ll have crowd responses and about a dozen updates from mid-afternoon on Tuesday and then all the way through the night depending on how things go.

We’ll be posting these video reports into the main TPM blog. There’s no real production, it’s all pretty live and the Qik stuff can be a bit rough but it’s adding value.

TPM is not citizen journalism. It’s trained reporters and journalists using new media tools.

As a network of established political blogs that has around three million readers, we hope that our readers find the video content is something that keeps them interested. 

You can see on the homepage of TPM right now a big Google map with a TPM header on it.  Tomorrow at 6, it will start streaming election results at you.  You can follow the presidential race, the senate races and the house races at the national, state, or local level.  That’s right, you can watch elections results stream into your favorite swing state county by county.  This is why someone on an email list I’m on today said “Andrew Golis is the Stringer Bell for political junkies.”  I GOT THAT WMD! (Go watch The Wire and be ashamed of yourself if you don’t get the reference.

I explain the map on a TPM vid today:

You can see the map at TPM. It looks like this:

Update: Good LORD!  Can’t keep up w/ NBC.  They’re going to imprint a map on the Rockefeller Center skating rink.  Show offs.