Good business plan advice

Colleague David Weintraub is teaching an entrepreneurship course in the j-school this year.

David's run his own photo freelance business for some time, and he has some good advice on formulating a business plan.

In this "every man for himself" era, probably not a bad idea to read and bookmark.

For some people, Mickey D's is a religion, but ...

This headline over an AP story on Salon takes it a bit far.


Yet another reason to sometimes use a helping verb to prevent a "crash blossom."

Four myths of media

According to "The Moguls' New Clothes" in the October edition of The Atlantic, the four are:

• Growth is good.
• Globalzation is good
• Content is king
• The cult of convergence

In an excerpt from their book "The Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media Companies," Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald and Ava Seave argue that:

• Most of the growth appears to have come from mergers and acquisitions done at prices that make their financial success unlikely.
• The problem with going global is that it actually increases your competition because fixed costs are easier to justify relative to the possible overall gains. The global strategy also comes as consumers are turning inward for their information
• Content isn't king because those who create it, not those who sell it, get most of the benefits. "Put simply, the core of any competitive advantage more often than not drives from the manner of aggregation, rather than the creation of content. It is no coincidence that Google ... is an aggregator, not a content company.
• Convergence ultimately comes down to breaking down barriers and "[w]henever someone suggests that breaking down barriers to entry is good news, hold tight to your wallet."

Their conclusion? The way to make money in the media business these days is to, essentially, tend to your knitting. In other words, the money comes from running largely mature businesses efficiently.

There's another way to put that: Cut costs ruthlessly and don't invest in "a clearly dissipating franchise." Welcome to the first decade of the new (media) century.

Stupid Layoffs

Add this one to the list -- Brian Throckmorton, copy chief at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald Leader.

Brian has been one of the leaders in the word business - thoughtful, insightful, fun to be around and always a great seminar to attend at ACES.

The gutting of the industry continues. May it rest in peace.

AP Style - International Space Station

Finally!

After years of resisting it, AP today decides it will change and now accept International Space Station, capitalized, as proper style.

Some things just take a little longer folks ....

Microsoft tablet

From Gizmodo on Microsoft's Courier tablet.

Take a look at the video. If the come-to-market (if it ever does) version does even half of this, imagine the possibilities. And imagine if video, not just stills, was integrated. Blows my mind ...

Convergence Newsetter - August

The back-to-the-classroom issue of The Convergence Newsletter is out.*

Holly Fisher leads this edition with a look at what she'd wished she'd learned in j-school, and what she's glad she did, now that she has become one of the pink-slipped. David Weiuntraub has details on his new entrepreneurship for communicators course, including some good links to materials and some classroom exercises worth thinking about.

See you in September (in other words, look for the issue in your in boxes late this week or next). Our new editor, Matt McColl (I almost typed that McCool, which would have been very appropriate), has been doing a great job. Me, as exec editor, I just tear more of my already thinning hair out.

(*Yeah, it's the August issue in September - go figure. If you're buyin', I'll tell ya my woes.)

(And don't forget that if you want to get TCN when we do e-mail it, just send us a note at convnews@mailbox.sc.edu. It's free.)

We also welcome your articles, reviews, etc. We like to say TCN is a publication of first impressions bridging the academic and professional worlds. And if you want to comment on any of the material, go to the TCN blog.

Democrat vs. Democratic - and other observations

Sometime in the past two years or so, I suspect largely because the GOP made an issue of calling it the "Democrat" Party instead of the "Democratic" Party, news organizations suddenly seemed to adopt whole-hog the use of phrases such as "Democratic-controlled" instead of "Democrat-controlled" or "Democratically controlled."

I assumed it was the media once again shying away from anything having to do with the "other side," made my piece peace with it and abandoned teaching "Democrat-controlled," as it appeared to be out of fashion.*

(For the record, none of this is a political statement; I just happen to be of the mind that sometimes, when you can make the case that one usage has some grounding in common sense and clarity, you might consider sticking with it.)

So today, in an AP article about ACORN** and its problems, we have this:

Many Democrats used to advertise their ACORN connections. Now, however, the Democratic-led Senate has voted to cut off the organization’s grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Democrat-dominated House does not want it to get any federal money — period.

(I guess things really are different in the House and Senate.)
Yes, let's stipulate this is picking nits, but I think it's a nit worth picking. The House is dominated by Democrats, and the Senate is led by Democrats, not "Democratics." In fact, the problem with "Democratic" is illustrated in this recent query to AP's "Ask the Editor" (you'll probably have to search for "Democrat" to find it:

Q. Should it be "the Democratically controlled Senate" or "the Democratic-controlled Senate"? – from Los Angeles on Thu, Jan 08, 2009
A. The second usage is customary.

The tendency with "ic" adjectives, when paired with another adjective form, is to go with the "ically" form as the stronger grammatical construct of an adverb modifying an adjective. But "Democratically," notwithstanding the capital D, then starts for some people to implicate derivatives of "democracy" in the broader sense than the party. (If you want to read an impassioned, down-and-dirty, name-calling argument over this, check here.)

As for using "Democrat" to modify the modifier, we have numerous cases in English where the noun is used as a descriptive, so I'm not sure the declension is incorrect in this special case.

Let's think about a parallel using "robot." If the world were controlled by robots (OK, stop the comparison-with-journalists jokes), we might be more likely to say it was "robot-controlled" than "robotic-controlled," even though robotic is the adjective form. "Robotically-controlled" would actually be the better form, but it also has the connotation of something being controlled remotely from afar, not necessarily by robots.

A quick Google search of the terms (not dispositive, but enlightening), shows 168,000 entries for Democrat-controlled and 226,000 for Democratic-controlled. But the usage troubles me. (There are also 105,000 for Democratically controlled, but just eyeballing it, those appear to have a lot more white noise from entries referring to the form of government.)

So, what do you say?
----
*I seem to recall first seeing this in an AP "Ask the Editor" question a couple of years ago when Norm Goldstein ran the stylebook and the Democrat/Democratic Party debate was full-tilt, but I can't find the entry I printed at the time.

------------------
Three other things while I am at it:
1) From the same article: "ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis" -- any reason she does not warrant having "chief executive" capitalized before her name?

2) Why do writers (and by extension desks) continue to use a comma with "and that" when the conjunctive phrase is used to link dependent clauses: The sheriff said Smith had escaped, and that his brother had helped? The sheriff said both things, so why separate with a comma. I argue against the comma in all but the longest and most convoluted phrases - in which case they probably should be separated by a period (or several).

3) Remember parallel constructions? From the ACORN article as edited in my local paper:

She condemned the actions of the two employees who appeared in the Brooklyn footage, but ACORN also has portrayed segments of such videos as manipulative smear tactics and blaming right-wingers "upset because they are out of power now." Try "blamed" instead.

But here's the original article:

She condemned the actions of the two employees who appeared in the Brooklyn footage, but ACORN also has portrayed segments of the video shot there and in other cities by the hidden-camera couple as manipulated to make it look bad.

Lewis on Friday said the attacks on the group are "really reminiscent of the McCarthy era."

"We understand that the Republican Party is upset and the right wing is upset because they are out of power now," Lewis said on New York City radio station WNYC.

So this editor was guilty not only of a grammatical error, but of being misleading since the edited version makes it sound as if the organization had issued a statement "blaming right-wingers."

So the correct edit would have been: She condemned the actions of the two employees who appeared in the Brooklyn footage, but ACORN also has portrayed segments of such videos as manipulative smear tactics, and Lewis blamed right-wingers "upset because they are out of power now."

For the 'peevologists' among us

Excellent piece this week at On The Media -- on the anniversary of Samuel Johnson, father of the dictionary, it looks at how far we've come -- and how far we haven't.

Largely built around the much-despised Merriam-Webster's Third New International, now almost five decades old, the piece by Mike Vuolo is a common-sense look at what dictionaries are and are not and the never-ending disputes surrounding them.

What's that headline reference to "peevologists"? You'll need to listen to find out. Hopefully, you're not one. (If you are, that previous sentence probably will send you twitching.)

New Fisher Grid

One of the things we use at Newsplex, and that I use in some of my classes, is a one-page sheet that started out being called by the ungainly "story organization and planning," but was rechristened the "Fisher Grid" by my co-authors of "Principles of Convergent Journalism."

It provides a structured way to think about planning a story across media, including thinking about the best way to tell the story and then backing down to alternatives based on the resources you have.

With new options and the rise of easy-to-do slideshows, etc, it needed an update. So a new version is available over at the PCJ wiki. It's a Word doc so you can fill it in by hand or put it up on a computer and fill it in that way, as my students do.

Another questionable "probe" headline

"Probe" is a word that, around headline writers at least, should be handled with long tongs, protectives shields and oodles of common sense -- not to mention the snicker detector turned on high.

So, our latest entry comes from the Post & Courier of Charleston. We report, you decide (thanks to Sydney Smith for the outpoint):

Useful site - sports calendar

In this morning's e-mail was a pointer to what looks like it could be a really useful resource, an international sports calendar on the International Olympic Committee site.

Right now it goes back as far as 2002 (settle some bar bets?) and as far ahead as 2013 (plan that TV watching schedule?)

Thanks for the pointer to Resource Shelf.

CNN goes a la carte

CNN, which began selling its content akin to a wire service earlier this year, has now broached the wall to a la carte service, a term that wire services have struggled with for years.

(See, the dirty little secret is that there are a lot of cross-subsidies inside the wires, just as there were with the old phone company; it's why papers in the smallest states, for instance, have been able to get a state report nominally on par with that of some of the largest. Start selling things individually, however, and a lot of things that make for a well-rounded wire report likely get ditched.)

Editor and Publisher reports CNN is selling single copies at $199 each through the CNN Wire Store. So it's not exactly whip out the credit card and buy a few. Still, I can see more than a few publishers doing the calculus - and puiting more pressure on AP.

On AP Style and changing language

Joe Grimm of the Jobs Page and former long-time recruiter for the Detroit Free Press (now editor in residence at Michigan State), is the latest to weigh in on the need to double-check your shibboleths at the door, especially when it comes to AP Style.

His follow's John McIntyre's recent observation that many of the former distinctions are melting away.

Here is my September Common Sense Journalism column on the same sorts of issues.

What is style exactly?

by Doug Fisher

Recently came one of those e-mails of frustration about newspaper style, especially AP's. Summer, when such worries should be put away, is almost over, and we're heading back to class and the office. So I thought it might be helpful to share some of the conversation (with the writer's permission). Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Can you help me on a couple of mysteries about stylebooks? Reuters' putting its Handbook online highlights the question of why other U.S. media are so miserly about sharing their stylebooks.

For AP, the book makes money. Reuters, not so much. Reuters style has not become the industry-wide standard AP has in the U.S.

A smart British linguist said several years ago house style made no sense except as a way for publishers to distinguish themselves in competition. … Are these simply articles of faith, like so much else of the crass brand of prescriptivism that journalists are inculcated in?

A lot of such research needs to be done but probably never will be with little funding. … AP is still grounded on what could be transmitted over "the wire" and about brevity. … Other publications adopted AP style mostly for production reasons -- since they were using AP copy to a large extent, it made sense not to deviate. …

The first AP Stylebook was a thin volume in 1953. Many news conventions go back to the powerful editors of the late 1800s and early 1900s … about when H.W. Fowler was writing about "The King's English" … and many things became "rules" instead of guides.

Style is the publication's, and the publication can do whatever it wants. It's really pointless arguing about it. … What I tell students is that style … in many cases comes down to picking one of two or more equally supportable alternatives. Consistency does have its place, though not to the exclusion of all else.

We teach AP … because our graduates are likely to encounter it. But … if you work for a boss who wants you to spell "the" as "hte," that's a style decision, and you do it.

Journalism styles are among the most conservative, right? They make Bryan Garner look like a punk poet. (Now, really: If Times reporters humored Phillip Corbett by using "careered" as a verb in covering car crashes, all they'd do is persuade even their elite readers that they'd made more errors, no?)

You confound a bit style and usage. Garner is a valuable chronicler of modern American usage. Usage is in constant flux. It's what we argue about most. …

Style steps in and says, in essence, OK, but we can't argue about this all day, so here's how we're going to do it (though it should be reviewed frequently).

Then, there is idiom. Has "could care less" become such idiom that it can be easily substituted for "couldn't care less"? … And let's not start on "begs the question." These disputes end up in stylebooks, too, to no one's satisfaction.

So, we are under orders to cling to something like the idiom of the Saturday Review circa 1958, if only the style weren't so much more idiosyncratic than that.

You are not under orders to use any style except that of the person signing your paycheck.

I'm not sure the linguists even realize it, but they're replacing the writers of "you morons split an infinitive" letters to the editor as the squeakier wheels in editors' lives. And we all know how decisions are made by the fearless newsroom defenders of all that is right.

Usage, grammar, etc., have always changed. … A 1970s book on grammar for journalists, for instance, says a semicolon should be used in front of "so" as a conjunctive adverb. If you did that now, people would look at you funny. It clearly has passed into wider use as a straight conjunction.

Change – comparatively glacial change – in all those "rules" has accelerated because of the Internet. It's not that language wasn't changing. It's that Mrs. Graber could teach the same things in third-grade English – and numerous professors could teach the same things in numerous writing and editing classes, and numerous editors could enforce the same things year after year – because change was hard to monitor and measure. Now it is easy, unleashing what seem like endless debates.

As an editing professor, I have to do a "reality check" before each semester to see what might have changed (things like the acceptance of "gone missing"). … There will probably come a day when AP will not be the dominant style. We'll see what evolves then.

Papers and Twitter: When all you have is a hammer ...

Everything is a nail, is how the old saying goes. That pretty much sums up a lot of what I still see in newsrooms.

The hammer here is the hard-to-shed orientation that news is still something to be "produced" and "delivered" as mostly a one-way affair, instead of being a conversation. That's probably understandable; organizations really aren't all that good at conversations. They're not set up for it. Conversations are a granular things, and organizations are all about homogenization.

Which is why watching what many news organizations have done with Twitter has annoyed but not surprised me. They've created another dumping ground for shovelware.

Having not learned from earlier escapades online (and still doing the shovelware thing on their Web sites in way too many cases), too many news organizations have turned their Twitter feeds also into a shovelware wasteland. The feeds stick out like a sore, one-way thumb on a two-way medium.

And now someone has called them on it. At the Future of Journalism conference in Britain, researchers said they found that "although 91% had Twitter accounts, only two thirds of those studied actually tweeted and that 98.5% of the hyperlinks tweeted, simply pointed to existing website content."

One of the researchers, Marcus Messner, said: "We found that more attention needs to be paid to community building. It needs to go beyond shovelware. "

Having said that -- and having bashed The (Columbia, S.C.) State around recently for not getting it in one area online -- let me now say that this is one thing that newsroom does right. The State's Twitter feed is clearly produced by human, not machine. It's readable, it reacts and it's generally got the idea.

More newsrooms could follow that lead.

Another exhibit of not getting it

No, this is not another rant about a newsroom not getting the 'Net - although that's part of it. It's about a newsroom not getting it, period. And as news staffs continue to get cut, as they have at The State, you begin to wonder if anyone really is minding the store.

The case for the prosecution:

• On Monday, the paper ran a nice advance story on PBS' "The History Detectives" having come to Columbia at the request of a history buff who thought the historical marker noting the bridge that Union Gen. William T. Sherman used to reach Columbia was out of place. The bridge is long gone, of course, but there appear to be remnants in the Broad River.
• The story strongly hinted the history buff was right, but noted, "Everyone involved has been sworn to secrecy until the episode is shown." Fair enough.
• Episode airs Monday night. History buff is proved correct.
• Does The State update its story or do a follow-up story? Dare you to find one. Do a search on The State's Web site and you come up with a link that reads 'History Detectives' to Columbia Man: 'You were correct." Go ahead - click on that link. You will be almost instantly redirected back to the original, un-updated story! Hello? Anyone home?

Forget the intertubes. Forget that it's 2009. This is simply about getting it as journalists, period.

Having put the advance story in a prominent position one day, no city editor in his or her right mind in years past would not have done at least a short follow-up. But you won't find one in the paper. (And you've already gotten online whiplash if you clicked on that link.)

Sure, the paper put up a nice link to the video story on its Web site. I'd give kudos, but that should be routine these days. But what about folks who don't want to sit through 15 minutes of video, who have busy lives but who were left wondering from Monday's paper and may just want to know quickly "Did they ever prove it?"

Instead, this paper has gone from essentially owning the story and setting itself up to be "the answerer of questions," thus helping its follow-up audience, time on site and all that stuff, to potentially being major clueless irritant. (Not to mention there was additional info to be reported from Monday's show - that the history buff apparently has in process an application to move the marker. This involves Civil War history, folks, and such things are not taken lightly in these parts.)

I've seen this play out more and more. And it's not just papers. There was the recent disappearing act by TVs when it came to the early stages of the L.A. fires.

Let's hope "not getting it," a bad-enough ailment in the digital realm, doesn't turn out to be the creeping crud.

Still, the complaints about content

At the Media Post blogs today, Derek Gordon is "Mourning the state of content."

It caught my eye because it involves other than newspapers and media properties. I do some consulting for small businesses, too (starting with my sister-in-law's catering biz and erstwhile restaurant), and one of the things I find myself harping on lately is content.

Too many people see the Internet as one big shopping mall and think if you just throw up a store front people will come - and stay. The Google analytics on too many sites show differently - high skip rates, little foraging into the depth of sites, etc. (Sounds a lot like some newspapers, too, doesn't it?)

But on the Internet, everyone is a publisher and the ethos is different: Give me some good content and I'll drop by and maybe set a spell -- maybe even buy something. "Engaging" is the new watchword. I've told my sister-in-law, for instance, that just once a week she needs to take 20 minutes and put up a little tidbit. Maybe a recipe, maybe just something simple like how to core and apple easily or squeeze a lemon without getting the seeds everywhere. Pretty soon that stuff turns up in search engines, and that's when the action starts.

Gordon also laments some basic tech skills, but I'd just settle for some content. He writes:

But I must confess to one overriding concern that grows with each new Web site I encounter: Too many business owners have built sites that are to some degree unprepared to conduct business on the Web.

Whether this is a commentary on our fast-changing times or the failure of our education system to adequately prepare our citizens for work in the 21st century, one thing is clear: There is a widespread lack of basic writing abilities and an equal lack of even the most basic technical skill. ...

But the thing is, from my experience, the problem seems to be widespread. Folks from many socioeconomic backgrounds and from every corner of our country seem to suffer from the same limitations.

Web sites are undermined by basic composition problems. Where there is copy, it's often unfocused, with grammatical problems and, often, misspelled words. Even when it's well-written, it's left to grow stale or fails to be interesting enough to be link-worthy. In terms of technical ability, too many Web site owners are unable to install the Google Analytics tracking code in their site's footer on their own. Even those who use a good content management system such as WordPress will have very often failed to employ the standard SEO pack. Mention HTML, and they break into a cold sweat.

Check out the rest of it. Food for thought.

Getting the language right about transgendered

We in the media seem to really get flummoxed when it comes to talking about sex and gender (mine from a few years ago) -- and transgender.

So it's worth letting your eyes wander over to a post on Feministe today in which an exasperated writer takes to task the media's misuse of what a person's transgender is.

Time to learn it. We live in an ever-diverse society. There will be a test.