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Chicago ≠ The Cubs

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Really digging Mark Caro here:

Presenting sumptuous visions of Wrigley Field and Chicago itself, “We Believe” equates the team and city while tracing their parallel histories. But is that really how Chicago sees itself?

I don’t generally blow four-run leads. I try not to fall to pieces when the spotlight is brightest. 

I’d rather view us as the Michael Jordan-era Bulls: playing smart, working as a team, outhustling the other guys and hitting the clutch shot.

[snip]

I might even flirt with treason and suggest that we seek our collective reflection in the White Sox, who are scrappy, constantly rebuilding and perpetually overlooked. But most of us like to score on occasion.

Ooh, had me until the end. Because I’m pretty sure winning the World Series is like scoring with the hottest girl in school.

By the way, anyone know what the statute of limitations is on bragging about your most recent World Series win? Is it five years? That seems about right.

Take heed, Jay

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“So you go on at nine o’clock at whatever night and you get killed and you say, ‘What am I doing this for? For my ego? For the money?’ I don’t need that anymore. I have an ego like anybody else, but it doesn’t need to be stoked by going before the public all the time.” – Johnny Carson, as quoted in this Esquire piece by Bill Zehme, on why he didn’t want to do “specials” after leaving The Tonight Show

Also, I killed a good amount of my workday productivity recently by reading this Playboy interview with Johnny Carson from December 1967. Our Leno interviewfrom October 1996 was interesting as well. (Note: The links are safe for work, but your workplace may disagree.)

Huffington Post needs an intern; copy-and-paste experts need no longer apply

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I regret that too often this blog is replete* with bomb-throwing posts directed at just a few targets. Even I think “Move your needle to a different groove, son.” But sometimes it’s just too easy:

AdAge: Someone Bids $13,000 for Huffington Post Internship

I don’t know what the job description is, but it most certainly does not include re-publishing reviews from local publications…anymore.

Hey, do I at least get points for doing something constructive? Truth be told, The Chicago Media Future Conference is why this blog has languished as of late. But on the plus side, we’re close to announcing our full slate of panelists, and we already have some interesting posts up about SEO, unbundling content and the Trib’s new Chicago Now project. Head on over there and check it out, and sign-up for the conference if you’re so inclined. It’s free!

* Confidential to Chris Jones: This is the proper use of this word.

Don’t let Zell fool you: The Trib isn’t opposed to giving it away for free

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Sam Zell’s recent interview with Bloomberg News is getting a lot of attention because he’s calling his purchase of TribCo “a mistake.” But it was this quote that stuck with me:

“I think we’re looking at every option at the Tribune Co.,” he said. “It’s very obvious that the newspaper model in its current form is not working. And the sooner we all acknowledge that the better. Whether it be home delivery, whether it be giving away content for free, I mean these are critical issues.”

This isn’t the first time Zell has complained about “giving away content for free.” In 2007, he said:

“If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do? We have a situation today where effectively the content is being paid for by the newspapers and stolen by Google…That can last for a short time, but it can’t last forever.”

The Beachwood Reporter columnist Sam Singer takes Zell to task from a legal perspective over the folly of trying to fight Google on this and says:

“Their best bet, I believe, is to embrace aggregation, to invest in optimization strategies that will ensure their content a more prominent place among the search results.”

The thing is, the Trib is already doing this. In fact, it did this on Bloomberg’s Zell story, effectively taking advantage of the strategy just as its Chairman and CEO railed against it.

Right now, the Trib article is the first result in Google News if you search for “Sam Zell.”:

(Click to embiggen)

This isn’t an accident. It’s because the Trib has a well-executed SEO strategy (just ask this guy, he’ll tell you), and it uses services like Google News (the kinds of services Zell is referring to when he talks about giving away content for free) to build revenue. More traffic to the Trib makes its website more attractive to advertisers. And speaking of ads:

(Click to embiggen)

That’s the Trib article in question; I’ve sloppily highlighted a few areas on the page. Those are ads the Trib is selling against content that’s comprised mainly of an interview by another news organization. And they did this – hang on, this is shocking – to make money. Against content that’s “given away for free.”

In a previous column on Beachwood Reporter, Steve Rhodes had this to say:

As I’ve written before, newspapers sell ads against content created by others all the time, be it Oprah, the Cubs or American Idol. Not only is it mutually beneficial, but it’s the responsibility of a news organization insofar as cultural criticism – including that of the media – is warranted.

He’s right, of course. Newspapers have been making money this way since they began, and now many of them have figured out how to do it online. None of this is sneaky or underhanded. It’s industry standard at this point. And it’s how media companies monetize their content. The Zell story is one of many on the Trib site alone (every time you read the headlines on their movie reviews, you see their keyword strategy at work to hilarious effect), not to mention many many other sites.

So when Sam Zell says “giving content away for free” isn’t working, he only means they’re not making enough money on it yet. Not that they’re not making any.

Crain’s columnist Greg Hinz to play Freddy Krueger?

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Oops, sorry, no. I’m mistaken. It’s Jackie Earle Haley who will play the finger-bladed killer in a Nightmare on Elm Street remake. But c’mon: You can understand my confusion.

Here’s a picture of Jackie Earle Haley:

And here’s a picture of Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz:

One, two…Greggy’s coming for you…

Speaking of Hinz, he’s running down the possible candidates for Mike Quigley’s Cook County Board seatshould/when the current County Commissioner win the 5th district special election today.

Quick hits

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Broadcasting and Cable says that there are no more star anchors. They’re being replaced by reporters who are “using all available resources to gather news.” At the Chicago Journalism Town Hall a couple months ago, Carol Marin noted a similar trend at newspapers, where people who’d been good writers were being shunted aside in favor of those who were multi-talented producer/editor types. This is one of those times when professionals should recognize the industry change, and adapt, not try to fight against it. Mock the intern with the Twitter account at your peril.

Also, I was surprised that Michael Kinsley would say the “death of newspapers” might not be all that bad.

Lastly, I started a Tumblr blog a while back, dropped it, then picked it back up again. It’s mainly filled with short, longer-than-Twitter comments on news stories, amusing pictures, and cool videos. As the title implies, it’s effluvia.

I’m also posting links to all the Our Man In Chicago posts there as well, so if you only want to go to the trouble of following one blog, that’d be it.

Arianna on ChuffPo’s plagiarism: "The intern did it."

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This week, Time.com published a piece by Belinda Luscombe about Arianna Huffington. It’s one of the few profiles of her that addresses the plagiarism (Time’s word for it, not mine) that the Chicago branch of Huffington Post (or ChuffPo) engaged in last year. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons, including the new spin Huffington is putting on the issue (2nd page):

In December the site’s Chicago section was found to have been plagiarizing. “This was a problem with an intern,” says Huffington. “There was no excuse, and we corrected it.”

Really? An intern? That’s your excuse? Where have I heard that before…? Oh I know!

When I thought about what to write for The Huffington Post I was stuck on the idea of writing about the Huffington Post, because that’s who broke the Cindy McCain story where she, or an intern her people say, lifted recipes from the Food Network’s web site and put them on John McCain’s web site as her own “favorite family recipes.”

[SNIP]

So thank you to The Huffington Post for looking out for the busy, the overworked, and the overheated chefs in America.

Yeah, Arianna Huffington is a regular Norma Rae.

Now, I’m not saying Huffington is lying here but here’s what Wired’s Ryan Singel was told about it in December 2008:

The Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti says the contretemps are overblown — that the complete re-printing was a mistaken editorial call and that The Huffington Post’s intention in aggregating other publications’ content is to send traffic their way.

Wow, what incredible freedom Huffington Post interns have! They get to make editorial judgment calls about the content of one of the most-read Web sites in the country! No wonder people will work for them for free!

The Time article also summarizes the SEO methods HuffPo uses to create a competitive advantage over the sites whose content it uses. Luscombe says these methods as “complicated and mostly secret,” which is only half-right. They ARE complicated, but not at all secret if you’re hiring the right SEO experts.

In the article, Huffington says the trade-off is all the pageviews that she sends the way of the sites from which they take content. If my time as Web Editor of Time Out Chicago is any indication of the traffic other sites are getting, the number of page views we received from the reviews they lifted was minimal. And it’s hardly worth the loss of ad revenue from search engine traffic. Back to the article:

While this is wily, it’s legal. But news organizations may not tolerate others cherry-picking their content and repurposing it for profit for much longer. “Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post,” says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. “It’s not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates, it’s about the value.” There are other aggregators, but HuffPo is the most tempting. “It’s a big player, and the site that has got closest to the line” between fair and unfair use of copy, Benton notes. [Emphasis mine]

The sad thing is, there’s an ethical way to aggregate. And ChuffPo’s actions – intern or otherwise – have soured many big media types on the idea of it, when it really could be a boon for their sites.

If only more networks "twisted" their coverage in the wake of Stewart/Cramer

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Last post on all this and then I promise I’m moving on…

My initial emotional reaction to this anonymously sourced tip from TV Newser that MSNBC was “twisting” its coverage by not covering the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview was “KNAVES! How dare they…um….not cover something that’s…all that newsworthy.” I couldn’t even make it to the end of the sentence before my outrage fell apart.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that this is true and isn’t an attempt to discredit the NBC network of news channels. (For what it’s worth, no less than MSNBC’s golden boy Keith Olbermann says, in a comment on Daily Kos, it isn’t true.)

As I wrote last week, Jim Cramer isn’t the real problem, he’s just the one person who agreed to take a whupping for the team. So what’s the value for MSNBC or any other news network for covering the talk show appearance of one of its affiliate’s stars after it happened (you could argue that covering it prior was all in the name of synergistic self-promotion)? Did his appearance on The Daily Show change anything? Has it led to actual news? Has CNBC changed the nature of its financial reporting as a result? Has Jim Cramer dropped his goofy sound effects or manner of presentation? We don’t know any of this yet, so there’s nothing to report. If later this week, Jim Cramer starts nailing banking CEOs to the wall and speaking in calm, measured tones then that’s news you could tie into his Daily Show spanking and it’s time to pull out the footage. If they fail to show the interview at that point, you could argue MSNBC was misreporting the story or “twisting” its coverage.

With all the real problems affecting the country, spending more time on reporting and analysis about how we got here, and less time showing the Town Square flogging of Jim Cramer could logically be called “exercising editorial judgment.”

The LA Times’s Johanna Neuman: Jon Stewart is just mad because he’s broke

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You know that phrase “Washington insiders” that’s trotted out by lazy pundits or politicians when they want to characterize someone, either an elected official or a commentator, as out-of-touch with the average person? I always thought that sounded phony, like the “career politician” slur.

[TANGENT: You know what that person actually is in the best of times? A professional. Joe Biden’s a career politician. Helen Thomas is a Washington insider.

Obviously, in both cases, I want that person to be ethical and fair, and not looking for ways to enrich his or her pocketbook or personal profile at the expense of the greater good. No, here’s what I want out of a D.C. reporter: Someone who knows the ins and outs of the city, so he or she can find truth and call bullshit when it’s warranted. And here’s what I want out of an elected official: Someone who is well-versed in procedural matters and studied in the art of compromise so he or she can get things done for the betterment of the constituents. Those people are usually folks who’ve spent time in the trenches so let’s throw a little respect their way from time to time. I mean, you’d never hear “Oh she’s a career doctor…” or “He’s spent years as a public schools insider…”]

After reading Johanna Neuman‘s post about the Cramer/Stewart interview at the LA Times’ Top of the Ticket blog, (via Romenesko) I’m starting to understand why people would think spending too much time in D.C. is a bad thing:

“In fact, the Emmy-winning Stewart was so caustic — he suggesting [sic] Cramer should remove the designation “financial expert” from his pitch — it kind of makes you wonder how much he’s lost in the economic meltdown.”

Someone finally asks how the country’s most influential financial reporters contributed to our economic crisis, and your first impulse is to ask what’s in it for him? I know there’s been a lot of criticism about the lack of real journalism on this issue, but how about aiming your rifle at the rabid dogs instead of the Animal Control worker?

Neuman’s obviously a smart person and spent years covering D.C. politics. So perhaps she has – to her detriment – been blinded by those who spend too much time motivated by ego or financial gain so that’s the only prism through which she views the actions of others.

A momentary lapse of blogging

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Been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the day job lately – which always translates into a complete lack of interest in writing about anything related to the Web and other media – so the blog has been a bit quiet. But also, I’ve found myself using Twitter (follow me here) to talk about damn near anything that comes to mind. It’s strange: I’ve never really felt compelled to divulge a lot of personal details here, but apparently I have no problem spilling the minutiae of my life, 140 characters at a time. So having that as an outlet has probably resulted in less verbiage here as well.

So in an effort to get some momentum going again, I’m running a “best of” older OMIC posts. Enjoy.

Open letters to a guy at my gym, Marilyn Manson and Nine West.

80s metal, starring White Lion and Lita Ford

The day I decided to stop being quiet about my faith.

A deconstruction of the announcement that a guy in a Filipino Journey cover band would be the new lead singer of…Journey.

Is Amy Winehouse authentic? Related: I did not meet her at a Lollapalooza after-party.

My issues with R. Kelly, Parts 1 and 2.

1000 words on The Ultimate Coyote Ugly Search.

Avril Lavigne is not “sexy.”

Wood-Tang and I break down Kanye West’s Graduation album.

Don Henley is a douche.

The time I offered free non-alcoholic beer on Craigslist.