The Best Radio Stations In The World Are Inside Your Machine

One of the things I enjoy most about digital culture is the ability to listen to community radio stations around the country. It is something I do each day, and each day I find it as enriching as the last.

We become the media we consume. For your own sake and the sake of the nation, consume the best media you can find. Here, this list of amazing community radio stations will get you started provided that you like indie rock, jazz, blues, Americana and other forms of progressive music, opinion and news.

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Media Literacy 101: Be Sold, But Not Fooled

Media Literacy 101: Be Sold, But Not Fooled

Content-marketing

I met Faris Yakob of Genius Steals at a conference hosted by Henry Jenkins at MIT a number of years ago. I recall being pleased that he was familiar with AdPulp. And it was fun to rap with someone I’d only known from afar at the time.

This morning, I learned that Faris wrote an opinion piece on content marketing for Campaign’s new U.S. site.

He notes that people are getting lost in semantics whilst searching for the definitive definition of the marketing practice. Here, let’s have a brief look:

One of the most often voiced is that content is not appropriately labelled — that its intent to commercially persuade the audience is veiled, which disrupts the church-and-state boundaries of editorial and advertising, and erodes the trust of the consumer in the publication, and indeed, in content overall.

One of the first things you would learn, if not the first thing, in a media literacy class is that no piece of content is objective. Everything comes with a point of view and looks to persuade you of that point of view, explicitly or otherwise.

No piece of content is objective, or neutral. I love that Faris is beating this particular drum. Journalists are not saints doing the work of a higher power. They tell news stories to make their publishers money. Just like copywriters in service to brands.

The promise of content marketing is simple. Brands who mine a substantive topical vein can connect in a real way with people by becoming the ultimate source, or the source with the best reporting, photography, videography and so on. Brand marketers have deep pockets for such coverage. Media companies do not, which means there is a vacuum that brands can fill for their benefit and the benefit of all.

Save Your Thumb And Your Mind: View As One Page

Save Your Thumb And Your Mind: View As One Page

Pageview journalism is a method of presenting information online in a slideshow or other framework that garners as many clicks from a reader as possible. This is what it looks like:

Entrepreneurs_ Best Productivity Hacks - Business Insider

Writing for The Guardian, Charlie Brooker lambastes the painful conformity of web-based media today, largely in response to the shortcomings of pageview journalism and the damage it does to a journalist’s ability to establish a narrative.

Newspapers used to be sombre dossiers issued each morning, bringing grave news from Crimea. Now they’re blizzards of electric confetti, bringing The Ten Gravest Crimean Developments You Simply Won’t Believe. The art of turning almost any article of interest into a step-by-step clickbait walkthrough has been perfected to the point where reading the internet feels increasingly like sitting on the bog in the 1980s reading a novelty book of showbiz facts that never fucking ends. This trend will only continue. In five years’ time, all news articles will consist of a single coloured icon you click repeatedly to make info-nuggets fly out, accompanied by musical notes, like a cross between Flappy Bird and Newsnight. Even a harrowing report on refugees fleeing a warzone will cynically draw you in by promising to show you a famous person’s bum after every 85th click. And it will succeed.

Media criticism, like this, delivered with a sharp bite is something to behold. The digital echo chamber is deafening. It takes a piercing voice to rise above it. Brooker has this going for him.

Of course, I agree with him that lowest common denominator page view journalism is a shitty development for readers, and makers of news. I’d extend this to advertisers, as well. For brands, the opportunity to serve people with valuable information and develop a customer relationship is in owned and social media. Paid and earned media continue to be important, but even the best online ads and editorial are competing with a thousand other possibly more interesting options, all of which are just a click away.

Media companies that peddle “step-by-step clickbait” believe digital media is not a reading experience, nearly as much as it is a self-guided navigation through text and images. New sites like Medium are beginning to counter this negative trend. Medium is a place for readers—that’s how the site is designed and it shows.

Alternatives like Medium provide one way to combat the “blizzards of electric confetti.” But pageview-driven techniques are not going away. Anything that can be monetized, will be, and right now advertisers and investors are propping up pageview journalism sites with buckets of cash. Henry Blodget told the Financial Times that Business Insider’s 2013 revenue would be “close to” $20 million. That’s a lot of money to work with every year. Nevertheless, media critic, Michael Wolff, puzzles over the math. He concludes, “The digital traffic world, with techniques and sources and results that are ever-more dubious, is, as I’d guess the astute Henry Blodget has ascertained, not a sound long-term play.”

Hard to say who is right, Wolff or Blodget. “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,” H. L. Mencken suggested. Maybe clicking 30 times through an “article” satisfies people in ways I don’t understand. Perhpas I should not impose my desire to have people read long copy? By the way, this article is under 600 words, so I fully expect high rates of comprehension and retention.

Wise Use of Online Customer Data Leads To Print Rebirth

Wise Use of Online Customer Data Leads To Print Rebirth

I like to read about media enterprises that are thriving. It provides hope for the industry, and hope for me personally as a writer, editor and self-publisher.

Newsweek_Print

According to The New York Times, Etienne Uzac, 30, and Johnathan Davis, 31, founders of IBT Media, are bringing Newsweek back to print. Each issue will cost $7.99.

“You would pay only if you don’t want to read anything on a backlit screen,” Mr. Uzac said. “It is a luxury product.”

What I find fascinating is how this company’s online media strategy paid dividends and paved the way for this print rebirth. The Times reports that IBT began using online metrics (across its 10 media brands) to help tailor coverage to what readers truly wanted.

Dry corporate-earnings articles larded with financial data, for example, were poorly read. But Mr. Davis discovered that readers landed on earnings pieces by searching for a company’s products. So IBT began to de-emphasize numbers in earnings stories while highlighting a company’s product pipeline.

There is a lot of chatter about big data and its various uses, but here is one example an applied use of data that proved both successful and desirable.

Ad Blogging: A Positive Practice,  An Unhealthy Obsession, Or Both?

Ad Blogging: A Positive Practice, An Unhealthy Obsession, Or Both?

Nearly two months ago, I made the decision to stop adding new content to AdPulp.com. I wanted to starve the blog and my blogging habit in the process. In theory it ought to be easy to do, the starving of a blog. Just close the window on it. Shut down the machine. Look away.

I wish it were that simple, but it’s not, at least it’s not for me. AdPulp exists as a media brand now. Digital media is alive in a way printed media is not, and you don’t put something that’s alive in a drawer and call it good, The End. AdPulp is also alive in our readers’ minds, at least for now. Which begs the question: why step off in the first place? A writer courts an audience like a bee courts flowers, so there’s something unnatural here. Right?

Actually, the reasons for quitting the blog are pretty simple. From a return on investment perspective, ad blogging was a losing proposition. I also confused the marketplace that supports me, by presenting as both ad creator and ad critic. People prefer to hold one idea in their mind about you, not two. Given that making ads pays better than ad criticism, it was easy enough to decide where to focus my efforts.

Stories for The Content Strategist by David Burn _ Contently

Having said that, I continue to be an advertising critic and a journalist. Quitting a blog doesn’t change that. In fact, I am working on a new feature right now for The Content Strategist about the challenges of managing “brand voice” in multiple digital channels. In days of old, this article would have gone up on AdPulp.com. It would have been unedited and typically I would have spoken to no sources.

Timeframes for “real journalism” are also much different. A blog post is something you throw together in an hour, maybe two if it’s highly involved. A feature for a proper media entity takes many hours of work spread over several days, even weeks. Now my process looks like this: come up with an idea, pitch it to the editor, create a list of interview questions, find people to interview and schedule a time to talk, take copious notes during the interviews, transcribe the notes, prepare a draft, edit, submit, receive changes from the editor, make changes, re-submit, wait for approval and publication. A blogger would likely laugh at the archaic nature of this process. But I cherish the slow, deliberate, thoughtful approach.

Whatever happens with AdPulp—a sale, an inspired reinvention, or nothing at all—I now have valuable knowledge I didn’t have before. One of the loudest-and-clearest messages from this nine-year journey is build a business first, then add a blog. AdPulp was a blog before the business, a write-it-and-they-will-come dart into steady headwinds.

Contently, the publisher of The Content Strategist, is a good example of the business-first approach to making media today. Contently, the business, is a platform for connecting journalists with publishers and brands. The Content Strategist, on the other hand, is Contently’s media brand–its skin in the game. At the same time, the site is an “ad” for the platform. That’s how it’s done!

Spreading the Word

Last year I began to actively seek out new places to publish my writing.

As someone who has invested heavily in the development of my own sites, I felt it was important to break out of any traps of my own making. To this end, here are three new pieces of writing (not published on any of my own sites) that I’d like to share with you:

  • A new poem published on Medium: Jury Duty
  • A new feature for The Content Strategist: Google Dreams of a Bot That Will Take Over Your Brand’s Twitter
  • A new feature for Nimble: 3 Ways to Light a Spark of Brand Love
  • Medium is an interesting development for readers and writers. It’s a platform for text, where writers self-publish as they would on their own sites. The difference is Medium offers what only a platform can: opportunities for discovery, collaboration and recommendation.

    The web is too big. Millions of personal websites are too hard to find, bookmark, return to and read. Some are well designed for reading, others not so much. I wouldn’t say stand-alone web sites are in danger of extinction, but there is a shift from owned media to shared media.

    In my own world, I saw the need for consolidation and focus, which led me to step away from AdPulp.com after a nine year run. The topic became tiresome, but it was also a matter of economics. David Burn the writer and brand builder makes money. David Burn the ad blogger makes friends in the business, and sometimes those friends lead to work.

    A blog can be good for business, but the line from the blog to your paid product or service has to be direct and I didn’t have that on AdPulp. I do have that on Bonehook.com.

    The Court Will Recognize: A Blog Can Be More Influential Than Mainstream Media

    I learned about the existence of SCOTUSblog this morning. The site is read widely by those with an interest in Supreme Court cases, and this year won a prestigious Peabody Award for excellence in electronic media.

    While the industry pub I co-founded lacks the Peabody, I can see a clear parallel between SCOTUSblog and AdPulp. Both are industry blogs put together by industry insiders, as opposed to a publication from a traditional media company. SCOTUSblog’s co-founder and publisher is Tom Goldstein. Goldstein is also a lawyer who specializes in arguing cases before the Supreme Court.

    In October 2002, when he and his wife Amy launched the site, Goldstein saw it as a business development opportunity. “Turns out it was a really stupid idea,” Goldstein said in a C-SPAN interview. “People who need serious Supreme Court counsel don’t say, ‘Get me the guy with the website.’”

    Three years in, having learned a lesson about media and marketing, SCOTUSblog realigned its purpose.

    “We hired a real reporter, Lyle Denniston, who’s been covering the court for more than 50 years and we changed the mission completely,” said Goldstein. “We don’t write about our own cases at all, and we’re not allowed to talk about our own cases. We said we’re just turning this over to the public. It’s not intended to promote us in any way. It’s intended to be a public good.”

    Shawn Hartley and I launched AdPulp.com one year after SCOTUSblog got its start. I can affirm Goldstein’s findings. A stand-alone industry blog is a poor vehicle for self-promotion. Like Goldstein, I figured it would be easy for AdPulp’s readers to connect the dots and say to themselves, “Hey, these guys really know what’s up — let’s hire them to make advertising for us.”

    Because I am a MarCom pro, this lesson might have been easy for me to relearn. It was not. Ergo, I will repeat after myself…Complicate and/or confuse the marketplace at considerable risk to your earning power.

    I nearly quit AdPulp several times in the past few years. I have always enjoyed the act of making the site, but the near term return on investment has been consistently disappointing. Like Goldstein wisely counsels, people who want an ad campaign do not turn to the guys with a website.

    Goldstein smartly incorporated his learnings and went in a new direction. SCOTUSblog is now a viable media entity. I’d like to see AdPulp become a more viable media entity, as well. We started it as a business, not a hobby, but it has become more hobby than business over the years.

    Perhaps, we too need a shift in focus? For nine years, we’ve been a site for ad grunts by ad grunts. But that’s a small, well-informed audience. Meanwhile, there’s a massive audience of relatively uninformed advertising lovers and haters that we might serve.

    Know Thyself Writer-Man

    Digital disrupts all in its wake. Even our language is not safe.

    Consider the word “content.” It’s a word I have adopted to clarify my professional specialty.

    In April 2006, I was promoted from senior copywriter to content director at BFG Communications in Hilton Head. I was head of my own department, the content department, which set about filling vast digital spaces, a.k.a. our client’s websites, with content.

    Given my history with and attachment to the word content, Tim Kreider’s opinion piece, “Slaves of the Internet, Unite!” got my attention when he turned his argument to what words mean and how they build or destroy real market value.

    The first time I ever heard the word “content” used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I — henceforth, “content providers” — were essentially extinct. This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it’s the delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called “art” — writing, music, film, photography, illustration — to the status of filler, stuff to stick between banner ads.

    Most content, especially content made to sell, is in fact filler. Therefore, in the context of an advertising industry discussion, I am not grappling in the same way Kreider is with this problem. But he and I both agree that real writing must be called writing, not content. Same for real writers—they are writers not content producers or managers.

    For me, this presents an important choose-your-words-wisely moment. Because content departments and content directors are not all that common, even today, so it’s not simple for me to easily convey my value to prospective buyers of David Burn-made content.

    I was speaking to an old friend the other day. I thought how can my friend, or any friend help, me land new business when he or she doesn’t clearly understand what I do for a living?

    “Hi, my name is David. I convey brand value.”

    Sadly, especially for a writer, the above explanation and titles like copywriter or brand storyteller don’t do enough to communicate our market value. I am not sure there is much in the way of a workaround here.

    I don’t want to over think this, but when you tell someone you are a writer, there’s an immediate suspicion (in gentler souls, a curiosity) about how you earn your way in the world. That’s likely why we come up with fancy words for what we do, or worse, long-winded explanations. It’s also why we work in fields like advertising and media.

    How Twitter Is Changing The Game Day Experience For Fans

    How Twitter Is Changing The Game Day Experience For Fans

    team_adidas

    The experience of watching college football is altered considerably when using a double-screen setup to watch the game on one hand, and talk about it on the other.

    It used to be one would simply jump up from the couch and yell affirmations or hurl curses. Today, we express our emotions as fans on Twitter, the closest thing we have to a real-time coversational platform on the web.

    Sports writers take part in it:

    Bloggers take part on it:

    Fans take part in it:

    I think it is fair to ask, does the Tweeting make for a richer college football viewing experience, or is it a digital distraction that we’d be better off without?

    During today’s game, Nebraska came out running the I-formation, slashing and gashing for ground yards. I was happy and I was stunned. I hadn’t seen this team–our team, the real Nebraska–for many years. Sadly, the vision did not last. It slipped away in what seemed like an instant and the madness on Twitter got loud fast. I decided to put the second screen away and watch the game.

    Of course, there’s also the post-game commentary to consider and take part in.

    I wonder how many college programs are using social listening software to judge fan/consumer sentiment about the players, coaches and program. We don’t need to guess at the sentiment of fans or customers. Their support, love for the program and alternatively, their disbelief and disgust with it, is all neatly cataloged in the database for data scientists and marketers to mine.

    Another thing worth noting about these game day “conversations” on Twitter: Good luck trying to engage with Bo Pelini, the NU athletic department or even the journalists on the Huskers beat. All of the above clearly approach Twitter as a broadcast channel, and they don’t want to get entangled in the complexities of managing fan anger or opinion of any kind. As a result, they ignore 99% of all @replies, which makes no sense within the context of Twitter itself, but plenty of sense when you realize how access in college sports is a privilege—one that Bo Pelini has been keen on revoking. His team’s practices are closed to the press, for instance.

    If Your Story Doesn’t Spread, Does A Tree Fall In The Forest?

    Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed was on Jim Cramer’s CNBC talk show, “Mad Money” today.

    The segment provides an instructive look at modern media, and the audience for bite-sized pieces of news and entertainment.


    I do not always like the BuzzFeed product, but I like the bold way Steinberg talks about his media company.

    “For us, Facebook and Twitter, that’s the new network, that’s the new cable system. And we’ve mastered a way to create and optimize content on social,” claims Steinberg.

    For revenue, Buzz Feed famously shuns the ad banner in favor of content-driven social advertising. “People only share things that they’re proud of, that make them look good. Things they want to stand for. So it’s the same thing with the advertising content,” he explains.

    Steinberg says, “We look in 15-minute increments and our system gives more promotion to things that are being shared. It has to be shared to get additional promotion. That’s a really high standard.”