"Trust" is the Key to Growing Your Follower Numbers - Tell it to the Beast

The Daily Beast must have an editorial calendar that builds in a university ranking of some sort every few months to boost readership and grow its follower numbers.

Earlier this week the news website released a new list, "50 Druggiest Colleges," sending the public relations and administration offices of 50 colleges and universities scrambling to either respond or to at least generate a message that could be sent to students, faculty, friends and the media.

Just about every time The Daily Beast releases a university ranking, it gets slammed for its use of unscientific data and analysis.  In the instance of the "50 Druggiest Colleges" list, it included inaccurate information about at least one university which greatly influenced the institution's ranking on the list.  Subsequently, The Daily Beast reported the correction and dropped this particular university's ranking by 21 spots.

But the damage had already been done to this university and to the 49 others who made the list.  Who reads corrections?  And besides, The Daily Beast had already received what it wanted: coast-to-coast news articles on the ""50 Druggiest Colleges" ranking since nearly every state in the U.S. was represented.

Last month, Newsweek, another struggling weekly news magazine, and The Daily Beast announced a merger  resulting in the creation of The Daily Beast Newsweek Publishing.

Time will tell if this convenient marriage has legs or if it's just a weekend affair.  If The Daily Beast is looking to earn credibility in the world of online news, though, its best bet is to learn to be more responsible.  It might start by reducing its over reliance on data for its university ranking features from the likes of College Prowler and employ a scientific method for collecting and reporting on useful data. 

Will the Cloud Save Journalism?

Do you ever struggle with defining the line between content and news?

I could justify the blurring border easily if I look only through my commercial lenses. But that seems self defeating, because the question ultimately brings into play the foundation of democracy:  What happens to the press' role as the Fourth Estate when the news media experiences the kind of rapid decline we've witnessed over the past decade?  

The emerging void in journalism should worry all of us. The Project for Excellence in Journalism's recent annual "State of the News Media 2010" report, indicated 5,900 newspaper jobs were lost in 2009 (in addition to a similar number in 2008). The overall impact is a 33% reduction in newsroom employment at newspapers since 2001.  In the same time, there have been 450 jobs lost at local TV news operations.  We've seen major dailies shutter their doors and major news magazines like Newseek placed on the auction block.  We've seen this offset with an incredible number of bloggers -- only a handful of whom are legitimate journalists.  But can a disaggregated array of bloggers -- many of whom represent corporate interests rather than independent, objective journalists -- serve as the new Fourth State?  And if not, what is THEIR role? 

Not surprisingly to regular readers of this blog, we believe the cloud will serve a valuable function in rebuilding the Fourth Estate, enabling the high costs of printing, publishing and physical distribution to be contained while restructuring advertising models. We see an interesting new vision that integrates journalism and neojournalism in projects like Newsflash from Future News: What Will Journalism Look Like?, published last year by the design experts at IDEO.  We see exciting possibilities for media in new technologies like HP's MagCloud, and we see user friendly delivery systems emerging with the new generation of eReaders like Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle. Technologies and ideas like these involve audiences, diversify content, expand ideas, accelerate the creation and delivery of information into a continuous two-way stream and provide us with relatively familiar formats for accessing information with the touch of an icon regardless of where we are in the world.  

But journalism doesn't exist without journalists. The question that worries us most is whether news media can shed the crushing costs of traditional brick and mortar publishing overhead and embrace these new models fast enough to begin reinvesting in their depleted editorial staffs?  


Image reprinted from Newsflash from Future News: What Will Journalism Look Like? © 2009, IDEO