Then seemingly out of nowhere the CEO of Yahoo is kicked out and a “For Sale” sign is put up on their front yard.

Both Yahoo! and AOL were technology giants that are moving to become media entities. AOL doesn’t hide it with the HUGE investment in Patch and acquiring HuffingtonPost. Yahoo perhaps made the shift too coy and thus might have to start breaking apart. Yahoo hasn’t made the drastic switch of resources that AOL has and the potential sale might be a direct reflection of poor internal investments. Now AOL’s big bet might not win – but at least it was a conscious bet that the company made to become a content creator of massive proportions. I think Yahoo always rested its laurels on being a search company with a few social properties here and there (they never utilized Delicious or Flickr that well).

And thus the lesson below…..

Technology companies must understand that they are also media companies.

Media companies must understand that they are also technology companies.

Why?

Because the two are married.

Let’s take a step back to get here.

1. All media is social

The intent of media is to communicate something to people. Skirting the “if a tree falls in a forest” question – I’d say that all media is social.

2. Then what the hell is social media?

What we call “social media” is a misnomer given #1 above. A more proper understanding of it might be “minute media” or media about minutia (then again, ‘minutia’ is all about perspective; ‘dog bites man’ is big news to the man’s family). When blogs bursted on the scene in the early 2000′s we saw some of this minute media. It turns out that was just a crack in the damn. The real wave of minute media came around life-casting ie: Twitter, Facebook updates, etc. But this is all media.

3. Minute media is made possible by technology.

See: the Internet, the falling cost of publishing, etc.

4. If technology powers this rapidly evolving media (it defines the medium) then technology companies are media companies. That might not mean “journalism” companies – but media companies nonetheless.

Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter and more are all technology companies that make their money because of the media they produce or enable.

Even Apple is a media company to some degree. They build hardware with the intent of syncing it to their very massive and user-friendly media store iTunes.

Some of this is not news for folks (Lisa Williams may be the first person I heard to clearly state this). When I look at AOL’s and Yahoo’s moves it strikes me as apparent and something to take pause to notice. AOL, while often berated for patch, should be applauded because while most technology companies that move into media deal with ‘content’ AOL made a specific goal to do community journalism.

So where does this leave media companies?

They must move to become more like technology companies. They must learn to either create their own platforms for minute media or truly adopt/adapt to other platforms. They must find and define the platforms that enable the type of media they want to support. This, I believe, starts where Jeff Jarvis’ post about platforms being journalism leaves off. It’s not that platforms are journalism – it’s that technology enables media and journalism is a type of media that requires a type of platform. Journalists love to complain about Demand Media, for example, but it’s a beautiful case where a media company has built a technology platform to support the type of media they want to make. I agree, it’s not journalism – but then journalists must BUILD the platform that enables their type of media or pray somebody else does. Newspapers should define that technology platform instead of waiting for somebody else to build it for them (charging them an arm and a leg in the process).

I’m a little under the weather so I’m not even going to give this a second read/edit. But hey, this is my semi-minute media space. It’ll hopefully be interesting to somebody.

I’ve always been a big fan of failure. I think journalism should hold a “fail camp” (inspired by Ethan Zuckerman). When I re-started the blog carnival I dedicated a month towards failure. I’m working on a new project (details to come soon, promise) and I think/hope failure will be a big part of it.

We talk a lot about barriers to success. But we also say that we can only succeed on the shoulders of our many failures. Therefore I’d like to point out what I think are the barriers to failure (and therefore also to success). If we don’t fail early and fail often we won’t push forward. So below are some barriers to failure. Luckily most of these are easily overcome if you can identify them.

1. It’s not a problem until it’s a problem.

The “What If’s” are a terrible thing. It assumes that every bad scenario you can think of needs to be handled right away before you even start. This is the opposite of the sage philosophy from “Getting Real”: It’s not a problem until it’s a problem. I put this barrier first because it’s a particularly poignant problem in the journalism community. We are natural skeptics. Our instinct is to think about who might be secretly benefiting, who is maliciously stealing public money what ‘problem’ is there underneath the surface. That’s great in reporting but the WRONG attitude to starting something new. The “What If’s” are unproductive. Deal with “this is” when it happens. I am very familiar with “what ifs” because I get them every time I explain Spot.Us to a journalist that has never heard of the concept.

What if stories get influenced by a donor?

• Concerned journalist: What if a neo-Nazi wants to fund a story? OH MY GOD David – HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO JOURNALISM?
• Answer: Well, we limit how much a person can donate, so you need a group of people.
• Concerned journalist: Well, what if a GROUP of neo-Nazis want to fund a story?
• Answer: umm… well, you need a reporter who puts their professional reputation on the line doing that story.
• Concerned journalist: Well, what if the reporter is a Nazi? Jesus David, didn’t you think about that!
• Answer if I have energy: If there is a group of neo-Nazis and a reporter, they don’t need my site to do the story they want to do.
• Answer to stop the obvious ‘what if‘ cycle of the conversation: You’re right. I should shut down the site before that happens.

Bottom line: If the reason you aren’t doing something starts with “what if” – it’s a bad reason not to move forward and perhaps fail. It’s not a problem until it’s a problem.

2. Tradition!!!! (sung loudly while swinging your hands in the air)

Traditions are great. But if presented with a new way to do something which breaks tradition – you should take it. Traditions are only as strong as their tests. If you never test a tradition, it’s weak, fragile and hasn’t evolved. If you test the tradition against a new method and the new method fails, score for tradition (waves hands, sings loudly), but if not – you must learn to adapt. The old tradition of war was that it was fought in an open field in straight lines of volleyed musket fire wearing bright uniforms that looked like targets. That “tradition” didn’t stand the test of time for a reason. Do you really want to defend the online version of volley-musket fire because it’s “tradition.”

3. Letting the perfect be an enemy of the good.

Dreams of perfection should not stall the launch of something good. If it were perfect you wouldn’t fail early or often. You wouldn’t fail at all. But one could also argue if you were aiming for perfection, you’d end up attempting nothing. At a certain point you have to accept what is and isn’t possible in a reasonable timeline and aim for what is reasonable. The good news is that you don’t have to END there. You are just starting there. In some respects I think that’s the reason so many folks let perfection become the enemy of the good. They are concerned that they’ll never progress after an initial effort. Hence, we won’t start unless we know we can get all the way. This is a great way to invest months into a project that could fall flat its face. Remember: It’s cheaper and easier to try something than it is to debate about whether or not to try something.

4. Fear… of failure. 

It’s a perfectly natural fear. Nobody wants to have their ego bruised. Luckily we are living in a time where the web is figuring itself out. There is a way to fail gracefully, to fail towards success. It’s not even altruistic, if you fail you’ll learn more and will be more likely to succeed in a future endeavor. You can fail selfishly and get kudos along the way. Remember kids, only you can defeat fear of failure.

5. Institutional momentum

This is a bit different from “tradition” above (#2). In this case it isn’t for lack of will that new things are tried and potentially failed. In this instance it’s for lack of an institutional way. In other words – there are no resources (time, money, knowledge), to get started on a project even though everyone earnestly wants to try it. The good news, any institution that has this problem of existing momentum also has some resource,s it’s just a matter of allocation. This is the classic newspaper problem. Why don’t news organizations stop the presses and invest in digital? Because print is still where they make their money. You can’t cut off the head to save the body.

But here’s the truth. If there is a will, there is a way. Fact is, if you accept that perfection is not the enemy of the good and that you don’t need to accommodate every “what if” scenario, you can create a streamlined alpha of many projects. You can do this independent of the institution. And institutions need to learn to let go, allow some 20% time, skunkworks or whatever you want to call it. You just need a wee-little bit of space. The smudgiest of resources to begin. From there – you’ll get a better sense of whether or not something is worth more resources.

6. Resources to get started

There is good, fast and cheap. You get to pick two.  Keep your scope small and remain flexible. Google does have a lot of resources and yet innovation happens outside of their Google-plex. It’s possible. You just have to be ready to make sacrifices. The good news is that you can always come back to fix things. Later will always happen – now is fleeting. Take advantage of now so that in the future, you can continue to push forward.

7. Leadership vacuum

If you don’t have good leadership you won’t launch new products. Leadership needs to be clear, so that everyone can get in line. Leadership needs to have a vision, to communicate that vision and know how to navigate the above barriers. If not, they themselves are a barrier. In truth, leadership is a post in and of itself, but certainly a leadership vacuum is a great barrier to failure. While that last sentence may seem counter-intuitive (great leadership should lead to success) consider Teddy Roosevelt’s quote: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

Carpe Perscribo (Seize the writing/journalism)

Still in its infancy Google+ has been the topic of many-a-tech blogposts. As a former tech-writer I love and hate this stuff. Sometimes I want to slap Mashable right in the ‘http’ and tell them to never do another “Top X Ways [name your industry professionals] Can Use [new social networking tool].” If you are curious though – here are the  top five ways journalists can use Google+ courtesy of Mashable.

Equally I want to avoid speculation about Google vs. Facebook. There is already plenty of that. If a Facebook executive has a sneeze that sounds like ‘ahh-choogle’ the tech-press is all over it. I personally am not a fan of Facebook and welcome my Google+ overlords. I do have a post in me about privacy, silicon valley speculation, etc – but I don’t want to add my voice to that already loud chorus.

Instead I want to write about Google+ in terms of everyday average use. Both how journalists use the Internet and how everyday average people use the internet (assuming the later is slightly different).

Sure enough 10,000 Words (the Mashable of journalism blogging) recently did a post on the top 10 ways journalists use the Internet. This is the ENTIRE internet mind you – but the results of the study are revealing. According to research journalists use the Internet for….

1. Reading news
2. Searching for news sources/story idea
3. Social networking
4. Micro-blogging
5. Blogging
6. Watching webinars/webcasts
7. Watching YouTube
8. Exploring Wikis
9. Producing/listening to podcasts
10. Social bookmarking

By rough estimate I’d say six of those activities can be encapsulated by Google+ in a way that Facebook doesn’t (partly because Facebook looks like a user-interface designer puked on the screen). One could argue with Google Hangouts you can add another one or two activities to the count and considering the network is still young, who knows where it could go.

While I won’t venture what the top 10 Internet activities are for non-journalists I suspect the majority of them are social in nature, including email (gmail having lots of penetration) and research (Google again). Now we can start to see some real Epic 2014 scariness/potential.

The real lesson here is that journalists on Google+ should keep in mind how they are using the platform and how the public might be using the platform. The two aren’t necessarily the same and all-too often we think the rest of the world uses web technology the same way we do. Whenever I want to be humbled I watch a member of my family use the computer and think to myself – ignorance is bliss.

The reason to be on Google+ isn’t because it’s the newest, hottest, sexiest thing. That might be a good reason to be on it as an individual (hard to seperate) but not why you should be on it as a journalist. You should be on these sites to understand how people are communicating and the vocabulary of this communication. Friendster informed MySpace which informed Facebook which informed Google+. If you ignore these sites you will fail to understand how a growing portion of the population deals with the flow of information and inevitably how more people will deal with this flow in the future.

If you are a journalist your JOB is to understand and insert yourself into the flow of information.

I love this question and I’m pumped on finding out what tools and tricks other folks use.

I’ll start with the newest tool that has changed my email experience

Nudgemail

Email can cause more stress than it’s worth, and then I found Nudgemail. If you’re like me – you hate seeing unread emails in your inbox. You’ll open them and find out that this email requires action but you can’t tackle it until next Thursday. If you’re a list-maker like me – you have a choice 1. Leave it unread, starring at you everyday until next Thursday when you can tackle the problem or email it to thursday@nudgemail.com. Next Thursday at 6:30am that email will be re-sent to you. You can email virtually any date/time. 3pm@nudgemail.com, december21@nudgemail.com, etc, etc. I’m willing to admit that email acts as a bit of a to-do list for me. But I refuse to let that mean that email is in charge of my life or should constantly stress me out. Nudgemail gives me control over my inbox. If it’s a problem that I can’t tackle until Tuesday – then tuesday@nudgemail.com takes care of it for now and I can move on to a more urgent matter.

Apple Keyboard Shortcuts

I just got back from visiting my parents and teaching my mom about keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps mentioning keyboard shortcuts is a bit of a yawner for other Carnival of Journalism folk, but it goes without saying – this is a BIG time saver. I’m lucky that I learned to type young (thanks mom) and I’ve picked up the Apple keyboard shutcuts pretty quickly. I love finding new ones too. Do yourself a favor, find a useful one on that list and spend a week making it second nature. I’ve probably increased my productivity a bajillion fold not having to slow down to click from tab to tab, window to window, etc.

In August 2010 I did a post: “Five Tools to Increase Productivity” and it might help to list those here as well. I’ll give short explanations and if you want the full introduction to these tools, check out the link.

The Viddler Interview

I get contacted by students all the time. Journalism professors like to point to Spot.Us and they often assign projects that involved interviewing journalism entrepreneurs or new media models, etc. I try to make myself as available as possible. I also try not to get annoyed that I’m asked some of the same questions all the time. When people ask “where did the idea for Spot.Us” come from – I don’t want to be flippant and just write back in an email “from my head” nor do I want to spend 10 minutes writing out the real story (over and over again). Instead – I respond via Viddler, a YouTube competitor. If you check out my Viddler profile you’ll see I have almost 100 videos. All of them are titled “Answers for XX.” Typing out the answers without shortchanging the students would probably take a minimum of 20 minutes each. Using Viddler it’s closer to 5. The mental relief is also great. So create a second YouTube account or a Viddler account or some other video uploading competitor and use that second account as a way to talk with others who might be asking you long winded questions.

Text Expander

Do you write a lot of emails? Do many of them have the same elements or formats? Do you run an organization and sometimes you need to reach out to various people but you don’t want to mass email people (lame?). Do you write a lot of html and would love some shortcuts? Check out Text Expander. It creates files of text that are at your fingertips just create a short code like “news-orgmail” and when you type it – BAMN instantly the full text that you want to send to news orgs is pasted into your email. You can have as many short coded emails as you want.

Jing

This tool comes via Kara Andrade and Erik Sundelof. Jing is a screencast tool which is incredibly useful if you work with a remote team building and managing a website. If you’ve ever had a phone conversation with a web developer about a bug,  you’ll know that communication is hard. You’ll ask them to get on the computer so they can see what you see. But you are never 100% sure if what you are saying translates. All that goes away with Jing.

xPad

It is as cool as it sounds. The xPad is the ultimate notebook. Do you take notes on your computer? Do you use Microsoft Word to save those notes. If so – please stop reading this right now and slap yourself. Microsoft Word is a horrible way to take notes. It is clunky, big files, slow to open, slow to close and worse yet – doesn’t easily transfer online (people that cut and paste word documents into a  WYSWIG editor are a pet peeve.) For a long time I just had an internal system of using TextEdit (Rich Text Documents). It worked okay. I’d keep one blank document open at all times (note taking) and save important ones. Luckily Joy Mayer, a fellows Missouri Reynolds Fellow told me about xPad.

Rapportive

This little plugin helps you know who you are talking to. If you are like me and you get an email from somebody new one of the first things you do is Google them to get the details. Rapportive does that for you. Right there in your inbox they’ll search for related social media accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Forget searching to find out who this person is – it’s already in front of you. Related but not as practical: Gist.

Grease Monkey

Grease Monkey is the script that fathered all scripts. First: If you don’t use Firefox, stop reading this and slap yourself.

If you do use Firefox, are you using it to its full potential? Maybe not. Download Grease Monkey and then search through the seemingly endless add-ons. The important thing here is not to get lost in the sea of possibilities. Instead think about a problem you already have in your browsing experience.

From the launch of Spot.Us, I’ve always said the following:

• Anyone can tackle the crowdfunded journalism model. In fact, NPR could do it tomorrow and blow me out of the water. It’s just about being transparent and giving up control over how donation money gets spent.
• This model would have more success at the national or international level.
• This model would have more success if a known brand took the lead. (Again, I always tend to cite NPR.)

There has been much opining about the New York Times pay wall that went up this week. I was quoted in a Neiman Lab post on the topic; I wrote about it for the Reynolds Journalism Institute, where I’m currently a fellow; and I was a guest on WNPR, an NPR station in Connecticut, to discuss the topic with other news professionals.

Here’s one thing that I previously haven’t said publicly: Whether or not they know it, and without identifying it as such, the New York Times has taken a big step towards the NPR model. And that puts them just a stone’s throw away from the Spot.Us model. In some respects, I actually think they are closer and more likely to pull it off than NPR.

Subscription Plan Isn’t About Access

Let’s start by calling a “duck” what it is. The “pay wall” is not a “wall.” It’s incredibly porous. A savvy reader can find a dozen ways around it, from finding a Tweet of the story you’re interested in to removing part of the Times’ URL. In other words, the subscription plan is not about access. People that think the fee is about access are the same folks who think they have to pay AOL for Internet access in order to keep their AOL email address. Savvy readers will know it isn’t about “access” but rather something else. For starters, it benefits the print subscribers, who pay less for digital access than all-digital subscribers. Fair enough.

But I am willing to bet a LOT of people will pay for a “subscription” not for access and not because it comes with their print subscription, but for something else.

Donation Driven Journalism

If there is one thing that Press+ has taught us (aside from the fact that really rich folks can hype up a technology product and sell it off for millions of dollars) it’s that, yes, people will pay for news even if access to is never truly restricted. That’s a limited audience/market, but it exists. Interestingly enough, the price point doesn’t matter as much as one would think. That audience will pay $5 if you ask, and they’ll pay $15 if you set that as the benchmark.

National Public Radio has known about this small market for a LONG time. I could have told you this within 10 minutes of launching Spot.Us. But at least today we can see it as more of a given for the conversation. There is an audience that will pay for content. It’s small, and not a replacement for advertising, but it’s there.

The NYTimes.com subscription plans are not enough to sustain the entire organization, but it is a new revenue stream that didn’t exist before. You can call it a “pay wall” or a “metered wall” but, again, I think we should call a duck a duck. This is a donation system, plain and simple. News organizations don’t want to refer to “metered walls” as “donations,” and I understand why. I’m happy to stroke their hair as they cry into their ink-stained hands. We can call it whatever they want, but it’s a donation because there is no HARD reason for anyone to pay it other than because they want to or are too uninformed about how to get around it.

A Modest Proposal

Assuming the New York Times doesn’t want its future tied to the technical ignorance of the masses the way AOL currently does with its dial-up customers, the next question is: What can the Times give to its new donors? As Dave Winer and Steve Outing have both said:

“Wouldn’t it have been wise to, at this juncture, offer something to sweeten the deal. Something truly exciting and new that you get when you pay the money. Something that makes your palms sweat and your heart beat faster?” (Dave Winer)

Tote bags? Bumper stickers? Membership to a wine of the month club (with wine reviews from the Times sent along with every bottle)?

These incentives are necessary because the Times needs to find other ways to keep a paying customer on board. Where one month somebody might pay, the next they’ll slap their face and say, “Why am I doing this? It’s certainly not for access.”

These tote bag gifts mimic NPR fundraising. But let’s think even further. What could be an incentive that would increase transparency and participation in journalism and not cost the NYT organization infrastructure costs (ie: purchasing and shipping thousands of tote bags)?

Imagine if along with every $15 monthly “metered access” payment a NYTimes.com reader also got five NYT Points. After three months they’ve accumulated 15 NYT Points. Those points can then be used to vote on topics, areas of coverage, or redeemed for the tote bag mentioned above (an excellent plan B).

Again, NPR could do this tomorrow, except — believe it or not — NPR is a bureaucratic nightmare when it comes to how donations are handled. Remember, each NPR station is unique and the mothership NPR, aside from being caught in a culture war, is not allowed to fundraise from individuals the way independent stations are.

But the Times doesn’t have this hangup. Whether they admit it or not, they’ve begun fundraising efforts this week. So will the NYT find something to make it fun for donors? Or do they think that the false claim to “access” is enough?

Opportunity to Interact with the Times Community

I think there are a lot of smart folks at the Times and they’ll be watching how people react and pay/don’t pay for this subscription system. For those that do pay it one month the question is, will they continue to pay? For that, they need to be purchasing something. Call them “NYT Points,” call it “NYT Membership” — I don’t care. But I think a part of it should include giving those members a stake in how the funds from their subscription are spent.

In other words, there could be a new sense of transparency and participatory control in how a news organization spends its funds. With their new metered pay wall, the NYT is just one incy-wincy step away from cracking the code to crowd-funded journalism. Why do I want to pay my $15 this month? Because then I can vote on next month’s NYT coverage. This would be the NYT using a kind of Spot.Us model.

And if that day ever comes, you won’t find anyone happier than me.

I have learned a lot in my experience running Web projects including Spot.Us, a non-profit startup organization that fundraises for independent journalists. Building anything from the ground up requires myriad skills. One skill in particular played a pivotal role and enabled me to avoid many pitfalls that entrepreneurial journalists face as we tread into the unknown future of our craft. The fundamentals of journalism are still required. An organization must know how to produce engaging content. But it also needs at least one person who can do project management.

Project management isn’t about middle-managers, paper-pushing or other forms of newsroom bureaucracy. Project management at Spot.Us doesn’t entail dealing with our accountant, managing freelancers or planning our publication cycle. Managing a project isn’t about “business as usual” and has nothing to do with the day-to-day grind of putting out a publication.

Project management is the ability to plan, organize and secure resources necessary to see a project from start to finish, such as building a website or mobile application. One way to think about projects is in comparison to our understanding of games (video games, board games, etc). Like all games, projects have a stated purpose, an end point or definition of winning. They also have rules or constraints. Get caught as a “fish out of water” and you lose Marco Polo. For projects, constraints are either budgetary, time or scope. And like games, projects need a player who is making decisions to try to reach the end goal within those constraints. This is the project manager’s mission, should he or she choose to accept it.

Some organizations have the wrong vision for a project. This is a natural and acceptable position to be caught in. May a thousand flowers bloom and the industry learn from these mistakes. A much worse fate, and one that is not applauded, is a vision that never comes to fruition at all because of failed project management.

Once the vision and idea of success is articulated and agreed upon, the first conversation a project manager needs to have is around constraints. All too often this conversation is absent and the project suffers. It comes down to picking and choosing battles.

TWO OUTTA THREE AIN’T BAD

Games have very real constraints. Many have a limit of “lives.” Lose your last life in Mario Bros. and the game is over; the player’s actions in the game reflect this. Other games don’t have a sense of “life or death” but put in constraints of “points.” In Monopoly the points are literally “dollars,” and you only start the game with so much, but by taking risks you can earn more. It’s a game that requires an enormous commitment of trial and error in order to build a “monopoly.” Players in Mario Bros. may be cautious, where Monopoly players will try to buy up lots of property while they can, each reacting to their constraints.

These constraints are known to the player, but if an observer doesn’t understand them, it can be confusing. Project managers need to convey their constraints to everyone involved, especially the stakeholder. I often use the following phrase: “There’s good, fast and cheap. Pick two.”

In other words, project management constraints are usually some combination of time, budget or quality. If you want a website done cheap and fast, a capable project manager will find cheap developers and designers. But be prepared for the website to have bugs. If you want quality on a low budget, the project manager may have to rely on volunteers who’ll work at their own pace. The ideal scenario is to get a site built that is both good and fast, but it will cost you a pretty penny. If you have that option, congrats; you’ve been dealt a good hand.

The project manager doesn’t make the rules, but she does play by them. There is no wrong/right choice, but these are constraints a project manager will need to know in order to make the right decision. Constraints should be made in cahoots with stakeholders so there aren’t any surprises. A good project manager finds out the budgetary and time constraints, does research, and explains what is reasonable to deliver and at what quality. Then negotiation of constraints can happen in an informed manner.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

To rescue the princess in one popular video game, Link always needs to accomplish annoying side tasks. These feel like distractions, but it’s really a matter of timing and getting things in order. He can’t kill the dragon until he has acquired the sword. Link can’t find the sword until he has won the archery contest, and you can’t win that archery contest until you earn the rupees to buy the damn thing.

Depending on the project, there will be any number of side tasks. They are not distractions, and the order in which you do them can be fatal. For example, when building a website, you want to start with a clear description of every feature, then lay out those features in a design (forgetting aesthetics/logo). You will discover new features and priorities along the way, and that’s why you save development for last, right before the aesthetics and skin of the site. Otherwise you could blow through your development budget, and any discovery in the layout phase will result in a sub-par product. If you start with the logo, you’re just plain doing it wrong.

DISTRACTIONS OF TECHNOLOGY

There are, of course, tons of practical decisions a project manager makes. What technology platform should a site be built on? Who should we hire to build or design it? What hosting service should we use? A project manager cannot be an expert on everything. But she should know how to communicate with experts, interpret their knowledge and put it to practical use.

There are always trade-offs. If a decision is made and the project manager isn’t aware of what is sacrificed, even if it turns out to be the right decision, it is being made blindly and is a poor decision. If you build a site in Drupal, you are choosing a robust starting point and sacrificing flexibility to build out custom features. If you choose Django, you are making the opposite decision. When you hire someone straight out of college, you are sacrificing experience for a lower salary and hopefully some enthusiasm. Again, there is no right or wrong. But there is informed and uninformed. Doing anything in the latter could bite you in the butt.

Every project is unique and has its own constraints. But it’s the job of the project manager to make decisions in light of constraints so the job still gets done. There is always a finish line in sight for a project manager. As news and technology collide and combine, publishers will increasingly find themselves in the position of technology companies. And technology companies live and die around their ability to launch new projects. In the near future I suspect we will all shout: “Project managers for the win!”

With that in mind, I wanted to write a practical post. Five simple things that increase my productivity. Before the list begins a disclaimer: The only way to increase productivity is to do things. You can be equipped with every tool out there – but if you don’t focus it won’t help. As my friend Cyrus says “Being a good writer is 3% talent, and 97% not being distracted by the Internet.”

What tools save you time?

(As an added bonus example – this image provided via Tagaroo. Waste time looking for good photos, try Tagaroo!)

Text Expander

Do you write a lot of emails? Do many of them have the same elements? Do you run an organization and sometimes you need to do reach out to various people but you don’t want to mass email people (lame?). Do you write a lot of html and would love some shortcuts? Check out Text Expander. This original tool came to me via Amy Gahran, bless her soul,  and has been a life saver. It even keeps track of how much it estimates its saved you. To date for me: 92 hours (estimating that I type 400 characters a minute). It also has an auto-correct tool that fixes common typos. Lucky for me, my typos are never common.

Jing

This tool comes via Kara Andrade and Erik Sundelof. Jing is a screencast tool which is incredibly useful if you work with a remote team building and managing a website. If you’ve ever had a phone conversation with a web developer about a bug,  you’ll know that communication is hard. You’ll ask them to get on the computer so they can see what you see. But you are never 100% sure if what you are saying translates. All that goes away with Jing. Now take a quick screencast of what you are seeing and upload that to screencast automatically and then share the link. Boom – you and your team are on the same page. No need to schedule a conference call, no worries about miscommunication.

xPad

It is as cool as it sounds. The xPad is the ultimate notebook. Do you take notes on your computer? Do you use Microsoft Word to save those notes. If so – please stop reading this right now and slap yourself. Microsoft Word is a horrible way to take notes. It is clunky, big files, slow to open, slow to close and worse yet – doesn’t easily transfer online (people that cut and paste word documents into a WYSWIG editor are a pet peeve.) For a long time I just had an internal system of using TextEdit (Rich Text Documents). It worked okay. I’d keep one blank document open at all times (note taking) and save important ones. Luckily Joy Mayer, a fellows Missouri Reynolds Fellow told me about xPad. I have not needed to open up Text Edit since. The xPax stays open. I can create a new internal document in seconds. Rename it whenever, delete it and flip between notes in a breeze. If you have tons of Word documents or any other kind of documents clouding your desktop this is your solution.

Rapportive

This little plugin helps you know who you are talking to. If you are like me and you get an email from somebody new one of the first things you do is Google them to get the details. Rapportive does that for you. Right there in your inbox they’ll search for related social media accounts on LinkedIn, facebook, Twitter, and more. Forget searching to find out who this person is – it’s already in front of you. Related but not as practical: Gist.

Grease Monkey

Grease Monkey is the script that fathered all scripts. First: If you don’t use Firefox, stop reading this and slap yourself.

If you do use Firefox, are you using it to its full potential? Maybe not. Download Grease Monkey and then search through the seemingly endless add-ons. The important thing here is not to get lost in the sea of possibilities. Instead think about a problem you already have in your browsing experience. Maybe you want a better way to find the latest news. Then go to Grease Monkey and search news. You can see already there are more tools here than one person could use. But – I promise that picking the right one will save you a TON of time and energy.

So there you have it – these are just five tools that I use on a regular basis that have probably saved me countless hours. More than 92 at least

I do not think we hold our tech blogs to high enough standards. I think we let them take us on cult of personality rides and we get infatuated. Today I am a total back-seat tech-writer. As I read various tech blogs I find myself wondering how I would cover issues. I have lots of praise but also constructive criticism for the current tech blog scene. Since people often ask me what sites I follow to stay on top of things I figure a post like this will let me rant and answer that question.

Disclaimer: I’m focusing on organizations that cover technology. If this list were to include tech pundits or individuals (Kottke, Laughing Squid, Rough Type, etc) it would be much longer. I am also excluding sites that cover the cross-section of technology and media (Nieman, MediaShift, Buzzmachine, PaidContent, etc). This is not an exhaustive list. It’s tech-blogging 101 for those that need to be introduced.

So without further adieu – my list of tech blogs and their vibes.

Read Write Web

Right now Read Write Web is the New York Times of tech blogs. This isn’t just because they have a syndication deal (which they do) but because RWW provides a sense of analysis that other tech blogs don’t. I recently met Richard MacManus, the founder of RWW, who confirmed that their emphasis was on context rather than speed. This may seem counter-intuitive in a world of speed and constant updates, but it is what separates them and as a reader I appreciate it and trust them more than most tech blogs because of it.

Wired

It’s hard for me to objectively describe Wired. Not that objectivity is the goal, but I worked there for the first year out of college and it is still one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. As a result, thinking about Wired gives me warm fuzzies and I know first hand how much love and attention goes into the editorial process. As a result this is a go-to source of tech news. It is for many people because Wired is one of the first sources of tech news. For some, like my father, Wired isn’t a news source – it’s a cultural touchstone. It represents the tech revolution itself.

TechCrunch

TechCrunch is guilty of the cult-of-personality. You cannot separate organization from Mike Arrington who has shaped it from the ground up. This is not a bad thing. Mike has a strong personality and he knows it. His importeur is all over TechCrunch. So whenever I read TechCrunch (which from what I can tell values speed over context) I have to put on my Mike Arrington goggle filters. That said, TechCrunch pushes boundaries in reporting and that is why I love following them. They have mastered the art of respectfully changing an article based on reader comments. At one point they even tried to kill embargoes for their site. I am sure it didn’t work – bu that kind of radical thinking shows the role that techblogs can have and that’s why TechCrunch is notable. They are not afraid to push boundaries while covering technology.

Mashable (Updated from Comments)

The truth of the matter is – I love some of the PEOPLE at Mashable (Vadim Lavrusik and Tamar, etc) but I DON’T like Mashable. In fact, it comes to mind as a tech blog who I wish would step it up.  First: In tone and ethos it comes off way too much like MTV. Everything is very flashy, glitzy, etc. It makes an old man like me have seizures. More important: They are a tech company disguised as a news site. They write how-to’s, lists, digg-bait, etc. As a result they have a dog in the tech-race that they are covering. I think all tech blogs have a dog in the race to some extent – but none more obviously so than Mashable IMHO. I like their content when I’m in a certain mood. But if I’m not in that mood – it can actually irk me.

Venture Beat

I like Venture Beat because it is straight and to the point. Follow the money. This is the Wall Street Journal of tech blogs. I’ve known a few writers who have worked here over the years and I think they do a good job of following the industry. It’s also interesting to note that like GigaOm this blog was started by a tech reporter from a newspaper. Today in journalism we talk about entrepreneurialism and personal branding. These tech blogs are living proof of why.

GigaOm

Similar to Venture Beat this is an example of a tech reporter who owned his beat and turned that into owning his own media company. That is admirale and has a larger lesson for the journalism industry. In fact, GigaOm is becoming more and more of a general purpose destination. They cover everything from the environment and media, but with a tech spin. They also do a good job of letting you know the individual writers including Mathew Ingram (one of my all time favs).

Engadget/Gizmodo

In truth I am not an Engadget or Gizmodo fan. My interest in technology is rarely gadgets or gizmos. These two sites occupy the same space in my mind. The recent iPhone 4 kerfuffle was notable. I think these blogs tend to be caught up in shiny new play things and that is not interesting. It’s straight consumerism. They might as well be printing catalogs for Apple and other companies. Just my anti-consumerism two cents.

Business Insider

I’ve been following Business Insider back when it was called Silicon Alley Insider. One of the defining things about this site is it’s New York attitude and approach to covering technology. They are distinctively not caught up in the hype machine that can be silicon valley. I love this about them. They also BLEW ME AWAY with their investigation on Facebook. Talk about holding a company’s feet to the fire.

Lifehacker

I love this site for thinking out of the box. This shows you how technology can improve your life on a very practical level. Whereas Venture Beat is all about following the money, this site is about following the practical uses for your everyday life. For that, it is invaluable.

Search Engine Land

I’m including this as an example of a niche tech site. There are tons of these (some of the best cover specific sites like All Facebook). They are fantastic when you want to dive deep. Search is arguably the most important online industry and this is a great blog to follow it. I also recommend John Battele’s Searchblog if you want the go-to independent blogger source and for many of these niche topics the independent blogger who covers the beat is just as insightful as the niche organization.

Silicon Valley Watcher

The last on the list Silicon Valley Watcher does an amazing job of staying very personal (Tom Foremski) but with an air of professionalism. It’s just a good read. No final analogy (although I think Tom’s time at the Financial Times is reflected in this blog.

So what is your favorite source of tech news and how do you describe it?

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As many a reader know, I love drawn out analogies. Here are some of my favorites.

• Journalism bloggers as musicians
• The Community Dream Team: Tech versions of the 1994 Basketball Dream Team. Lawrence Lessig was the Larry Bird of my Internet Dream Team.
• Cities as relatives (I will soon include Columbia Missouri to the list of “my three cities”).
• Community journalism as baseball and as a social gathering.

I’ve always wanted to see a Crunchbase for journalism startups. If this is a time of experimentation then we need to keep better track of projects that start and fail. When I talk to young journo-entrepreneurs that don’t know what Backfence was, I’m concerned we are going to reinvent the wheel. Or worse – reinvent a squeaky wheel.

All of this is to say – we can learn from projects that fail (failure is not a bad word). Recently a Y Combinator project “NewsTilt” launched to great fanfare only to shut down three months later, returning money back to the investors. I want to examine this not from a high-horse position, but because from my point of view the speed at which this happened allows us to hone in on specific lessons.

1. Under Promise and Over Deliver

This is a general rule of thumb whenever you are going to try something for the first time aka a web-startup. When you launch, you probably only have one iota of functionality. That is the functionality you can promise. From their press release: “NewsLabs aims to save journalism by building community around news.”

Stop right there. No ONE thing will save journalism. You will never find me claiming that Spot.Us is going to save journalism. I often say that Spot.Us is PART of the solution or PART of the future for journalism – but there is no silver bullet. As awesome as you think your startup is, don’t claim that you are inventing the coolest thing since sliced bread. If you have indeed done that, others will say it for you. When Spot.Us launched my stated goal was to fund 4-6 enterprise reporting projects in the first year. Looking back that might have been a VAST under-promise. But hey, I delivered and then some.

Meanwhile NewsLabs (the company of NewsTilt) claimed “This is the future of journalism.”

It seems the CTO also learned this lesson as stated in his farewell note:

In retrospect, I now believe that we should never have made promises about building your online brand or large amounts of traffic (early email threads about how to deal with large number of comments now seem very ironic).

2. Duty and Teamwork

It is easy to start speculating here because of the nature of how this venture shut down. The CTO wrote a farewell post noting that the CEO had left two-weeks earlier. There was also mention that for one of the three months the startup was around the CEO was on a honeymoon. This leaves room for a lot of WTF questions which I won’t go into, but my friend Matt Mireles does (glad somebody asked these questions and pointed out the craziness). I’m less interested in the drama that probably occurred behind the scenes than I am from the lesson we can take here – which is around the role and relationship of founders. (note: Hacker News has a thread where the CEO says he will give his own postmortem explanation).

I was lucky to meet Paul Gahram the week before NewsTilt shut down. He gave a talk about successful startups and his first rule is: Founders, founders founders (to the tune of – location, location, location).

The idea and technology behind a startup is not nearly as important as the founders. That is the heart and soul of a startup. He went on to talk about dynamics of founders, the number of founders and the relationship between founders. Bottom line, it’s important that they have a strong and trusting relationship. Things WILL get tough and you need to be able to lean on each other. The analogy Paul used was that of soldiers. They form a bond with each other such that they don’t want to let each other down. Marines go through hell during training to become “brothers” so that in the thick of battle you don’t show a tint in your armor. It’s not because you aren’t scared – but because you don’t want to cause concern for your other brothers. When things are tough, you smile and carry on, usually bearing more than your normal load. The startup world moves so fast that if both founders feel that bond, they’ll both smile, carry more than they can – and will often come out of it with a stronger startup than when they entered the tough times.

3. Your value is NOT just for journalists

NewsTilt had a good proposition for writers, as Spot.Us contributor Matt Baume noted, but it needed to be checked with an appeal to a larger audience. I’ve ranted about this recently. NewsTilt was not the startup I was discussing in that original post – nor do I think they are 100% guilty of this journo-startup-sin, but I think a comparison with True/Slant gets my point across.

• In fact True/Slant and NewsTilt are VERY similar (they should have studied True/Slant. The technology NewsTilt offered wasn’t that much better.
• Both had a shot at marketing but True/Slant‘s efforts were more geared toward attracting readers (same with The Faster Times). NewsTilt started by appealing to and attracting to reporters. Great for a discussion in the journalism community among journalists who discuss the future of journalism – bad for the other 99.99 percent of the population.
• An interesting side note: True/Slant was bought by Forbes, although it was not a true acquisition Forbes was an early investor and the founder was a former editor of Forbes and is now head of innovation. This could have been a signal to NewsTilt that potential exists are tough.

4. It takes more than three months

If your goal is traffic and engagement (for the sake of traffic) it will take more than three months. Plain and simple. Which is to say – don’t quit on your startup. Granted if lesson #2 (duty and teamwork) is hitting the fan, you have other issues and maybe should throw in the towel – but you can’t quit after three months because the traffic isn’t where you want it to be. Iterate, learn and adapt. Three months is not enough time to evaluate if you are able/unable to achieve your under-promised goals. The lesson here: The best way for your startup to fail is if you quit.

If you build it – they will come only works with ghosts and baseball fields. Websites don’t possess that power (except for Kevin Costner’s website)

5. Technology won’t necessarily solve a social problem.

Journalism faces a lot of problems. Some of them are technical. Or better yet, some of them are the inability of news organizations to become technical. Or better yet, some of them are a result of technology changing the way we exchange information. Or better yet, some of them are about how technology is changing the economics of content. Or better yet, some of them are related to how technology is changing the way people spend their time (I know you’d rather be LOL Cating right now).

Point is: Technology is very much a part of this discussion – but it is not necessarily the solution to what is a very deep and nuanced social issue. I think (although I certainly don’t know) the folks at NewsTilt put too much emphasis on their tech-wizardry and the idea that they would build tools for journalist and all the sudden POOF – journalism would be solved.

Again – technology is certainly a PART of the solution, but it needs to be integrated within the fabric of a social context – where the problem exists.

As a past winner I try to help out at the PBS Idea Lab blog when I can, so I interviewed a few of the winners. The video is below.

It should also be noted that one of the winners PRX is going to work with the Spot.Us code! I included a video of Jake Shapiro explaining what exactly they are going to do.

Winner: Brad Flora from Windy Citizen. For details on his project check out the PBS Idea Lab post.

My friends at USC Tom Grasty and Nonny de la Peña and their creation Stroome!

The folks from Davis Wiki are launching Local Wiki

From Arizona’s School of journalism: City Seed

The folks from Front Porch Forum

Jake Shapiro explaining PRX’s StoryMarket