Newspapers Need to Sweat the Small Stuff in Social Media

A widely-publicized Gartner survey says newspapers are missing out on the social media revolution. Newspaper search is below par next to Google or Yahoo and they have failed to integrate social media into their “content ecosystems.”

Those are the survey’s macro conclusions. Allow me to share more localized observations  many of which I’ve thought about for a long time that support Gartner’s conclusions.

It took eons for newspapers to include reporter’s email addresses at the end of stories, implying that newspapering was a one way conversation. Some still don’t. Methinks it is not a waste of space.

The message was “We talk to you, but you don’t talk to us.” It was arrogant and now the chickens are coming home to roost with newspapers in a tailspin. When I returned to IT newsweekly PC Week in early 1991, I put my email on every weekly column and slowly, others adopted the same practice, seemingly small at the time. And I tried to respond with a “thanks for your note” in appreciation that they were willing to spend the time writing regardless of whether they agreed, disagreed, praised or railed at me. I was also guilty of arrogance, too, but that wore off a long time ago.

Here’s another example. The Boston Globe for which I written for many years and dearly love as evidenced by my dropping $400 once again to get the dead tree edition for another year uses a Twitter feed (I think it’s GlobeRedsox…Twitter is “stressing out” so I cannot find it) to send out tweets on the Red Sox. Last time I looked,  it had a following of  3,500 or so and was following eight which were other Globe sports team feeds.

Granted, this is probably an automatic news feed, but someone has to look at and manage those tweets. Shouldn’t they be listening to its readers and/or fellow twits? I suppose the Globe should get credit for having a Red Sox Twitter feed, but it needs to follow all those that follow it. The newspaper, which I sense does a decent job with social media relative to its peers, has many sports blogs where readers can liberally comment, but they shouldn’t they be able to Twitter into the Globe as well?

That the Globe sees fit not to follow anyone on that Twitter account reinforces the notion that the newspaper as a mighty institution doesn’t need to listen to constituents. At minimum, it could follow all those that follow them and  blithely ignore the reader tweets. The message would be “we appreciate you following us so we’ll follow you and we think Twitter is important.” That’s a powerful and important statement.

Lately, I have been trying to follow some journalists and editors on Twitter and many are still are nowhere to be seen. The same applies to Facebook although many journalists are doing a good job on their own initiative. If I was the editor, I’d be telling my charges to get their butts on Twitter and Facebook as well as integrating those mediums into the brand.

I’ve heard comments like “Twitter is stupid” or “I don’t get Twitter.” Any newsperson who doesn’t immediately recognize its value as an ideal realtime news delivery mechanism might consider a new profession (given the state of newspapers, they probably are anyway). When Twitter “Find” comes back up, I’ll see if the scribes at my local newspaper (not the Globe) are Twittering.

I have yet to find a newspaper that has figured out how to survive much less thrive in the Age of Social Media. Someone told me the Austin Statesman is doing well, but it’s hard to tell from a financial perspective because it is owned by closely held Cox Newspapers. When I do, I will duly note it in this space and share their success story.

My 400th Twitter Follower: Is this a Omen?

ようこそ、John Dodge (johnmdodge)! Koji Shida (koji_shida) があなたをフォローし始めました。 下のリンクで Koji Shida のプロフィールを確認してみてください。 http://twitter.com/koji_shida Koji Shidaをフォローするために、「フォロー」のボタンをクリックしてください。 それでは Twitter — こうしたメールによる通知を中止したい場合はこちら: http://twitter.com/account/notifications

Boston Globe Killacycle Article: The Cutting Room Floor

My piece on the Killacycle, an electric drag racing motorcycle, ran in this morning’s Boston Globe and is presently on the Boston.com’s home page. Quite a bit didn’t appear including a sidebar about why electric  drag racing has not taken root in New England. The sidebar’s main source is electric car owner Bob Rice, who is a thoroughly entertaining and crusty retired Amtrak engineer.  Some technical details were dropped in the main story, but those are nowhere near as good as the last line of the main story. It expresses the wonderfully contrarian nature of electric car folks.

>The Killacycle is not bad for a guy who finished 14^th in his high school class. That’s 14th from the bottom in a class of 835, he proudly points out.<

Here’s the sidebar:

The popularity of electric vehicle racing is growing if the membership of the National Electric Drag Racing Association (NEDRA) is any indication. Now up to more than 100 members, the organization has come a long way since “a small group of ampheads” like Bill Dubé and John Wayland met over pizza a dozen years ago following the Saturday night races

“The Northwest is the hotbed right now,” says NEDRA president Mike Willmon who credits Dubé and Portland, Ore. forklift mechanic Wayland with pioneering the sport of electric vehicle racing. “Bill’s gotten in big with Harley drag racing. They brought him under their wing as a token electric.”

Wayland nicknamed “Plasma Boy” built the White Zombie, a 1972 street-legal Datsun 1200 sedan that holds the electric car quarter mile record. Both Dubé and Wayland have been building, racing and commuting in electric vehicles for a decade or more.

While New England has spawned battery maker A123 Systems and universities where substantial electric car research is underway, the six-state region hosts virtually no electric vehicle racing. A lack of drag strips, money and interest are to blame.

“It’s a different mindset out west in Wayland country,” says Bob Rice, a retired Amtrak engineer from Killingsworth, Conn. Rice is president of the New England chapter of the Electric Auto Association. “It was a whole different world when I was out there,” he says about his visit last year to the Wayland Invitational races. He made the cross-country trip to Portland, Ore., in his Prius, but locally zips round in the “Led Sled,” a 1989 Jetta he converted to an electric.

What’s missing here, he says, are drag strips. “I’d love to see it, but there isn’t enough racing support here. The City of Portland owns the Portland International Raceway.” As a result, he refers to the East Coast as the “Least Coast” with the trademark irreverence characterizing many electric racing pioneers.

“If you want to see real racing, you’ve got to go out west. Sure, drag racing is silly, but it’s a lot more fun than advancing technology through wars,” he says, citing how death and destruction propelled aviation. A drag strip is an ideal environment to determine when batteries overheat, explode, catch fire, under-perform or wear out quickly,

“The Least Coast is stuck in the 19^th century,” Rice wryly observes.

Twitter Lingo from Tweet Town

Do you know what you’re doing if you Twoogle? Here’s Tweet Town’s definition:

“Twoogle - Twitter as the human Google. Pose a question, get near-instantaneous results. The Wall Tweet Journal.”

Tweettown has the best Twitter vocabulary list I’ve seen or certainly the most comprehensive. The good thing is you can make them up as you go.

Twaiting is twittering while waiting. Some are obvious like twibute (to praise someone on twitter). Others are more bizarre like  “Twitterbate - To masturbate to another user’s tweets.” Could be a twitter rebate, too….or a twitter debate although that would be twitterdebate. Right?

Here’s one they can add: Twitchup…twitter with ketchup, which would mean that twitstard would be twitter with mustard. I can hearElmer Fudd now.

Twitter commentary on ITNews.com

I just wrote an ITnews.com commentary on why I think Twitter is not a  flash in the pan and how companies are starting to embrace it. The piece was was hooked into an IDG News Service story that described Salesforce.com’s efforts to deploy Twitter as a tool to help customers.

A lot of folks say they think Twitter is stupid and I guess you have to be something of a news hound to go around sharing thoughts and links a couple of dozen times a day. I love it. In fact, I love the ability to measure my own audience which is still comparatively small at 300 in Twitter. Same with Facebook where I have 740 friends.  Growing those numbers is a hoot and I mean with people I know or with whom I share a common interest. Of course, the larger the group, the more diverse its composition. If you have a Twitter following of 200k, it’s pretty hard to know everyone on a first-name basis.

While many journalists still get queasy around web metrics, I like them because they give you the ability to measure and expand your reach as well as to de-emphasize what isn’t garnering eyeballs.

Anyhow, check out my Twitter commentary on ITnews.com and follow me on Twitter.

Rough Cut Lumber from Esty’s Sawmill

Rough cut lumber where a 4x4 is really four inches by four inches.

[Follow me on twitter]

Working with rough cut lumber (spruce, white pine) and truely measured lumber is a joy. Yesterday, I had a chance to go to the Ralph A. Esty & Son sawmill and lumber yard in Groveland, Mass to pick up some lumber for a firewood storage shed.

I love rough cut lumber because it’s often green and incredibly easy to work. What’s more, a 2×4 is an honest 2×4. They don’t shave a half inch off the dimensions and call it a 2×4 like at Home Depot and most yards. I never understood why lumber companies did that. What happened to truth in advertising? A board foot at Esty is 1 foot x inch x 1 foot and often a eight foot board or stud is nine foot, never shorter than what’s specified.

I thought the mill had closed which would have been too bad because it’s the only one in the area. That was the rumor and Esty’s rivals enjoyed spreading it, according to manager Roy Esty. Indeed, the sawmill and yard have fallen on hard times and is running only three days a week now, but at least it’s running. Five years ago, the place was bustling, thanks to what Roy termed “commercial business” such as pallets for Haverhill Paperboard, which closed last summer throwing 174 out of work. I recall in the early eighties a friend loading up his truck with bark mulch because Esty gave it away. Same with scraps for firewood.

Five years,  I built a small barn out of Esty’s rough cut lumber (spruce, I think) which feels, smells and looks good. Instead of the usual plywood for the floor, I used rough cut inch thick planks at half the cost.

Roy said milling oak for box truck beds is quite robust, though. Yesterday when I visited, it was just Roy and another counter man working. Five years ago, there’d be four counter men writing up lumber from a separate building from the hardware store (great assortment of barn hinges, latches and sliders and they had a guy who specialized in barns) and just as many yard men. The place has a bit of a forlorn look, but at least it is still going as it has been since 1917. Haverhill Paperboard started up in 1902!

The operation sits on a sharp bend in the Merrimack River and the Esty family could have been sold to developers in real estate’s gogo days. I’m glad they didn’t and are still cutting logs just as their forebears did for the past 92 years. I urge you to pay them a visit should you have the opportunity or need.

IEEE Bestows Journalism Award on Dodge (me!)

It’s time to brag a little as the IEEE put out a press release today about the two winners of of their 2008 Distinguished Journalistic Contributions awards for furthering the engineering profession. I’m proud to say yours truly is one of them. Unfortunately, I did not make it to Salt Lake City for the IEEE’s annual meeting where the awards were presented. Anyhow, I won it for my coverage and conceptualization of Design News’ Boeing 787 Dreamliner coverage.

In total, Design News where I was editor-in-chief won four awards for that coverage for which I was the architect and often the author. Now if only the damn plane would fly!?

My deepest thanks go to Dean Geoffrey Orsak who heads SMU’s  Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering. He sponsored my award application and had the brilliant idea that I take a shot  at it. He sent me the press release which I ran in its entirety below (Unfortunately, I cannot locate the link.) MSNBC.com science editor Alan Boyle also won the award for 2008.

I am very proud of this award because electrical engineers as a rule are a very hard crowd to please – especially if you are a journalist.

> From: p.mccarter@ieee.org > Date: March 17, 2009 5:18:56 PM CDT

> To: Multiple recipients

> Subject: IEEE-USA Awards $3,000 in Honoraria to Journalists Who Have Increased Engineering Awareness

IEEE-USA IN ACTION: $3,000 IN HONORARIA PRESENTED TO TWO JOURNALISTS WHO HAVE ADDED TO PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF ENGINEERING

For the first time, IEEE-USA has awarded two $1,500 honoraria to recognize print and electronic journalists who have added to a greater public understanding of the contributions of engineering and computer professionals to society.

The two award winners were recognized by 2008 IEEE-USA President Russell Lefevre at the organization’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City on 28 February: Alan Boyle, science editor of MSNBC.com, for his series of articles on future engineering challenges; and John Dodge, editor-in-chief of DESIGN NEWS, for his series of articles on key new technologies in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Past award recipients have included NPR’s Richard Harris (1991); the CHICAGO TRIBUNE’s Jon Van (1993); THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’s G. Pascal Zachary (1998); and Jon Katz, for his book, “Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho” (2000).

To see articles written by the 2008 IEEE-USA journalism award winners, go to: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16545946; andhttp://www.designnews.com/blog/Design_engineering_at_large/205-Boeing_s_787_Dreamliner_aims_to_improve_flying.php > > CONTACT: Pender M. McCarter, APR, Fellow PRSA, Senior Public Relations Counselor, +1 202 530 8353, p.mccarter@ieee.org

Chris Marvelous Adventure Moves to Stockholm, Lidice, Plzen and Terezin

You might notice TDR has a new look and that’s for one reason. I had to add pages for son Chris’ fabulous travelogue from his semester in Europe. He is studying at Charles University in Prague and taking advantage of cheap fares to travel somewhere fascinating every weekend.

His travelogues were too long and rich to assign to a blog post and if I had, all my other posts would have been pushed off the page and into oblivion. So I added them as a page (sorry for the WordPress mumbo jumbo). Also, the page headings in the old look were too big and occupied too much space. The new look is more accomodating in that regard and has three instead of two columns. There’s other things I want to clean up on TDR so stay tuned. And let me know what you think.

In any event, I posted his wonderful ramble on his weekend in Stockholm and Uppsala as well his visits to Lidice where the Nazis committed revenge driven mass murder, Terezin known for its concentration camp and Plzen where Pilsner beer was invented. It’s vintage Chris again making you feel like you are traveling with him. The title of the page is  Stockholm, Lidice and Terezin. It includes direct links to a copious amount of photos he posted on Facebook.

His first post is equally entertaining and is called Prague to Budapest. With his permission, I will also post the tale of his profound discovery of his Hedja relatives in Bovejov, a town if 500 two and half hours from Prague.  The Hedja’s are on Ann Dooley’s mother side. Ann has been my better half for 26 years. It been wonderful to plot his travels via direct communication on Gmail chat and viewing for he provides updates on his Facebook account.

ITnews.com after Week one

It”s been four days since I posted because I have been so busy with the launch of ITnews .com. It’s been a blast so far…so much news, so little time!

Anyhow, ITnews.com for those of you who don’t know aggregates the news from across IDG’s myriad news brands – Computerworld, PC World, IDG News Service, The Industry Standard, Network World and Infoworld.  Given my long history covering IT, it’s been very gratifying to reconnect with so many former colleagues who are 1) at IDG, 2) still in the ‘industry’ as we call it, and 3) folks I’ve reconnected with on Facebook (we have a ITnews.com facebook group, too).

Anyhow, I am working with Martha Connors who runs IDG’s Online Publishing Group, a bunch of sharp developers who created a great content management system based on drupal, the open source CMS.  It took me about 24 hours to pick up. With so many free and robust CMS’ like drupal and WordPress, one wonders why some companies spend millions on such CMS platforms (and metrics) .

Anyhow, check out ITnews.com and as always, let me know what you think. And as always, I’m always on the lookout for good stories…exclusives and scoops of perception. Got a good one tonight eating dinner at a neighbor’s  on the hot topic of social media metrics – measuring the conversation about your company.

My plan is to be up here on the Dodge Retort as frequently as possible, sometimes pointing to the hotter stories on ITnews.com.

Hooray Lenovo T43, Boo LG Chocolat, HP PSC 1610

I am constantly amazed how much technology comes into my home office and household. So here’s some quick hits on two things I disliked and one thing I liked. Call it the hooray and ixnay report.

Hooray for the Lenovo T43 ThinkPad notebook model 1871. No, it’s not a new netbook. Not new at all. It’s not small. In fact, don’t confuse with the Russian T-34 tank that beat the Germans in WWII. The 14.1 inch display makes it quite big and bulky. But I’m not here to talk about it’s display, processor or any of its innards. It has to most magnificent keyboard I have laid my hands on in a notebook. And I just got the notebook yesterday from IDG where I am editor of a new tech news aggregration site called ITnews.com. I could wail on the keyboard and feel was, as Woody Allen said, “transplendent” if such a non-word could have meaning. A friend of mine who works at Lenovo said to me: “We make the best keyboards in the world.” Now I believe him.

Ixnay on LG Chocolate cell phone.  I’ve had four or five of them in the past two years. No one could hear me. Then I couldn’t hear anyone. Yeah, I got one or two a little wet, but they should have lasted. Worst of all the nav wheel is so small, you end up hitting the wrong thing which is really bad when you shouldn’t be using a cell phone-like when driving. My phone cost money with two years activation about that long ago. A month ago, I noticed it was free. I wonder if it now falls into the “you can’t give those away” category.

And the booby prize of the day goes to the Hewlett-Packard PSC 1610 All-in-One printer. I like the idea of printing, copying and scanning and the PSC 1610 fit neatly within my tight workspace. But the paper feed never worked, giving me fits when the printer seized up telling me it was out of paper or there was a jam. Poor thing has a few of my fist marks on it. If I hold the paper just right, the feed catches,  but with mutiple copies, I never do better than two for three. It’s an enormous pain.

I did get some satisfaction, though. When an engineer from H-P dinged me for something in one of my prior engineering blogs, I told him his printers STINK.

I’ve had a new Canon PIXMA MX310 in the box, but hate configuring printers so much it’s been sitting on the floor for a month. And I had a bad Canon printer before, but could not bring myself to buy another H-P because the PCS 1610 was not the first bad one, either. I also want to use the H-P until the ink runs dry given the extortionate price of cartridges.