Close readers will notice a trend in 2008 here on Searchblog: I’ll be posting stuff about conversations, and in particular how companies are doing when it comes to having conversations with their key constituents. You may recall my one of my seminal posts on this topic: From Pull To Point, in which I urged the Wall St. Journal and the Economist to join what I called at that time “The Point To Economy.” I now call it “The Conversation Economy” and since I wrote that post, the NYT has joined, and it looks like the Journal may follow. But as this post from Poynter shows, CBS News ain’t even nearly there yet, and it’s particularly interesting, because it has to do with video, which I think is a key grammar in what I am starting to call the emerging Internet Creole. From the post:
CBS Sunday Morning may be the best news show on television. A couple of weeks ago, it carried a superb piece on the art of conversation — one that I wanted to send to a friend. So, logically, I went to CBSNews.com to look for it.
It’s not there. Or maybe it is — but I certainly couldn’t find it.
Well, I found a text writeup ( http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/12/16/sunday/main3623367.shtml ), but it says that:
Comments Are Closed For This Story
Commenting closes 72 hours after this story was published. If you would like to make a comment, you may: comment on today’s stories or contact CBSNews.com
Interesting — they appear to be most interested in “gut reactions”, “knee-jerk responses”, etc.
John–
I wrote a 2,200-word article for PBS MediaShift last August examining why it is so much more difficult to search through video news archives than it is to to search through print/online news archives.
It has less to do with “the Conversation” than it does with “the Search.” As you are looking to update your book, this research effort should be another important addition to it.
Jon
John– let me expand on my point above. You are vastly over-complicating this issue. You would like (as we all should), a searchable index of all of the content from a given media channel (whether it is WSJ or CBS). You would like each item from that index (an article, or show) to have an anchor to link to. If RDF had been deployed properly (instead of the hack we love which is RSS), we would have reached this point by now.
Additionally, as I found through my article for PBS Mediashift, video search/browsing continues to be several years behind text search. That’s what I heard from many folks doing video news archives in academia, footage houses, and the new “2.0” search facilities.
The best bet for searching video is AOL’s Truveo, but for some reason, CBS is not making Sunday Morning episodes available online, and Truveo doesn’t have it from any other source.
I’ve done enough legwork on this. You and Mr. Zollman are interactive media professionals. You likely have more time than I do to track down somebody at CBS. Don’t even mention “the conversation.” Just say you are trying to track down a video clip of theirs, you’d like to see if it is available online– and, if not, why; if so– what would it cost to watch it.
As per “the conversation.” The NYT has had seamless links to the archive for 2+ years now. You claim that they only “joined the conversation” 3 months ago with the end of TimesSelect. But this is pure myth. As I demonstrated in my research series, people were linking to the NYT in great numbers over those two years.
It appears that you argue here that freeing the Op-Ed writers represented a change in the conversation. But in your book, you wrote: “Notice I did not say abandon paid registration, in fact, I support it.”
Either you are not being consistent with what you wrote, or you didn’t really articulate well what you were trying to say on this in The Search.
Three weeks ago I sent you my response to this section of your book. I did plenty of legwork here, providing a list for you of the Google News ranking algorithm, explaining some of the data uncovered by NewsKnife, etc. I think that sending this presentation of information would be valuable to your readers.