Mystery Journalism Theater 3000

Posted on September 17, 2010 Written by 11 Comments
mst3000

The boxes are blurring and the silos are stirring. Welcome to a Brave New World of journalism.

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I’ve maintained that while newspapers are in trouble, journalism isn’t going anywhere. (No, it’s not going to TV, which is floundering through its own business model issues.) There will always be a place for the activity of sharing information and analysis in a timely manner. However, because the price of delivering that information has so radically upended the business model, it may take a while to figure out exactly who gets paid, by whom, and how. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication Tagged: , ,

The Zombie’s Brain

Posted on September 14, 2010 Written by 11 Comments
confusion2

In a crisis, what you see is what you get.

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No, I am not making a trite statement about “it is what it is,” or about transparency. What you see is what you comprehend… what you understand… what you internalize.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the pieces you need for effective crisis communications, and I’ve been thinking even further about how inadequate most organizations are with regard to making the right impressions stick. I can look at your messaging and know what you meant for people to get. But how do you take that next step so the public at large truly feels and knows what you want them to remember? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication Tagged: , , , , , ,

The Stories Pictures Will Tell (If You Just Listen)

Posted on September 10, 2010 Written by 16 Comments
wesley1

(No audio today… this exercise doesn’t lend itself to it.)

Show me, don’t tell me. Nothing new about that.

What is new is the thinking about the effectiveness of showing instead of telling. We’ve fallen all over ourselves as communicators, adopting flip cameras and Flickr streams. Bandwidth is cheap, and it’s no longer cost-prohibitive to launch a barrage of high resolution photos and videos when you’re trying to get your message across. Yes, “pictures tell a thousand words,” but are they the right thousand?

Most of the time, we deploy pictures with almost no regard to the stories they might tell.

Tell Me What You See

This is an exercise in telling visual stories, and you are an active participant. I want you to spend a minute or so with each photo, and jot down what you think you might be able to figure out about Wesley. When you’re done, click to the next page.

(The links are below the Share The Knowledge icons)

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

Filed Under: Communication, Personal Tagged: ,

Dancing With Myself

Posted on September 3, 2010 Written by
dancing

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Mirror, Mirror, on the wall; Who’s the sharingest of them all? Let’s play a little game. I’ll describe an object, and you tell me what it is.

  • It has feathers
  • It is yellow
  • It has a beak
  • It has webbed feet
  • It’s cute
  • It’s not fully grown
  • It cannot yet fly

What would you say it is? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication Tagged: , , , , ,

The Search for the Secret Sauce

Posted on August 31, 2010 Written by 7 Comments
google all

Most internet users don’t remember a time before there was a Google. (Those who do likely were grimacing over my failure to capitalize Internet.) For those who made surfing a dry activity since 2000, there has always been an Algorithm in the background, providing order to the vast online Universe.

What Google did was promote the idea that an unseen formula could improve your search results. Human-inspired and seeded indexes could not scale to cover the exponentially-growing feed of data – and we needed a Secret Sauce to sort it all out.

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[Read more...]

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Whiteboard MythAdventures

Posted on August 10, 2010 Written by 38 Comments
thisisapost


Woman quits job via whiteboard. Allegedly.

(If you send me a url with a picture of your comment on a whiteboard, I’ll format the comment for you…)

Filed Under: Communication

The Sweet (and Sticky) Science of Editing

Posted on August 6, 2010 Written by 11 Comments
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In television news, you have little time to waste. There’s a set limit budgeted for your story, and anything more than five seconds over your allotment calls for penance, or at least a quest to seek special dispensations. When every second counts, you try not to waste any of the time you have – yet you don’t want to leave anything out.

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Scarcity breeds process. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Marketing Tagged: , , , ,
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