The Real Eyewitness News

The television news industry has been changed forever. It began back in the 70's with Roger Grimsby, co-anchor on the ABC network news show Eyewitness News. The show aired nightly on channel 7 in New York and broke away from the longstanding talking head format of television news delivery.

Overnight it seemed we transitioned from the serious, somber and deliberate style of an Edward Murrow or a Walter Cronkite to the casual fun-loving demeanor of Grimsby. It was the beginning of a long slide down a slippery slope where the entertainment value of the newscast began to carry more importance than traditional values such as accuracy, integrity and objectivity.

Other networks and "news" shows were quick to adopt the more casual look and feel, where gaffs and technical errors were no longer embarrassing but fodder for jovial banter among the on air personalities. The truth is content on television is driven by viewer ratings which in turn drive the advertising costs that ultimately determine revenue. News shows were no longer exempt from the need to attract the most viewers. Sadly, it seemed most viewers were more interested in being entertained than informed. At least the networks cannot be blamed for that.

With the advent of social networks, people are increasingly getting more timely and accurate news from the web. There are numerous sources where one can simply track events all day long and not have to wait for the six o'clock broadcast with its catchy sound bites and glib commentary. I've recently met a young man who at the delicate age of 14 started to monitor various social networks and news feeds, and who today curates a web site called UpfrontNewsWire.com. In thirty minutes each morning he puts out news from around the world and then heads off to high school.

The long term effect has been a loss of viewers creating a need to reduce costs.  We wind up with a smaller newsroom staff, fewer deep thinkers and instead rely on pretty faces that are adept at reading their lines from a teleprompter.

This is not to suggest they are all bad. Many television news programs still have serious journalists at the helm but they often wind up on public channels or pay networks. 

The internet and social networks have nearly destroyed the newspaper industry. The question is how will the major networks armed with their revenue pressures, rigid schedule, skeleton crews and pretty faces compete? We live in a a world where technology allows virtually anyone to have the resources to replace the television station.

The answer lies in embracing the enemy. When stations become enlightened like KOMU in Missouri, KOMO in Seattle and Fox in LA, welcoming the new "back" channels and incorporating them into the news gathering process, the audience will respond in kind. News delivery will be a two way street, a lively dialogue among all the participants inside and outside the studio, including the real eyewitnesses.

A new breed of journalists will emerge. Those who can multitask and engage intelligently with the citizens delivering the raw news. The ones who can separate the wheat from the chaff, put the pieces together and deliver a cohesive report from it all. The ones who are nimble and adept at using the new technologies will be the winners.

They are not going to need the tall antenna, powerful transmitters or cable delivery services. They are simply going to want a microphone, a quiet keyboard, an HD web cam, a big monitor and loads of bandwidth.

And they will have more fun with the audience than Grimsby would ever have imagined.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Will Email Ever Die (Part 1)

Got into an interesting debate the other day over the question of whether social networks like Facebook or Google Plus would eventually replace email. We've all read or heard about one company that turns off email at the end of the business day and another banning the use of internal email altogether. Companies are encouraging the use of other forms of electronic exchange, phone or face to face meetings. Outside of work, more and more people are texting and posting instead of using email to communicate with family and friends.

In my view, email still servers a useful purpose and will be with us for a long, long time. However, this is a complicated topic and so I have broken the discussion into two parts. Today in Part 1 we will look at more efficient ways of using technology to collaborate. Next week in Part 2 we will come back to why email will stay around.

I have long been an advocate of moving the one to many communication model into another format, more suited to the process of asynchronous discussion and collaboration. Several times throughout my career I evangelized the concept of discussion space also known as forums, chat space, bulletin boards and a variety of other labels. All of the popular social networks and many commercial software systems offer this capability.

Imagine you want to solicit some ideas from five people in your company. The standard approach is to send an email containing your request to all five. Ideally, each of them will reply to you and you assimilate those responses into one final answer. But  what often happens is one of the five invariably responds only to you perhaps with a comment asking for clarification or adding a new dimension to the question. You are now forced to send a follow-up note to the others to bring them up to date.

In the meanwhile, they have sent some notes around to each other and people outside this circle to engage more people in the discussion. They too are collecting and assimilating multiple responses into the one they plan to send back to you.

Look at the myriad of problems with this approach. From a resource perspective we are generating an awful lot of extra emails increasing network traffic, using  limited bandwidth and consuming storage. Emails are flying everywhere delivering the same content over and over again. This is particularly acute when the messages contain attachments such as spreadsheets, pictures or diagrams.

Multiple instances of these messages are stored on each person's computer and on the mail system server, and ultimately in back up copies and archives.

In addition to wasting all these computing resources, we have people constantly comparing the last message received to all previous messages, trying to identify the new information and reconcile it with prior versions of the content.

Now, compare this with a model in which you post your initial message to one place much like an electronic bulletin board where the others can see it and post their response. The request for clarification is immediately visible to the other participants. They, in turn, can respond to it with additional comments which will also be visible to all. As each person responds, the thread grows and all the information is in one place at one time. Grant access to others and more people can read through the discussion and add their comments at the end.

This is the model most familiar to social network butterflies. Post a photo or status to Facebook and all your friends respond in the thread below. Post a link or a blog entry to Google Plus and the comments flow in orderly fashion below.

Since this approach is clearly more efficient and familiar to the younger generation entering the work force, should we assume that email will disappear from the office? Will email go the way of the acoustic coupler? Do you even know what an acoustic coupler is?

More on this next week in part 2.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Saving Private Files

Let's start off the new year right with some sage advice for anyone who regularly uses a computer at home or in the office. We have discussed the need for good passwords and protection against malware. An often overlooked but equally important practice is to make regular backups of all your important stuff.

Perhaps you have an army of technicians devoted to ensuring you never lose one bit of your information on the computer in your office. But have you checked to see what rules or conventions you must follow for them to be able to restore lost files? Have you asked them to bring a document back just to confirm they can do it, and to determine how long it takes? By the way, often their protection only extends to files stored on the network server and not those on your local hard drive.

Of course, at home you will have no such team of experts looking after you. If you don't protect yourself you could lose everything. Whether a natural or unnatural act, if your computer is damaged or destroyed, how will you recover all of your documents, pictures, programs or other information?

The answer is a simple one, and something all of us should regularly do; make copies of the important files on your computer! I know about now many of you are tuning this out thinking nothing like that will never happen to me. Perhaps  you don't have time for this today or you think all your important stuff is "in the cloud" and can't be lost.

All I can say is like the lyric from that Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi, you don't know what you got till its gone.  So, if you don't want to be singing the blues, invest in a highly reliable, automatic utility to quietly and continuously make sure your important stuff is copied and stored somewhere other than on your main computer.

Most computers come with a free backup program and there are certainly dozens of  products and services you can buy. But you have to configure them properly and occasionally check to see that they are doing the job.

I found one in particular to be outstanding. CrashPlan, from Code42, has been on my desktop machine for well over a year. It was truly simple to set it and forget it. It has been diligently moving copies of all the files in the directories specified to other locations every day without fail.

It was originally installed on a notebook computer, long since wiped out. However, I successfully recovered a file when I needed it from the archive months later. It was every bit as simple as would have been to find the file on the actual notebook. Moving through the windows folder structure, the file was located and simply copied to my current machine.

CrashPlan allows files to be stored in the cloud (where my old notebook files now live), an external drive or other computers on your network. You can even allow your computer to used by others to store their files, fully encrypted and inaccessible to anyone but the owner, of course.

At this point, I have CrashPlan on all my computers which frees me from any concerns about ever losing anything. Using my account, I can recover any file from any computer to any other machine I control. Knowing this has allowed me to sleep very well at night.

Don't wait until your first meltdown to begin using a backup utility. Contact me and I'll arrange a trial of CrashPlan for you.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC


[Editor's note: Full disclosure; CrashPlan was provided free of charge for evaluation and use.]

Google Morning America

For the last several months a small group of people at just a handful of local TV stations throughout the United States have been experimenting with Google Plus Hangouts, providing anyone with a camera and voice direct access to the live studio. Hangouts, you recall, are two-way video chats with up to 10 participants at a time. People in these hangouts were treated to an insider view of what goes on behind the scenes before and during the broadcasts.

Sarah Hill from KOMU in Missouri was the first to recognize the potential and take it beyond the backstage role by putting ordinary citizens on air to contribute to stories and even do their own reporting. I was fortunate enough to among the relatively small group of co-hosts as this show pioneered a new level of citizen journalist involvement.

A few other stations continue to stick their electronic toes in the water conducting regular hangout sessions with ordinary people while off camera. With the introduction of the On-Air feature Google allows an unlimited number of viewers of a hangout. Forward thinkers like Matt Markovich from KOMO in Seattle, are looking at ways to exploit this technology as a means of creating  a variety of new two-way channels.

Surprisingly, the major news networks both here in the US and abroad have not fully embraced this technology, that is, until now. I was delighted to see signs that both ABC, CBS and the BBC are beginning to experiment a little more.

Yesterday I stumbled across an impromptu hangout with a few people from the popular ABC network show Good Morning America. Andrew Springer Associate Producer, Social Media in New York opened a hangout and included Segment Producer Katie Bosland participating remotely from the Iowa Caucuses.

This is part of their plans for comprehensive election coverage. The hangout was opened public meaning anyone on Google Plus could join in and ask questions about the process, the candidates or anything else. GMA announced another Iowa Caucus hangout scheduled for later that evening.

At the same time, my good friend and colleague Mike Downes managed to catch CBS News Radio employing a hangout as a new means of channeling questions from the public to people on air. His inquiry about the role of social media in the election process was relayed from the hangout to the radio show guests who reacted in real time during the broadcast.

In 2008 the outcome of the US Presidential election was significantly influenced by social media. Add to Facebook and Twitter the powerful new tools and services Google are bringing to the table. YouTube, Google Plus (Hangouts) and Google's own Politics and Election pages are opening new chapters in the journalism rule book.

We know NBC are studying this and various Fox station affiliates are toying with it as well. The evolution of broadcast journalism, indeed the whole of the news business continues at an alarming pace. Well beyond how politics and elections will be covered, these developments are fast changing the entire news business. It is exciting to have been involved at the outset and anybody's guess how it will all turn out.

Stay tuned. Most of this story is yet to be written.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Back To The Future

Welcome to the new year. It is January 2012 and you have, no doubt, been reading the many technology predictions published over the last few weeks. Big name magazines like Fortune and Forbes, trade journals like Computerworld and Information Week, leading columnists, bloggers and pretty much everyone chimes in with their forecast for what's hot and what's not in the coming year.

As in the past, the demise of particular companies, if not entire product categories are predicted. Many are ordering funeral arrangements for RIM. One prediction has the on-line retailers stealing share from the big box stores by offering price and convenience at the point of sale, while another has the big box stores crushing on-line retailers with, well, price and convenience at the point of sale. Legislation could have a big impact if internet sales are finally subject to tax.

Social networks, increasingly a source of information and advice, continue to have significant influence on opinions and specifically on purchase decisions. True not only of hard goods but services and media consumption as well. How we find news and entertainment is undergoing a major shift and will continue towards total digitization.

You see a pretty consistent theme with continued growth in the use of mobile devices including tablets, cloud services and social networks. Not much risk in touting these observations.

You can find any number of views on the long standing wars; Apple (IOS) vs Windows, Apple (IOS) vs Android, and plenty of views on which browser, social network or e-commerce site will dominate. Perennial predictions of broad sweeping changes in government and industries like manufacturing, healthcare and energy appear.

Finally, we have the ultimate prediction that the world will end in 2012. A silly conclusion allegedly based on studies of the Mayan civilization.

My level of faith in the accuracy of any of these prediction is about equal (except for the last one.) Some will be right on and others way off the mark. But history has proven we can rarely predict the truly disruptive development before it actually happens.

Does Siri or big brother Watson foretell a new era of audible, contextual computing? Is the Nao Robot the first in a long line of humanoid shaped, electronic companions? Will all of our information and entertainment sources converge into one omnipresent digital delivery platform? Will science ever give us acceptable battery life for our phones? It's anybody's guess and I think we will have to wait and see how it all turns out..

The only prediction I will make is that the role of senior management must evolve quickly to keep pace with the rapid changes in business and technology. You cannot stick your head in the sand and ignore any of the changes mentioned above. Even if only half of them are half right we will be entering a period when we will face a completely new business landscape and you must be equipped to deal with it.

Please note I did not say "IT" management. This is not an error. The role of the CIO has forever changed and we will talk more about that in later columns. But the entire senior management team must become tech aware and tech literate. It is essential they realize the business environment has and continues to undergo a major evolution. While I recognize the world does not revolve around technology, it has become central and critical to operations and, therefore, integral to the success of virtually every company in almost every industry.

If you don't keep pace, I predict you will eventually fail.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC