I spent a few days last month at the BlogWorld conference and New Media Expo in Las Vegas. I didn’t gamble a cent– I like to say I’m not dumb enough to play a game of chance, not smart enough to play a game of skill– but I learned a lot, tweeted a lot, and met heaps of interesting, engaging people. I even got to see Beatles LOVE courtesy of Cirque de Soleil. The show was magical and it was fun to watch 20-something Eastern European acrobats dance like ’60s-era Yanks to “Back in the U.S.S.R.” But getting back to the learning part, in the spirit of  making sure what happens in Vegas stays online, here are a few old and new media lessons from BlogWorld:

1. Online vs. traditional journalism is not a zero sum game

Despite some stinging comments hurled at CNN anchor Don Lemon during one panel, I was surprised by how much love “legacy media” were getting in BlogWorld. NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen advocated using search data to determine what readers care about. Blogcritics publisher Eric Olsen waxed nostalgic about the tactile experience of print magazines. Rather than eye each other suspiciously, old and new media types shared best practices and ideas for preserving quality journalism.

2. Video kills the blogging star

Since most of us bloggers came out of the print world, we sometimes tend to overlook the power of multimedia content. But panelists ranging from Facebook evangelist Shama Kabani, to consultant Jay Berkowitz warned that anyone who forsakes video is leaving money on the table. According to Berkowitz, only four percent of marketers use YouTube, even though the video-streaming site is also the world’s second most popular search engine. So whether you’re filming it or embedding someone else’s, video ought to be part of your content strategy.

3. The Internet is just a big search party

Speaking of search engines, almost every BlogWorld speaker mentioned the symbiotic relationship between content and search. Chris Baggott, an expert on corporate blogging, said that many content creators foolishly buy into what he called “the myth of the audience.” Most websites get roughly 66% of their traffic from search engines, Baggott said, and so all content should be written for the first-time reader. This means defining—and relentlessly repeating—a strategic set of keywords that people are likely to search for. “Think about what [prospective customers] are going to type,” Baggott said, “And talk about it.”

At first this rubbed me the wrong way; I’m a big believer in fostering community and building relationships with readers over time. But I now realize that these things aren’t mutually exclusive. Defining a set of keywords and writing clear, pithy content around them is simply good communication. One thing that Twitter has demonstrated is that brevity can go a long way. People don’t have time to decode your cutesy headlines when their RSS feeds and Twitter Lists are packed with goodies. So don’t just think of search engine optimization as a crude marketing strategy. Think of it as good writing.

4. Nice guys finish first

In the heady days of ink-stained newsmen and billionaire publishers, loutishness was a virtue. Think of newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Citizen Kane), Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch. But now that media is no longer a product but a conversation, to paraphrase Dan Gillmor, the meek have inherited the (Word)press.

The “rock stars” of BlogWorld were celebrated not for their egos but their generosity. This was evidenced by the drastically different receptions given to Guy Kawasaki—billionaire venture capitalist—and Chris Brogan, the so-called “nice guy” of social media.

Brogan is known for superhumanly responding to every @reply on Twitter and playing “matchmaker” between vendors and clients, as he put it. Kawasaki is notorious for his automated “robo-Tweets.” During his keynote, Brogan preached mantas like, “Selling is never about getting more than you give” and “I like making relationships before I make money; I’m not a hooker.”

During his moment in the spotlight, Kawasaki reminisced about cruising down the streets of L.A. in a Ferrari and stubbornly refused to play along with comedian Kevin Pollack’s hilarious “Larry King game.”

I met lots of people at BlogWorld. There was the group I joined for dinner after they put out an open invitation on Twitter, and the successful podcaster who told me about his family on the way back to the hotel. And then there was the guy who ping-ponged from table to table pitching his product and boasting about the 500 business cards he had “collected.”

I’m not sure how many cards I collected. But I’m certain I got more out of BlogWorld than he did.

Last month Slate announced that it was pulling the plug on Today’s Papers, its popular daily summary of the morning journals, and replacing it with The Slatest, a thrice-daily aggregator of “the 12 most important news stories, blog entries, magazine features, and Web videos of the moment.” Like many diehard Slatees, I was shocked. TP had become the prologue to my mornings. It was a quick, concise read, that made me feel reasonably well informed before starting my day. But I soon chalked up my initial reaction to nostalgia. After all, Slate’s editors were right. The news cycle is no longer daily. And newspapers aren’t the only players driving it. Surely, as an online editor, I should be the last person to cling to such a relic.

But now it’s clear to me that Slate got it all wrong. The lesson of online news is not that readers want their news all the time and from countless sources. It’s that they can afford to be pickier about when and from what medium they get it.  Sometimes that may still be from the newspaper at the breakfast table. At other times, it may be via smart phone on the way to the pub. In any case, organizations need to add value to the news by providing either content or context. I don’t need Slate to tell me what the 12 most important news stories are right now. That’s what my RSS feeds and Twitter and Digg and the myriad other aggregators that have emerged in the 14 years since Slate introduced TP are for. Today’s Papers did something that was virtually impossible for most of us to do on our own: read all the major papers and write up a concise and thoughtful summary of their contents.  As another blogger put it, “what made TP worthwhile was the ability to get a good-if-not-full picture of a big and complicated world without easy answers in just a couple of paragraphs at a time.” There’s still a need for that.

But the truth is that TP was never about the news cycle. It was about news judgment. It’s not just inside baseball to know what newspaper editors are leading with, fronting, or putting below the fold. It helps us—as editors and reporters and media critics but also as readers—to not just read the news but think about the news. That’s where “meta news” differs from aggregation. The latter can be achieved through algorithms. The former needs human processing. Behavioural economists talk about how meta-thinking—thinking about thinking—can lead us to make better decisions. Well, thinking about thinking about the news can make us better journalists and better citizens. My favorite media outlets—from the Daily Show, to On the Media, to Talking Points Memo—not only deliver news but encourage us to give it a second take. By listing instead of processing the day’s top stories, The Slatest makes us work harder, but think less.

While we’re on the subject of branching out from traditional journalism, check out Sparksheet, which launched about an hour ago. It’s a new media and marketing blog by Spafax, the custom publishing company behind enRoute and other slick “branded” magazines. I will be helping them produce content and already have a couple of posts up about airlines on Twitter (some get it; others, not so much) and Robert Scoble’s social media starfish. Like I said, journalism is changing and the walls between ad shop, think tank and newsroom are coming down– and being replaced with windows.

I recently took the train to Ottawa for a job interview at a partisan political organization. Over sushi and seaweed salad, my interviewer asked whether I was afraid, if I took the job, I’d be shunned by the mainstream media gods. I said I wasn’t; I lied. But everything I said next was true.

I told him that journalism is changing, that first-person narratives, argumentative essays and cheeky personal blogs were all the rage in our battered journalistic landscape. I said that the best bloggers—the Josh Marshalls and Michael Geists and Andrew Sullivans—are serious intellectuals whose reporting is grounded in sound research and reasoning. Yet, they all have strong voices, and crystal clear points of view. I told him that, in any case, I didn’t go to J-School because it was my lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter. I wasn’t even particularly keen on current affairs until university.

Rather, I pursued a master’s in journalism because I was interested in everything– from music, literature and pop culture, to  politics, religion and technology– and figured a life in reporting would allow me to dip in and out of various disciplines and worlds. I chose journalism because it seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, what Churchill and Herzl and Orwell did before moving on to grander things. Besides, a year and a half of school would allow me to hone my writing and chops and put off getting a job for another 18 months.

I told him all this, and I meant it. But why, despite all that, did I still feel as though I had betrayed some fundamental instinct or ethic that I never had in the first place?

OK, I’ve been a bad blogger.  It’s been almost a month since my last post here. But I haven’t been that bad. You see, I’ve been posting away over at Masc Magazine, a new blog that looks at MASCulinity in politics, popular culture and everyday life. So far I’ve blogged about Yiddishisms, Barack Obama, Ken dolls, and now Steve Harvey, which I’ll paste below since it hasn’t gone live yet. I’ll make an effort to post future pieces here as well, but make sure you check out the site itself. The other contributors have a lot of important things to say about “who’s the man?” and what the even means. My latest post after the jump…

Have you heard of Steve Harvey? He’s the comedian turned self-help guru who has been making the T.V. talk show rounds lately, promoting his book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. Harvey gives dating advice to single women. He promises to reveal “men’s secret playbook” and teach women how to “win the game.”

I stumbled upon Harvey’s apperance on Oprah a couple of weeks ago and at first I was impressed. He’s funny and self-deprecating, with a mischievous teddy bear charm. Harvey urges women to set their standards high and to delay sex until they find out what men really want from them– whether they’re “subsistence fishermen,” or merely “sports fishermen.” He preaches that men essentially need three things from women– support, loyalty and “the cookie,” which is his cutesy, network-friendly euphemism for sex. “Slow down ladies,” he says. “We can’t hold your hand unless you let us.” All reasonably sound –if simplistic–advice.

But then Harvey lapses into cliche. On relationships, he insists that “the woman controls everything,” that they have “all the power.” He says that “a man has to mark his territory” and that every women should adhere to a 90-day probationary period before granting her partners his “benefits package”– another cutesy euphemism for sex.

Wait a minute. I’m all for empowering women, but why should they have “all the power”? Isn’t a relationship about sharing and compromise, a constant negotiation based on trust and communication and not some 90-day money-back guarantee?

A relationship is not a zero-sum game; It should be a partnership, not a power struggle. Instead of telling women how to “win the game,” perhaps Harvey can teach couples how to move beyond it.

Slate has a really good piece on Slumdog Millionaire and the debate over whether the film romantacizes poverty, or provides a rare anti-Bollywood depiction of the “real India.”

I’ve got mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I don’t think it’s such a bad thing for a film that explores some painful subjects to be packaged as a “feel-good story.” By contrast, I think of melodramatic and moralistic films such as Crash or Babel that hammer you over the head with tragedy and violence, leaving you numbed instead of inspired. On the other hand, I agree with the author of the Slate piece that the director can’t have it both ways. Are the characters in Slumdog depictions of real people in the so-called Real India (in which case, why are they so one-dimensional), or archetypes in a modern fairy tale (in which case, why should we care about their traumatic pasts and why couldn’t the film have been set in Miami instead of Mumbai?)
 
I’d like to give director Danny Boyle the benefit of the doubt, since I’m such a big fan of Boyle’s Trainspotting, which some critics at the time wrongly accused of romantacizing heroine use. But Boyle’s style– a realism/surrealism hybrid– suited that film’s subject matter– the consequences of drug use– perfectly. I don’t know if it’s as appropriate for telling an objective, geographically and historically-rooted story such as Slumdog.

I’m a tweeting man now. Like a good J-school graduate and bad Berkmanite, I finally joined Twitter. I think I resisted it until now because it was introduced to me in a trite, “this is the future of journalism” kind of way.  Plus, it kind of has a dopey name– not sure how that made it past the beta stage.  No one wants to be a twit, so why would you want to be involved with a platform ostensibly designed to  produce them?

But it turns out that Twitter is actually kind of great, as are many of the people on it.  Today I got some sweet journalism tips from @suzanneyada and learned about the physics of time travel in Lost from &jakedobkin. I also tried this way-too-Canadian tweet on for size:

“Now I know how Americans felt when we had Trudeau and they had Nixon.”

Yeah, I’m working on it.

With my thesis approved and my days as Washington correspondent behind me, it’s time to get back to blogging in earnest. Also on the agenda: finding myself a  job and, as David Byrne once put it, a city to live in.

But first, the blog. As you may have noticed, I’ve moved my D.C. stories to their own page consolidated the multimedia stuff as well. In the next few days I’ll be overhauling the design, so look forward to a snappy new title and say goodbye to my charmingly ominous mug up top.

Tomorrow (this morning, really) Barack Obama will be sworn in as his country’s 44th president. I’m starting to think it was a mistake not to make the trip back down to D.C. for the spectacle. But I’ll always have election night and the spontaneous celebration in front of the White House, where I met John T. Porter.

Amid the drunken high fives and shouts of “YES WE DID,” I found Mr. Porter solemnly staring at the 1600
Pennsylvania, Ave. He told me he grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where “laws against Negroes are still on the books.” He kept shaking his head as we stood silently, wrapped in the cocoon of history.

John T. Porter; November 4th, 2008

More posts, fewer late-afternoon cafe au laits. That’s my Thanksgiving resolution (do they even have those?)

The big news is that my multimedia project is starting to take shape. Within the next couple of weeks I will introduce the annotated feature story. I’ll start with my forthcoming profile of Chris Clark, the Washington Capitals’ “family man” captain, and sprinkle some additional commentary and audio clips throughout it. Think news writing meets pop-up video. Now I just have to figure out what the hell that looks (and sounds) like, and whether I could teach this old piano how to play that tune.

“That’s where things are headed.”

Those are the vague and foreboding words of wisdom invariably bestowed on leery J-school students wondering where they’ll find a job now that the newspaper industry is imploding.

Where? The Internet. What things? Journalism, the future of.

“That’s where things are headed.”

True. Very true. Except the esteemed bestowers of said advice– profs, MSM vets, cash-strapped editors– don’t really know what that means. And they’re certainly not happy about it.

For too many in the industry, the Internet remains a necessary evil; an existential threat that’s not going away; a tyrant to appease until they reach retirement age and abandon ship.

Let the millenials deal with it. It’s their mess, anyway.

Even my peers, many of them, are resentful. They see a turf war between us – we who will inherit the columns of the New York Times and Newsweek – and them – those pesky attention-grubbing bloggers and MySpace members who threaten our job prospects.

But the Internet is not only where things are headed, it’s where the most intrepid reporting and freshest storytelling is already taking place. It’s not just where things are headed– *sigh*– whether we like it or not, but where things ought to be headed. It’s evolution, baby.

As Jeff Jarvis says, the Internet enables us do what we do best, and link to the rest. Thanks to creative thinkers like David Cohn, it allows the public to decide how and about what they would like to be informed.

As for me, I’m still figuring out what my contribution will be, how I will help re-invent the wheel. And I’m hoping this weblog will help me do it.

This blog will not just be a depository for my clips, a virtual CV or a public diary. It will be a place for me to play with technology, wax journalistically, and find my online voice.

Le Canadien Errant– the wandering Canadian. That’s me.