One of the greatest challenges facing news organizations today as they shift their operations to the Web is figuring out how to make it pay. What's most frustrating for me, as an Internet researcher and a proponent of online innovation, is that some of the best online presentations aren't automatically those that make the most money. In fact, some of the most interesting online news sites, those that seem to embrace the three principals I think are the most vital online - interactivity, connecting with the audience and understanding a medium's strengths - almost always fail. And it usually occurs just after I have written about them or showed them to one of my classes. In fact, I may be an online innovation jinx!

It just happened at Yahoo! News. I had Robert Padavick, one of the site's senior producers, speak to my class remotely. I wrote about him on this site. I used Yahoo!'s People of the Web series during BOTH of the teaching presentations I gave while I interviewed for jobs. From Robert's Facebook page last week, I learned he had been a victim of ]Yahoo's most recent layoffs. I'm not sure about the rest of the news division, including Kevin Sites, but I'm not hopeful if they laid off someone as talented as Robert. Out of all the references I found on Yahoo's layoffs, there was no specific mention of what happened to the news division.

This isn't the first time this has happened. Roanoke.com used to feature TimesCast, a funny and inventive online news broadcast, created by their Web staff. I really liked it, not because it was the most professional piece of work ever, but because it wasn't as uppity as everything else you see on TV or even the Web. It seemed to really be speaking to its audience instead of over them. But that show hasn't been online for more than a year. It has been replaced with a sports and entertainment broadcast, which while innovative, isn't quite as fun.

The most glaring example from the Cyberbrains standpoint has to be Backfence.com. While we didn't always agree with their no-holds barred approach to citizen journalism because they did not actively edit or solicit contributions, we appreciated them for investing money in communities and offering a much more democratic news product. I also appreciated their loving embrace of hyper-local news. They had no pretenses about not running cute kitty pictures, local restaurant reviews, or dead deer pictures. This is rare in professional journalism.

But Backfence, as a citizen journalism forum, lasted only about a year. Now it's trying to be a local, online marketplace. According to this post from one of its co-founders, I think Backfence still has a lot to teach online news professionals.

The question remains what can Yahoo's cuts teach us about making online news profitable, and more importantly, why is no one else, at least that I can see, writing about this. Yahoo! published some high profile features and signed some even higher profile partnerships that should have given it some leverage as an online news provider. I sure the 60 Minutes clips and extras remain, but what about the elements of People of the Web or Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone? What about the revolutionary ways Yahoo decided to cover the 2008 presidential election with annotated interviews of each candidate and instant opportunities to comment? What about the news blog that didn't talk down to the audience? What about the site's entire philosophy not just to aggregate news as Google does, but to give it perspective and analysis?

I'm sad not just for a friend who is on the market in a difficult time. I'm sure Robert will land on his feet. I think he join me at his alma mater and get his Ph.D. Students need to learn the skills he has, and I don't think many of us can teach them. But more I'm sad that it seems Yahoo! had turned its back on an ambitious journalistic mission to "focus on the bottom line." That's not what journalism, but especially online journalism, should be about. What happened to allowing a site like Amazon.com run a deficit for more than five years in order to build it into the powerhouse it is today?

A quick update to explain why I was misting up in the Reynolds Journalism Institute open conference room earlier this afternoon. My class introduced me to a a new blog which I've added to the blogroll on the right. NerdWorld, from Time magazine online, is co-writer by a Simpsons' executive producer. Give me one good reason why I wouldn't like it.

But that wasn't what had tears leaking from my eyes, and I'm really not exaggerating here. If you don't believe me, watch this video.



I found it scrolling through Time's Top 10 lists for 2008. This was No. 1 on the Top 10 viral videos, and the wellspring of emotion it elicited in me explains why. It also represents to me the power the Internet has in bringing people of different cultures together. We all just want to dance together, don't we?

Anyway, the rest of this and the other lists provide a good excuse not to work on your last class paper EVER! Ha ha ha ha!

Sorry it has been a while once again, but it took another TV show to get me fired up enough to write. This time, however, it wasn't ER, which I've almost completely written off, by the way. One more ER employee's kid almost dying on the table will do that. No, this time it's one of my favorite shows, The Amazing Race, and this time, my peeves coincide pretty well with the goal of this blog. While a once thought CBS did a good job providing additional content and reader discussion boards online, it wasn't until I turned to them for some vital information that I realized how behind CBS really is. And maybe if anyone is listening, it can teach them what maintaining an online presence really means, because simply, it's like I tell my students in beginning newswriting: You never want to leave your readers with any questions, especially if you can easily provide the answers.

Tonight was the Amazing Race's season finale, and to no one's surprise, Nick and Star won. It would have been a much better final leg if Dallas (of Dallas and Toni) hadn't committed a fatal mistake by leaving his passport and money in a cab. This mistake put them seemingly so far behind that at the end of the last episode, the show's host Phil Keoghan met them on the street to tell them they had been eliminated. Even if they had made it to the end, they wouldn't have been allowed to continue without a passport.

Amazingly, that's where CBS left it. The end of the episode featured no scrolling text saying whether they ever made it home. I was especially appalled that at the end of the finale, when Dallas and Toni were conspicuously absent, the show's producers again failed to explain anything.

Aha, I thought, they must want people to go to the new, improved CBS Web site. I'm betting they have an interview with Dallas and Toni at the Elimination Station. No dice there either, just an insipid blurb about how sad it was for teams to leave sunny Acapulco. Wait, why were they in Acapulco again? Did I miss that stage?

Well, if the videos section didn't have the info, surely the CBS sponsored discussion boards did, right? Wrong! CBS hadn't even bothered to put up an "official" episode 10 thread yet, and the unofficial fan one wasn't any help, either. In fact, I thought a saw a tumbleweed blow by on the CBS discussion board because it hadn't really been used in a week.

I did finally find my answer, and I should have suspected it would be outside CBS' kingdom all along. Reality TV World published an interview with the Mother and Son team two days after the episode aired that featured such compelling information as how they got back and why Dallas put his bag with the passport down in the first place. Turns out he had to adjust his microphone at the insistence of the camera crew traveling along with him. Oh, and he got home after someone in Russia turned his passport in at the U.S. Embassy.

So why didn't CBS bother to tell its fans this? Why leave a loose end? If all the space you had was the 60-minute program, I could understand, but you're promoting the heck out of your improved Web presence, and you can't even pay someone to create or even monitor the threads? What's the point of the Elimination Station too - seeing Marisa and Brooke, the "Southern Belles," in bikinis?

The reason I think I'm so upset is that I've seen this all before. CBS' supposedly great Web site reminds me of newspapers' early Web forays. The thinking behind those efforts basically is like it or lump it. Don't consider what fans really want. Just copy what everyone else is doing. Discussion boards are big now. Let's do that. Maybe we should have our contestants blog? I hear that's all the rage. Oh, and because we have the fancy cameras, let's slap together a couple of videos and throw them up too.

It frustrates me even more because Amazing Race always seemed like a show that thought of its fans as more than Joe Sixpacks. One of the reasons I've always loved the show, and why I've heard it wins the reality show Emmy every year, is its crews follow the documentary style of film making. They show what truly happens and not manufacture drama. Now I'm starting to think maybe the producers just do this a little less on The Amazing Race than other shows.

When will the networks get it? Probably when other media organizations start, which will be sometime in 2016, or when their fans really start demanding it. If thousands of pounds of peanuts can save Jericho, maybe a couple hundred angry e-mails can bring some resolution to Dallas and Toni's real story on Amazing Race. If you're as fired up as I am, send them here. If you really want to improve your Web site, give me a call. I've almost got a fancy Ph.D.

P.S. I'm not the only one upset. Check out this great post by Jessi K. on RealityTVCalendar.com

Sorry, I've been away from the blog for a bit. I'm been traveling hoping to convince some university to give me a tenure track position, but I really have no excuse. I actually posted a couple of days ago about a new service MTV is offering (see below), but that post got lost in the Interwebs. So in true blogger fashion, I'm going to update everyone with a couple of short bullet points. This is really what I should be doing all the time, but I kind of have diarrhea of the fingers I guess. In other words, I type too much.

1. The Job Hunt: Last week I was at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and next week I'll be in Norman, OK interviewing for jobs. I also had a phone interview with Michigan State that I don't think went well enough to lead to a site visit, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. With the economy the way it is and universities, including Missouri, freezing positions, I have to be grateful for what I've received. I still have a bunch of applications out (Hello Oregon, TCU, Arkansas and Tennessee!) that I haven't heard from.

2. Videos on demand: Too bad my earlier post on MTV Music didn't make it because it was filled with lots of self-deprecating wit about my wanna-be rocker days. Regardless, the point was to trumpet the arrival of MTV's new site which does something the network itself hasn't done in about a decade - actually play videos. In fact, the site has nearly every video MTV has ever played, including such luminaries as the 10-minute "Thriller," the first video ever on MTV "Video Killed the Radio Star," and the video that changed my life - Metallica's "One." Too bad it's only the short version. I'm still going to embed it at the end because my head is starting to bang just thinking about it.

3. Sad Economic News: WhizKids, the makers of one of Lincoln's favorite games HeroClix, announced it's going out of business. This post on GeekDad says they are looking for a buyer for the HeroClix franchise. I wonder how much money we've got in the bank? Oh, none because Lincoln and I have spent it all on the little plastic HeroClix figures! In all seriousness, it's a really fun game for anyone who's wonders what it would have been like to command all the powers of the Mandarin.

4. Some newspaper news (well, sort of): I wrote a couple of months ago for The Cyberbrains about how newspaper Web sites have neglected one of the most important elements of their print publications - the Comics page. My suggested solution was to embrace Web only comics such as Homestar Runner. King Features, one of the largest syndicators of comic strips, had a better idea - Create a Web comics presence news organizations can add to their Web sites. It's an interesting idea and could work, if (and this is a big IF) the site and the comic creators will fully embrace the advantages the Web has to offer. I hate to knock a fellow Mizzou alumni, but I really don't see the 85-year-old creator of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois creating Flash animations or even video strips. More to the point, I don't see King Features giving him the help he needs to do it.

5. Role Model: I try to point out good examples of blogging, especially news blogging, when I can, and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the inspiration behind this post. Check out Bob Collins of Minnesota Public Radio and his daily feature called NewsCut.

Here's the video I promised. ROCK ON!!

As much as I don't agree with his policies, I have to give Barack Obama credit. Based on my experience working as an election judge at a Columbia, MO polling place on election day, I clearly saw how well Obama and his campaign mobilized voters to hit the polls. In fact, many of the some 500 people I checked in last Tuesday were first time voters, who said they were making the effort to participate in this historic election.
My day as a poll worker almost didn't get started. As many of you know, I'm not a morning person, so before going to bed Monday night, I triple checked my alarm to make sure it would go off at 4 a.m. Well, I should have quadruple checked because it didn't, but for some strange reason, I woke up at 4:45 a.m. anyway. I was late, but I made it well before the polls opened.
A line started forming at about 5:30 a.m. and more than 20 people were waiting before we opened the poll. However, that was really the last line we saw all day. We had a steady trickle of voters the rest of the time, with anticipated rushes at lunchtime and after work never materializing. Our precinct still had a better than 50 % turnout, which was good. But it would have been better, I think if our precinct hadn't been so new. We had at least a dozen people come to our poll mistakenly after getting incorrect directions to another new polling place from Google Maps. I have to wonder how many people gave up after not finding the poll at the place they thought.
However, I was also encouraged by the commitment most voters showed. A couple of people told me they drove around town two hours before finding our poll. We also had scores of people wait extra time while we called the central polling location to verify their addresses or voter registration. In fact, I can think of only one person all day who left in a huff, and I think she came back and did what she needed to vote.
The most encouraging thing to me was the diversity of people who voted. Mothers brought their 18-old sons. Sons brought their 76-year-old mothers, who had never voted before. I even had one woman who said she had lived in the United States for more than 20 years try to vote because she wanted to support Obama. I didn't have the heart to tell her she couldn't vote because she only had a green card. I think the supervisor ended up giving her a provisional ballot anyway.
In all, my experience was positive. The worst parts were waiting. I wished we were busier. I will definitely work at the polls again because it taught me to appreciate our democracy even more. Even if the outcome didn't occur as I had hoped, I witnessed the voice of the people in action, and I'm OK supporting it.