All Things Cahill

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  • Whither Investigative Journalism?

    The “Special Sauce” for news media has always been investigative journalism, ala Woodward and Bernstein.  It’s what made myself and an entire generation of young writers want to get into journalism back in the 1970’s, each of us aching to bring the mighty low, to shine lights into dark places and in the process, make our names, too, household words.

    Today, investigative journalism is a dying craft.  Dying not because there aren’t reporters willing to ask the tough questions, but because media itself has rolled over and become passive.  Somewhere in the 80’s and 90’s news switched from investigating controversy to reporting on press releases. 

    Why is it dying?  

    • Mega-corporate ownership – Many of the owners of major media now are not primarily media companies per se (think of NBC as owned by GE), hence their primary goal isn’t news, it’s now earning profit for the corporation.  Is it possible the GE has muzzled the news? 
    • The economy – when things are down, it’s hard to justify putting a reporter on a special assignment for a day if it isn’t going to lead to a story right away.  The best investigative journalism often takes weeks or months.

    I’m sure if I thought about it, I could come up with many other reasons.  One thing I can state with certainty is this: not only has the way we get our news changed, the very fabric of what our news is has changed.  And I am not at all convinced its a good thing.

    In the vacuum that has been created, we’re now getting much more news “analysis” which is very easy to produce, very cost effective, and really comes down to us listening to someone else’s opinion.  Often those opinions come with agendas, be they right or left wing.  The funny thing is that if we really want analysis, we can get if via podcasts, vidcasts, blogs, etc. There is little that big media brings to the table here that can’t be found elsewhere.

    At the end off the day, we all lose without investigative journalism.

  • Social Media Community Building 101 – The Team

    So you’ve got the basics set, having a general plan ready to go (you did read the first article in this series, right?).  Now it’s time to nail down another important aspect of your little project: the community team.  Again, we’re going to have some choices to make, and each one comes with it’s own set of baggage.

    • Partner – give up equity in your project and pay the team member with an ownership stake.  This helps to properly motivate team members in the beginning, but to keep them involved, your going to need to see some financial success fairly quickly (but that’s a good thing, right?).
    • Hire – The dreaded FTE, which is something a new and unproven business model should avoid at all costs.  You’ll know when its time to get serious and hire people, but pre-launch isn’t the time.
    • Contract – As Charlie Sheen notably said about call girls, “I don’t pay them for the sex, I pay them so they will go home after the sex.” This is the reason I like contract work or freelancers for building sites initially.  The project is scoped, the project is built and eventually, they go home.  No long term commitments, no nasty divorces.
    • Outsource/Third Party – Hire a company or freelancer for a specific task or area of expertise.   
    • Barter – Yup, you can trade your skills for those of other professionals.  The good news is that no cash has to change hands.  The bad news is that you’re going to be doing work for someone else, for free…
    • Intern – There are folks out there who will want to become involved in your site, and they’ll be willing to help, and they’ll do it for free.   Not all of them will work out, but you’ll find over time that looking inwards to a community for help is a great way to make things happen.

    You should have a good idea from your business plan where the major areas of work are going to be.  Let’s generally assume: (more…)

  • Skype Moves Into 1st

    Om Malik reports this morning that Skype is now the largest long distance phone company.  That’s a huge stat when you consider that Skype wasn’t even a blip on the radar a few years ago, and flat out didn’t exist a decade ago.

    We’ve come a long way.  Remember when you got calls from MCI, Sprint and the rest almost every day?  Remember the incredible bills when your kid called American Samoa or Rangoon?  

    Telecom was one of those industries that had been completely comoditized before we were born.  It became all about price and marketing.  Skype has taken it to the next level, by providing a large portion of it’s long distance computer to computer communications for free.  

    That’s changed the way a lot of people live.  My Aunt and Uncle talk to their granddaughter in Alaska almost every night.  Such a call from the east coast of the US would have been priced prohibitively just a couple years ago.

    Many companies have a “Skype First” policy, in which all internal communications should first be attempted via Skype.  The savings for business is dramatic.  It also changes the way people work, as it’s now easy to keep a voice line open with someone on the other side of the world for hours at a time.

    Congratulations to Skype for pulling off the unthinkable – they’ve moved into first against all the other long distance companies.  Hmmm…wonder if they’re profitable.

  • Friday Music Video: The Pogues

    If I Should Fall From Grace With God…a truly seminal work.
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrBLqp-s__o[/youtube]

  • CEO’s Guide to Jetting from JetBlue

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmDiDJ7QrdU[/youtube]

    The other two can be found here…

  • The Dark Heart of Social Media Marketing

    Over the past few days, I’ve seen several of the A-listers on Twitter tweeting directly to the airlines themselves about problems they were having with flights. Sounds like a neat use of Social Media? Not hardly, when you look at it closer…

    You see, in the first case, the A-lister in question turned up late for a flight, which happened to be overbooked. So this A-lister came up without a seat, along with something like 8 other people. Immediately the A-lister began to whine on Twitter about the party at SMDBcon (or where ever these folks are currently flocking to join the conversation), while tweeting directly at the airline’s corporate twitter account to help them. Veiled threats of a full on Twitter flogging ensued, then suddenly, the final “I’m on, but in the last row…” tweet.

    Here’s the problem. What about the other 8 folks? I’m not saying Twitter was the resolution to this problem, but if it was, it was exactly the wrong move. If they did “help out” all they did was create a whole new level of support for a very minor subset of their customer base, the Twitter enabled self-obsessed web marketing-types. And remember, this person was going to be late for a party. What about the others? How many of them missed something important?

    For the record: Internet: 1.5 billion users, Twitter, around 8 million (and a large portion of those don’t actively use it); so the question becomes this: why would you want to create another tier of customer support just for these folks? Are the Twitterati that important to us? Is it incumbent on business to make sure an A-lister who was late for the flight is hurried off to their party?

    Think it’s just an isolated incident? The same week I saw another A-Lister tweet that he’d been kicked off a flight. Then for the next hour he bitched about the attendant that threw him off, for having refused to turn his cell phone off after the doors were shut. That’s an FAA regulation, and for the record, if you travel very much at all, you should know that you’d be summarily tossed if you refused. This fellow went as far as tweeting direct to the airline, using the attendants name, demanding they should be summarily fired.

    So let’s think carefully about this: do we really want to go down the slippery path of creating another tier of support, so that we can enable people to get around the existing process? Discuss….

  • Social Media Community Building 101 – The Starting Points

    (This is part 2 of an on going series of posts on Social Media.  If you didn’t see my first post, in which I define Social Media is, I emplore you to start there  now.  All the posts in this series will be tagged “Social Media 101” so you can find them easily.)

    Starting a new community is a fairly daunting task. In this post, I’ll point you to some initial steps that will help you along your way towards building a stable, sustainable and scalable platform that will make growth and success technologically possible.

    First off, you have an important technology decision: are you going to roll your own from scratch, assemble pre-packaged systems, or look for a complete system that will fill your needs. Considerations:

    • Roll Your Own (think of custom coded PHP, ASP, Perl, Java, etc. solutions):- You need to be a competent coder.
      – Time to market will be longer.
      – You will have complete control over how your site works.
      – Your feature set at launch will probably be restricted.
      – Less spam issues, as you’re solutions will be one off, hence the packaged spam products will not know how to attack you.
         (more…)

  • Spring is in the Air…

    And unfortunately, in New England, that generally means that the snow has melted enough for all the dead stuff it was covering to start festering, with the smell of decomposition hanging in the air like a thick Gloucester fog.

    The annual migration of the cops has brought them back to their speed trap haunts, with thoughts of revenue enhancement on their minds, the precursor to their yearly feeding frenzy at the summer construction detail grounds.

    The cruelest days, those that come right before the emergence of the green…the days of death. I truly cannot stand March…

  • Friday Music Video: King Crimson

    In honor of all the bloggers out there who think “Sponsored Posts” are okay…time to Google the term “Journalism Ethics“.

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lCYdMXVre0[/youtube]

  • Major Site Update – Splitcoaststampers.com

    Yesterday we updated the Splitcoaststampers.com site, the absolute best site on the net for Rubber Stamping and Card Making,  with to the latest version of vBulletin, added a left column and did a whole bunch of system integration throughout the site. The project took approximately 4 months to complete, with tremendous work by Scott Bigelow, a great backend engineer and hardware guy, and Daven Nolta, the site manager, who kept us on track and on target for the community needs.

    In addition to the standard upgrade stuff, we’ve added more Social Media functionality.  Facebook Connect buttons, a Twitter Stream, a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group.  There are several other big Social Media features we’ll be unveiling over the coming weeks, but thos will be subjects for another day.  

    The important point is that the site is no longer running on a horribly out of date vBulletin install, which I’d taken as my personal mission to resolve.  If you’re using systems like vBulletin, you really need to stay current.

    The upgrade wasn’t without it’s problems. We did find we had several issues with formatting when we went live. In further researching them, I find they were almost universally IE6 and almost universally using 800 x 600 screen resolution. The screen shots from users were almost comical, as some had 5 or 6 malware toolbars installed in their browsers, making the vertical space in the browser window almost non-existent.

    If you are using IE6, I strongly urge you to try downloading Firefox or Google Chrome, or even the latest IE version(IE8). Your current browser is close to 10 years old. Your internet experience is lacking because of your use of outdated technology.

    Also, I suggest you right click on any area of the empty desktop screen and click properties. Then click settings and increase your screen resolution. It is becoming very hard for us to support people using very low screen resolutions, when we also have to be able to handle very high resolutions as we are seeing from laptops. If I cater to you, the laptop users are going to see my site at postage stamp size.  And again, you’re missing out on a lot as no one really designs for small screen resolution anymore.

    Oh, one very funny thing, we began our upgrade at around 10:30 am.  At 10:45 vBulletin released an update to their system, so as I was upgrading I immediately got a message about it.  Timing, it’s all in the timing.