Webs@Work

It helps when you’re the leader of 1.3 billion people and you put your popularity on the line online. Flush from the accolades for his sympathetic response to the Sichuan earthquake, Chinese leader Wen Jiabao has gone Web 2.0 with a profile on Facebook.

You can be friends with Grandpa Wen, the moniker for China’s 66-year-old premier who has always cultivated a populist image unlike many of the Communist Party’s aloof leaders. And with 15,000 Facebook ’supporters’ as of this writing, he’s more popular than US President Bush on the social networking site.

As the face of China’s grief, Wen’s knack for looking sympathetic has won him supporters offline. Hours after the quake hit Sichuan province, he was on the scene with a bullhorn. TV cameras followed him for days as he tried to comfort children and put on a hard hat to enter a collapsed building.

Full of laudatory comments, the Facebook page was set up two days after the 12 May quake. It has photos of Wen walking through the rubble, comforting victims and breathless posts such as: ‘I love you, oh my God,’ ‘A model Premier for the world!’ and “Go Grandpa Wen! Go China!”

The profile creator had uploaded a mournful “We Are The World” - style music video that interspersed horrific images of the quake’s aftermath with shots of musicians wearing white T-shirts with “5-12″ printed on them.

Facebook lets users create personal profiles. The page appears to have been set up recently though it’s not clear whether it’s the work of Wen himself, a government official or someone with no ties to the premier. The page bears the official government photo of Wen in a gray suit.

The Chinese leader is one of hundreds of politicians on Facebook. He joins Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, Taiwan’s Ma Ying-jeou, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and every major US presidential hopeful who have Facebook pages. The site has a section where users can ‘Browse All Politicians’ and see them ranked by their number of ’supporters.’

Devotees of the micro-messaging service Twitter watched the news unfold before their eyes as a 7.8 magnitude struck Sichuan province in China at 2:28 pm (0628 GMT) on Monday. The “Twitterati” got the news even before networks like Singapore-based Channel NewsAsia, CNN, MSNBC, BBC or the earthquake tracking US Geological Survey had the information.

This is a major disaster the horror of which is only just unfolding. While mainstream media scrambled to put up their “breaking news” headlines of the deadly catastrophe which has killed well over 20,000 people, Twitter had pictures, maps, videos all being sent in real-time. Here’s a glance at Twitter search site SUMMIZE and real-time results for “earthquake”

Micro-blogging outshone mainstream news as the earth shook with tragic consequences because people who felt the quake in China used their mobile phones to dash out “twitter” text messages as events unfolded, via the service provided by San Francisco-based Twitter Inc.

While it is stretching the imagination to suggest that the “Twitterati” knew of the earthquake before the US Geological Survey, Twitter reportedly became a source of information for major news organisations covering the earthquake. Twitterers became a bridge between the Chengdu-based Twitterati and mainstream media:

CNN’s John Vause in Beijing: 900 school children in Sichuan buried; 3000 troops and helicopters, Wen Jiabao on their way. ANDREW LIH (fuzheado)

BBC says 100 confirmed dead and rising. MICHAEL DARRAGH (michaeldarragh)

Here are more Twitter posts:

Slightly dizzy after being shaken around by the Chengdu earthquake for several hours now. CASPERODJ

At home in fact, cooking dinner and getting on with things. Just had another aftershock though.
INWALKEDBUD

Twitters are abbreviated text messages that can be instantly posted on online bulletin boards and personal websites and sent to the mobiles of selected friends. They were at the forefront of a gush of quake pictures and video swiftly posted online via Yahoo’s Flickr, Google’s YouTube.

Here’s how information spreads like wildfire on Twitter. First responder Robert Scoble a blogger, who was on the news into the early hours of the morning, was transferring news from the more than 21,180 people he follows to the 23,200 people following him. In turn, many of those folks would re-tweet (the term used to describe a message being re-sent out) the news to their followers.

Twitter was launched in March 2006 to let people share their every move with friends every moment of the day. Twitter users get a maximum of 140 characters a message. Ironically Twitter designer Biz Stone envisioned its potential as a communication tool by a ‘tweet’ warning he received about a California earthquake while about to board a train last year.

The first stage of the BBC’s newsroom integration project is up and running as journalists from the corporation’s television news service began working in a common newsroom with their colleagues from radio and television news bulletins. The Press Gazette reports that this week’s changes are the first phase of the BBC’s effort to integrate its news operation across media.

Journalists from the BBC’s international news channel, BBC World News, and those responsible for the text-based sections of the BBC News website will be brought into the converged newsroom in the coming weeks. The change has reduced the number of newsroom roles significantly. More...

The first wired generation raised in the virtual realm is coming of age and recreating the world in their image. Digital natives are deserting traditional sources of information for an emerging journalism of interactive multimedia experiences informed by the timeless dynamics of story.

This was the theme of my talk this week at a conference in Singapore on computer games and multimedia. I spoke about how news organizations are experimenting with storytelling in virtual worlds and the need to re-imagine journalism in a game environment.

Serious games and their potential for interactive, player-directed storytelling are great at illustrating complex situations. The concept is not far-fetched. Journalists must re-imagine story narratives and experiment with computer simulations to help digital natives learn about news events and trends.

Such an approach envisions new narrative forms as sophisticated play to engage a tribe of gamers who demand stimulating complex systems. The medium of games has matured along with the digital natives who grew up with it. In a galaxy not too far away, this generation will be learning about politics - not by reading or watching the news - but by playing games with peers in virtual worlds.

For example, news on the Olympic Torch and the shadows that dog it can be created as a game that immerses people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. Players create avatars modeled on characters such as the Dalai Lama and politicians caught in the fray. The route to Beijing offers rich scenarios for the virtual reconstruction of real cityscapes.

In his keynote, David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute in UK shared a glimpse of the future of serious play. The movement has serious brain power behind it. Advocates and nonprofit groups have joined forces to search for new ways to reach young people, while tech-savvy academics are keen to explore video games’ education potential.

Serious games are already being developed to help players learn about health, social, political and economic issues. The United Nations has released Food Force, a game that helps people understand the difficulties of dispensing aid to war zones.

A newspaper or other local news organization needs to be more than just a pipeline for informing people about current news and events.

PAUL GRABOWICZ University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

News games are more than voyeuristic mindless fun. They can be a medium for change. At Carnegie Mellon University, a game on the Middle East conflict is being developed. In the game Peacemaker, players assume the role of either the Israeli prime minister or the Palestinian president.

The idea of games for journalistic storytelling is in the skunkworks. The New York Times has published a game to help readers understand immigration legislation that was up for debate.

News media can use games to provide context for young people to understand their community and its history. Journalism professor Paul Grabowicz says video games let people re-live the history of their communities and understand not just what’s happening today but what came before.

Funded by a Knight News Challenge grant, Grabowicz and his students are developing Remembering 7th Street, a virtual reality game that replicates an Oakland street known for its jazz and blues club scene in the ’40s and ’50s.

Educators and traditional media approach games with fear. There is much to celebrate and little to fear when a young medium and old media converge on new media to reach a post-MTV audience. When information is retooled as enthralling experiences that tap the emotion and intellect through the interplay of narrative, performance and play, the consequences of this fundamental shift in media creation and use are profound and promising.

Through their ability to renew age-old modes of cultural expression, games can be adjuncts to topical issues, providing fresh experiences to spur community interactions. Augmenting play with media narratives can connect audiences to current events and issues.

We need best practices to re-imagine a knowledge aesthetic that provides core journalistic services built around a community of media producers, visual storytellers, information designers, narrative architects and game developers.

Serious Games sites:
Water Cooler Games
Social Impact Games
Games for Change
Impact Games

Related Read:
Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games
Using Video Games to Tell the News

While national newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today are growing, local newspaper sites are losing market share to pure-play Internet sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, as well as aggregation sites like newsvine.com and topix.net.

Acoording to a 2007 study from The Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, new types of nontraditional actors can be expected to enter the arena of Internet news, increasing the competition for users’ attention. Lobbying groups are among the possible candidates.

The Internet has unleashed news with a partisan spin. Although some news aggregators highlight stories on the basis of journalists’ or visitors’ judgments, other aggregators emphasize stories and angles that promote a partisan agenda.

Farewell Netscape, thanks for the surfing memories. You started it all for me in the early days of the Web. Though your graphical user interface is a relic in my memory, you were the Web for me back in 1994.

In a few hours time, the icon that gave people their first experience of the Web will no longer be around. Owner AOL will no longer support Netscape Navigator from 1 March 2008 and recommends users to upgrade to Firefox or Flock which are based on the Navigator technology.

Created by Marc Andreessen, Netscape helped make the Internet a mass market phenomenon when it was launched in the mid 1990s. But it could not compete. Its hey days were numbered when its user base and market share were eroded by Microsoft, which bundles Internet Explorer with its Windows operating systems.

Recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to IE’s 77.35% and Firefox’s 16.01%. This same underdog once claimed more than 90 percent of the market, sparking the browser wars of the 1990s and the subsequent Microsoft antitrust trial.

Users can visit the UFAQ and the Netscape Community Forum for support. AOL is also setting up a Netscape Archive where users will be able to download old versions of Netscape, without any support.

Netscape Navigator introduced me to the World Wide Web by enabling me to access information online. Those were the good old times, but I won’t miss Netscape. I write this on the Safari browser which I have come to love. No doubt an underdog touches a soft spot, but Netscape had its day. Rest in peace Navigator. The Web and I will cherish your legacy.

Related reads:
Official Netscape Blog: End of Support for Netscape web browsers

After newspapers, TV could be the next roadkill on the Web. With Web video shaping up to be viewers’ platform of choice, the migration of eyeballs and time spent watching video online is eating into broadcasters’ advertising pie.

Google’s plan to wring advertising revenue from its Youtube videos will keep broadcasters up on many a sleepless nights. If Google succeeds in marrying advertising to online video, broadcasters could find themselves in a bind similar to newspaper publishers. The familiar scenario - declining circulation and advertisers switching to cheaper, more effective online distribution.

For me, watching ads-infested TV sucks. With so many multimedia offerings online, scheduling must-watch shows is really a pain. I’m switching to Web video because I don’t want to waste time sitting through the TV ads. Here are the Web video hits that are making roadkill out of TV:

AOLin2TV
BBC TV News
ChannelChooser
cciTV.com
Democracy Internet TV
Live Online TV
PBS Frontline
PeekVid
Yahoo!TV

The Jeff Pulver Blog has a great collection of video Websites grouped into five zones, from professionally “produced” TV shows to personal video blogs:

1. “TV on the Net” - sites for TV shows that are, or have been, on TV/Cable and are available for viewing on the Net.

2. “TV Shows Only Available on the Internet” - new programs produced for the viewing on broadband.

3. “User Created Content sites” - sites like Veoh and YouTube which let community members upload video to share with others.

4. “Sites to View TV” - sites like ChannelKing and ChannelChooser where someone can watch commercial TV stations.

5. “Misc” - for websites that didn’t fit in any of the above.

CNN’s public journalism initiative, “beta” iReport is inviting anyone to send in photos, video, stories and more, creating instantly one of the biggest sites online for “unfiltered, uncensored user-powered news.”

Youtubish and video-centric, the site includes standard user-generated features, such as rating contributions, search by subject or submitter, sort by most popular. Anyone from around the globe can contribute pictures and video of breaking news stories from their towns and neighborhood.

Unlike iReports on CNN.com which are vetted by CNN, the iReport portal is unmoderated and stories appear on the site the moment they’re uploaded. CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage.

The site isn’t co-branded with CNN yet in a clear effort to seperate the CNN brand from the unmoderated content on iReport.com. The majority of iReports are on this site — about 90,000 — while CNN has only used about 900 of those on air or on CNN.com

CNN has been experimenting with citizen journalism since 2007. One event in particular catapulted such citizen journalism onto the international stage. On April 16, 2007, video submitted by graduate student Jamal Albarghouti captured the sounds of gunfire during the Virginia Tech massacre.

CNN paid Albarghouti an undisclosed amount for the exclusive rights to the video he shot on his Nokia N70. The immediacy of the pictures demonstrated the potential for such content.

So is citizen journalism inevitable? Is this another step by MSM and its archaic practice of editing to embrace new ways? Only time will tell whether this experiment will end up being a popular entertainment portal or a valuable news source.

Here’s a chance to be a YouTube millionaire, but only if you’re a top content creator. In the US, users of video-sharing site are already making money from the videos they post on the site. The project is being extended to other countries, starting in the UK.

Those signing up to the YouTube Partner Programme will be offered a share of the revenue generated from advertisements that run next to their video. Partners are independent video creators and media companies who are looking for online distribution. New YouTube partners include LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary.

The amount earned will depend on the number and popularity of the videos. YouTube says those making “several thousand dollars a month” are regularly producing videos with over one million views

The first wave of US partners - including singer/songwriter Tay Zonday, wordsmith hotforwords and comedians apauledtv and peteandbrian - have already become responsible for a significant percentage of YouTube’s total traffic, according to YouTube.

As people spend more time on social networking sites, they are increasingly thinking about how to monetise it. YouTube is part of the trend of social networks and user-generated content sites offering people a chance to make money for the content they create.

What’s happening in your neighborhood? Everyblock has just launched to let users search for news and information by address, zip code or neighborhood. For example, typing a zip code in the Chicago site brings up all the crimes reported there.

So far only Chicago, San Francisco and New York are covered, but more cities will be added soon. With its unique filter on the chaos of city life, EveryBlock does a good job of pulling information from disparate sources for Chicago/NYC/SF-based readers.

To get a taste, check out a map of all photos taken recently in Downtown San Francisco, a list of vehicles stolen in Chicago, or a log of the graffiti recently cleaned up in Brooklyn.

Al Thompkins of Poynter Institute reviews:

Click the word “map” on the upper right corner of the listing, and it maps all of the crimes. The site also gives you restaurant inspection scores for every zip code, street or specific address.

I then found all of the new business licenses issued for that zip code. When you click on the Business Reviews navigation bar, you’ll be directed to a listing of various businesses that you can comment on and rate.

Anytime the city of Chicago sends a press release from a city department that mentions this section of town, it will show up in the city press release section of the site.

The “news articles” tab features stories from various sites that in some way mention the area covered by the zip code. “Filmings” is a tab that mentions what movies have been filmed in that area of town.

The “photos” tab takes you to Flickr photos that have been tagged as having to do with Chicago. The site lists street closures due to construction, block parties. etc

While the sites may look like a random collection of data pulled from myriad services and slapped together, they promise serendipitous moments as Website destinations and innovative journalism.

The site was dreamed up by Adrian Holovaty, also behind the popular ChicagoCrime.org that maps incidents of crime daily. EveryBlock is funded by a $1.1M, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, a competition for making local news more easily obtainable.

Everyblock competes directly with Outside.in. Yahoo’s OurCity, while still beta and only covering cities in India, has many similar features as well. Also see YourStreet.

Here’s a great guide on citizen media, aimed at non-technical readers. Produced by Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices Online, An Introduction to Citizen Media, offers context and case studies on how people across the world use blogs, podcasts, Web video and digital photography to engage in an unmediated conversation transcending borders, cultures and languages. A Spanish version is available.

From the Introduction:

A change is taking place in how we communicate. Just ten years ago we learned about the world from newspapers, the television, and radio. Professional journalists would go to faraway places and bring back stories, photographs and videos of situations they witnessed and people they met.

Just ten years ago we rarely, if ever, communicated directly with the journalists themselves. Leading members of society wrote editorials expressing their opinions about various issues, but the rest of us could only share our opinions and thoughts with a small group of friends.

Bow thanks to new tools like weblogs, it is now possible to easily publish to the Internet. From Turkey to Kenya to Bolivia, everyday people are starting to share stories and opinions with the rest of the world. While this new form of communication is now freely available, most people participating still live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban cities.

While there are already several excellent introductions to the principles of citizen media, they tend to focus on citizen media initiatives in North America and Western Europe. This guide hopes to showcase some of the most exciting and innovative developments on citizen media in the non-Western world.

There’s a zero-sum flavor to the arguments of Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, at the Hugo Young memorial lecture in London. Misdiagnosing the threat facing media today, he warned that reliable news reporting is dwindling in the face of bloggers.

Dubbing the Internet a “media tsunami,” Keller flailed at blogs and pilloried sites like Wikipedia and Google News, insulting the Web products for not having things like foreign bureaus in war zones and because they don’t create content but aggregate it from other media.

“The civic labour performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replicated by legions of bloggers sitting hunched over their computer screens,” he declared. Hold it a sec. Google News and Wikipedia never claimed to be a news organization.

While the dinosaurs lay their last eggs and take swings at the new pamphleteers, perhaps we should revisit the history of The Press to remind ourselves why it exists. Perhaps at the top of their pyramids, old media dinosaurs fail to see that they have lost their monopoly on information.

Rather than being the sole source of information they once was, the press and TV are now part of a new information distribution structure. Content will always be king, and readers will go to wherever they can get the highest quality, most credible news. Good journalism is always in demand, whoever delivers it.

There is room for bloggers to contribute to the conversation. Instead of competing, bloggers and journalists should focus on good reporting. No model has worked so far. In a truly robust press, trained journalists and ordinary folks work to improve understanding of the communities. Professionals form the backbone with citizens in their various communities providing ideas, information, and old-fashioned legwork.

Well and good, problem is why would people offer time and knowledge to help out the journalists? The results of the Assignment Zero debacle portend the potential of citizen journalism. The concept of user-generated content is in danger of becoming a distraction from the real discussion about how professional journalism will navigate the rapids of technological evolution.

Steve Outing said recently in an item on the demise of his user content-powered Enthusiast Group, “I believe that what user content needs to succeed as a business is professional editors to be the ones to sift through it all to find the stuff that people will care about.”

Crowd sourcing works fine if you want to buy stuff and exchange verifiable info with peers in a Web forum. But news consumers want accurate, reliable, fair, credible, relevant and useful information which the citizen journalism model has yet to provide.

Michael Hedges notes in his Follow the Media post that citizen journalism, a term invented by accountants, is past its prime when listeners, viewers and readers lost interest in ‘reports’ from the 16-year old on the corner with a cell-phone camera:

Blogs, touted as giving voice to many, became, largely, ranters ranting to themselves or PR people posting the daily spin. Blog creation has peaked, wrote the Pew Research Center in a 2007 report. The successful became niche publishers, albeit of the traditional media model. The rest are just out there, hanging by the Web.

User-generated content is another concept designed to warm the accountants’ books. Couple it with the much vaunted social networking sites and zillions of web hits are created. All content may, indeed, be equal for 20 year old user/creators but an adult looking for knowledge and clarity is left empty. Unfortunately, sources for adults have evaporated into the dither of click-through ads

All said, is there a self-sustaining Website that actually practices journalism out there? Kara Swisher, who covers technology for the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital said this of Keller’s speech:

Actually, I think Keller’s real problem is the audience, especially young people, who are increasingly using those sites and others. The fact of the matter for an awfully long time now is that consumers of information are sampling all over the Web and don’t just rely solely on the New York Times for info.

That’s too bad for Keller, I guess, but not bad at all for consumers, who Keller never assumes are discerning at understanding what they are getting. But they are and are simply not a mass of dumb sheep just taking it all in and not questioning anything.

But I cannot imagine he lives in the present-day world when he claimed in the speech: “Most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.”

This is simply not true going forward, and he should have done some reporting on the subject to find out. There is an ever-increasing number of online outlets who are doing most excellent online reporting.

Read his full text here.

If you use Skype for interviews, here’s a great tutorial on all you need to know to get true broadcast-quality recordings. Thanks to Doug Kaye and Paul Figgiani of Blogarithms.

Professor Walter Lewin’s Lectures on Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are legendary for their clear and dazzling presentations. Now they can be viewed anywhere, anytime on the MIT OpenCourseWare site which shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from over 1800 courses spanning its entire curriculum.

The Walter Lewin Video Lectures

8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics
8.02 Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism
8.03 Physics III: Vibrations and Waves

Thanks to the global classroom the university has created to spread knowledge online, Lewin is today a Web guru. The professor is part of the Web generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and iTunes U. MIT on iTunes U contains video and audio files of MIT faculty lectures, public lectures, and community events.

And if you’re thinking of homeschooling a high schooler or gifted teenager, here’s an invaluable resource. M.I.T. recently expanded its online classes by opening a site aimed at high school students and teachers. Lewin is among those featured.

Open CourseWare is not an MIT education. It does not grant degrees and certificates or provide access to MIT faculty. Most educators use it to plan and teach a course.

Who says YouTube is the preserve of fickle teens? At 81 years old, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has launched her own Royal Channel on the video-sharing website to broadcast a very traditional message on a very untraditional medium.

Going live just after midnight today, the channel is a royal first. The monarch will use YouTube to send out her 50th televised annual festive message at about 1500 GMT on Christmas Day.

Buckingham Palace plans on posting rare archive footage on the website, including her maiden Christmas Day television speech sent out to Britain and its former colonies in 1957. The Queen spoke presciently in that black and white broadcast from Sandringham about the impact of technology:

Today is another landmark because television has made it possible for many of you to see me in your homes on Christmas Day. . . I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct . . . That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us.

QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Christmas Day Message, 1957

Showing a canny knack for keeping ahead of the times, the Queen launched an official website for the British monarchy in 1997. Last year’s message was available for the first time as a podcast on the Buckingham Palace website.

By tapping into the YouTube community, the Queen’s advisers hope she will be able to broaden her appeal to more people of all ages across the world and keep up with technological innovation. Users will be able to rank the royal videos by giving them a star rating.

Those close to the Queen have said how, encouraged by her grandchildren, she has long been keen to learn about new technology. She has her own private email address, “surfs” the web and uses a mobile phone.

Tuesday’s television broadcast, which has been recorded at Buckingham Palace, will be in high-definition format to ensure a better picture quality.

Buckingham Palace’s news release announcing royal channel.

As 2007 winds down, it’s time to take stock of Web video over the past year and how the landscape is likely to evolve. Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove sounds off the Web video market in an article.

The central thesis is that two general categories have emerged in the Internet video market over the past year:

Aggregators - which include consumer sharing sites, commercial video portals, and social networks,

Platforms - such as Internet TV platforms, community platforms, and uber ad platforms.

For video content owners and website publishers, several major trends will shape strategies in the Web video market.

Branded Destinations - media companies with established brands and new start-ups will continue to build successful branded destinations so they can control the access to audiences.

Audience Networks - content owners will continue to develop distribution strategies that place elements of their content library into wide distribution, in most cases with advertising attached.

Audience Monetization - content owners will look for new ways to blend ad formats, insertion policies, and targeting tactics across pages, short-form video clips, long-form shows, and open distribution.

Contextual Publishing - short-form online video does best placed in a context created by web pages, comments from users, etc. Contextual in-page video publishing will grow.

High-Quality Video - the increasing access consumers have to long form, high-quality video will push Web TV closer to traditional broadcast TV.

Check out the Engagemedia wiki to review the best available tools for the creation, playback and embedding of online video using Free and Open Source Software video codecs. There’s also a set of recommendations for development to enhance their adoption by social change video projects on the web. You can give your feedback here. PDF Version

TOP 100 NEWSPAPER WEBSITES

Find out how newspapers can put your message in a whole new light. Here’s a site that gives you solid support as you evaluate your media strategies.

Avaaz.org a community of global citizens acting on the major issues facing the world, is running an online petition for Burma on its site. The group has sent tens of thousands of messages to foreign ministers in Europe and Asia, raised funds for Burmese groups and run a global ad campaign.

Now it wants to grow the petition to a million names and deliver it formally to the Security Council itself, to push them to go further and mediate talks in Burma. Over 820,000 supporters have signed up. You can sign the petition here.

TV folks still don’t get it! When I’m consulted by broadcasters planning to launch an accompanying Website for a TV series, I am often floored by the silo-thinking that an online presence is merely something nice to have to reinforce the brand and generate awareness.

Little wonder that so many micro-sites purporting to be the online arm of a TV show are, well, so small and mono-dimensional. Sure, the bean counters on the board ask for the business case. It’s about time they drop the blinkers and TV-centric thinking and build the Website as a product.

The Website cannot be conceived as a brochure for reinforcing the TV brand, but rather as unique content sold as its own entity. It’s about leveraging the resources unique to broadcasters to implement a successful online strategy.

With Web content eating into the profit pies of print and TV, online financial success for broadcasters lies in creating true cross-platform integration with the TV side of their business. Traditional media are not getting the share of advertising because they have not got past the ways to monetize their Websites.

ESPN.com and CNN.com got it. And it’s simply that people will pay for content if it is valuable to them. What ESPN and CNN have done is increase cross-platform reach to their audiences by investing in and building their Websites. It’s about taking the information the networks have and knowing how to feature it.

ESPN.com developed cross-platform storytelling by streaming video and creating interactive games for their users. CNN.com emphasized the cable network’s strength in delivering breaking news by expanding on the I-Report feature which allows the portal to receive a large volume of breaking news without actively soliciting.

So instead of using third-party and costly software, broadcasters should create a local network of sites, organize the local Web and take advantage of what’s already available to create unique community. Some of the brightest minds in the industry know where the future lies and are steering their online products in that direction.