Christian Oliver's digital thoughts

Today is El Universal’s 100th anniversary. I’m a proud alumni of El Universal and I’m happy to remain involved in its development. We are working hard to get this company through this transformation era into another 100 years of quality journalism.

For the occasion I wrote a piece which can be read in Spanish at eluniversal.com  

Congratulations to everyone in the family of El Universal in Venezuela.

This is the intro to my article:

“Rather than submitting the same contents in each kind of media, the contents should fit in each possibility of supplying information. The challenge is big indeed, because the current change involves the media, the audience and the world. The information is here and users are either active or passive with regard to the news”

Continue reading…

El Universal has an English version of the Anniversary edition, which can be found at the Daily News Section:

Here is an English version of my article: From the newspaper to multiple platforms

Out of personal experience I have recently noticed how there are less personal blogs and many are not as up to date as they used to be. I haven’t updated our family blog for a while, mostly since the year started. I stopped blogging due to lack of time. Well, it’s not entirely lack of time but a matter of convenience.

Facebook and Twitter are killing my family blog!
Why? Because it’s so much more convenient to keep our family and friends up-to-date through Facebook and Twitter than through the blog.

When we started the blog in 2001, it was the best way to keep our loved ones up to date, but many things have changed since then.

One great advantage of using Facebook is having unprecedented control on who can see what. If you spend some time tweaking the privacy settings on Facebook, you can control to the person who gets to see what. This is increasingly important to me given the levels of insecurity in Venezuela. It always scares me to travel there and know that there is so much information about us freely available in my family blog.

Yes it’s true that most people don’t know about it but Google does, and thus anyone willing would.

It’s also true that I can set some privacy settings on the blog to control that no sensitive information is freely available (which I have done), but then I have to put the burden on our friends who have to register on the blog to be able to see everything, and who needs another login and password!?

The beauty that most of our friends and family are already on Facebook does take the burden off of their shoulders.

Our closest friends are up to date and our non friends are not.

Perfect, right?

Wrong.

From the security and control perspective it is correct but there is one big problem with abandoning the blog and putting everything on Facebook. In the Digital Media world its called “Data Portability“, that is my ability or lack thereof, in the case of Facebook, to retrieve my information and migrate it to whatever service I see fit. As of now, we can’t do this with Facebook. Everything we publish there dies there. We can’t extract it and republish it anywhere else. If Facebook closes (unlikely but not impossible), everything we’ve published would be toast.

This is not the case with our blog. The data is ours and we have complete control on the server and back it up frequently. I could move the entire content of the blog from one platform to the other any time I want. In fact, this has happened already once when I moved it from Blogger to WordPress. And also, the WordPress blog itself has moved a few times from one server to the another.

Thus we’ve decided to keep blogging but only put here the important stuff, the stuff we don’t want to risk loosing, making this our true Family Diary. This blog has always been a good diary for us but it also had a lot of filler that it’s not crucial to “leave for posterity”.

Hence so, the family blog will from now on focus on important events that have happened and that bear some relevance to our lives.

Everything will be published after the fact (for live blogging follow me on Twitter or Facebook). Given that we are going through the parents stage of our lives, there is likely to be a lot of news and milestones from the kids, which most likely will be closed to registered users depending on the sensitivity of the information.

No, we are not that egocentric! We are happy to share our lives with our loved ones as it makes us feel connected but it’s definitively not thought of as responsibility with our fans or anything egocentric like that. Our main motivation is to keep a diary of our lives and share it with our closest friends and family.

At the end, it seems that fragmentation is affecting everything. Now there is a variety of platforms to communicate and each one is ideal for a particular usage scenario. Things are getting more complicated but at the same time, easier, it all depends on how much you want to do.

Long live the personal blog!

El Universal in Caracas produced a video with me about their future challenges and how media consumption is changing with the advent of media fragmentation. Here it is.

I have to translate it into english but most will already see the point. It was hard to convey so many details in 3 minutes. The first script I wrote took around 8 minutes, thus we had to chop it a lot.

I was reading a post by Jeff Jarvis and it hit a note on my subconscious. This is a topic I’ve been struggling about for the past year. When I was invited as a judge for the Fundación de Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano on their yearly awards, I realized that some changes need to be made on this kind of awards, including the Pulitzer.

In general, awards should look to reward innovation, journalistic principles and above all quality. They should not limit themselves to rewarding traditions or old ways of doing things.

Awards have to change their structure from media outlet based to content type based. It is obsolete in this era of fragmented media and audiences to continue giving awards to “newspapers”, “television” and “radio”. Some awards like the Pulitzer have already taken this path but I would suggest breaking them down further by type of content, i.e. politics, economics, technology, etc. Even the Pulitzer only takes into account the web and print when giving awards for Breaking News. How about using other communication tools such as SMS, Twitter or even AIM?

Furthermore, we should move away from rewarding individualistic work and motivate team work. They should shift their focus from rewarding single individuals to coordinate efforts of multidisciplinary teams. The Pulitzers make a great job at this but many awards are still not up to par and many still think of them as individual achievements. I would rather see an award given to the newsroom that managed to cover a breaking news event in the most effective way, making the best use of its available media outlets than rewarding the typical photographer who was at the right place at the right time. We have to incentivize going beyond that.

There should still be categories for individual efforts and for individual skills, almost like in the Oscars, say for “Editing”. But there should be awards for innovation. How about an award for “Best use of Social Networks in the creation and dissemination of a journalistic piece”. It would be great to have entities looking at these type of awards and in themselves disseminating best practices in the cutting edge of media.

Maybe fragmentation is the answer to awards as well. It would only make sense that in a fragmented media world, we had fragmented awards. Fragmenting the awards would also open the door for smaller operations to qualify, that way we can start seeing new names other than the usual suspects with enormous budgets. Rewarding excellence in smaller operations can have a bigger impact on the overall quality of journalism as we all want to learn from examples we can achieve.