WIRED’s Dylan Tweney Visits Racepoint

By Guest Author

Wired.com Senior Editor and Blogger Dylan Tweney stopped by the Racepoint San Francisco office today to engage in some lively conversation around what’s happening at WIRED, how Wired.com is forging new approaches to online journalism and how journalists and PR people can more effectively work together.

Some key highlights from the conversation:

• Blogs and microblogging tools like twitter have made journalism more “personal” and yet impersonal at the same time. While tools like twitter have allowed journalists to more directly connect with readers, with more followers it becomes increasingly difficult to really have any meaningful 1:1 interaction with everyone.

• The ability for readers to post blog comments is currently an under-leveraged feature. While journalists gain the immediacy of feedback on stories and blog posts, there could be better basic moderation to enable more intelligent conversations that get past the tone and actual add value to a story. People who comment (on blogs) can be harsh and highly critical, but if journalists can get past the tone and forge deeper conversations and more meaningful interaction, there’s a lot of great information that can be harnessed that will result in a better story.

• The journalist’s role is not to provide the definitive answer, but to be a conversation starter. By pointing out interesting discussions, the journalist can make something greater, beyond his/her own point of view.

• Journalists and PR people need to better collaborate because journalists no longer have exclusive access to the news. With the proliferation of bloggers, pundits and other sources online good journalists understand that they need reliable PR people with useful information that will help them keep abreast of latest developments.

• twitter is largely suited for bragging in its current state and the future of twitter is in becoming an advertising platform. Tweney reminds us that the number one rule in twitter is to “be useful.”

• With the demise of daily newspapers, there will be an information vacuum for bloggers to access information. Companies and their PR leads have an opportunity to fill this void by creating useful blogs that can become reliable sources of information.

Tweney is certainly one of the most open and innovative journalists we’ve talked to, and perhaps one of the most evolved as well. When asked which print media are likely to survive, he mentioned Vogue as a great example of continuing to feature rich, engaging ads true to their brand. He’s also an avid follower of Jeffrey Steingarten.

5 comments March 13th, 2009

Would You Pay $250,000 for More Twitter Followers?

By Ben Haber

Twitter has recently become a popularity contest for some users, as celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres have openly campaigned and begged for followers.  However, others users are willing to pay (a lot of money) for the additional following, like Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo.  He has offered Twitter $250,000 to include him on their list of 100 suggested people to follow, which every new user sees.  The list offers new Tweeters a wide range of people and companies/organizations to follow, including Google, The New York Times, John Mayer and Kevin Rose.

Calacanis went on to tell TechCrunch that he believes the the top 20 recommended slots will be worth $1 million a year (like a Super Bowl commercial) by 2014.

So how much attention and/or traffic does Twitter bring?  TechCrunch published a chart showing how much of their Web traffic came from Twitter over the past 14 months.

While TechCrunch appreciates all of their followers, they did say that not all followers are equal:

My suspicion is that most of the new followers aren’t hard core TechCrunch fanatics and wouldn’t be as valuable as the follower that we “earned” prior to being added to the suggested list. So far the data is confirming this.

So while it can be good to have a lot of followers, it’s much more important to have the right followers.

4 comments March 13th, 2009