Citizen Media - The Future Has Been Cancelled

The IFRA workshop I wrote about on June 12, entitled: Citizen Media - The Future Is Here! has been cancelled as I was recently informed.

The cancellation appeared in the notice at the IFRA website.

According to inside information, there was insufficient number of participants, hence the cancellation. Three top industry personnel were scheduled to speak at the event to be held in the heart of Kuala Lumpur for two days starting July 22. They are:

• JEAN K. MIN - OhmyNews as a director of international division
• PAUL BRADSHAW- creator of the Online Journalism Blog (http://onlinejournalismblog.com)
• KEVIN SITES - Yahoo's first ever correspondent with a website of his own – Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone (http://hotzone.yahoo.com/).

It is a shame really. If you remember, the last IFRA citizen media workshop which was also held at a leading hotel in Kuala Lumpur failed to showcase Jean K. Min despite the brochure stated that he would be attending.

I was at the workshop and was only told that Min was not attending less than an hour before the workshop was to start. This time I was really looking forward to meeting him, and Bradshaw, but no chance again. Although the other participants were no less interesting, I felt 'cheated' because there was no explanation 24 hours prior to the event.

Anyway, this posting is to let you guys know that the IFRA workshop is OFF.

How To Promote A New Movie Launch Online

I often receive new movie releases via fax, the information from which I would be using Online. And many times, I had to call up the movie distributors and tell them to give me an electronic version, with all the releases written in a text file and stills in jpeg formats.

Today, I have fewer problems with public relations and marketing communications teams representing movie distributors and cinema chains. They stop sending me faxes and mail flyers containing anything from discs to posters. And I am thankful.

But if you are announcing a new movie, and think of sending your releases to an online newspaper or magazine, there is something you should think about - how about including a link to the movie's trailer?

Go talk to your computer guys or your principal's tech team. Ask them for an 'embed' script which you can include as your public relations material.

If you have never seen this script, or known one, it is a code snippet which, when inserted into a website, will allow it to display the movie's trailer hosted remotely. You know, just like YouTube?

Including a code snippet for a trailer will certainly make a story more memorable than just a text-and-picture story on a web page. Afterall, multimedia is what the web is all about!

The End Of Print Is Near?

LA Times is cutting jobs . Other newspapers in the US and across the world are probably, too, as the world goes into a recession as Warren Buffet predicted months ago.

With world economy in tailspin, cost cutting measures are the next logical step to be taken, even by newspapers. And why not?

As information sources explode, led by the Internet, it will be pretty tough for the common man in the street to digest all there is in a 62-page newspaper in what's left of his 24-allocated hours daily - tougher if he was subscribed to broadsheets than tabloids.

And as advertising budget shrinks, higher copy-to-ad ratio will mean more stuff to fill empty pages - meaning increased workload and staffing for the publisher and more stuff for the reader to digest. And will he or she suffer from information flatulence?

With the shrinking purchasing power, any consumer with access to television, radio and, at work, the internet, newspapers will but come last in one's information food chain. You simply don't have the time to read everything and even if you did, someone will outread you anyway when the midnight newsreel hits the tube.

Out of this, if newsprint costs can still be absorbed, the free paper models will likely to come up tops. Very unlikely its circulation will drop although justifying the actual readership figures will be tough - if not impossible - if not audited creditably.

In Malaysia, where one paper has successfully increased its prices without highly tangible loss in revenue the past 12 months, rising newsprint and other costs that have begun biting into its profits.

With the recent fuel price hike, costs will be a favourite topic for discussion in management meetings - not so much as editorial content. Whether this will result in cost-cutting measures such as lay-offs, as its overseas counterparts have undertaken, will depend on how much shareholders' reserves it has built up over the years and how well hedged is its newsprint stock.

Word on the ground has it that many vernacular broadsheets have also mulled size reduction - from broadsheet to tabloids - something many would have frowned and gone near so much as a thought a decade ago. How many would fold up will be anyone's guess.

The only saviour for the newspaper, where I am watching from, is to jump into cyberspace. This will be extremely easy for established names and those who were on the bandwagon decades ago. For the new kid in the block, just trying to climb out of search engines' sandbox will be a tough one.

Of course, with cost being the main consideration, online policies that are clearly thought out and intelligently laid out will go a long way to hedge the newspaper against future woes - be it costs or staffing or technology.

Google Retiring Referral Ads

Finally, the word is out - Google Adsense will retire Referral Ads which it introduced about a year ago. If you have been using Referral Ads, time to go back to the server and templates and start changing the ads. Replace them with the traditional Adsense ad units or else come August end, you will have a blank space staring at your face - matched by the drop in ad revenue from Adsense.

If you want to know more, read about it here.