TBD Home Page circa 4 am, Launch Day

Today is finally the day. Today, TBD.com has launched and all of us who joined this venture with high hopes of shaking up the news business get our chance to sink or swim.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes and take a look at the site. Let me know what you think, either here in the comments, in our live chat today or wherever you tend to post your rants. If you see technical issues, please do us a favor and report them here.

What we put out there today is nowhere near a “finished” product. We’ve said from the beginning that TBD will always be developing and changing as we get new ideas and more information – so consider this TBD 1.0.

I really want to take this opportunity to say I’ve been so lucky as a journalist and as a person to have been able to build this site with these amazing people. I’ve never been so challenged, felt so excited or learned so much in such a short time as I have here. I have had the time of my life putting together this big crazy idea – and I expect it to only get better as we actually get down to the business we all came here to do.

We’ve been getting a lot of press in the lead-up to launch and I expect to see more reviews in the coming days. I’m collecting them here. Let me know if I’ve missed any links.

Thankfully, the Nieman Lab Blog took the time to assemble what dominated discussion regarding the future of news this year and takes a look at what will likely be hot topics next year as the industry continues to reel and (hopefully) evolve.  Most notably, next year seems to be heading in a direction of looking beyond the industry itself to what the affects the changes in the industry will (or should) have on journalism education, politics and public policy.

And in the second camp of journalism industry blog posts, Paul Bradshaw reviews all of the complaints news folks have had against The Internets over the years in one fell swoop. From hating on Google to opposing blogs and user-provided news, he offers something of a summation of just how depressing some news execs can be when it comes to that which they don’t understand.

News Corp’s Murdoch says he’ll hide his content from Google very soon. I’ll believe it when I see it. And if he does do it, how long will it take for regret to set in?

Pay Models

Alan Mutter points to the indicators and recent comments from newspaper execs that all point to a continuation of free news online at most outlets. A few places are going freemium, most notably the Star Tribune, who is mimicking the success of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with a premium sports service. The discussion in the comments is good too.

More on “freemium” content at the SF Chronicle and BusinessWeek.

Social Media

STATS: Has Twitter Flatlined Just Short of Mainstream? – For a long time, Twitter was gorwing exponentially, as was Facebook. But then Twitter evened out and Facebook just kept going. What happened?

Facebook Ads Now Let You Target Friends of Your Fans – Want to advertise to the friends of the people who are already fans of your company on Facebook? Now you can, thanks to the “friends of connections” targeting feature that was just rolled out by the social networking site.

How Twitter is Changing the Face of Media – Nothing new here, but it is a nice little overview of how far the news industry has come in using Twitter. Mashable also has a shoutout for social media’s effects on local news.
Mashable has 5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases for those who still aren’t sure what to do with those invites.

Speaking of Wave experiments, RedEye has ventured onto Wave. As much as I applaud experimentation with news technology, I really have to question RedEye on this approach. It’s like advertising that you’re having a party, but only a few of your readers will actually be able to go. They seem to forget Wave’s still in preview mode and not everyone has an invite.

Of course, we as an industry keep digging our own graves by prematurely declaring the death of journalism in columns and blogs every week. We really need to learn a lesson or two about message management.

Now the bad news. The people we as an industry rely on to make important business decisions (including keeping some of us employed) don’t have a clue how precarious our presence in the marketplace is without loyalty from readers.

A survey from the American Press Institute indicates a big disconnect between news executives and readers when it comes to judging the importance of the local print newspaper – and of those papers’ presence online.

One particularly appalling bit of info: 75% news execs think switching off their websites will drive people back to print newspapers instead of other websites. Readers, of course, say they’d simply go to another local news website, national news site or TV/radio. The execs seem to think this is still the boom era for newspapers and they still have a monopoly.

These people are deciding the future of my industry. God help us.

• The 7 Ways to Approach Twitter – Are you an organization? A personal brand? A personal account? All of the above? If you’re debating how you should use Twitter, take a look at these approaches.
• O’Brien: Older generations adopting new technologies faster than young – San Jose Mercury News – This may surprise you: When it comes to listening to music on iPods, blogging, downloading podcasts, joining Facebook, and using Twitter, the over-35 crowd is adopting everything from social media to consumer electronics at a faster rate than their Generation Y (ages 18 to 24) counterparts.
• The newspaper industry just gave away another free meal, er Twitter: do they have any left? « Scobleizer – Very thoughtful post by Scoble on what newspapers let slip through their fingers in the Internet Age – and what is still left to salvage.