'Take risks, learn from mistakes,' says film-maker

Joffé spoke to several hundred students at the University of Navarra on Thursday.

Film-maker Roland Joffé has a way of leading people on a mystical meditation to find out who they are and how they will communicate with the world.

"The truth is that no one in this room actually knows where we are," he told about 400 students and professors Thursday at the University of Navarra School of Communication. "And if we don't know where we are, how on earth can we know who we are. And finding out who you are is all your journey, isn't it?

"Communication is about finding out who you are and listening to other people and finding out who they are. And that's very beautiful."

Joffé is best known for directing The Mission and The Killing Fields. But he holds a special interest for the University of Navarra audience because he wrote and directed There Be Dragons, a film about the founder of Opus Dei and the university, St. Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer. (Our colleague Jaume Aurell was a historical adviser on the film.)

Make choices, take risks

Joffé encouraged students to take risks and learn from their mistakes, "Because that's the only way we learn. We're in a great vortex of communication. When we communicate, or when we create a film or a work of art, we can get it wrong. That's not scary, because we all make mistakes, and getting things wrong is part of the process, and listening to those who tell us we've got it wrong is an act of love."

How a musician views piracy and streaming

In May I was in New York at an academic conference and had time to spend with my son, Patrick Breiner, a jazz saxophonist.

I wanted to hear what he had to say about the economics of the music business from his perspective. He ended up talking more about relationships than economics.

Patrick says that in the digital world, the connection between the artist and their work is intangible. So the act of downloading the work for free "doesn't feel the same as taking a physical thing from a store or a person."

"When you download content for free, at least in my experience, my relationship to that content is cheapened."

Patrick, 32, says he has downloaded lots of material for free from libraries and other sites, and never listens to it. On the other hand, the music he has bought and literally invested in -- whether from streaming services, CDs, or vinyl albums -- "I listen to all the time." 

"It's not students with smartphones but professors' teaching methods that are to blame"

I want to share with you my translation of a blog post (Spanish) by my friend and colleague Jose Luis Orihuela, a professor at the University of Navarra, author, and keynote speaker.

Orihuela is addressing a problem that faces many teachers and professors: they say their students are distracted by all the media on their smartphones and are not paying attention in class.

Don't blame the students, he says. Blame the professors.

"It has to be said again: the problem is not that the student is distracted by technology but that the professors have to change their methods and the content of their teaching.

"It's easy to place the blame on the students and their devices; the hard thing to do is redesign education to adjust to a culture of connectivity. You can't teach against the culture of the students. You have to build on top of it."

He mentioned a well publicized column by a professor in Uruguay who decided to throw in the towel rather than fight against students using Whatsapp and Facebook in his classes.

Orihuela went on, however, to says he encourages those teachers who are adapting and admires  those who are changing.

The real challenge isn't students using tech devices in the classrooms, but rather professors learning to be digitally literate.

In this video (Spanish), Orihuela elaborates on the topic:

'Distributed content' expands reach, weakens influence of news organizations

The following is an excerpt from my chapter of a book on digital news media that will be published shortly, in Spanish. 

Among the most important developments in digital journalism in 2015 was the emerging practice of creating, distributing, and monetizing news known as "distributed content". 

Bell: 'Facebook is eating the world.'

What it means: news media organizations hand over their content to platforms like Facebook without linking back to their own websites so that smartphone users can get nearly instant access to the content without having to wait five to 10 seconds for it to display -- an eternity for impatient mobile consumers.

Versión en español

Snapchat was the first platform to stake a claim in this new territory of competition when it launched its Discover channel in January of 2015. Facebook followed in June with its “Instant Articles”, and others such as Google, Instagram, and Apple quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

These social and technological platforms had at least three motivations, according to Josh Constine of Tech Crunch. They wanted to avoid having users abandon a link to news content because of a slow download; they wanted to keep users in their own walled gardens to prevent them from going to other platforms; and, finally, they wanted to take advantage of the audience's attention to send them targeted advertisements, tailored to their personal tastes, preferences, and buying habits.

Forget about the big numbers; go for loyalty, trust

Anyone who has studied the metrics of the internet in any detail knows about the Big Lie: those big numbers of total users and page views that everyone relies on are practically meaningless.

• More than half of the visitors to websites stay for less than 15 seconds. 
• Three-fourths of the users of the most important news sites in the U.S. visit only once or twice a month. How can you even consider them users?
• Half of the internet users in 26 countries are getting their news through social media rather than the originating news sites themselves, according to the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2016. 
• 43% of social media users don't know where the stories they read originally appeared.

Jon Slade of the Financial Times

In other words, millions of clicks or millions of users are not an indication of trust in a particular news brand or loyalty to that brand. We need new metrics, better metrics.

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So it was heartening to see this reality affirmed by of one of the leading lights of digital media innovation, Jon Slade of the Financial Times, in an interview with Ian Burrell (thanks to NiemanLab for the lead):

“I've seen data recently that says that of all the pages on the internet less than 1% of them are from newspapers – the vast majority of time spent is with social channels and they are always going to be much bigger than you are – so if you’re trying to play a game of scale then you’re going to lose.”

There are only a few international brands that have even a slight chance of competing with the likes of Facebook and Google for the digital advertising dollars that are based on the number of eyeballs delivered to specific ads.

Media entrepreneurship takes hold at universities

Journalism professors are adapting to the realities of a historically tough job market. Their graduates are struggling to find stable work in an industry whose biggest players have been cutting staff for a decade.

So universities are teaching new skills -- multimedia production, community management, data management and visualization, among others -- as well as the traditional reporting, writing, and audivisual production skills.

They are also finding new business models. While the traditional media companies are hamstrung by mountains of debt and declining revenue, universities are stepping up to innovate and create new forms of journalism for the digital age.

A Facebook group for those interested in teaching media innovation and entrepreneurship has reached 800 members. And the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism is about to hold its third summit for educators in this growing field on July 15. Jeff Jarvis and Jeremy Caplan have been leaders in this field. I participated in the first two summit.

Spain's most successful digital journalism startup

In our search for the next big thing, we often overlook some of the steady innovators who grow organically without millionaire investors or crushing debt loads.

Alfonso Vara-Miguel of UNAV

One such example is El Confidencial of Spain (their slogan: "The preferred daily of influential readers").

This is a digital news publication whose value proposition for 15 years has been to offer quality news exclusives "that other media cover up or don't publish because of their overlapping political and business interests," according to researcher Alfonso Vara-Miguel, professor at the University of Navarra (in Innovación y desarrollo de los cibermedios en España, 2016, Eunsa, Pamplona, pp. 166-77).

Spanish news consumers are more skeptical of their news media than most (more on that below), so this independent-spirited publication, with a philosophy of spending no more than it takes in, has racked up some impressive numbers:

• advertising revenue exceeded US $9.9 million in 2014
• after-tax profits were US $1.3 million in 2014
• full-time staff numbered more than 100
• it averaged 735,000 daily readers in August 2015 (ComScore)

The value proposition is exclusive journalism free of political and business influence. 

Versión en español