Journalism in 2011 & Occupy Wall Street

It’s Thursday 11/17/2011 at about 2:15 Eastern Time.

I’m watching the Occupy Wall Street protest live at: http://www.ustream.tv/theother99

The segment I’m currently watching is being broadcast by Tim Pool: http://twitter.com/#!/timcast

He has been covering this protest live, non-stop since 7:00am using nothing more than his cell phone with 4G and 4 donated Energizer XP18000 backup batteries. (After 8.5 hours his first battery is still at 75% power.)

Here is a picture of him from MSNBC:

This is been interesting to watch because of the stark difference between his broadcast and CNN.

Here is a screenshot of his broadcast on ustream.tv:

At this time he has nearly 28,000 current views with a total of 314,000 total views. The broadcast also has a live chat feed tied into the ustream chat, Facebook and Twitter on the right.

He is exhausted and wants to take a break. He won’t. His hands are freezing because he has no gloves. Someone is supposed to be bringing him gloves but they are a mile away.

It was raining for about an hour. He used a plastic bag to protect his camera. He really wanted an umbrella. Finally, someone gave him one.

Here is the live video feed from CNN for about the last half hour:

I’d like to get you a shot of the video they are shooting. But it doesn’t seem to be coming back up. When they are on the air they have no sound. The CNN reporter clearly looks uncomfortable with her stylish raincoat and perfectly done hair.

Tim broadcasts screens of other peoples’ cameras and video cameras. He gives credit to any and all other citizen journalists at the movement.

And then earlier this week we had this:

Associated Press Staff Scolded for Tweeting Too Quickly About OWS Arrests — Daily Intel

Apparently the AP policy is that you can’t scoop the wire on Twitter. If you are an AP employee you can’t put something on Twitter if it hasn’t been put on the wire first.

I have been in the Internet business full time since about 1996. It always seemed to move fast. But I’m here to tell you, the speed of change is faster than I’ve ever seen it. And it just seems to be getting faster.

Take a look at this line graph:

It took Google+ 16 days to reach 10 million users. There has never been a faster adoption rate of any media in the history of humanity. And who knows if it will even stick. People may already be moving on.

This incredible speed of change is potentially leaving the old guard left in the dust.

As all of this goes on I can’t help but think of the American Revolution and the Red Coats.

Here are these guys wearing red, marching in line. They are easy pickings for the Revolutionaries. The Indian-learned fighting tactics of the Revolutionaries were infuriating and also effective against the Red Coats.

It feels the same way with so many forms of powerful organizations:

Music industry is pissed people are stealing their music.
Movie industry is pissed people are stealing their movies.
Colleges refuse to offer education in current technology.
News organizations enforce protocol no matter what.

The old guard leaders are having an incredibly difficult time with the concept of sharing information, giving away information, trading information. Information appears to want to be free. The old guard hates that.

I recently had a professor tell me that he didn’t want his students talking about his class on Facebook because that’s too much power. They couldn’t be trusted with the information. This wasn’t some nuclear physicist. He was a PR professor.

It’s the hoarding of information that will be the death of these organizations. This is their red coat. If they absolutely refuse to let the information go and be free they will die.

Think about this from the perspective of your business. How much of your business strategy has to do with hoarding information:

Pricing.
Your weaknesses.
Your financial solvency.

It’s the companies that become increasingly transparent and open that will be the companies of the future.

This post was written by

Sage Lewis – who has written 333 posts on SageRock Digital Marketing Blog.
My name is Sage Frederick Lewis. My kid's name is Indiana Sage Lewis. I am filled with love and passion for many things in life. The list of things I like about life is MUCH longer than the things I don't like about life. So, since you don't have all day reading about the mundane things I love (some of which, btw, include: Rocky, Indy, SageRock, movies, pizza, cheesecake, running, exploring.) here are the things I don't like: Driving Meetings Zucchini (I like it fine. I'm just allergic.) I think that's pretty much it. My Twitter account is: http://twitter.com/sagerock My YouTube Channel is: http://www.youtube.com/sagerock