Or it did, before a New York Times article on Monday said the following about Wal-Mart’s recently launched Check Out blog:

Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries.

This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

Corporate blogs are nothing new — General Motors, Dell and Boeing have them — but Wal-Mart’s site, called Check Out (checkoutblog.com), turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing.

The result is an intensely personal window into the lives, preferences and quirks of the powerful tastemakers at Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, who have spent years shielded from public view.

Their decisions about what makes it onto Wal-Mart’s shelves have enormous impact, earning (or costing) vendors millions of dollars.

Keep in mind this is the same Wal-Mart that, as the largest music retailer in the world, has a reputation for stubbornly sticking to carrying only censored top 40 material. Are you frustrated and confused? I’m frustrated and confused. Sure this is just good business practice, but it’s so…progressive for a business that’s been historically old-school. How am I supposed to react when Wal-Mart does something I like? I can ignore all the charity — that just comes back thru taxes — but this, this is too positive and up my alley to ignore.

It was a blogger on the Check Out, after all, who first disclosed last month that Wal-Mart would stock only high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format, rather than the rival HD DVD system. The decision was considered the death knell for HD DVD.

Ah the future. Hello.

This is not Wal-Mart’s first plunge into the blogosphere. Several years ago, when the retailer’s public relations problems began to mount, it turned to the Web for relief. It created one blog, Working Families for Wal-Mart, to trumpet the chain’s accomplishments and ding its critics. It created another, Wal-Marting Across America, to highlight the good deeds and productive careers of Wal-Mart employees.

Critics dismissed both as thinly veiled extensions of Wal-Mart’s P.R. department, and Wal-Mart shut them down.

The lesson seemed clear: create an authentic blog or don’t create a blog at all.

Wal-Mart employees began developing Check Out (subtitled “Where the Lanes Are All Open”) a year ago and recruited a handful of buyer-bloggers last fall, giving them rudimentary training on how to post their writing, upload videos and create hyperlinks.

After heeding the lessons of Wal-Mart’s earlier blogs and consulting with several well-known bloggers from sites like the Huffington Post, the buyers decided the site would succeed only if they wrote in their own voice, free from censorship and corporate review.

There are several notable and amazing things happening here. The first is the failure of the PR blogs, which serves up a point about the new media marketplace in general; communication isn’t one way any longer and ham-fisted marketing has to be creative to succeed, not just there. Businesses are having to answer increasingly to public opinion and scrutiny, and well funded ad-campaigns for crap products no longer offer the near guaranteed success they used to. People want respect and their own opinion. The second, and most incredible part of all this, is that Wal-Mart understood and bought into these truths.

We live in a world where most businesses erroneously think that with enough money they can tell us what to buy, what to do. They haven’t accepted that the public now has voice enough to demand quality products, and to sink those that aren’t. And who is it that’s stepped up to embrace this reality? It’s definitely not the music industry, they’re too busy pushing that music piracy is a gate-way to drugs, murder, and terrorism. It’s not the movies, they’re too focused on piggybackcloning the legalized assault music is making. It’s not some hot new entrepreneurial enterprise or corporation with a history of innovative thinking. No, it’s retail megamonster Wal-Mart, one of the only businesses around to still hold that type of big stick power and influence, that makes the move to give the customer control.

WTF? And yet — Awesome.

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Original NYTimes article: Link

Download full .pdf version: Link

View decidedly lame watered down net version: Link

Visit Information Architects website to learn more: Link

This is the new audience for news. They grew up in a world where the Internet has always existed and this has changed their social and cultural attitudes.

“The generation coming into adulthood has had a very different experience than we have had”, [Lynch] argued. “Our audiences are changing and we are not as aware of this as much as we should be.”

Lynch pointed out they have grown up with no private spaces, no private lives and no expectation of privacy.

Partly this is because they have grown up in a world without solitude. The mobile phone, IM, Twitter means they never need be alone, at least virtually.

Let me just stop everyone right there for a moment. I see a lot of ‘this audience,’ ‘the generation,’ ‘they,’ ‘they,’ ‘they,’ ‘their attitude,’ ‘ their experience.’

Who exactly are we talking about?

As a university student charged with taking a critical look at the media industries that surround us, one of the notions most frequently pressed is that we’re not to refer to the actions of ‘the media’ as though it were one body. ‘The problem with the media…,’ ‘The media always….’ No. Big sweeping classifications of that vein do no good for anyone because certainly there are usually exceptions to most any rule.

Is it not reasonable to expect the same to be true in reverse? I understand the intentions, but question the outcome of looking at ‘this generation’ with such narrow parameters. They are right to identify changes in their audience, but I worry that grouping people with these broad stroke labels creates detrimental and inaccurate perceptions. In particular that the experience of ‘this generation’ all occurred in the past few years. I shall use my own experiences as a counter point illustration.

I first recall the Internet showing up late in elementary school, and more heavily around sixth and seventh grade. It made sense to me from the onset. I’d played Nintendo and the idea of interacting with on-screen objects to ‘take you somewhere else’ was one I was comfortable with. In that regard, perhaps my peers and I were more prepared to handle and understand the web. The ‘book and pages’ analogies weren’t necessary. I would consider it more accurate though to say we ‘grew up on technology’ than ‘grew up online.’

Remember that this was a different Internet back then. Afterbirth was everywhere. The first computer I accessed the net with was running DOS at startup. Things were very user un-friendly and no one was sure what to do with it yet. It was slow and had very few of the practical utilities it has now. I spent small periods of time online, but as doing so tied up the house phone it didn’t allow for the marathon sessions possible today. ‘Alone time’ is definitely something I and many of my friends had plenty of. We were on the same ride as everyone else, but often were simply better equipped and motivated to invest in it.

By high school separate phone lines became more commonly used and I found myself online considerably more. Remember though that the web still wasn’t nearly the pervasive force it’s come to be. Of my friends who did have computer and net access, the vast majority of them had no more presence online than an ICQ or AIM screen name. My having taught myself enough HTML to put together simple web pages put me leaps ahead of most my peers in web-guru-ity. We used things like mIRC. Yahoo and AOL chat rooms. Maybe a message board or two.

Lynch pointed out they have grown up with no private spaces, no private lives and no expectation of privacy.

I find this decidedly untrue for myself. We were online, yes, but much more invisibly so. Only the nerdiest of poetry writers and gamers had heard of some thing called Myspace. The depths of something like Facebook were still long off. You didn’t put photos of yourself online — what would you have done with them? At most you had, again, your ICQ or AIM profile in which you revealed maybe your age, sex, and penchant for trashy novels, but the immersion went little further than that. It’s amazing how fast we lose perspective along the path of change. Recall that The Sims was all the buzz at this time, and the idea of people existing, communicating and doing normal day-to-day type activities through an on screen avatar was stirring up all sorts of conversation about the future of technology! mind rot! hooplah! Only the most forward looking basement EverQuest jockeys really had first hand understanding of where this all was going and what it may mean for websites, and only if their Mountain Dew trip was intense enough to trigger some major extrapolation.

I got my first cell-phone my junior year and text messaging was then a too-expensive novelty. Napster hit the scene and many downloaded songs for the first time — one at a time. Blog-as-diary was starting to be the explosive phenomenon it would grow into. It wasn’t until I graduated in 2003 that anywhere near half my friends had Myspace accounts.

Lynch’s explanations, focusing on what’s available right now, are most accurate in describing the current batch of 10-15 year olds, many of whom will have grown up with these technologies as a constant reality. Yet many of them still live in households without Internet access. They’re not all rolling out of bed and checking their Facebook and Twitter accounts on personal laptops. Many of them still watch their parents read the newspaper over coffee each morning — planning on the day when they’ll do the same.

My point is that generalizations and assumptions about our proposed lifelong Internet experiences do a disservice to everyone. It’s foolish to use a snapshot of now to explain desires and attitudes shaped over a much longer time frame. My peers and I may be more comfortable online than many older folks but to assume we weren’t there for the ride in any capacity, or that we don’t understand and hold important the value of classic print journalism is to miss much of the picture.

Switching gears from nitpicking and nostalgia I turn to the latter portion of Hermida’s coverage of Lynch’s presentation, in which I find much more to agree with.

…what really matters for journalists is understanding [this generation's] attitude to who is an expert. Lynch explained how the research showed children create online personas and develop reputation on the web, regardless of their age.

This is important for journalists, who tend to assume they know more than their readers. However, said Lynch, the young do not share this perception.

Instead, she argued, online no one knows you are 12 and this generation is part of a world where knowledge equals practice, regardless of age.

This was one of the quotes she highlighted from her research: “I might be 13 but I know more than anyone else in the community about fan fiction.”

Provocative talk for a room, largely full of print journalists who are uneasy and a little frightened by the changes taking place in the media.

Here they’re hitting the nail right on its big fat head. The times I most frequently lied about my age online were always when doing so made my contributions or statements hold more weight. As a fourteen year old film and music critic I felt my opinions were well considered and valid, and so did others so long as they were in the dark about my age.

If there’s one thing we all need to be learning from the online experience it’s that information either is or isn’t valuable in and of itself, and who it comes from is changing and matters less. The Internet says more voices are better, and is the purest example of democracy we have. Speaking of which — Net Neutrality — but we’ll save that for another time.

Hermida and Lynch are on the right track in their emphasis on accepting changes in the audience, and attempting to illuminate what those may be. They’re accurate in their perception that much of the youth hold their opinions and abilities as being worthy of competing on whatever level they warrant, regardless of the creators age. I do hope, however, that they can approach these changes without shrinking their view of the audience to oversimplified stereotypes.

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Alfred Hermida’s overview of Lynch’s presentation: Link

Adam Bond has removed his post in which he says he just can’t help but be reminded of the Nazis whenever he thinks about opponents of the proposed Middleborough casino. Now I wish I’d quoted an excerpt when I alluded to it yesterday.

Oh, wait — Bellicose Bumpkin has it here. It’s nice to know that Bond’s brilliance lives on.

I loved this. What a perfect illustration of how things have changed. People can’t hide themselves and the things they say anymore, even if they suddenly decide what they were saying was moronic. Sometimes, for the legitimacy of public record, that’s cool.

Other times it’s scary. Very scary.

Media Nation Blog: Link

I got a message college listserv today from a designer who is looking to score an online news job. They posed the question of what are the “essential components of a good newspaper website?” and what are your favorite online news sites.

I responded that no one newspaper website is the same, as most have different audiences, which call for different functions.

I did say that newspaper websites need to optimize their content to be found by search engines and they need to make their content shareable. But those are pretty much the biggest overall items I thought of.

This is such a huge question right now, that I decided to take a moment and whip out a few of what I see as being the most important or beneficial elements of a ‘good’ newspaper website. There are as follows:

• Content is the most important thing, and should include in-depth articles along with multimedia. Don’t get distracted by the nature of the web, content still matters most. Would the information still be as useful were it written on toilet paper?

• The design should be clean and lend itself well to adaptability. It needs to be professional and appealing in its appearance, but clean. Everything should be built around a stable story archive core, and adding multimedia bells & whistles only after-the-fact. Centering the site around the use of technology will only leave it dated in a years time.

• Stories need to be easy to browse by subject, region, and date.

• As much content as conceivably possible needs to be free.

• User ability to ‘digg’ or vote for articles as being interesting with list of most voted in last hour, day, week, year, ever.

• Interactive / targeted ads should generate revenue to support print dept.

• Include some degree of social networking (user ability to create profiles, blogs, highlight favorite articles, list favorite other people also reading articles, forums, so forth).

• Expand on articles with links to further info around web — making newspaper sites a fantastic homebase resource.

• Web-only content responding to articles and blog posts around the web.

• RSS

Of course this list could go on indefinitely. These considerations though, should form a strong foundation from which to work from. Part of what has led to frustrating newspaper sites is that so many of them were poorly designed to begin with. Trying to throw a bunch of imagery and video on top doesn’t suddenly equate to ‘good stuff.’

Can you think of anything huge I’ve overlooked?

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Shawn Smith’s Original Wired Blog Article: Link

Blogging is often a very communal process and I’d say that students who blog will find they gain much more benefit from networking through their blogs then they get from other aspect of having them. And it’s through these communities that audience comes.

Zac is more right than he knows. This principle isn’t true just of blogs but across the entire board of media industries. Audience and community are the key terms of the next ten years as the news increasingly becomes a giant networking party.

An example of how mistakes are made in these areas: When I attempted to contribute a comment to Christian and Zac’s conversation I was denied, as only registered Wired blog users may leave comments. The inability for me to post as a guest cut what could have been a great dialogue off at the knees. Whoops.

Christian’s Original Post: Link

I became addicted to blogs in mid-January. Since then, I’ve asked four or five other journalism students if they read blogs or have their own. None of them do. I’ve heard that a journalist should write daily to nurture creativity, and it makes sense.

Still, many student journalists limit their writing to the campus newspaper. These are the students who are content to learn their trade without really doing it. Theory is fine, but it means nothing apart from application.

Of course, application is impossible without inspiration. A writer needs something to write about. But stories don’t just fall out of the sky — that’s why I’m such a big fan of blogs. There are so many blogs out there, each with a unique spin on things. I often publish my own post in reaction to another journalist’s blog. The blogosphere is such a great resource, every journalist should take advantage of it.

Journalists, consider this post an admonition.

Though new to blogs, already Christian is starting to understand the new environment and the ways the future may unfold. And he’s outwardly proud of himself! Don’t we all want that? He’s right that journalism and media students have a responsibility both to themselves and the public to put their voice, knowledge and experience out there for others to feed off of.

I often publish my own post in reaction to another journalist’s blog.

To which I have now responded. Which someone else, in turn, may also do. Then another. And her. And that guy. So on and so forth. And if the conversation is important or interesting enough — two days from now it should show up in a major print newspaper.

Christian has the right idea. And don’t worry, there’s more like him out there.

Sheckler’s Wired Journalists Blog Post: Link

Medill faculty teach our students that journalism should be transparent. It is a mistake when I don’t set the best example I can. Just as our faculty set high classroom standards for students learning to be journalists, as dean I should exhibit those standards.

Today I met with the Dean’s Council, a group of 14 faculty and staff members who are deeply involved in teaching and in administering the school. We agreed to review the standards for all work published under the Medill banner. I will set up a faculty committee this week to begin that process.

-Levine

Following the coverage of the Medill Dean’s quote scandal continues to be an exciting time. What’s most interesting to me is that this conversation didn’t start with the big media. It didn’t first appear in some major newspaper or magazine. It started with some kid, educated yes, but an unemployed student nonetheless who raised an issue at the ground level that has now gone and entered into a wider public debate in circles much higher than he.

We agreed to review the standards for all work published under the Medill banner. I will set up a faculty committee this week to begin that process.

Look what has started because of his contribution. This is the future of journalism – right here in front of us. Small people breaking big news in small ways to effect good change.

My second mistake was that I did not save the notes I took in the IMC class. That was careless and something I knew never to do as a reporter.

Yes, we know, you’re a goon.

Dean Levine’s statement at Journalist Speak: Link

So much so, in fact, that you can’t avoid the question as whether or not his blog post constitutes journalism. Read the post — I mean, how is it not? He’s writing what are basically slightly less proper print articles. Lax journalism. Yet it’s more insightful and detailed in its explorations than most everything on TV news and half of what you read even in print.

So what is this? Is this citizen media? It’s a blog. Some of the posts are just string of conscious. But it’s a damn smart stream. Where’s the line here? What’s citizen journalism? Would the article have any more or less weight if he was a journalist by profession? Does it matter that it’s on a blog, not on a piece of paper?

Is citizen journalism looking increasingly like a throw-away term?

Have we not reached a point where all that distinguishes ‘journalistic’ work from non is whether the quality of the information meets a certain standard? Dan Kennedy certainly meets it.

Read Dan’s Article Here: Link

In an interesting follow-up Chris Heisel, who works at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, took a look at these findings and decided to make a tagcloud of his own using what he called his ‘ideal’ list of what should be important skills and knowledge sets for potential journalists.

Of the two, the one compiled from actual job-opening data is slightly more preoccupied with technology, using tags such as ‘digital,’ ‘photoshop,’ ‘technical,’ ‘blogs,’ and ‘audio.’ Heisel’s list moves past the technology and assumes those tech skills to be the standard base level. His terms are focused on the implementation of the different technologies, how they work together, and how to use them most efficiently. The job-data says ‘interactiv[ity]‘ is the most important, but Heisel actually touches on what that means with terms like ‘rss,’ ‘social,’ ‘syndication,’ ‘video,’ and ‘audience.’ In addition he puts forth that classic elements like ‘design’ and ‘usability’ are still as important as they’ve always been.

I tend to lean toward finding Ulken’s cloud as the better. We can’t just let ourselves get lost in a sea of technology and lose sight of what’s important. And when we do use different technologies we have to figure out how to use them to make the product better — not just hope that the technology itself will be selling point enough.

Eric Ulken’s Original Post: Link

Chris Heisel’s Response: Link