I was trying to describe the machinations of new media to a friend who still reads only print. Once started, the dictionary of new media began to flow. Below is a sampling of terms, which might strike some as exaggerated and others as all too true. Thanks to Make magazine writer William Abernathy for adding his tweaks.
New Media Nomenclature
Confused about social media, new media, and whatever happened to your daily newspaper? Here’s a dictionary of new media terminology that might help you distinguish a Facebook friend from a Citizen Reporter.
Aggregation – unpaid reprinting of original writing; replaces paid syndication.
Blogger – an unpaid commentator, whether a former journalist or journalistmanqué.
Citizen Reporter – an unpaid reporter, with or without training in journalism.
Cloud, the – The expertly managed corporate data storage facility into which you should move all your personal data. See “Thin air.”
Comments from the Crowd – formerly known as Letters to the Editor.
Content – The thing that keeps ads from bumping into each other. What writers, photographers, and other artists used to be paid for.
Content Everywhere – the same content repurposed in different publications regardless of the content’s origin.
Copyeditor – an extinct job title for a person who corrects grammatical, typographic, and stylistic crimes against language. This job has been outsourced to readers, and its arcane strictures are unknown to twitterati and texters.
Copyright – An antiquated practice of paying creators by preventing content from being repurposed for free.
Editor – A marketing professional, preferably with an advertising background. Also a publisher.
Facebook – a place for sharing personal gossip and happenings with the rest of the world; serves as prime bait for advertisers.
Facebook friend –
1) Someone you knew once.
2) Someone you hope to impress.
3) Someone you actually know.
Freelancer– An unpaid blogger. If a former journalist, a blogger paid minimum wage plus a fraction of the click-through.
Google+ – A way to keep Facebook from finding out about your life by telling it to Google instead.
Hyperlinks – Footnotes Gone Wild!
Investigative Journalism – now available as the result of successful digital fundraising.
Journalist – Someone trained in writing for print media who expects to get paid $1 per written word. Nearly extinct.
Kindle Fire – If Savanarola had only lived so long.
LinkedIn – Reid Hoffman’s personal cash generator and the bane of all headhunters not operating in the highlands of New Guinea.
London – Where I have been held up at GUN POINT and you must send me money for an air fair at once dear friend.
New Media – any form of digital content that includes news, opinion, and entertainment, which are often indistinguishable.
New media intern –
1) An undergraduate who works for college credit instead of money. 2) A recent graduate who works for resume experience instead of money. 3) Why undergraduates and recent graduates can’t find paid work.
News – repurposed content reported by tweeters, bloggers, or in some cases, actual journalists.
Open source – free software, whose source code you pretend to know how to review and inspect. What you gain in freedom you give up in usability, which is often on a par with that of Stone Age agricultural implements.
Paid content – news and commentary written by people whose insights are held in such high esteem that their readers are willing to pay to see it. The most successful paid content providers impress their discerning readership by removing their pants.
Personalized content – enhanced method for making targeted advertising even more annoying.
Photojournalist – extinct occupation. All journalists/reporters are now expected to take their own photos. Guess who pockets the savings?
Social media – unpaid advertising in which friends are expected to push content onto their friends.
Thin air – Where all your cloud data goes when your password is sniffed. See “London.”
Tweet – High technology’s answer to the haiku. A short-form message that presumes to replace the sentence, the tweet disproves the adage that brevity is the soul of wit.
Video content – A method by which YouTube and phone manufacturers promote worldwide illiteracy and stamp out excess bandwidth.
