The Artful Scavenger: Music News for the 21st Century (Part 2)

So, when we last left our music site, SkelterNews.com, our editorial staff was laying out a game plan to report on the breaking story, “Skelter tell RollingStone.com they’re breaking up.”

For our team, there are two stories, really. There’s the story of Skelter breaking up. And there’s the story of what Skelter told RollingStone.com. This is where I bring in what I call “the artful scavenger.” RollingStone.com is an information predator. They make the kill. They are an original source. But what about SkelterNews.com? How do our friends in that Poughkeepsie basement office report the break-up without plagiarizing?

Well, they can report the first story — Skelter breaks up — by taking what they’ve learned from RS (thank you, Jann), and using that as a launching pad to other original sources. What does the band’s website say? Did the bassist tweet anything? Anything from the guy at the Facebook fan page, who usually has insider access? They had a show last night. Is there a clip on YouTube? Can I further set the scene of the break-up show with a quick trip to Setlist.com? There are a thousand places where the resourceful folks at SkelterNews.com can gather information to create their own unique story without rewriting one word from RollingStone.com.

But what about that quote the big Texan bassist gave to RS? Is it essential to the story? If so, and if it was given exclusively to RS (and not, say, yelled from the stage), then give credit where credit’s due.

“Bassist Big Tex told RollingStone.com, ‘The singer was impossible to work with, really. Too much of a diva. We just couldn’t take it anymore.’”

The editor of SkelterNews.com is also responsible enough to embed a link to the complete RS article. He knows those guys are thrilled to get links to their site, just as our editor is when someone links to his own site. Links translate both to better searchability and to more traffic. We all — sites big and small — want that!

So, given his very modest tools, the editor of SkelterNews.com was able to deliver a unique report to his readers within minutes of the story breaking. Minutes! That’s the domain of the artful scavenger. Those, who can locate a carcass and make a meal of it the quickest, survive. The rest? Keep an eye out for their sun-baked bones on the savannah.

The Artful Scavenger: Music News for the 21st Century (Part 1)

The beauty of the Internet is that any bit of information, once introduced to the blogosphere, can gain instant traction and launch itself in a million different directions. So, a news story — let’s say, a music news story, for the purpose of this blog — has its original source:

“Skelter tell RollingStone.com they’re breaking up.”

(I use Skelter as a hypothetical example, by the way, because I know no one in the band will be offended…because I was in that band. Shameless, I know, but I’m not offended.)

Anyway, RollingStone.com reports this and 200,000 readers see their story that morning. But that’s just the beginning. People take that bit of information and pass it along on Twitter, Facebook and countless other social networks. Among those digging into the information carcass are music blogs. Not every music site gets to interview Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page or the singer for Skelter. But that doesn’t mean their followers don’t expect them to report it.

Ah, that’s an interesting concept. SkelterNews.com is run out of a basement in Poughkeepsie, New York, with a single editor and two unpaid student writers. Why in the world would readers expect that site to have that story…that soon? Once upon a time, when the Earth’s crust was cooling and the Internet was just a gleam in young Al Gore’s eye, people learned about their favorite stars from broadcast media, like magazines and TV. If Rolling Stone, the magazine, got an exclusive story, they wrote it up well in advance of their print date. The story then broke the day the magazine hit the newsstands. Oh, maybe there were news reports on TV if the artist had major star power, but it’s more likely your favorite band broke up two months before you learned about it.

In this nigh-Triassic Period, our industrious publisher of Skelter News, the magazine — if he had no advance warning from his sources…if, indeed, he was in a position to even have sources — would then scramble to make some calls, get some quotes and then try to have his own story written in time to make his next printer date. So, four months after the fact — oh, let’s give RS and Skelter News some credit for stopping the presses, etc. — let’s say two or three months after the band broke up, Skelter News readers got the story from their favorite Skelter magazine.

Wow. If that story breaks today, we expect to have that news from SkelterNews.com the minute it breaks — even though SkelterNews.com exists in a Poughkeepsie basement, with no real insider contacts. Readers expect it.

What an amazing leap, both in technology and expectations.

(To be continued…)