media
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be rebuilding some newspaper sites.
If you are weak in the knees, don’t click through, because it’s pretty bad.
http://www.thehour.com
http://www.thestamfordtimes.com
http://www.wiltonvillager.com
Tomorrow, we have our first meeting and I’ve decided to take the rest of you along.
It should be fun.
Subscriber vs. Free. . .
full text feeds vs. partial. . .
traditional journalism vs. community and blogging. . .
display ads vs. collecting detailed attention and gesture data with which to empower users to control their vendor relations. . .
(well, you know)
stay tuned
I have officially accepted a position of Web Development Director with The Hour newspapers in Norwalk, Connecticut.
The company is locally owned by a trust, a much different scenario than the Tribune owned The Advocate, where I previously held the postion of Senior Web Producer.
The current sites are in great need, and the company is hoping I can bring them up to modern standards.
Hopefully the scenario will offer me the opportunity to make the sites a model for other newspapers of all sizes.
I expect to use many of the ideas you folks have given me to formulate a modern strategy that includes consideration of VRM, Attention, Gestures and syndication.
OPML will be an integral tool building these newspaper sites and services, as will the concept of River of News.
I also plan to use open APIs from other services like Twitter and Flickr and Grazr, to integrate these services into other communities.
Similarly, I’ll try my best to expose whatever services we can offer through the use of APIs.
There are great opportunities out there for media companies that are willing to do things right, and I’m hoping this will be a chance to do just that.
Doc Searls doesn’t explicitly mention VRM, but tells how VRM can save Internet Radio. Make sure to clcik through and read his Linux Journal article. That’s where it gets real ineteresting.
It sounds to me like Doc is pointing out that ASCAP and the others are next for disintermediation, as a new public radio market emerges to replace the drowning old advertising based radio regime.
Apr 18 2007 10:54 am |
media and
advertising and
VRM |
No Comments »
Frank Gruber used to work at Tribune, where I still do (for the moment, pending a Gannett buyout, any day now).
Frank points to a post about Sam Zell, who is buying Tribune, who suggests that newspapers close themselves off to Google News.
Frank mentions the attention economy and basically suggests that closing a site off to the world in this environment would be Suicide 2.0.
And he should know.
Frank works as a product manager for AOL, a company that recently realized they needed to open up their walled gardens in order to compete and regain their losing market share of attention.
So far, it seems to be working well for AOL.
Frank also was a stalwart at Tribune for opening things up, getting them to open up their content to RSS feeds, despite the fact that they refuse to publish full text. I’ve been a member of Tribune’s Product Development Committee for years now, and have never gotten a decent answer on why we are not allowed to publish full text feeds.
Frank is right when he says it would be ashame if Tribune falls backwards and goes the route that is being suggested. It’s tough enough for traditional media to make it without setbacks like that.
We shall see. Old Media Doomsday, anyone? I believe it may click soon!
Streaming never really worked great over dial-up, but I guess it was better than waiting an hour to download something.
Once you have sufficient bandwith to stream things well, progressive download will work just as well.
Plus, the market changed, with the proliferance of the iPod, and people want to download and transfer their media to portable devices.
Streaming is now only a worthwhile solution for live events.
And with the timeshifting revolution that Tivo and on-demand has brought, one can even say that “Live” is dead.
So, streaming is dead.
Long live the download.
Mar 30 2007 06:04 pm |
media and
apple |
No Comments »
A recent Scripting News comment by someone named Matt (not me) brings up an interesting topic we’ve been discussing at our local newspaper website, http://stamfordadvocate.com.
Matt points out that Dave Winer shouldn’t fault the reporter for a misleading headline, because it is written by the editor and the reporter has no say.
He’s right. That’s usually true.
The problem is, that’s probably an area where newspapers need to adjust the way they work. As Scott Karp puts it, they need to decide what kind of publisher they are.
You see, what the newsroom folks call “editorial process,” means that many levels of filters and processes are applied to stories to ensure correctness, as well as fill the needed space.
Every editor must admit that they have cut parts of a story due to lack of space despite it having weakened the story. Sometimes cuts are made to strengthen an article too.
In general, these processes are not a terrible thing, whether they work all the time or not. But they aren’t necessary for something to be good journalism.
In an online world however, it could cause problems because of the immediate feedback loop, as in the case of Dave Winer and the NYTimes reporter.
No one ever said to themselves, “That New York Times editorial process got it wrong.”
They say, “That stupid reporter got it wrong.”
Now that we have come to want (and expect) the news writers and creators to answer our accusations of innacuracy, the MSM can’t hide behind the shield of “editorial process.”
As I see it, they have two choices. Either they don’t use reporters names, or loosen up on their editorial policy.
They won’t accept either. The first because of ego, and they second. . .well, for another type of ego.
You see, that would make them bloggers . . . and human.
Update:I re-read Scott’s post and think I may have mis-interpreted it. I think he is saying the flaw is in the way the ads are sold, not online advertising itself, to which I agree. (Could be the Black and Tans. I’m Italian, but my mom says we are all Irish on St. Patrick’s, so I have a Guiness and some Corned Beef to celebrate too.)
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I’m usually on the same page as Scott Karp, but not today.
Maybe it’s because I’m snowed in and it’s St.Patrick’s (Black and Tans), but what he calls a flaw of online adverting, I call a fix to a flaw of traditional advertising.
First of all, it’s not only Yahoo and the big boys getting premium rates for page views. As the producer of a couple local newspaper websites, I can say that our page-views are worth much more than $1 per a thousand.
It’s true that national advertiser can sometimes get that CPM, but it more like $4 to $18 per CPM and that doesn’t include the text ads we have on the page. Nor does it take into account that each page-view serves 2- 4 display ad impressions. And some pages are sponsored also.
All in all, I’d estimate that our cost per reach is lower than our in-print advertiser cost per reach, but not that much lower.
The fact is, I don’t think either rate is as valuable as the cost, so we are in agreement that pay-per-click is bringing down the the total value of a page view.
But that’s exactly what we want, as an industry. Wha?
Like Scott says, it’s about knowing who your users are. The value of an ad is in what value it delivers to the advertiser, not in what perceived value any salesperson can convince the advertiser that a particular buy has.
And, like I’m sure Scott knows, the internet is best at bringing the margin between cost and value together, to zero in some cases.
It’s not a flaw, it’s a virtue.
I guess that means that high traffic does not equal a business model. Popularity is not enough, though huge popularity is still enough for the time being.
I think that’s just because we are in the huge transition. We now value things by the old model, “perceived and estimated value.” We soon will value them by the new model, “true value.”
That’s where Doc’s VRM will play a large role, as well as gestures and intention.
I see VC’s as the ones placing faith in page-views, moreso than web 2.0 companies. Most Alot of them are aiming right, I think.
Who can’t resist the allure of high traffic, though.
I watched the Frontline piece called Newswars, the other night.
While everyone agrees that a major reshaping needs to take place in the newspaper business, my intial reaction wasn’t as one-sided as Jeff Jarvis, perhaps because I am a Tribune employee, and knew some of these people firsthand.
Jeff is right; major cuts can be made on the print side of most newspapers without lowering the output of “real news.”
However, it’s also true that the economics of Wall Street might not be the best driving force when it comes to making newsroom decisions.
If that were the case, the whole country could just send one reporter to Iraq and we could all share her view.
Of course, views are plentiful in this day and age, but for a company the size of Tribune, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to have more than one newspaper covering a national war.
That said, I’m in total agreement that the organization as a whole is overlooking what real value it can provide for it’s readers and site users.
The real value does indeed rest in it’s local communities and journalism. I sometimes wonder if that’s always going to be enough.
In the Frontline story, I think it was the WAPO exec that said print revenue and circulation was declining, but he wasn’t sure how quickly Online would catch up.
It will never catch up.
There are too many competitors online for that to ever happen.
Washington Post reports the Tribune sale of two local newspapers, where I am the Senior Web Producer.
In fact, I was the first person within the company to ever work on these sites, back in the nineties, when I volunteered to get them listed in the Open Directory, Yahoo, and Search Engines.
Back then I was (thanks to Philip Greenspun) trumpeting around the company for an idea called “community.”
You know, what they now call UGC (User Generated Content).
Personally, I feel we should go back to calling User Generated Content “community” again. It’s more accurate, and less derogatory.
But most newspaper folks would not understand what I mean by saying that UGC is a derogatory term. Because it defines the user as lesser than the site “professional.” But most people in this business would say, “yeah, they aren’t on the same level.” Most smart bloggers realize that’s just not the case.
However, when I say this, I don’t mean to devalue the work done by many “professional” journalists. Some of it is great.
Unfortunately, media is a commodity. Even good media is a commodity.
Do these companies still have something of value? Absolutely, but we live in a “hit and run” web society. I read this story in the Washington today. Tommorrow, It’s BuzzMachine that get’s my attention. Next it’s my family’s group blog, pointing out late spring lift ticket deals. After that, it’s TechCrunch, Library Clips, and CNN. You get the idea.
Back to “community” on a news site. They all thought I was nuts. Now it’s one of Tribune’s main initiatives.
A little late to the party, and I’m still not sure they fully understand it. They think community is getting people to contribute to their sites. They should be asking, “what can we contribute to the community?”
In the nineties, message boards and other community features did, in fact reside on sites. Today these features are distributed across a million sites. (I know about myspace. If they don’t open to the rest of the distributed social network, they will go the way of the old AOL. It may take ten years, but they will)
If they asked me now, where I would focus. I think I’d say “syndication” (thanks to Dave Winer). Be cog in the distributed web of information flow.
However, these news companies cling to a page view model, and a home-page-centric view of themselves, even if they are aware of all the story-level traffic they are getting.
Ajax, RSS, widgets, downloads, OPML and the rest of the trends all indicate to me that the future winners are the people and businesses that provide value in the relationships and conversations happening out there, not the ones who try to corral their “users” into a one size fits all product, that so many news sites are.
Ask not what the users can do for us, but what can we do for the users.
Jarvis from Davos: “We are going to try to open up the conversation.”
All I can say is that if a deal happens soon with Tribune company, that our newspaper and a few others will open the conversation completely. This will be a major positive shift in the way newspapers conduct themselves, and I think plenty will follow our lead.
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