newspapers
Some interesting discussion happening on Twitter and blogs about online grocery services.
One of the symbiotic relationships in the ‘old advertising’ world is that of the local newspaper and the local supermarket. I actually think newspapers shoulsd get involved in helping local merchants communicate with the local communities.
If you think about it, it’s just like being an A-list blogger for the local merchant community. As long as the voice is genuine it will work.
But you see, I’ve been building newspaper sites for almost ten years now and if I told my team that they should get involved with conversations about their readers grocery lists, they’d think I was nuts.
But it doesn’t sound crazy to me. I wonder if I am nuts.
Jan 21 2008 07:56 pm |
newspapers and
twitter |
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It was nice little surprise to hear Jeff Jarvis on NPR during my morning commute.
Jeff was being asked about WSJ and commented how becoming more ‘news’ and less ‘financial’ would give it more reach and a broader advertiser base.
It made me realize that we are headed toward being a country with three news organizations. Maybe four.
NYtimes.com, WSJ.com, USAtoday.com and wherever the privately held Tribune company (LATimes.com etc.) might land.
Obviously I’m heavily favoring the newspaper companies. It will be a more complex rollup than that, but you get my picture.
Further, it makes one wonder whether each of these organizations aligns themselves with the online players, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and maybe Amazon or even eBay. Or is it Facebook and the social network arms of these players that find a partnerships.
We already see that path shaping up with Yahoo’s recent newspaper deals.
Of course, one has to wonder how WSJ and MySpace could ever marry each other since they seem world’s apart, but I’m betting that changes in both of those organizations will over time have them creeping toward a common ground.
What do you think?
Duncan from TechCrunch just posted about how artist “50 cent” gets the current state of the music business.
Maybe he does, I don’t know, but Duncan doesn’t give me any evidence that he does.
In fact, his presumption that file-sharing doesn’t hurt the music biz is ludicrous.
What he is trying to say is that if you embrace the changing world you can profit from the change rather than die. This is true.
Most recording artists have a better chance of making a living now than ever. File sharing helps in that regard, yes.
But the music business is hurting. Why? because they were all about distribution, and now that’s free. Just like Newspapers.
That doesn’t necessarily mean bad news for artists, because they can go direct to their fans. What the industry will consist of is smaller (and large) companies that support the artists as they tour and market their art.
Sounds fine, right?
Not if you are used to owning the artist and being in the drivers seat.
That’s where the music business was. If you belonged in that world, file-sharing is an axe in your trunk.
Mike Arrington should start editing these posts. Who is watching the register?
Newspaper sites are creating a product for a market that doesn’t exist.
You see, it looks to us like their websites are just not so good, but they have thought about their sites a lot, and these are not dumb people.
Why then, is so much effort going into making such a low quality product?
One could argue that the management just doesn’t get it yet, if they ever will, or that they are out of touch with the younger web demographics. Well, that may be true, but there is more to it.
Newspaper sites are creating a product based upon what they perceive to be what their loyal customers want and in many cases they succeed at this.
Unfortunately for us, that means we have to put up with all the noise that a strategy like that causes for our sense of what a good website should be.
Thankfully we can route around that by just consuming RSS feeds. But wait, they are almost never full text, so these sites even fall short there.
A typical print newspaper reaches a small percentage of its market. The percentage of that customer base willing to use the online product is orders of magnitude less. In other words, there is no market there. Certainly not a large enough one to build a business upon.
In essence, by building a product aimed at an audience that hardly exists, they have alienated most of their possible future customers or readers.
Why are they doing this?
It all comes down to two things. One, that many of them love their own product, as do many of their current customers. They think that they can transfer that love to the web, but too few of their customers are willing to do that, including the very people creating the product.
The second is the wrongful assumption that because traditional advertising and journalism is good and satisfies a need of the community, that there is no other sufficient way to accomplish that need . It is this wrongful assumption that is at the heart of an entire industry finding it difficult to adapt.
The core opportunity that the web provides both service users and service creators is the ability to satisfy needs in a better or more efficient way. If it does not succeed at that, it will not succeed.
Instead of classifieds, we have ebay. Instead of traditional journalism, we have a host of other things e.g. . Instead of advertising, we have pay-per-click.
Here is a word to the wise.
If you don’t think your web strategy is going to be better for both your business or your customers, just get out.
If you are trying to retain some quality of your analog product because you think the digital version can’t accomplish it, just get out.
The biggest geeks around don’t sit down at a computer because it’s innately enjoyable.
they do it because it’s going to accomplish something better than could be accomplished without the tool.
If it ain’t better, it’s worthless. Just get out.
And thats the name of that iTune.
Just watched Jeff Jarvis on Newshour.
It was basically a reassertion that we have abandoned objectivity for transparency.
Couldn’t agree more there.
While I agree that not every reporter has an intentional “hidden agenda,” the fact remains that every decision made is one made with some sort of baggage. For example:
“We covered this yesterday.”
“We need to get this out now before we get scooped.”
“I don’t think the readers are interested in this.”
“We can’t verify that so don’t mention it at all.”
And so on. Perhaps they are all questions that a “good” journalist asks. Maybe. But as Jeff said in the conclusion of the piece, “It’s not whether you have an opinion, it’s whether you tell the truth.”
Update:That may not be an exact quote of Jeff. You see, a journalist wouldn’t have pointed that out. They misquote all the time and never point it out.
Who would think I’d have trouble picking a platform.
Roll my own, Drupal, Wordpress, OpenACS, Joomla, People Aggregator?
The list goes on. Granted, I’m leaning toward PHP systems. I know it best.
I like Postgresql but I’ll take MySQL. Don’t think I’m interested in a commercial DB.
It’s definitely Unix or Linux. I tend to like FreeBSD.
Aside from OpenACS, all run on Apache.
Drupal looks great, but it’s always a struggle learning new ways to do things that are simply achieved with PHP.
Cobbling together systems is also always a pain. I like clean data. Yet, who can argue that Wordpress is a great solution for the blogs that will be on the site.
There is just too much good stuff out there.
I’m leaning towards simpler rather than a monster like Plone. Master the basics and build on.
Jun 01 2007 04:20 pm |
newspapers and
wordpress and
php |
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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
Newspapers need to take a lesson from baseball.
It’s mid to late innings and your team is losing but you have a man on first.
You give a decent hitter a “sacrifice bunt” sign. No one likes to get this but it’s part of team play.
The hitter bunts and the infield comes charging. The runner is going and safe at second and the hitter is thrown out.
Now you have a man in scoring position. There is no gurantee that the next batter will get a hit. In fact, the chances are pretty slim.
Still, it’s a popular managerial strategy.
Newspapers have a man on first (classifieds and local ad dollars), but they are losing the big game (search and Attention). If they don’t make a sacrifice (open up), they’ll need two hits to score, and that’s a long shot to say the least.
Sometimes you need to take one for the team.
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.
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!
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