Newspapers are creating the right product for the wrong market
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.
Microsoft finds good use for MSN.com
Today, Microsoft turned the home page of MSN.com into an ad for Office 2007. Oh, the irony.
The metacommunity concept as a framework for OPML based communities (part 3)
The web has its own desire.
That gravitational pull is towards pure conversation.
This blog is actually predicated (think about the title) on the fact that the web will one day disintermediate everything that does not add value.
Only those adding to the conversation will endure.
Some might ask, “Well, didn’t AOL chat rooms provide pure conversation?”
The answer is no.
Chat rooms were akin to a hundred people shouting in a room. Hardly a conversation.
I hate to use a bar analogy (I have been in a few), but a bar room is not a hundred people shouting, and hopefully the person at the other end of the bar is not talking so loud that they are disruptive.
In a real social environment of mass, we move in and out of conversations. We overhear something of interest, yes, and join that conversation, but our ability to do that is controlled by us, hopefully.
Chat rooms did not allow that.
Likewise, blogging doesn’t give us the real ability to target another individual, despite the link gesture, which is useful but not direct enough.
IM is pure, but lacks the community aspect.
In nature, this ability to move in and out of ecosystems is not only permissible, but necessary for sustenance.
The microblogging phenomenon has taken the first step toward this global community, with a dash of direct conversation. It may not be the end, but it is a means toward that end.
It takes the best of email, usenet, forums, blogging, and IM and rolls them into an easy to use format. ease of use is a key component. Blogging is too much work for some people.
Microblogging has one aspect missing. A distributed nature. Once it has that, it will take over.
Identity, VRM, RSS, and RPC (APIs) will allow us to achieve the next needed step toward “pure conversation.”
And microblogging will be at its core.
IM is dead
I’ve had my share of “* is dead” (here, here, here, here, here. here and here) posts (I’ am a dead head, I guess) and I’ve agreed with Stowe Boyd on IM before, but his post today about IM being a commodity in the face of Twitter etc. really rings true.
We are on the cusp of a new level of online communication that is all about flow or “river of news” as Dave Winer coins it and it is becoming so ubiquitous that it will be a commodity.
Usenet for the web anyone?
That has some negative connotations, but this time the user is in charge, not the system, right?
Billboard advertising mindset still rules
One of the more interesting sessions at NetJ so far was the session on revenue.
“How do we make money with journalism?”
There were a few people in the crowd that pointed out that the old model of advertising was dying. Jay Rosen brought up Doc Searls’ VRM movement, though he didn’t explicitly call it that.
Dave Winer made a good point in the hallway that advertising is actually growing but we are in a transitional phase.
I also met Scott Karp from Publish2
But most of the crowd was still caught up in the idea that the model was to grow page-views and populate billboards.
It certainly is a dillemma. The choice before all media companies can be put succinctly:
Cash in today and be extinct tomorrow or plan for tomorrow and hope you are not extinct before the sun rises.
Reverse Publish
The first really interesting assertion for me:
Newspapers need to reverse publish, especiallly bloggers.
NetJ begins
Networked Journalism Summit, that is.
I’ll have some photos and audio later.
Networked Journalism Summit
Wow, what a long blogging hiatus for me.
Well, I’m back and tomorrow will be blogging and posting audio from the Networked Journalism Summit, run by David Cohn and Jeff Jarvis.
Jeff wants people to go their and try to start fires, rather than just have high level discussions so I’ll be promoting two-way feeds as the future of news. We’ll see how that goes.
Newspaper site reformation 1.1
Okay. I’m pretty sure I’m going to build a new system to act as the CMS of the new newspaper sites.
Since I’m doing so, I may as well choose the technologies that I feel most confident with.
In this case the web pages will be built with PHP and Apache, and the database will be Postgresql. These will all run on FreeBSD.
Why build instead of using Drupal or Joomla? It is a tough call, but I have yet to see a CMS that isn’t story centric, or even more importantly, “site centric.”
Yes, you can achieve a great degree of “community” with a lot of CMS’s out there, especially with a blogging platform like Wordpress, which I seriously considered for many good reasons.
But the future, IMHO, is in distributed systems, and I don’t see anything that is built specifically with that in mind.
I’m basing the system on RSS 2.0 and all of the data that will be treated as atomic units, whether it was created by a staff reporter or photographer, a site visitor, or it comes from another system or site entirely.
If it sounds like an aggregator, well it is, but it’s a very smart aggregator, because I don’t mean to suggest that we won’t be displaying our original content with some prominence. But that’s just one view of the content. OPML will be the skeletal structure that suports the multiple views. We may even try to implement checkbox news. ; )
You see, it’s based upon a feed-centric view of items, so if the feed is from the editorial department and has a category of sports, we know what it is.
If the feed is from elsewhere, we know what it is.
Ultimately this is based upon a web-centric view of things, not a company-centric.
Also of note, is the idea of groups, or groupings, as Stowe Boyd might more aptly describe them. AdHocracies, is the way I’ve put it in the past. Stowe hinted at this some time back with his blog trees idea.
The concept here is that a feed, or a blog and its items are a thread of expanding contributions. I’ll be using SSE to help that along. Two-way news is something I’ve been ineterested in for a while, but have yet to hammer down.
Greg Narain told me (at Ajax World) that it was too complicated and I agree that is an issue.
The only way this can work is if it’s transparent to the people using it. It’s just got to make sense from a user interface perspective right off the bat, or it won’t fly.
I know. Good luck.
A lot of this decision was based upon the ideas that the projectvrm folks have been throwing around lately. In addition to a distributed approach to the content, we’ll be supporting OpenID and other distributed identity ideas like XRI/inames. (like =matthew)
Lastly, along the same lines as VRM, is the idea of user attention data, but It’s way too early to tell in what ways we can make that useful. But i think we will.
Jarvis on Newshour
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.
