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Kevin: BusinessWeek teases out the New York Times dismal first quarter with results coming in below analysts estimates. The revenue was $22m below consensus estimates. "The disappointing performance was driven by a nearly $124 million decline in the Times Co.'s ad revenue from the same time last year. While most of the erosion was concentrated in the Times Co.'s newspapers, its Internet ad revenue also sagged by 8 percent, or $3.6 million."
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Kevin: Patricio Robles dissects pollster Mark Penn's numbers in a Wall Street Journal article claiming that there are more professional bloggers in the US than lawyers. I have to say that I was a bit sceptical of the numbers, and Patricio finds them wanting. Penn's biggest problem is mixing statistics and studies, but Penn also writes the piece in such a way that it leads the casual reader to believe that the number of paid up bloggers comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. I will wait to see if Penn or the Wall Street Journal responds.
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Kevin: This is an interesting post from 2002 by Tim O'Reilly about piracy. In 2009, I suspect that has got renewed attention in light of The Pirate Bay verdict in Sweden. Tim lists several lessons from the file-sharing wars including: Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. and Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
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Kevin: Hat Tip to Nieman Labs for tweeting this. Erica Smith, designer and programmer, has an excellent graphic to help editors think about the kind of graphic they should create for a given set of data. It's such a simple but powerful chart.
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Kevin: The headline says it all. The New York Times sees continued erosion of advertising in this recession, leading to a $61.6m for Q1 2009. The Business Insider breaks down the numbers.
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Kevin: Mathew Ingram calls on newspapers to think more creatively as Google News launches a feature that allows you to navigate news by time. He asks: "One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this?" This has been done, back in 2007 by El Comercio in Peru. But I still take his point. There is a lot of room in innovation in all parts of the newspaper business, both on the editorial side and the commercial side.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
links for 2009-04-21
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Kevin: Michael Wolff makes the hyperbolic prediction that 80% of newspapers (in the US although he doesn't qualify it as being specific to the US) will be gone in 18 months. He doesn't provide much support or evidence for his prediction. He also blames CraigsList for the collapse of newspapers, which founder Craig Newmark took exception to saying that newspapers failed the public trust on several high profile subjects such as the weapons of mass destruction justification for the war in Iraq and the financial crisis. I think they are both wrong. CraigsList is only one online service that undercut newspapers' traditional sources of revenue, and the decline of newspapers is as much about relevance as it is about trust. One prediction Wolff made that is much more likely is that New York Times will be owned by another company in 18 months.
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Kevin: Guardian Information Architect Martin Belam talks about his role and also some of the core principles of the Guardian's web development. "These are that URLs should be PERMANENT, that all content should be uniquely ADDRESSABLE, that multiple routes to content make everything DISCOVERABLE, and that everything should be as OPEN as possible."
links for 2009-04-20
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Kevin: Steve Yelvington looks at the idea of the Boston Globe moving to a paid content model based on Amazon's Kindle. Rolling out a Kindle will require a lot of upfront capital, something hard to come by during the credit crunch. He suggests looking at the mobile phone industry for the kind of costs you'd need to amortise over six years. Moreover, he looks at the loss of revenue from classifieds, display advertising and banner advertising on a device like the Kindle. He also worries about Amazon as a middleman who will take a slice of an already lower margin business than newspapers.
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis looks the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, which he is conducting with his students. This is worth watching, especially because they will be "doing this in the open, so we can get as much help as possible". They will begin looking at hyperlocal from a local perspective, 'a news ecosystem that comes after a metro paper," and paid content models. This is one to watch and possibly help with.
Social technology and civil society
I’ve just started a research project for Carnegie UK Trust looking at the way in which civil society associations are using social technology to communicate, collaborate and organise. This is a three month project during which we will cover three main areas:
- An examination of the current use of social technology by civil society organisations
- An exploration of what the future may hold, how social technology might evolve over the next fifteen years
- A set of ideas and recommendations for civil society organisations to help them make the most of social technology
I will be writing about as much of this research as I can and hope that by doing so, we can collectively explore some of the ideas, assumptions and issues that I uncover.
My first question for you is this:
Which civil society organisations are doing the best job of using social and/or new media to fulfil their remit?
To dig a little deeper into what we mean by “civil society organisations”, Carnegie UK Trust have provided this as part of their definition of “civil society”:
Civil Society as associational life. Civil society is the ‘space’ of organised activity not undertaken by either the government or for-private-profit business. It includes formal and informal associations such as: voluntary and community organisations, trade unions, faith-based organisations, co-operatives and mutuals, political parties, professional and business associations, philanthropic organisations, informal citizen groups and social movements. Participation in or membership of such organisations is voluntary in nature.
If we take that as a working definition, it’s pretty broad, so we can be very inclusive. As for the definition of “social and/or new media”, I think at a minimum we should be looking at organisations that are utilising any of these tools:
- Social networking sites (third party or bespoke)
- Blogs
- Twitter, Identica or other micro-conversation tools
- Wikis
- Social bookmarking
- Forums, bulletin boards, or other thread-based communications tools
- Audio, whether stand-alone streams/downloads, podcasts, or other digital formats
- Video, whether stand-alone streams/downloads, videocasts or on video sharing sites
- Photo sharing sites
- Virtual worlds
- Multimedia, whether online or CD-ROMs
- Interactive television
- The mobile web in any way
That’s a pretty long list, so there should be plenty of organisations and individuals out there who are doing good work in this arena. So, who are they? And what are they doing? Although the main focus of this research is UK organisations, we are interested in exemplars from around the world, so if someone abroad is doing something amazingly stunning, then they count!
What’s missing from the Google/newspapers discussion
It seems to have become fashionable recently for members of the media to rail against Google, claiming that the search giant is significantly to blame for the demise of newspapers. The arguments appear to include:
- Google is a parasite that makes money off newspapers content through aggregating it
- Google, by acting as a middleman, deprives newspapers of control and therefore income
- Visitors from Google are of low value because they do not stay to explore a site and therefore are not exposed to enough ads to make their visit worthwhile to the news outlet
In my opinion, these arguments are all wrong, but rather than debate them here (other people are already doing it), I’m curious to ask why two key parts of the problem are being utterly ignored.
Google enables existing behaviours
Before newspapers started publishing on the web, newspaper readers had a limited number of choices if they wanted to read what the paper had printed: read someone else’s copy, or buy and read their own. Once someone has bought a paper, the tendency is to read substantial portions of it, or even read it cover-to-cover including the bits one doesn’t really care about.
I am sure that there are psychological forces at work here, perhaps cognitive biases such as ownership bias. After all, who hasn’t felt the desire to get the most value for money out of a newspaper or magazine purchase by reading as much as one can manage, even when one has run out of any real interest?
That behaviour, and the forces that encourage it, is absent online. Instead of feeling obliged to oneself to make the most of a newspaper purchase, people are now searching for only the information that they need or want. They become promiscuous browsers, instead of dedicated readers.
Google facilitates that behaviour, a behaviour which was present before Google existed, and which will continue after Google is gone. The news outlets, however, are fixated on the idea of a dedicated reader and I’ve heard some journalists get positively indignant at the suggestion that promiscuous browsing is not just a normal behaviour, but rapidly becoming the default. They think that dedicated reading is the one true way to absorb news, and look down upon anything else.
This prejudice is damaging the news industry badly, because if your whole revenue generating mechanism, not to mention your metrics for success, is built upon the idea of people spending lots of time on your site, reading lots of articles, then your business is built on sand. Instead of working from a set of assumptions that are no longer valid, how about the news industry learns how their readers’ lives, attitudes and behaviours have changed, and uses that as a basis for developing a more robust business model. After all, people aren’t going to go back to their old habits. Ever.
Advertising innovation can be done by companies other than Google
Whilst Google News runs no adverts, news content does make its way into the general search results where advertising does very well for Google. This, for reasons unclear to me, is seen by some in the news industry as a grave assault, to be fought and destroyed.
Yet Google, alongside Craigslist, Gumtree and their brethren, are ripe for advertising disruption. The sites that were the disrupters can themselves be sideswiped, by the very sort of clever innovation that appears to be almost entirely lacking in the news industry. Why have news outlets not put together their own versions of TextAds and AdSense, allowing advertisers to buy text ads on certain topics, categories, or keywords? Can I go to a major news website and buy a keyword directly from them? Why are news organisations, who have been in the advertising game forever, relying on third party tools to spread excess ad inventory across their extended blog network? Why give away that slice of the pie to someone else?
Where is the advertising innovation? And no, annoying pop-ups, rich-media ads and irritatingly loud audio ads do not count. They are about as innovative as a slap round the face with a wet haddock – they are old school, scattershot, relying on interruption instead of relevance, and worst of all, they infuriate the visitor so much that even if the ads had been of interest, their childishness is terminally off-putting.
It feels like the news outlets have abdicated responsibility for finding new and better ways for their advertisers to buy space, time and keywords, to manage their own accounts, make their own decisions on where they want their ads to appear and manage their own budget.
It’s time for the news outlets to reclaim advertising, to learn from Google, Craigslist and Gumtree and beat them at their own game. Railing away at Google or any other site that’s eating their lunch is, however, a waste of time and a distraction that the industry can ill afford at the moment.
links for 2009-04-17
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Kevin: "Newsroom employment at U.S. dailies plunged 11 percent last year, the most in at least 31 years, to levels unseen since the early 1980s, the American Society of News Editors said. Newsrooms lost 5,900 workers to 46,700 in 2008, after shedding 2,400 jobs a year earlier, the Reston, Virginia-based newspaper organization said in a report today."
links for 2009-04-16
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Kevin: Charlie succinctly describes changes in journalism in this post when he writes: “I have already written at length about how journalism is no longer a product but a process. It is not a manufacturing industry anymore, it is a service. And as I have said, it must now find ways to be part of other networks rather than simply create online spaces of its own. This is truly Networked Journalism.”n
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Kevin: This is a comprehensive list of not only how to increase the number of followers for your news organisation but also a good overview of services that journalists can use for Twitter such as BackTweets, which allows you to see who is linking to your stories on Twitter.
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Kevin: ”
OverviewSome 74% of internet users–representing 55% of the entire adult population–went online in 2008 to get involved in the political process or to get news and information about the election. This marks the first time that a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey has found that more than half of the voting-age population used the internet to get involved in the political process during an election year.” -
Kevin: Seven great examples of how data can be used to help tell stories and show trends, in other words to do great journalism. The examples show how Twitter can be used to chart the spread of flu in New York City, how data shows the frequency of fatal traffic accidents across the US and how a map helps show the areas of Toronto with the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease.
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Kevin: “Researchers from City University London have published a report showing one European newspaper’s steep drop in revenue as well as unsteady Web traffic after it became an online-only publication.”
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Kevin: Dante Chinni at the Christian Science Monitor looks at the closing of the Ann Arbor Daily News. The reaction he reports by people in Ann Arbor: ‘unfazed’. (I used to work at MLive.com, which published the website of the Ann Arbor News.)
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Kevin: Kos of the Daily Kos responds to this common comment: ‘Whenever we debate the future of newspapers, inevitably someone asks, “if they go out of business, where will blogs get their stories?'” He lists the sources for stories on the Daily Kos over the last week. Newspapers counted for 20%. He says: “It’s always sad to lose a good source of journalism. But we live in a rich media environment, easily the richest in world history, and the demise of the newspaper industry will simply shift much of the journalistic work they did to other media.”
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Kevin: The Next Web blog has an interesting analysis about what they see as Google’s social network play – building a network of apps with sociality cooked into them – for instance, Gmail with GTalk, Maps with Latitude and Google Reader with sharing and commenting features. They also have some suggestions on how the social experience could be better such as easier ways to add friends, add a friend stream and improve the design and how all of the apps work together.
links for 2009-04-15
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Kevin: The Washington City Paper, my old hometown free alt-weekly, has news of a shake-up at the Washington Post. It looks like the Post will be 'flattening' their editorial structure and offering buy-outs to editors. It's the fourth round of buy-outs at the paper since 2003, the City Paper reports
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Kevin: The Guardian's Martin Belam blogs about how the video of London police attacking Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests. Tomlinson died shortly after the attack of a heart attack. The video has prompted an inquiry into the incident. Martin shows how the video 'spread The Guardian brand across media', and talks about how novel this is in terms of British media. Before this, the BBC, Sky or ITN would be the only news organisations with exclusive video. The video, taken by an American who works in financial services, was offered to the Guardian after investigative work by Guardian reporter Paul Lewis.
Martin does a great job showing how the video spread and how Guardian branding on the video on YouTube was carried far and wide, although some outlets tried to minimise the branding with video-player overlays. He also highlights the differences in use and attribution between online and print. Print often failed to attribute the video.
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Kevin: A relatively easy way to combine Google Maps and Street View with Microsoft's Virtual Earth in one embed. However, unless I'm missing something, this is only for a single point. But a nice quick and dirty mashup if you want to see quite a bit of information about a location.
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Kevin: Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN correspondent in Asia, interviews a group of young Chinese behind a site called Anti-CNN.com, which was launched to counter what they felt was a distorted and inaccurate picture of their country presented in Western media.
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Kevin: This is a really thorough tutorial Matthew Stoff and David Durrett of The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches Texas on how to not only use Twitter for breaking news from the field but also how to easily display it on your site. This was written in the US where Twitter works on SMS, but they show how it can be used with a service called TwitterMail so that someone can easily use this with a Blackberry even if it's not possible to install a Twitter app for the Blackberry such as Twitterberry. However, by using a mail-based system, they are correct in saying that you'd want to be careful who you share the account details with.
links for 2009-04-15
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Kevin: The Washington City Paper, my old hometown free alt-weekly, has news of a shake-up at the Washington Post. It looks like the Post will be 'flattening' their editorial structure and offering buy-outs to editors. It's the fourth round of buy-outs at the paper since 2003, the City Paper reports
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Kevin: The Guardian's Martin Belam blogs about how the video of London police attacking Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests. Tomlinson died shortly after the attack of a heart attack. The video has prompted an inquiry into the incident. Martin shows how the video 'spread The Guardian brand across media', and talks about how novel this is in terms of British media. Before this, the BBC, Sky or ITN would be the only news organisations with exclusive video. The video, taken by an American who works in financial services, was offered to the Guardian after investigative work by Guardian reporter Paul Lewis.
Martin does a great job showing how the video spread and how Guardian branding on the video on YouTube was carried far and wide, although some outlets tried to minimise the branding with video-player overlays. He also highlights the differences in use and attribution between online and print. Print often failed to attribute the video.
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Kevin: A relatively easy way to combine Google Maps and Street View with Microsoft's Virtual Earth in one embed. However, unless I'm missing something, this is only for a single point. But a nice quick and dirty mashup if you want to see quite a bit of information about a location.
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Kevin: Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN correspondent in Asia, interviews a group of young Chinese behind a site called Anti-CNN.com, which was launched to counter what they felt was a distorted and inaccurate picture of their country presented in Western media.
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Kevin: This is a really thorough tutorial Matthew Stoff and David Durrett of The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches Texas on how to not only use Twitter for breaking news from the field but also how to easily display it on your site. This was written in the US where Twitter works on SMS, but they show how it can be used with a service called TwitterMail so that someone can easily use this with a Blackberry even if it's not possible to install a Twitter app for the Blackberry such as Twitterberry. However, by using a mail-based system, they are correct in saying that you'd want to be careful who you share the account details with.
links for 2009-04-15
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Kevin: The Washington City Paper, my old hometown free alt-weekly, has news of a shake-up at the Washington Post. It looks like the Post will be 'flattening' their editorial structure and offering buy-outs to editors. It's the fourth round of buy-outs at the paper since 2003, the City Paper reports
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Kevin: The Guardian's Martin Belam blogs about how the video of London police attacking Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests. Tomlinson died shortly after the attack of a heart attack. The video has prompted an inquiry into the incident. Martin shows how the video 'spread The Guardian brand across media', and talks about how novel this is in terms of British media. Before this, the BBC, Sky or ITN would be the only news organisations with exclusive video. The video, taken by an American who works in financial services, was offered to the Guardian after investigative work by Guardian reporter Paul Lewis.
Martin does a great job showing how the video spread and how Guardian branding on the video on YouTube was carried far and wide, although some outlets tried to minimise the branding with video-player overlays. He also highlights the differences in use and attribution between online and print. Print often failed to attribute the video.
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Kevin: A relatively easy way to combine Google Maps and Street View with Microsoft's Virtual Earth in one embed. However, unless I'm missing something, this is only for a single point. But a nice quick and dirty mashup if you want to see quite a bit of information about a location.
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Kevin: Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN correspondent in Asia, interviews a group of young Chinese behind a site called Anti-CNN.com, which was launched to counter what they felt was a distorted and inaccurate picture of their country presented in Western media.
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Kevin: This is a really thorough tutorial Matthew Stoff and David Durrett of The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches Texas on how to not only use Twitter for breaking news from the field but also how to easily display it on your site. This was written in the US where Twitter works on SMS, but they show how it can be used with a service called TwitterMail so that someone can easily use this with a Blackberry even if it's not possible to install a Twitter app for the Blackberry such as Twitterberry. However, by using a mail-based system, they are correct in saying that you'd want to be careful who you share the account details with.