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Kevin: "Total revenue shot up 22% over the year-ago period. Much of the growth came from international expansion of its education publishing, but online revenue at FT Group also contributed."
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Kevin: A new project in the US 'focused on 'helping newspapers identify a strategy to survive its midlife crisis.'"
Some ideas:
• "Focus on taking market share from existing customers in the local market. Yellow Page directories are particularly vulnerable right now, NP 2015 notes.
• Keep the focus on increasing Internet revenue to push up multiples. Investors value Internet revenue 10 to 20x as much as revenue from print. (Keeping print is an imperative, however)
• Break down ad sales teams by specialists. Sales people should be category experts — like say those who concentrate on consumer packaged goods — who can sell across all channels." -
Kevin: Patricia Handschiegel makes an incredibly important distinction in her post looking at website traffic numbers and possibly highlighting why lots of traffic doesn't necessarily mean a successful business: "What a lot of companies are secretly finding out is that traffic does not mean there is an audience, at that at the end of the day, the audience is where the value is. Boasting giant page views and unique visitors means very little when those you are driving to the site are not sticking around, using it or returning."
Yearly Archives: 2009
links for 2009-07-27
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Kevin: Steve Dennen at comScore Voices writes: "These trends demonstrate the challenge for newspapers to more deeply engage online with the growing number of consumers who do not get any of their news information from the print or online editions of their newspapers. Beyond looking for approaches that will attract these consumers to their own sites, the newspapers must explore alternative ways – including using social media or distributed content as potential distribution models – to reach this audience as the Internet becomes the preferred medium for news consumption. By continuing to evolve their services in a way that aligns with their consumers’ preferences, they may be able to identify alternative ways to offset the revenue lost from their declining print channel."
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Kevin: The criticicism of the Associated Press continues to roll in. Scott Rosenberg writes: "“A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web.” That’s the headline on a New York Times article right now. But if you read the article, you see that the Associated Press’s new campaign isn’t only about “unpaid use of articles,” it’s about any use of headlines as links. In other words, it sounds like A.P. is pulling the pin on a legal Doomsday Machine for news and information on the Web — claiming that there is no fair use right to link to articles using a brief snippet of verbiage from that article, or the original headline on the article."
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Kevin: Josh Karp, founder of The Printed Blog, provides this excellent advice about starting a business, content or otherwise: "It's really important to strike a balance between product development, or available functions, and revenue generation. You want to develop the smallest amount of functionality you need to generate the maximum amount of initial revenue. We focused too much on the product, and not enough on proving that we could make money, and that was a big part of our downfall."
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Kevin: Paul Bradshaw highlights two posts comparing Associated Press' plans to add content protection to the failing effort of the Recording Industry Association of America to protect content through litigation and fighting music consumers.
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Kevin: Hat tip for this to Cyberjournalist.net. Scott Porad, part of the team behind the LOLCat site, I can haz cheezburger writes: "Previously I addressed the misconception that user-generated content is free. To make user-generated content work, Cheezburger expends significant cost to sift through all the user submissions to find the best quality content. However, including this expense, content costs us less to acquire and is undoubtedly of higher quality. This fundamental win-win is the promise of crowd-sourcing and user-generated content."
links for 2009-07-24
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Kevin: "My answer to the beat reporter was that she should reassess what she does to figure out how she can best serve the audience. It could be that writing two or three stories a day is the answer. Or blogging may provide a way to develop a closer relationship with that audience. The digital revolution is less about adding multimedia tricks than it is about reinventing the role of the journalist."
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Kevin: "The New York Times is the latest to report Q2 profits mainly due to cost cutting. And like Gannett, McClatchy and Media General, and Journal Communications executives with the New York Times said the chilling ad revenue losses are starting to subside a teeny-tiny bit."
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Kevin: "Certainly, U.S. newspapers are in a mature industry with low growth potential once recovery from the recession occurs. Most companies will performance reasonably well after the recovery, but certainly some companies will have difficulties because of imprudent strategies and choices. Nevertheless, the industry as a whole will still remain in place producing revenue for many years to come."
links for 2009-07-23
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Kevin: "More than 70 major companies, academic institutions and high profile technologists have launched a campaign to educate US government agencies about the benefits of open source technology."
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Kevin: Ryan Sholin writes: "What do you call your readers now that they’re participating actively in the creation and curation of unbundled media?
Do you call them a community?
Better yet, what makes an online “community” and how can local news sites foster an environment that makes that more likely?"
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Kevin: "Morris and its auditor, Deloitte & Touche, have warned they are uncertain if Morris can continue as a 'going concern.'" That's really all that needs to be said. Another newspaper company failing in the US?
links for 2009-07-22
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Kevin: There is a bit of contradictory information in this post, but it appears that UK blogging network Shiny Media has gone bust (gone into administration). What is more interesting in this post is the contention that Shiny never got $4.5m in funding and never retracted the information. Something doesn't read right here, but it sounds as if things have been rotten in the state of Shiny for a while.
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Kevin: A communications lawyer looks at some of the proposals that have been floated recently in the US in order to keep newspapers afloat including outlawing linnking; allowing newspapers to become non-profits; changing copyright, tax or antitrust laws; or mandating the Automated Content Access Protocol. In the end, Jeffrey Neuburger concludes: "As the debate rages over both the root causes of traditional journalism's economic troubles and possible legal solutions, the online world marches on."
links for 2009-07-21
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Kevin: ReadWriteWeb has another take on Altimeter Group's study of social media and brands. "A new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers."
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Kevin: From TechCrunch "Acquia, a startup that commercially develops and distributes open source content management system Drupal, has raised a whopping $8 million in series B funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners with Sigma Partners participating. This bring Acquia’s total funding to $15 million."
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Kevin: Slate tries to determine whether newspaper or web readers are better informed. Definitely something to watch.
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Kevin: Juan Antonio Giner writes: "When you see thinks like this you recover the faith in creative and innovative story-telling as one of the main assets to deliver the news to a new generation of readers."
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Kevin: My colleague Martin Belam writes about how the media in the UK are burying their own bad news. It's a post well worth reading. Martin writes: "With the impact of digital distribution, and the effect of the economic downturn, we have more than enough reasons to think that the news industry is dying. Treating our remaining paying customers like children who haven't learnt to use Google yet makes us look like we have a collective death wish."
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Kevin: Washington Post news magazine Newsweek has a paid newsstand circulation of just 67,000 copies a week. That's in a nation with 300m people (the US). Mark Potts writes, "It's a little hard to see why—especially in an age of real-time online news—The Washington Post Co. is keeping Newsweek alive. Readers (and advertisers) just don't seem to care."
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Kevin: Condé Nast has hired McKinsey to help it "develop new perspectives" on how to generate money. The New York Observer has a memo from Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend on the "considerable and complicated task, forcing us to rethink the way we do business in many instances and incorporate efficiencies in every step of our process".
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Kevin: News monitoring service VMS estimates that the value of the TV news, daytime talk show, magazine and newspaper coverage of Twitter was worth $48m. Twitter received 2.73bn impressions bersus 63m for Microsoft's Bing search engine. For comparison, the value of the media coverage for Bing came in at just $573,834. Fascinating and a bit scary.
Outcomes and examples
For my Carnegie UK Trust report on the use of social media in civil society, we want to include a list of “outcomes”, i.e. possible results of using social media (provided that you do it right, of course!). We’d also like to pull together some very short examples – from charities, NGOs, unions, mutuals, co-ops, etc. – that illustrate these outcomes, where we can. Of course, there aren’t necessarily enough examples out there, but it’d be good to try and find some.
Here’s our preliminary list of outcomes:
- Social media helps to engage with segments of the population that traditional marketing may find it difficult to reach.
- Social media enables conversations to take place, which facilitates the co-creation of knowledge.
- Social media improves the relationship between an association and individual supporters, as well as between supporters.
- Social media allows information to rapidly ripple through a community, thus enabling quick and effective mobilisation online and offline.
- Social media provides platforms for dissent by allowing people to express discontent or highlight abuses of power.
- Social media strengthens offline communities, and offline events strengthen online relationships.
- Social media improves the transparency, governance and accountability of organisations, which increases trust in those organisations.
- Social media brings about financial benefits by helping organise direct and indirect fundraising.
- Social media, used internally, helps improve the effectiveness and efficiency of organisations and enables flexible staffing and volunteering.
- Social media helps create highly responsive and less hierarchically governed civil society associations.
Do you have any more key outcomes that you think we’re missing? Any of these that you disagree with? And, most importantly, do you have any examples that would illustrate these?
links for 2009-07-20
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Kevin: The Federal Communications Commission in the US has been charged to draft a National Broadband Plan, something akin to the Digital Britain plan in the UK. "The FCC collects broadband deployment statistics from industry. But, the statistics are gross. If one site in a zip code has broadband, the whole area is considered high-speed." There are gaps and serious deficiences with the industry reporting of broadband deployment. We've heard this before. For these reasons, they are thinking of trying to crowdsource the data. Watch this project for interesting ideas on how to crowdsource information.
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Kevin: I'm a big fan of open-source, and as this post says, many small and medium newspapers have had great success with Drupal. The Newspapers on Drupal group is assembling a list of modules commonly used by newspapers
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Kevin: Brian Reynolds says: "A common problem with current social games, Reynolds said, is that they don’t make players’ choices interesting over time, instead “burying the player in tedious repetitive clicking.” The challenge is improving the games’ progression curve, so players get steadily increasing rewards (points, virtual money and items) to encourage continued play. He believes simply refining this would instantly make social games more fun to play."
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Kevin: An excellent post looking at how journalists have worked to build their own personal brands alongside the work that they do at publications. It's an important thing that will help journalists break out of their institutions and develop career opportunities broader than the papers or broadcasters that they work for.
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Kevin: BBC World Service Director Peter Horrocks writes about how 'Fortress Journalism' is crumbling and how journalists main job is not longer to fight journalists in other fortresses.
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Kevin: Jack Lail writes … "the McCormick Foundation funded three proposals from new media women entrepreneurs at $10,000 each so they can launch within a year."
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Kevin: Alan Mutter writes about the passing of Walter Cronkite. He was the anchor that I remember (barely) from my childhood, but even those very early memories were of someone trustworthy and honest. Alan believes that we will never see another anchor like him in this age of multi-channel television. There are some great comments on this post, well worth reading if you are familiar with Cronkite's work.
I'm not certain that we won't see someone like him again, but it will be much more difficult to see someone who has that position in the US journalistic landscape. It was a much simpler world back then in terms of that people had fiewer choices. There were three major broadcast networks. No cable. No internet. People had fewer choices. It's a good post. It will get you thinking.
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Kevin: Kim Krause Berg writes on Search Engline Land: "Success in search engines was never quantity of pages vs. quality. It still is not. Rather, search engine market success is keenly tied to understanding user behavior and this is becoming more and more obvious every day."
And I'd have to say that understanding user behaviour is what we need when it comes to building news sites and building new journalism businesses. We need to understand how users behave and also what they want. It's not about pandering to users' needs as much as finding out what their informational needs are and how journalism might go about meeting those needs.
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Kevin: Derek Willis (who works at the New York Times) writes: "The folks at Sunlight today announced an effort to build a catalog for national and state datasets, going beyond what Data.gov is doing at the federal level."
There is a great opportunity here for journalists, academics, civically minded programmers and government transparency advocates in the UK to join forces on a project like this. It's about sifting through the masses of data to find the sources that are most relevant. It's not about replicating the data as much as it is about sifting through it and highlighting it. It's a fascinating idea, and I hope that we can work not only in the US and UK but elsewhere.
links for 2009-07-18
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Suw: Fascinating look at the development of banking fraud. A must-read.
links for 2009-07-16
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Kevin: Clay Shirky writes: "The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all."
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Kevin: Google explains what any geek knows. If news publishers want to prevent the search giant from indexing their content, they can do that tomorrow. Will they? The ball is in the news publishers' court, and quite frankly, seeing as a solution exists alreday for newspapers to 'protect' their content from Google, these publishers might have little chance in court of winning a case against Google. Instead, the newspaper publishers want to change the rules of the internet. It also shows once again how newspaper publishers show an amazing ignorance (and arrogance) when it comes to the basic working of the internet. As I've said before, if newspapers want to wage war against the internet, when they think they are just waging war against Google, I know which side I'm on. Don't break the internet to make up for a broken, but repairable, business model.