Category Archives: Media 2.0

12.22.08
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Digital versus print and apple and oranges analysis

David Carr at the the New York Times has written a story that must cheer the hearts of newspaper owners as they struggle to find a way to go back to the days of fat returns. Under the headline “Newspaper Shuns Web, and Thrives“, he speaks with a small community newspaper publisher who is enjoying 10% growth by almost choosing to “aggressively” ignore the web.

Ryan Sholin said on Twitter:

Yo, David Carr, apples & oranges is a pretty fricking basic concept, isn’t it? You’re comparing them.

I’d agree. Carr’s analysis is simplistic and just plain wrong. Carr says:

A few caveats before we turn back the clock on publishing history. TriCityNews employs 3.5 people (the half-time employee handles circulation), has a print run of 10,000, and has a top line that can be written in six figures.

A caveat is an outlying piece of data that can be ignored and not threaten the main thrust of the analysis. This is just one piece of data that destroys the analysis that it is the choice of the publisher to ignore the web that has made his business successful. The publisher also has negotiated long term deals with advertisers so that he doesn’t have sales staff, and he has six part-time columnists. I could make a very successful digital or analogue news business on that cost basis.

This isn’t about digital versus print. This is difference between having zero legacy costs, a small building and I’m guessing no print plant. This is a minuscule cost basis versus the high legacy costs of existing newspapers in terms of staff, paper and distribution. As any one knows, US newspapers still make piles of money, just not enough money to cover their costs.

And it’s not just the buildings, printing presses and distribution costs that the newspaper companies are groaning under. It’s the mountains of debt that they accumulated through aggressive, highly leveraged acquisition strategies. McClatchy took on debt to acquire Knight-Ridder. In September, they had to renegotiate a $1.175 bn debt deal to account for their declining revenue. Gatehouse is drowning in debt to the tune of $1.2 bn with a preciptious drop in their stock value, and we know the result of Sam Zell’s highly leveraged buy-out of the Tribune Corporation. To compare a 10,000 circulation start-up print news operation with a media conglomerate like Tribune Corp with $7.6 bn of assets and $12.9bn in debt is ridiculous. It’s about as ridiculous as comparing Digg with a newspaper. They just aren’t comparable creatures in economic scale, business model or editorial mission.

I would argue that the more accurate analysis is that Dan Jacobson, the publisher of the TriCityNews of Monmouth New Jersey has an incredibly lean news organisations with no legacy costs. It has more in common with Nick Denton’s Gawker than the Tribune Corporation. This is not an issue of digital versus analogue but rather the result of Jacobson’s focus on exclusive local content, a recession-proofed revenue strategy and aggressive cost containment.

Newspapers used to be the most efficient way to advertise. Now they aren’t. In the first half of 2007, Google pulled in 39.8% of all online ad revenue in the US. In 2007, Google was 241 in the Fortune 500. In 2008, it leapt to 150. No, Google’s business is not to create journalistic content, but it is competing with newspapers for advertising dollars.

Digital could support a news organisation on its own, if they were willing to radically reduce costs, and I don’t mean simply cutting staff. First, let’s look at the revenue side. There are still too many people running and working for newspapers that believe the 1990s chestnut: The web is great but how do you make money with it? The LA Times web revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs. As commenters on Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine point out, that’s not the only cost a newspaper has, but it definitely challenges the view that the web is simply a money pit. The problem isn’t that the web isn’t making money, but that it’s not making enough money at most newspapers to compensate for the decline in the print business, which is still the primary revenue generator for most big city newspapers. (Jeff just got an update from LATimes Editor Russ Stanton on their web success.)

But we also need to look at cost containment. Newspapers can still radically reshape their businesses to take advantage of digital efficiencies. I often talk about when I worked for the BBC in Washington. About 8 years ago, the bureau set up its first digital editing suite with a blue-and-white Power Mac and Avid video processing, storage and software. The total cost was around $80,000. In 2005, they replaced the system with a PowerBook, Final Cut Pro and a portable RAID array for roughly $12,000. Faster, better, cheaper and portable. Expensive equipment and production doesn’t necessarily mean better quality, and a good professional can produce 80-90% of the quality at a fraction of the cost. This may sound odd to people who know me, but invest in the people, not the kit. I’d rather have a job than a shiny new computer any day.

For many large chains neither the web, print nor anything short of selling porn would dig them out from underneath the mountain of debt they have accumulated. Highly leveraged consolidation is the problem and will be the death of some of these chains. This isn’t an issue of digital versus print. Now that the credit bubble has bust, leaner and more efficient will always win the day over highly leveraged and highly costly.

11.19.08
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Interview like a human being

Suw and I are huge fans of This American Life, a show on NPR in the US. We often listen to the podcast over breakfast on the weekends. My friend Mohamed Nanabhy says that the US government should spend its public diplomacy budget on This American Life because it’s such a good representative for the US.

One of the great things being back in the US during the elections was to catch up with Andy Carvin, head of the social media desk at NPR. Andy is live blogging a session with the host of This American Life, Ira Glass, on story telling and interviewing.

There is s view that an aggressive, in your face style of interviewing is the mark of a great journalist, but Ira and his team actually tell wonderful stories about everyday life full of humanity. It’s an amazing form of journalism, just different from aggressive public accountability journalism. Here are a couple of choice quotes from Ira:

Ira Glass: If you do interviews like a stiff, that’s what comes out of the interview subject. One of your greatest tools is to be a human being.

or this nugget:

Ira Glass: Pure imagination. Part of what makes a story work is the reporter imagining what it really means to be this person.

For any budding journalist who wants to know about interview techniques, Ira is one to listen to or watch.

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11.17.08
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Disrupt or be disrupted

more about “ Why do people listen to Michael Ros…“, posted with vodpod

Andy Dickinson has a post asking the question: Why do people listen to Michael Rosenblum? Andy thinks that Michael is worth listening to but that his approach doesn’t “work across the board”. At conferences, many in the room may be hearing Michael’s message for the first time, but Andy says:

As suprising as it may be to them, there are people in their organisations who are as knowledgable and passionate about video as he is. They may have more experience of the particular problems in their company and more direct suggestions to help solve them.

They may not give as good a show but they may give as good advice.

Suw sees the same thing in business. She is often called in as a consultant by people who agree with her, often passionately, but don’t have the political capital in their organisation to shake it from its inertia. They need a comrade in arms but have to buy one in.

Returning to Andy’s post, I think another, possibly more important question is: Why do people nod in agreement at conferences and then completely ignore Michael Rosenblum or other digital advocates, especially those in their own organisations? Frankly, Michael, Jeff Jarvis and many of us have been saying the same thing for years now. Digital technology will disrupt the business of journalism, and it presents a clear choice of either adopting and adapting the technology or watching your business crumble. However, we shouldn’t mistake the collapse of some businesses as evidence of lightning fast change. This has been a slow motion train wreck. This is the predictable outcome of the economics of disruptive digital technologies, which is why I’m mystified people continue to ignore this fact, carry on with business as usual and then feign surprise as their businesses implode.

We’ve had decades to watch the digital revolution play out. As Tom Coates wrote in debunking the attack of the snails argument:

So here’s the argument – that perhaps broadcast won’t last forever and that technology is changing faster than ever before. So fast, apparently, that it’s almost dazzlingly confusing for people.

I’m afraid I think this is certifiable bullshit. There’s nothing rapid about this transition at all. It’s been happening in the background for fifteen years. So let me rephrase it in ways that I understand. Shock revelation! A new set of technologies has started to displace older technologies and will continue to do so at a fairly slow rate over the next ten to thirty years!

Tom wrote his post two and a half years ago, and yet journalism and media organisations continue to bemoan the rapid pace of change. In fact, this change is just the logical conclusion of decades-long trends that have been clear to anyone who was actually paying attention.

In some ways, it’s understandable. If you have a wonderfully lucrative business model like television or the de facto monopolies of big metro daily newspapers in the US, the first reaction is to protect the existing business model rather than adapt to meet the challenge of digital insurgents. It’s a perfectly reasonable response.

In other ways, it’s a complete failure of management replicated almost identically across several sectors of the media industry. Newspapers have been suffering declining readership for decades. Television has been facing fragmenting audiences for years under the threat of cable and satellite. This is the failure of vision by media management: They have focused on digital consumption patterns without adopting digital production methods and undercutting their own costs. And as the erosion of audience has accelerated, they have mainly cut costs by cutting staff instead of by adopting digital production and distribution technology.

At this late hour for many media companies the critical question is, when are you going to stop nodding your heads at conferences and get on with it? Not many of us in media will be able to go hat in hand like Northern Rock or General Motors and ask for billions to bail us out. I think that Mindy McAdams raises an important issue in the comments on Andy’s post:

News organizations seem particularly susceptible to “a prophet is without honor in his own land” — people inside the organization who spread Michael’s same message might be completely ignored, but management will hire Michael to come in and do his excellent presentation, and THEN they will ooo and ahh about it, acting as if it is brand-new.

A few things to realise in the age of digital disruption:

  1. Higher costs of production do not necessarily result in higher quality of products.
  2. Quality and brand do not equal media success.
  3. Broadcast=wedding. Anytime you put broadcast near technology in the same sentence, it’s like saying you want something for a wedding. Just triple the cost.
  4. Disrupt or be disrupted. Actively look for ways to disrupt your own business model with digital technologies before someone else does.
11.13.08
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Journalism: Hop on the Cluetrain

After seven weeks in the US for the elections, I’m behind in everything: Eating, sleeping and blogging. I’m going to be writing a lot about the experience and lessons learned in terms of the technology and in terms of the journalism. But, before I get into deep thoughts about the trip, I saw something that really resonated with me as I watched how social media covered these elections and where traditional media was sometimes successful in adapting to the world of social media and also how much further traditional media still has to go.

Tim Eby of WOSU, who I reconnected with at the Columbus Social Media Cafe, just tweeted:

Retweeting @amber_rae amazing social media presentation @andyangelos http://tinyurl.com/5eqmxg

The presentation by Andy Angelos, quotes the Cluetrain Manifesto:

Get out of the way so internetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets. The result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Just so a leap of logic isn’t necessary because I’ve found sometimes I make connections that others in my industry don’t:

Get out of the way so internetworked journalists can converse directly with internetworked people formerly known as the audience. The result will be a new kind of journalism. And it will be the most exciting journalism that we have ever engaged in.

That’s the lesson that I’ve learned from my trip. Discuss.

10.29.08
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Social Media Cafe Columbus: The elections and foreclosures in St Louis

Sorry for the blogging silence here on Strange Attractor, but as I’ve mentioned, I’m currently driving across the US covering the elections. One of the things that Emily Bell at the Guardian wanted me to do was to meet up with bloggers and other social media folks on the trip, and I’ve managed to meet up with bloggers in LA, Denver and tonight a great meet-up with the Social Media Cafe crowd in Columbus Ohio. Thanks to Tim Eby of WOSU for the invitation. I met Tim and Robert Patterson in London a couple of years.

I came in a little late, but there was already a discussion about local community blogging project Ganther’s Place. People who live in the neighbourhood were using the blog to name and shame absentee landlords. They also mentioned how the blog was helping to gain the attention of traditional media to cover their concerns.

After that, Robert, Andy Carvin, who heads up the social media desk at NPR, and Anna Shoup also of NPR joined the meet-up through the magic of Skype. Andy talked about a project to monitor voting during the elections. They will use Twitter and SMS with the hashtag votereport to collect reports on voting, now during early voting and all the way through election day next week. You can already follow some early Twitter reports via Summize of Dwigger.

Robert has an absolutely fascinating project with the public broadcaster in St Louis. They are using social media to help people either facing foreclosure or falling behind in their housing payments to keep their homes. The entire focus of the project is to help people help themselves but giving them information about resources in the city. It’s about fostering community even as the fabric of the community is under strain from the housing crisis, and it’s about people finding ways to help themselves. Robert’s overall message was the potential of social media to renew community bonds and give people the tools for self-reliance.

I gave a quick overview of my social media efforts during the road trip. Twitter helped me arrange the blogger meet-up in LA. Twitter also helped me to cover the rise of homelessness during this housing crisis. I talked about how Ralph Torres in California contacted me because of the blog and gave me a foreclosure tour of Riverside California.

I also gave a quick overview of some of the technology that I’m using on this trip. I showed off Twibble, the Twitter client that I’m using on my Nokia N82. I also showed the Twitpic and geo-tagging features of Twibble. I’ll be writing more about all of this once the trip is over.

Thanks again to the folks at Social Media Cafe Columbus for the warm welcome. I’ll see you on Twitter.

09.27.08
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Your questions about US Elections: a(nother) experiment in journalism

Suw and I talk about the US elections over breakfast all of the time, and I realised since I came back to Washington last week that despite having very little interest in politics when I first came to Washington DC ten years ago, my geekiness has now spilled over into politics. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had about politics and the economy with a range of people since I came back. Suw was asking questions that I’m sure on the on the mind of many Guardian readers, and instead of letting these conversations disappear, I realised that I wanted to capture and share those conversations.

We recorded this conversation this morning over Skype. She was sitting in our flat in London, and I was sitting in my hotel here in Washington. We used the Skype Call Recorder from Ecamm (a bank breaker at US$14.95), but if you use a PC, Pamela will do the same things plus can automatically handle uploads to FTP servers and auto posting to several blog services. I used Pamela to record broadcast quality interviews when I was at the BBC. If you use a nice broadcast quality mic such as the Snowball from Blue (a lovely wedding present that Suw and I received from our friend Vince), the sound quality is stunning. We simply used the mics on our MacBooks. The Call Recorder software has a side-by-side split screen option so we didn’t have to do anything to edit the video apart from top and tail it (edit out our pre-call and post-call chatter). In the end, it took very little production time apart from the time for the call. Viddler, the site we used to host this doesn’t like stereo audio so I had to merge the channels, but QuickTime Pro handled that with ease.

That’s the technical side of things. Technology is simply a means to a journalistic end for me, and the real aim is to expand my little experiment to anyone with a Skype connection, a webcam and a question about the US elections. Sure, I love talking to Suw about anything and everything, and she wants to talk after the vice presidential debate next week between Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Republican nominee Sarah Palin. I want to use this to open up a discussion with as many people as possible about the US election, around the US and around the world. I’d also like to see how feasible this is on the road. After next Thursday, I’ll be traveling across the US. The technical challenges are pretty minor, especially compared to previous election trips that I’ve taken. The real measure of success for this and many other journalistic experiments I have planned for the next month is the depth and breadth of the conversation. If you’d like to take part, drop me an email or leave a comment. Let’s talk. There are lots of important issues on the table, and I’m so excited about how technology opens up new possibilities for civic dialogue.

09.15.08
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Is this “against pretty much every journalistic principle”? Should it be?

Last month, Mohamed Nanabhay of Al Jazeera asked what would be the most important things to include if one was building a news website from scratch. It kicked off a great conversation, largely via Twitter. I think it’s a question that more people are asking as we are open to more radical ideas to support journalism as the print business model comes under increasing pressure.

I collected some of the responses and added some of my own, but I wanted to flag up this response from Mads Kristensen in Denmark. He recast the question in terms not of building a news site but rather a media site “since the news business is so over-commoditized by now that it’s arguable if there’s any strategic advantage in looking just at news”. Some journalists might wince at that statement, but there is a lot of truth in it. We really need to ask some hard questions about what is our unique selling point. What information, analysis or entertainment are we providing that one else does?

Mads asks a question that is increasingly on my mind:

So to my mind this is more an idea of how to redefine media as such without the legacy of the old media companies. So what would I do?

I really am beginning to think that the ideas that will redefine media, news and information in a digital age will not come from legacy companies. They are in the awkward position of trying to build a new business to support the old, and I increasingly think that two motivations are mutually exclusive.

Mars’ vision is very customer oriented, which is not a view that one would hear in most news rooms. The question is what do our readers want to read or viewers want to see but rather what do we think they need to read an see. Mars believes:

Yes, I would act a lot more according to the stated needs of the community rather to what I myself would find important. I realize that’s against pretty much every journalistic principle in the book, but ultimately I think that’s one of the reasons why media companies struggle to stay relevant. And at the end of the day I would rather stay relevant and in business.

It’s sad to think that it would be considered against ‘every journalistic principle in the book’ to think this way. Every time I express that view, I’m accused of wanting to pander to the audience. I beg to differ. Journalists who don’t know want their communities want are both out of touch and these days soon to find themselves out of a job, and only a journalist in touch with their community knows what they really need to know.

09.10.08
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Running a small to mid-size news site? Try this CMS

Steve Yelvington is one of my heroes. Last summer, we swapped stories over beer in Kuala Lumpur with Peter Ong after talking citizen media at an IFRA Asia workshop. Steve told me how he wrote a newsreader for the Atari ST in 1985 and how he got the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newsroom on the internet in 1993.

Now, Steve should be everyone’s hero. He’s working on a next-generation news site management system, and he and the folks at Morris Digital Works have pledged to release the code under the open-source GPL licence. Steve describes the design ethos of the system:

When we’re done, this will be an innovation platform, not just a content publishing and community platform. …

Open tools and open platforms are great for developers, but what we really want to do is place this kind of power directly in the hands of content producers. They won’t have to know a programming language, or how databases work, or even HTML to create special presentations based on database queries. Need a new XML feed? Point and click.

It’s based on the open-source Drupal platform, and he talks what is possible with the system.

We’re integrating a lot more social-networking functionality, which we think is an important tool for addressing the “low frequency” problem that most news sites face.

We’re going to be aggressive aggregators, pulling in RSS feeds from every community resource we can find, and giving our users the ability to vote the results up/down. We’ll link heavily to all the sources, including “competitors.”

Ranking/rating, commenting, and RSS feeds will be ubiquitous. Users of Twitter, Pownce and Friendfeed will be able to follow topics of interest.

I couldn’t agree with Steve more when he says that internet start-ups have been smart in adopting open-source tools while newspapers have failed to embrace them. That thinking has to change. Steve is looking for collaborators on the project, and I think this is a golden opportunity for news sites to work together to build a platform for their future.

09.05.08
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Mapping out my US election road trip for the Guardian

I mentioned that I would be taking a road trip speaking to voters across the US about the issues that would decide the presidential election. After I wrote that post, Grzegorz Piechota with Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland got in touch to ask me about it. Suw and I met Grzegorz at the Transitions Online new media workshops in Prague in July. Grzegorz said that Suw and I helped motivate him to start a blog, Forum 4 Editors. He posted an e-mail interview with me about the trip.

His long journey proves that online journalism is not about sitting at the office and googling for facts. Kevin is going to do an old-fashioned reporting – meeting real people and talking to them – but he will use all the gadgets of the new media – Twitter , Flickr , Dopplr, Twibble, TwitPic, YouTube, Fire Eagle and others.

It’s as I often say, I’ll be doing old fashioned journalism with cutting edge tools. We’re going to try to bring people along with us and hopefully kick off a conversation not only amongst American voters but also with the Guardian’s global audience.

In responding to Grzegorz, I found this blog post by Martin Belam about the history of blogging at the BBC, where I got my start in blogging during the last US presidential election. The post somehow slipped by me when he wrote it. I’ll blame the crush of the holidays. It’s a bit belated, but thanks Martin for the kind words. Martin also pointed me back to my ‘valedictory’ post from the 2004 US elections:

I first got on the internet in 1990 when I went off to university. We had to use Unix commands to do anything, and I never thought it would appeal to anyone without seriously geeky tendencies. The learning curve was too brutal.

But then in the summer of 1993, I played with an alpha version of Mosaic. Even as primitive as this web browser was, I thought to myself that this was going to change everything I do as journalist. And of course, Marc Andreesen, who helped create Mosaic, took his degree, went to Silicon Valley and created Netscape. …

However, I have to say that of all the high-tech projects I’ve done, this blog, which I consider pretty low-tech, probably comes closest to all my university dreams of what online journalism could be.

And I’m really excited about this trip. When I did the trips in 2000 and 2004, there were so many things I wanted to do but the technology wasn’t quite there. Now it is. I’ll be writing posts about how we’re doing on the trip here on Strange and share as much of the lessons I learn as time permits. We leave on 5 October from Los Angeles and will be travelling some 6500km across the US.

If you want to follow along, we’re GuardianUS08 on Twitter. I’ll use my own Flickr account. I’ll post the other details as I have them. If you want to be a part of the conversation, just drop me an e-mail. If you want me to see something, just tag it GuardianUS08. See you on the road.

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09.04.08
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Journalism and Fact Checking: Follow the links

Stephen Colbert explains 'truthiness'

Stephen Colbert introducing the word 'truthiness'

I was writing a post for the Guardian US Politics blog today using the excellent FactCheck site to cut through the spin, mis-representations and some might argue lies emanating from the Republican Convention speakers. Before someone accuses me of bias, both parties spin, and it’s the job of journalists to counter the spin regardless of the party. FactCheck is a brilliant non-partisan service from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and I will stress non-partisan. They examined Democrats’ claims last week during their convention, and took the Obama campaign to task for airing an ad airing in Michigan that misrepresents John McCain’s current stance on low-cost loans to beleaguered American automakers. Politics is played by representing the facts in such a way as to support one’s world view, but there is truth and then there is ‘truthiness‘.

FactCheck does an excellent job of documenting its sources that allow people to evaluate the source material in total and also see the source immediately. It’s a bit of old school footnotes and new school linking, but it’s an excellent exercise in transparency. Even before clicking through the link, a reader can clearly see that some of FactCheck’s quotes come directly from press releases from Office of Senator John McCain.

I compare this to an AP story on the Huffington Post, on Google and Yahoo News that does the same fact checking job as FactCheck.org but doesn’t have any links. I know that this is syndicated content. But why not include links in the syndicated content? Come on, it’s not that technically difficult. I think that the Associated Press is leaving itself open to charges of bias by not providing links to the source material, and the AP has had to circulate talking points combating charges of bias from MoveOn.org and others against its Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier because he considered taking a position with John McCain in 2006. And now that McCain strategist Steve Schmidt has all but declared war against the media, it would be wise to increase the transparency.

As an internet reader, I’m increasingly suspicious of journalists who don’t link. Yes, if they quote an official that gives me a sense of the source. But why not link to original source material? It also allows me to dig more deeply into the story if I want without having to turn to Google.

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 says that it is a waste of resources to throw away all of the research that journalists do, and linking is not important simply in terms of transparency:

…understanding the value of links, and how they connect content, ideas, and people, is fundamental to understanding the value of the web. And understanding the value of the web is the key to unlocking the new business models that journalism needs to survive and thrive in the digital age.

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