Category Archives: Media 2.0

06.22.10
by

Le Monde: A textbook example for the press

With just two weeks of cash left, Frédéric Filloux described the crisis at Le Monde as “the textbook example of the evolution of French press over the last years”. He then went point-by-point the problems afflicting Le Monde in particular but the French press in general:

  • A steady erosion in readership.
  • A lack of budget discipline, made worse by loose governance.
  • The core newsroom’s reluctance to support the digital strategy
  • The collective certainty the “brand” was too beautiful to fail and that a deep-pocketed philanthropist will inevitably show up at the right time to save the company.
  • An difficulty to invest into the future, to test new ideas, to built prototypes, to coopt key talent or to invest in decisive technologies.
  • A bottomless investment in the heavy-industry part of the supply chain, in costly printing facilities.
  • An excessive reliance on public subsidies which account for about 10% of the industry’s entire revenue. Compared to Sweden, French newspapers have 3 times less readers, but each one gets 5 times more subsidies.

Most of these problems are not unique to the French press. The erosion of readership has afflicted the press in most of the western, developed world. A recent OECD report found that since 2007, newspaper circulation had declined by 30% in the US and by 25% in the UK. Before I moved to the UK in 2005, people always said that the problems afflicting the US press could never happen here because of the newspaper-reading culture. Only Japan’s newspaper market seems to have remained resilient.

In terms of a lack of budget discipline, I would only point to the industry in the US giving bonuses to execs while the companies were entering or operating under bankruptcy. As Robert Picard pointed out a year ago:

The Tribune Co. is trying to pay out $13 million in bonuses, the Journal Registers Co. is trying to pay $2 million, and Philadelphia Newspapers has already given hundreds of thousands in bonuses to its corporate officers.

The Tribune Co. is planning to put a cherry on top of the bonus sundae this year. They have already asked a bankruptcy court to approve $42.9m in bonuses and want to add an additional $16.2m in bonuses for execs when they exit bankruptcy protection. Of course, US media companies are not alone in providing bonuses to execs who preside over companies in financial distress. There are a few well known newspaper groups in the UK that have paid out bonuses to execs recently after announcing eye-watering losses.

As for lack of support in the core newsroom for digital strategies, I’d suggest that the current problem exist in a layer of powerful editors who believe they have the most to lose in any change. Rather than fully understand, much less support, the digital strategy of their organisations, they see it in their own best interest to protect the status quo and obstruct change, even as it leads to job losses and uncertainty over their own future. It is self-interest and short-sightedness to the extreme, but for them, it seems a rational decision.

Ah, the belief in the beauty of the brand, it is so endemic in media organisations that they can’t understand why their circulation is in decline. Surely in this age of a multitude of media choices, our brand, our quality will prevail, they say. Look at your books and your circulation, how’s that working for ya? Only a fool clings to a failing strategy, and the industry has more than enough fools to fill a ship.

Difficulty investing in the future, to experiment with new ideas, expensive investments in the past. Yes, yes, yes. It’s a textbook for more than France. About the only one that stands out as not generally applicable is the subsidy, and for those in the US and the UK looking for their own government bailout, it is instructive that while subsidies might help for a while, they are not a long term solution.

The industry has resisted fundamental change for so long. They believed that they could outrun the future with their brand, their quality and their market position, but they can’t. It is adapt or die, and if you wait long enough, you’ll be in the same position as Le Monde, with only two weeks of cash left and suddenly a room empty of suitors.

I honestly don’t believe most in the newspaper industry have the ability to make the changes necessary. They certainly haven’t demonstrated that in the past. In terms of the business of newspapers, they have proven that they can milk the business model for a little bit longer through cuts and consolidation. Bankruptcy will given them another go around, but it won’t fundamentally change the business environment that caused the collapse in the first place. The process will enrich a few but leave many journalists looking for something else to do.

As for me, I love journalism too much. I wasn’t going to wait around and watch anymore of this slow motion disaster. There are other ways to create a future in journalism and a future for journalism, and I’m loving have a chance to explore them.

06.17.10
by

Journalism’s future: ‘Silver bullets are the talisman of the desperate’

I will admit that it’s a bit cheeky quoting myself, but as I was watching the flow of posts and conversation on journalism blogs today, and specifically in response to Adam Tinworth’s excellent post Complexity is the New Reality, I wound up Tweeting “Silver bullets are the talisman of the desperate”. Adam was commenting on a good rant by Paul Bradshaw titled Let’s stop this ‘Curation is King’ crap right now.

…if curation is king in online journalism I guess I missed the coronation. Curation is a usurper, here to distract us from the bloody mess we’re in with the message ‘Business as usual’.

The future of journalism and publishing will not be curation, aggregation, the iPad OR mobile. It will be a strategic mix of these things and more depending on the market and the audience. As Adam says:

There is no easy answer, otherwise we’d have found it after over a decade. Complexity is the new reality. Clichés are just a crutch.

Clichés are much worse than that. Seemingly easy answers too often win internal debates, especially as Paul points out, some of these messages convey that ‘business as usual’ is an acceptable course of action.

Earlier this week, I wrote a post about multi-facted digital strategies that are generating growth for both the print and the digital for forward-thinking publications like the Christian Science Monitor and The Atlantic. The first comment on that post was “one word – iPAD!” The commenter isn’t alone: Mathias Döpfner, the head of German power publisher Axel Springer had this recommendation for his colleagues in the corner office:

Sit down once a day and pray to thank Steve Jobs that he is saving the publishing industry.

That’s the problem. Senior leaders in the industry aren’t looking for strategies, they are looking for a saviour. They want some supernatural – or in lieu of that, legislative – power to turn back the clock, put the genie back in the bottle, tax the internet and go back to the good old days when money just fell from the sky into their coffers. News flash: It’s too late. The good old days aren’t coming back. Anyone who tells you that you can continue doing what you’ve always done and that the solution is easy is lying. They care more about their current position than they do the future of journalism.

06.14.10
by

Ending the self-fulfilling prophecy that digital content doesn’t make money

If you walk into a newspaper newsroom, you will hear something said over and over: “You can’t make money online”. It’s closely followed by grumbles of how much the company spends on digital. These are held up as some incontrovertible truth, like carrots help you see better.

Just as ‘carrots help you see better’ was propaganda spread by the British Air Ministry to conceal the military secret of radar, the ‘truth’ that there is no money to be made online is nonsense. It’s unquestioned propaganda in newspaper newsrooms where there is an unnecessary, senseless and ultimately self-destructive battle to keep the newspaper focused on paper, a battle driven by advocates of the primacy of print.

I’m not calling for the presses to be shut off. Rather, I’m calling for innovation in both print and digital. This battle to preserve the past is preventing companies from creating print and digital products that serve 21st Century audiences. Companies that are clear-headed and audience-driven are developing multi-platform strategies that are reversing decades long decline in profits and print circulation while increasing the share of revenue from digital. Those newspapers who remain focused on print are missing that opportunity.

It’s true that print makes the bulk of newspaper revenue, usually around 80%. But in focussing on outdated print strategies newspapers are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: By not investing in digital, they ensure that digital revenues remain small in comparison to print.

In the US, Outsell found that in the news segment, largely made up of newspapers, only 11% of their revenues were from digital. In comparison, B2B publishers made 36% of their revenues from digital. Outsell analyst Ken Doctor said, “Simply put, the news industry has so far failed to make the digital transition.”

Although 11% of revenue doesn’t seem a good return, they have to be viewed in context. Print revenues are declining as a decades-long circulation drops no longer make print advertising as attractive. Digital revenues have been increasing, sometimes even through the recession, but it is usually from a very low base.

Commercial departments will also often tell you that it’s just not possible to make money online. In many instances, news organisations have built up huge audiences online but have failed to translate that audience into revenue. They will even refuse to investigate the opportunities afforded by digital on the basis that it would require them to do something different.

Commercial departments who say it’s not possible to make money online need to shoulder their responsibility for their failure to help newspapers make the transition to digital. If the current commercial strategy isn’t working – and old print ad sales strategies are not working very well online – why not try a new one? As the adage goes, if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.

There is hope, though. Folio has two great profiles of two publishers re-inventing themselves: The Christian Science Monitor and The Atlantic. Both profiles dive deep into details of the two different publications.

After rising losses, The Christian Science Monitor shifted from a daily newspaper to a web-first strategy with a weekly news magazine. One thing that stands out in the profile of the Monitor is how much audience research they have conducted and continue to conduct with more than 3,500 readers. They found out why people had stopped taking the newspaper: Cost, lack of time and a shift to getting headlines online. I really liked the way that publisher Jonathan Wells summed up how they re-thought their value proposition:

We had to think long and hard about it. Our approach is a composite of the learning economy—we’re serving people without a lot of time, who are trying to understand complex issues quickly, and contribute to a solution. As one guy here says, our mission is ‘Help me get smarter, faster.’

One thing that jumped out at me was how willing they were to be nimble and to rethink not only how they worked digitally but also their print strategy. As they said, they were able to convert 93% of their print readers from the daily to weekly, and they’ve increased subscriptions by 63% since the shift. Increasing circulation going from 2009 to 2010 is something that most publishers would have killed for. They are not pursuing newsstand sales. They are focused on attracting the “right customers through controlled, targeted growth,” according to senior marketing director Susan Hackney.

They have also increased their page views by 49%, and they are looking to develop a line of digital products. This is all really smart, strategic and refreshing in an industry that seems to be mostly focused on squeezing the last bits of profit out of declining business models. That’s just a taster of an excellent article.

Folio also did an excellent profile of The Atlantic, which is managing to reverse a revenue decline that began in the 1960s. I often say that news organisations need to disrupt their business before someone else does. Atlantic Media president Justin Smith did just that, pushing for a digital-first strategy. From the Folio article:

(Smith) stressed that print is not dead, but taking this approach allowed the company to unlock its grip on traditional revenue sources. Importantly, the Web site’s overhaul was set up as an insurgency on the print brand. “If our mission was to kill the magazine, what would we do?” said Smith, who added that a digital competitor was going to do that anyway, so they did it themselves.

They are projecting that digital will account for 39% of their revenue in 2010. They not only shifted to digital first, but they also took a novel marketing approach, setting up their own marketing services division in an effort to differentiate themselves from ad networks. I’ll leave you to read the rest of the article, and I’ll give you one last reason to read the rest. After decades of decline, they looking at a profitable fourth quarter of 2010 and a multi-million profit in 2011.

To reposition themselves, these publications are looking for innovation from both print and digital but with a digital first strategy. The Monitor is using audience research to deliver products more relevant to their audiences, and they are thinking clearly about where they need to go and how nimble they need to be to achieve success.

We can rebuild businesses to support quality journalism, and here are two examples that show a few options for the way forward.

06.11.10
by

Value of Journalism: Different motivations for journalists

I’m at the Value of Journalism conference at LSE right now. I didn’t live blog the panels, but there were a few things that stood out for me and spurred some thoughts. There were discussions about paywalls, which I think largely reinforced my view that a very polarised, noisy media fracas obscured a much more nuanced reality in the paid content strategies of news organisations.

I did want to flag up the comments of Joanna Geary, a friend of mine, who spoke about her journey into journalism. UPDATE: Like many people, she stumbled into it. She told me afterwards that the move “was planned but knew it wasn’t perfect for what I wanted”. She says that on entering journalism she wasn’t a newspaper reader, and she definitely wasn’t someone who had specific loyalty to one newspaper. She is an information seeker. Now, she says that she regularly visits about five sites a day.

They are full of people I find interesting. They stimulate my thinking. Those are the sites that I visit the most.

This is very much the way that I consume information. I’m interested in subjects and topics, and as a networked journalist (the topic of this conference), I use personal networks and other tools to get as much information and gather as many sources about a subject that I can. As a journalist, I then try to sift, filter, highlight and verify. I also try to draw connections between these sources and bits of information. It’s very similar to traditional newsgathering, but the tools are different.

At conferences, I’m often asked about my news consumption patterns, and my standard response is: “My reading habits are voracious and promiscuous.” I find the idea quaint that I would choose a single news source for my information. Every source has it’s point of view, some more prominent than others. I feel the need to read several sources of information to get a complete view of a subject or topic.

I used to think that I was in the minority doing this, especially seeing as as a journalist, it’s part of my job to sift through a lot of information. However, this might represent a broader shift in news consumption. Gina Chen at the Nieman Lab at Harvard looked at a recent Pew Research Centre study in the US. (Caveat being that US studies aren’t necessarily applicable to all markets.) She interpreted the findings as:

But the important point is that the loyalty isn’t to the platform, the application, the delivery system, or the brand. The loyalty is to the need for the information.

That succinctly describes my relationship to news and information. I’m still not ready to generalise my news consumption patterns, but I do think that there are elements of my news consumption patterns that I share with digital audiences. I think that people are filtering information, consciously and unconsciously. Editorial choice and voice used to be the only filter for news, but I think that is changing. People have other tools that are proving to be better vehicles for relevance than the traditional news outlet and its manner of bundling information.

Teasing out Trust

Back to the conference which has the overarching theme of the Value of Journalism. It’s important to draw a distinction between societal value and economic sustainability. Speaking of teasing out issues, Joanna also drew a distinction between legality, accuracy and trust:

If it was illegal to be untrustworthy and wrong, a lot of journalists would be in jail.

Joanna also talked about her motivation for getting into journalism. I’m writing this part of the post a little after the panel, and I don’t want to put words into Jo’s mouth. However, it is safe to say that her motivations going in were different than the motivations that she found other journalists had. Jo said that she found that many journalists just wanted to write, to have influence and be recognised. Jo’s motivations were more based on a desire to inform. (I’ll check with Jo just to make sure that I’m not misquoting her. She did say to me after the panel that she is finding more people in journalism like her.)

Jo’s comments resonated with me. As I’ve said before, in my rather brief career thus far I’ve had the honour of working for international journalism organisations including the BBC and The Guardian. However, I got my start at a small newspaper in western Kansas, The Hays Daily News. When you’re writing for a newspaper that sells 14,000 copies to people spread across a few thousand square miles, one is aware of the limits of one’s influence.

Of course, we all want to be read or viewed. However, in terms of influence, it’s not really something that I’ve sought nor is it what gets me up in the morning. My goal is to provide people with information so that they can make decisions in a democratic society. I know that trust and credibility is the bedrock of what I do.

Engagement has been key to building trust in the journalism I do, and Jo spoke very eloquently about that during the panel. It is one of the reasons why I have been such an advocate of social media journalism. It is a chance to directly engage with our audiences and to build (or in some cases rebuild) our relationship with people.

06.02.10
by

Participatory media: Encouraging people to ‘level up’

Derek Powazek has an interesting analysis of the quirky quiz show on US public radio (NPR) called Wait, Wait Don’t Tell me and looks at the lessons the show provides in developing participatory media projects. What I like about this post is that he’s looking at a relatively traditional media format, the radio quiz show, through a different lens, from the point of view not of radio but of social media and gaming. I like from the start how he re-defines the term “crowdsourcing”.

For my purposes, it means collaborating with the people who used to be the silent audience to make something better than you could make alone.

I’m going to focus on two of his points and let you read the rest of the post to get the full monty. I couldn’t agree more with his second point about structuring input. You have to give crowds a goal, something to aim for.

Too many crowdsourced projects create a blank canvas and have a rather utopian view that the crowd will create a masterpiece. It just doesn’t work like that. You’ll most likely get obscene graffiti rather than a Van Gogh because not a lot of people engage with something when it isn’t clear what they are engaging with. A vacuum encourages vandals. They assume that no one is looking after your particular corner of the internet and will usually start trying to sell Viagra if you’re lucky. I still hear Field of Dreams strategies at conferences, a “build it and they will come” ethos that was discredited by anyone with credibility a decade ago. (If someone espouses such a strategy and dresses up with a lot of buzzwords stressed to impress, run away. They really are just snake oil salesman.)

I think Derek makes another good point when he says “Encourage the audience to level up”. Again, this is taking a concept from gaming and applying it to participatory media. Most people still passively consume media (although many more people are sharing and recommending media). It’s often referred to as the user-generated content pyramid or the 1-9-90 rule (although this might be changing). A participatory media project or service should give “new users a clear path, limited tools, and an awareness of that those on the next level can do”, Derek says.

Too often, media create crowdsourced projects that are akin to bad dates, they are all about us. It’s focused on what we, the media, not what we, the people, get out of it. As I’ve been saying for several years now, if user-generated content plays actually provide value to users, not just media outlets, then more people will participate. Creating levels for users and clear benefits for them as they contribute more is one solid strategy for achieving greater participation and better results.

05.22.10
by

Al Jazeera Unplugged: Kaiser Kuo on China

This is a live blog. It may contain grammatical errors, but I tried to be as true to the essence of the comments as possible?

Google’s announcement in January that it would shut down rather than continue to submit to censorship in China. It created a lot of column inches about foreign businesses operating in China and also about cybersecurity.

Kaiser believes that focusing on censorship and The Great Firewall in China is actually crippling our ability to deal with China. It’s a too convenient narrative. He used the image of Sergey Brin standing in front of the tanks in Tiananmen? Square. The Chinese internet is very robust and interesting and deserves attention in its own right. Quoting a Chinese scholar, he says that The Great Firewall is being seen as the Iron Curtain 2.0. The US government is sending very clear messages by referring to this The Great Firewall as another Iron Curtain.

We have this image of Chinese netizens as a group of skinny patriotic hackers or cosmopolitan aspiring democrats. Often, he says that the reality is somewhere in between. Chinese rarely go outside of China to see content. They very rarely bump into The Great Firewall, although Twitter, YouTube and other western sites are blocked. He finds that regrettable. They often bump into self-discipline censorship. Any site whatsoever will receive from any number of ministries what the provisos on content. They will redact words or ask you to close accounts. If companies don’t comply, they can face penalties all the way up to being shut down.

However, the focus on censorship obscures the development of technology and the internet in China. There are 404m internet users in China, more users than people in the US. There are 800m mobile handset subscribers in China. There are companies such as the instant messaging service QQ, which has 80% of all internet users. The number of accounts, because of multiple accounts by individuals, dwarfs the number of internet users in China.

The internet in China can be described more as an entertainment super-highway rather than an information super-highway. In the last two or three years, internet censorship has become more draconian in China. More sites have been blocked, and the restrictions on domestic sites has become more onerous. At the same time, in recent years, the internet has emerged as a full fledged public sphere in Chinese life, something that has never existed in China.

There is discussion about issues that are assumed to be off limits, but there is a great level of creativity to conduct these discussions. Officials at all levels of government are constantly taking the temperature of online opinion. You see policy decisions changing in response to online public opinion. A picture was taken and posted online of an official wearing a watch and smoking a cigarette “clearly out of his pay grade”. The official was jailed.

A woman was accosted by a couple of men and one was a party official. She stabbed the men and killed them, but there was such an outcry online that she wasn’t prosecuted. We are seeing a real development of a public sphere in China. When we focus solely on censorship, then we miss this phenomenon.

Everyone here wants to advance internet freedom in China, and Kaiser is quick to say that he supports it. But when the US government that it is dedicating millions of dollars to support internet censorship circumvention technologies, many people changed their minds about the official party line. Some liberal Chinese users came to accept the view that the internet was being used for imperialism. Planting the American flag on this operation might have backfired.

The development of the Chinese internet will eventually overwhelm censors. These freedoms should be taken from within. They cannot be granted from without.

He applauds private organisations and companies working to help create that change, but to paraphrase Kaiser, government involvement brings baggage.

05.22.10
by

Al Jazeera Unplugged: Twitter and the US State Department

This is a live blog. It may contain grammatical errors, but I tried to be as true to the essence of the comments as possible.

William May, US State Department and the office of innovative engagement, talked about public diplomacy as government to people or people to people diplomacy. The end game of that is mutual understanding. What we have now is very different than what we had 10 years ago. Ten years ago, we had 40,000 people that we moved across borders, and we had broadcasting. We have two bookends, the exchange programmes and on the other end, broadcasting. In the middle, we have all this new stuff like Twitter and QQ. Quoting another person at the State Department (Judy Hale), “The new media will work in certain places, and we’ll use the right media to reach the right people.:

There are segmented audiences (you won’t reach 15 year old via a newspaper), and we are moving form monologue to dialogue to communities. Where are those conversations taking place? Where are those communities? Mobile is a huge game changer for us. They may have never touched a laptop or a computer but they have a mobile phone. Virtual worlds is another opportunity to us. Using the right tool is a huge opportunity for us.

  • 2007 they began using Second Life. They used chat and IRC for training.
  • 2008 ECA Social Network on Ning to engage not just people in exchange programmes but engaging the whole world. Their own video contest. Went from zero to 20,000 users in months. They created a mobile game called X-Life for English language learning. They created a digital outreach team. (6 writers in Arabic, 2 in person. They are transparent that they work for the State Department. They attempt to counter misinformation.)
  • 2009 They created the Office of Innovative Engagement. They created 23 Things and the FSI training (institutional things he said)
  • 2010 They created the American Center in Jakarta and implemented a metrics programme (using something called Crimson Hexagon a metrics and opinion analysis tool )

He provided some examples such as President Obama’s speech in Ghana. They wanted to increase the engagement. The embassies in Africa created hard copy press releases to traditional media asking for text message questions. They got 17,00 SMS messages from 85 countries. They filter the questions into five categories and created a podcast that they sent out to traditional media in Africa. (FM radio is to Africa what Satellite TV is to the Middle East, a transformative shift in media.)

Global versus local. Everything is local again. He gave the example of climate change. Do people want the global picture or how sea level will change where they live?

The Department of State has 180 Facebook pages, 50 Twitter accounts and also YouTube accounts.

They are bringing contacts they made in virtual worlds in Egypt to the US, bridging the virtual and real worlds.

 

05.22.10
by

Al Jazeera Unplugged: Robin Sloan of Twitter

Robin Sloan works for Twitter with their media partnerships. He started off with a few statistics.

  • Twitter has 105m users worldwide.
  • 30% of users are mobile.
  • Growing faster internationally than in the US.
  • 1bn SMS per day.
  • 60m tweets a day.

Robin said that inventors don’t always understand why their inventions work or how people use it. However, they do believe that there are some reasons why it does work.

We think that Twitter works because it’s an information network not a social network.

Many people are using it for ‘one-way’ relationships, such as following news organisations or TV shows. It is much like a traditional broadcast network.

They believe that Twitter works because there is “less friction”. They believe that this allows people to use Twitter in moments when they are waiting, interstitial time. What if news presented itself with no friction, without entering “news mode”. To read The New York Times or watch Al Jazeera, you have to enter this headspace, this focus, “news mode”. What happens if you could get information without entering “news mode”?

We just figured out websites, but he said: “Am I saying that news websites have too much information? Yes.” I think this is about presenting information in the flow of life without friction. This reminds me a lot like TV. In some ways, this becomes the new programme guide. They don’t look at the EPG; they look at Twitter.

Google just released Google TV this week. TV is still the world’s biggest medium. It has an audience of 4bn people. Google want to change the operating system of TV. Twitter and TV, these things really do go together.

How does this argument mean for news? How can you present information in context, in the interstitial moments in people’s lives. How can you make consuming news ridiculously simple? How can you present pure information, pure message? Real-time information happens when that friction approaches zero. This is the challenge. As a platform, as a medium, TV is behind in some ways. It’s ahead in many ways, TV needs no interface.

At Twitter, we still think that it’s way too complicated. There is too much friction.

05.22.10
by

Al Jazeera Unplugged: Joi Ito of Creative Commons

Again, this is a live blog. I’ll try to tidy things up later. I’m trying to do as many of these speakers as possible. I might miss a few.

Joi wanted to start first to frame the discussion. New media is fundamentally different than old media. Media is about access, and the business model defines the media. Looking at newspapers and satellite TV, it costs a lot of money. The big difference with new media is that it has significantly lowered the cost to create media and to connect. It’s fundamentally different than the past. To understand how it’s different and why it’s different. The architecture of the internet is open.

Before the internet, governments, corporations and experts create specifications. They costs millions of dollars. They are robust and they sell products an services to consumers and they pay fees to services. Telecommunications companies are still big business in the Arab world, even for governments.

In the internet, you have users, venture capitalists, standard organisations and a credo “Rough consensus running code”. It evolves over time. Internet standards are lighter weight than in the past.

The internet “open stack” consists of the internet protocol. The proprietary standards for networking gave way to the internet protocol. The standards for IP are shepherded by the IETF. Anyone can participate. It’s a very open system. The World Wide Web is another standard shepherded by the IETF. W3C is the standards body. It’s an ad hoc committee without specific government standard. Governments are uncomfortable that there is no government involvement in the web standard.

Creative Commons looks at the copyright layer. The copyright system used to make sense.

We are trying to create an open stack for the legal layer.

The other section is open source software. Open source and free access to the university network. Google ran a web server, probably Apache, and they accessed Stanford’s network. A couple of students built Google thanks to open source software. It existed before the internet, but the internet allowed people to connect with each other to build this software.

He next highlighted open video. YouTube and other sites, most of them use Flash. It’s proprietary. You can’t participate in this video internet stuff without permission. In HTML5, we were working very hard on video initiatives for open video. Google acquired a company that had a video technology called VP8. This is going to be the core video technology in an open video format called WebM. This is going to be a significant change in the video structure. (It looks like VP8 is being challenged by MPEG-LA, the vide licencing body for the MPEG standard.)

Giving things away for free doesn’t seem like a great business model. However, Creative Commons give users a choice in how they want they want their work used. He quickly walked through the different types of Creative Commons licence. Free is not just about not making money. Nine Inch Nails released a CD called Ghost. They gave their music away for free. They used an attribution Non-commercial share alike licence. They created their own site instead of selling it through a company. It’s about taking more money from fewer people. They made $6m. (I need to check that figure.) UPDATE: I checked that figure after the talk, and Joi said NiN made $1.6m in a week.

Al Jazeera has released content under Creative Commons. Until last year, it didn’t use the Creative Commons licence. It used a Free Software Foundation licence for creating computer manuals.

Joi said that he’s worried about licence proliferation. He talked about different organisations creating ‘vanity licencing’ schemes. The White House now uses a Creative Commons licence.

05.22.10
by

Al Jazeera Unplugged: Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab

This is a live blog. It might be a bit rough. I’ll add links as I can and might do it in a second pass.

Josh started by saying that the disruption in the news business that began in the US is now spreading to other parts of the world. He started off with a series of “scary charts” showing the precipitous drop in advertising revenue in the US and the newspaper circulation decline in the US. The decline in terms of newspaper circulation per 100 households has been dropping since the 1940s. He then displayed the time that average internet users spent per month on news sites, 8-12 minutes a month, versus the seven hours they spend on Facebook.

The media industry is fragmenting. The number one album on the charts in the US sold just 60,000 copies last week, but it used to be that to have a number one album you would have to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. TV is fragmenting with greater choice, and Josh pointed to yesterday’s announcement of Google TV.

UPDATE: For the average internet user , 70% of the content that people under 40 consume online is produced by people they know.

Josh sees this not as a threat but as a great opportunity. Newspapers in the US used to be enormously popular. In 1990, John Morton said that it is clear that newspapers will be twice as profitable int he future, but maybe not three or four times as profitable. Those profits made owners very rich, but they also paid for investigative journalism and foreign bureaux.

On the social web, even if it doesn’t look like journalism, it can be an important source of information. People might find out about an important story from their friends on Facebook or Twitter. This is not new. With movable type, new types of information were produced. The rotary press could print much more copies, more cheaply. 1900s came newspapers, 1930s radio, 1950s TV, 1980s cable TV, 1990s internet, 2000s, mobile phones.

Context in country to country is critical. Some countries are seeing gains in literacy so are seeing a dramatic increase in newspaper circulation. Media in non-English countries aren’t seeing the same pressure.

In the US, seeing media adjust. Some are trying to grow in scale. Some trying to produce so many web pages that if they make a bit of profit on each page, they will make money. Demand Media is producing 5000 pages of content a day. Associated Media, just bought by Yahoo, is producing 2000 pages a day. It’s not necessarily news content, but it’s providing a model. We are seeing the growth of niche sites, around subjects rather than geography. Some are building paywalls.

However, I believe that the number of people who will pay will be relatively small. People will have free alternatives.

And then he said something that I’ve thought for quite a while:

News is shifting from a manufacturing industry to a service industry.

Even in the past, only bout 15% of a newspaper budget went to journalism. That’s a fascinating statistic. Service industries don’t try to create demand but rather serve demand.

With an infinite number of content choices, people are now choosing things that aren’t news. How do we (as journalists) create that demand? He sees the big organisations as being OK. He sees non-profit models developing. “I generally think we’ll be OK,” he said. This technological shift will see a huge boon he says.