links for 2010-06-23
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Kevin: Fourwhere promises to help journalists see what is happening at a specific location. From a business standpoint, Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp all have built their business on checking in with mostly commercial locations. It makes sense from the standpoint of building a business for these services, but it doesn't necessarily build up a full view of what is happening on a location. If the location-based services started to provide other types of check-ins, it could provide a broader service. Conversely, journalism organisations could start providing more comprehensively geo-tagged content that could be sold to these services. Will they build the infrastructure to do it? Or will they miss another opportunity to develop a revenue stream and financially support journalism?
How new Fourwhere maps plotting Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla could be useful for journalists | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog
links for 2010-06-22
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Kevin: InsideFacebook.com looks at Facebook's international growth. (Data from April 2010) Monthly growth in Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, Argentina, and Malaysia of around 10%.
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Kevin: Some fascinating statistics showing Twitter's international growth. Kit Eaton writes at FastCompany: "Specific events around the world sparked peaks in international growth, Sanford notes–with the February 2010 Chilean earthquake prompting a 1,200% spike in member sign-ups. A 300% spike was seen after Colombian politicians began to use the system, and speedier growth was seen in India after local politicos and Bollywood stars began to Tweet."
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Kevin: Lots of lessons here about the new content economy. They run a very, very lean operation. They are visually led, which I think suits the content, and they have surprised advertisers in how well the advertising has performed. There is also a gem of a line in the piece about content designed for the iPad. Adam L. Penenberg, a journalism professor at New York University, said: "You’ll know a new narrative form has emerged when you have to consume a particular story on an iPad to truly understand its content, and reading it on any other platform simply wouldn’t work." (Hat tip to Mark J Davis for the recommendation on Twitter.)
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Kevin: A group of privacy advocates, computer scientists, lawyers and other interested groups met for the 20th Annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference. They produced a bill of rights for social network users. Jon Pincus, chief technology officer of Qworky, a Seattle company that makes meeting software for small businesses, and co-chairman of the 20th CFP conference, which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery said it best when he said: "The underlying idea is that Facebook likes to describe itself as equivalent to the third-largest country in the world. What rights do the citizens of that country have?"
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Kevin: Richard McManus has a good look at how to improve information consumption in the flood of real-time news. He suggests topic tracking services such as Google Alerts, PubSub, LazyFeed and Topikality. He also suggests news aggregators or creating a single feed of several sources. This is increasingly easy to do with RSS or Twitter lists. One last good piece of advice: Turn off the firehouse when you need to work.
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.
Is Facebook Becoming the Whole World’s Social Network? | Fast Company
Twitter’s International Growth: Becoming the World’s Water Cooler? | Fast Company
links for 2010-06-21
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Kevin: Loud3r provides semantic filtering technology for news and information, and it already has some big clients including a hyperlocal project by the Chicago Tribune, ChicagoNow. The Loud3r teams asks two questions about filtering solutions: 1 Does the solution deliver a comprehensive view of the topic to the reader? A comprehensive view includes Tweets, Blog posts, News articles, Photos and Videos.
2 Does the solution effectively improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the reading experience?
One of the key observations that the Loud3r team makes is this: "There’s not very much unique content produced every day. I know that seems like heresy, but 90+% of the content is simply sharing, reposting and duplication." -
Kevin: Finanical analysts at firms such as Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Barclays Capital are trying to use the 'hot news' doctrine in the US to limit aggregators from pulling together their "most closely held, time-sensitive and valuable information product: The daily stock recommendations generated by their financial analysts." The hot news doctrine stems from a 1918 case in the US where a rival to the Associated Press tried to repackage news from the wire service for west coast markets. The US Supreme Court concluded that the rival had engaeged in unfair competition.
links for 2010-06-19
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Kevin: "The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014." Also according to the Newspaper Association of America, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6% in 2009.
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Kevin: Tim Armstrong at AOL had wanted to buy Associated Content in the spring of 2009. Time Warner, which was in the process of spinning off AOL, said no. After the deal fell apart, the chair of Associated, Mike Perlis of Softbank, used his network to make overtures to Yahoo. It's a master class on how business networking works, and a great example of 'it's not what you know but who you know'. It also shows the deep networks in Silicon Valley. Yahoo was looking to expand its content offerings (again), and after an audit of Associated's content, they were sold. What is very interesting is this line in the story: Yahoo Media boss Jimmy Pitaro is "itching to use Associated Content freelancers to create niche verticals with endemic advertising".
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Kevin: Gary Andrews looks at how The Sun in the UK played an own goal in its attempts to engage bloggers to flesh out its coverage. After contacting bloggers and asking whether they would like to participate in their coverage, The Sun went ahead whether the bloggers gave permission or not. Chris Taylor from "It'll Be Off wrote to Gary: "I want to make it abundantly clear to everyone: I have nothing to do with this. I want nothing to do with this. And I am furious that the good(ish) name of my little blog, that ceased to be a concern some six months ago, is being used by the worst of all tabloids as some fucking publicity machine for their horrendous sweepstake generating iPhone app, and their even more horrendous newspaper.” Rights seem only to apply to media companies not to content creators.
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Kevin: Mel Taylor Media doesn't mince words in criticising Gannett Broadcasting, the local television win on US publishing giant Gannett, in its decision to outsource local web sales efforts to DataSphere, or in the words of the post, is "putting some of their local web sales efforts on auto pilot". The post describers DataSphere as the "master of call-center web sales and quickie blogs". The post quotes a Borrell Associates report published in 2003 looking at the Disruption of Local Media. "The key take-away from this 7 year old, Borrell report? As long as a traditional media manager is calling the shots at the local media website, it will most certainly fail."
links for 2010-06-18
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Kevin: James Robinson at The Guardian has a good summary of an OECD report looking at newspaper circulation trends around the world. The US and the UK top the table in terms of circulation declines, with 30% and 25% declines respectively since 2007. A few things that stand out in the survey is that US newspapers had an extremely high exposure to the advertising market. On average 87% of their revenue came from advertising. It helps explains why the recession has hit US newspapers so hard. It's a good summary, and the report itself is worth reading as well.
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Kevin: Laura Oliver looks at Rue89, pro-am news website launched in 2007. They expect to break even in the fourth quarter of this year. They have recently launched a monthly print magazine. They said it the site will become profitable regardless of the success of the print product. It was interesting to see how little sentimentality they had toward the magazine. "If it's a success, it will accelerate our development; if not, we'll stop it before it becomes a burden," said Pierre Haski. There isn't much detail on what has allowed them to move to profitability other than experimentation with online advertising formats.
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Kevin: David Cohn of Spot.Us talks about a new way that they have increased engagement from users and funding for journalism projects on the site. He calls it "community centred advertising". Bill Mitchell of Poynter described the system as this: "In some ways, it seems like a no-brainer: Encourage consumer engagement with advertising by giving users a stake in deciding how the revenue gets spent … Spot.Us itself is an experiment in transparency and control of money for news. This is just a matter of applying it to advertising."
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Kevin: I actually think that the headline is incorrect. Journalism isn't dead. Audiences are continuing their shift online. Jason Stverak says that newspaper websites seeing traffic at an all time high rebuts "studies that have shown traditional newspapers are no longer a thriving business model". How? If the newspapers were converting those large online audiences to revenue effectively, that observation might stand up, but the only economic bright spot is that advertising is returning after the recession and the deep cuts are allowing papers to return to profitability. I will agree that local newspapers drawing traffic from cable TV giants like CNN and MSNBC is good news from papers.
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Kevin: The Times of London is offering tickets to Toy Story 3 and the chance to win a weekend at the Grosvenor Hotel in Dorset to entice people to pay for news online in its new paid content strategy. It's a step up from free DVDs to shift papers.
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Kevin: From the World Editors Forum blog. Carole Wurzelbacher writes: "The University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute has recently announced the inauguration of WellCommons, a site designed to improve community communication about health issues." The site allows users to determine the credibility of the article with a sources section.
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Kevin: Rachel McAthy at Journalism.co.uk has a good roundup of the 12 projects that won funding in the Knight Foundations News Challenge 2010. The 12 projects split the $2.74 in funding. They were all local projects of some description. Some like the one from Stamen Designs were meant to ease the production of local visualisations and many of the others were some variation on a theme of aggregating local information. The grants were relatively small, most in the hundreds of thousands of dollars category. However, that's about what it takes to run a small digital project team for a year.