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Kevin: The Wall Street Journal looks at the trials of the last four years for newspapers with some closing, others going online only and many cutting staffs, reducing pensions and putting staff on furlough.
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Kevin: The superficiality and artificiality of commentary passing as news with respect to assessing Barack Obama's First 100 Days. The artificial mark dates back to FDR, when he met with Congress every day for the first 100 days of his presidency. It was a similar time of crisis as the US was mired in the Great Depression. But now, Howard Kurtz says: "Forget about FDR. It takes nothing more than a glance at recent history to see how absurdly premature this benchmark is. " And then explains the why it's still done. "So why do we do it? The media love anniversary-type stories."
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis makes an excellent argument for greater efficiency and less repetition in journalism. "Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight – that is, more efficient – times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?"
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Kevin: The latest elegy for free web hosting site GeoCities by Fred Wilson, with Flatiron Ventures. He shares his memoires and lessons learned. "I learned a lot from that deal. I learned that the Internet is all about people expressing themselves on pages they own and control. I learned that a business deal made over dinner and a handshake can turn into hundreds of millions of dollars, I learned that good partners are worth every penny of returns you give up to get them, and I learned that selling too soon is not too painful as long as you don't sell too much. And most of all I learned that you can make 100 times your investment every once in a while. And when you do, it's something special."
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Kevin: There are a few things worth noting in the Q1 results for US news group McClatchy. Gary Pruitt, chairman and chief executive officer, said: "The impact of the downturn had largely been limited to print advertising in 2008, but in the first quarter of 2009 it began to have a greater effect on digital advertising as well. Still, all categories of digital advertising are outperforming print advertising. In total, digital advertising revenues decreased 4.7% in the first quarter of 2009." But I think even more to note is how digital is increasing as a percentage of revenue. "Excluding employment advertising, digital advertising revenues grew 28.7% in the first quarter of 2009. Also, digital advertising represented 15.3% of total advertising revenues, up from 11.6% of total advertising for all of 2008…"
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Kevin: Nancy Friedman writes a wonderful satire of Maureen Dowd's irritating interview with the founders of Twitter. In this pisstake, Friedman gives us a glimpse of what might have happened if Dowd had interviewed Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Here's how it starts:
ME: The telephone seems like letter-writing without the paper and pen. Is there any message that can't wait for a passenger pigeon?BELL: Possibly the message I'd like to deliver to you right now.
Priceless.
links for 2009-04-24
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Kevin: Former Rocky Mountain News staffers are still hoping to launch an online news service, but their first effort has faltered. Journalists and their financial backers had hoped to get 50,000 paid subscribers, but they only got 3,000.
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Kevin: Ethan Zuckerman, who used to work at free website competitor Tripod, lights a candle for GeoCities, which is the latest casualty in Yahoo's cull of unprofitable parts of its slightly unwieldy web empire. It's a brilliant post that takes a look at the history of the dot.com-era web and projects forward to today, looking at whether UGC properties such as Facebook, even with its wealth of demographic information, can generate sufficient income. Seeing as Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.5bn in 1999, he wonders whether a company will pay a nine-figure sum for Facebook or Twitter, even though it's not clear how to make these sites profitable.
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Kevin: Major players in the electronics industry such as Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and Toshiba have criticised the BBC's Project Canvas IPTV initiative. They say it will technologically isolate the UK and that it isn't based on truly open standards.
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Kevin: It's like a blog post version of an E! show. Ze Frank. JenniCam. Amanda Congdon of RocketBoom.
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Kevin: The American Journalism Review does an unscientific survey and some interviews to find out what life after journalism is for many people who have been laid off over the last decade. "Thousands upon thousands of newspaper journalists have lost their jobs in recent years in endless rounds of layoffs and buyouts. What happens in the next act?"
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Kevin: A collection of web and tools collected by Erica Smith. It's comprehensive including basic web tools, geo-coding tools and tools for timelines and other visualisations.
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Kevin: A relatively easy way to batch geocode addresses that you've got in a Google Spreadsheet.
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Kevin: "It's a paradox: society can't survive without newspapers, but newspapers can't survive 21st century economics. Is there a solution? Let me step back into my M&A shoes for a second, and humbly suggest: the New York Times should acquire Twitter, instead of just professing love for it. Why? Not just because the New York "Twimes" sounds kind of cool — but because of the economics of news. News is about what's timely. There's nothing more timely than Twitter. Twitter would provide the NYT with four key resources and capabilities."
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Kevin: The Washington Post has hired American Prospect's Ezra Klein, one of the top bloggers on politics and policy.
Related ad fail of the day
Suw is flying back from a week in San Francisco after going to O’Reilly’s Social Foo Camp. When she flies, I sometimes track the flight live on Google Earth or sites like FlighAware or FBOWeb. Now, do I really want to watch a video of a fatal Russian plane crash that left nine dead as I track my wife’s flight home? I think not.
links for 2009-04-23
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Kevin: Wonderful. Useful. Simple. Tony Hirst with the UK's Open University has a great tutorial on how to create a (tag or) word cloud based on a hashtag feed from Twitter. This is how simple APIs are. You can do a lot just from by modifiying URLs.
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Kevin: Hat-tip for this link to journalism.co.uk. Federation of Journalist Associations in Spain says "that since June 2008, 2,221 out of a total of 30,000 Spanish journalists have lost their jobs amid a sharp drop in advertising revenues due to the economic crisis".
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Kevin: Roy Greenslade writing in The Evening Standard says that free newspapers created by local councils, local government in the UK, are putting pressure on commercial local papers already under threat from the recession and severe downturn in advertising.
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Kevin: Dan Gillmor expands on his concerns not about the supply but demand for content. "A key question in this emergent tsunami of information, is this one: What can we trust?" He is working on a book looking at media literacy, which has a companion site Mediactive.com.
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Kevin: Suw and I had the pleasure of meeting Nick Bilton, who kindly gave us a tour of the New York Times R&D lab. Our friend Jason Brush at Schematic put us in touch after seeing we were in New York from Twitter. Nick showed us the future thinking of the news at the Times including news that follows users through their day from mobile to desktop or laptop computer and then home to their media centre. It's the kind of user-centred thinking that more newspapers need to adopt. Rather than thinking of how they'd like people to consume their content, they need to find out how people actually use it and dispense with wishful thinking and assumptions. Check out the video.
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Kevin: David Weinberger live blogs a lunch talk by We, the Media author Dan Gillmor on journalism supply and demand and media literacy. David quotes Dan as saying that he's no longer worried about the supply of journalism but rather about the demand. "There’s too much information. Not all of it is accurate, including info in the mainstream media. 'The ecosystem is in bad need of repair.'"
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Kevin: Harry Jessell of TVNewsday reports that 80 to 90 percent of broadcast companies will have to renegotiate loans this year.
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Kevin: Aron Pilhofer explains the importance of Matt Waite's Pulitzer Prize for his PolitiFact project. Aron sums up and attempts to put to rest whether projects like PolitiFact are journalism. He writes: "PolitiFact is simple, scalable and smart. But is it journalism, some people asked? There's no lead per se, no narrative and no pyramids anywhere to be found, much less the inverted sort.
Journalism is about helping people make sense of important issues, and how those issues affect them personally. It's about uncovering that which someone wants to keep hidden. It's about holding people we place in high public office accountable. And by those definitions — or any other you wish to find — PolitiFact more than meets the test."
links for 2009-04-22
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Kevin: BusinessWeek teases out the New York Times dismal first quarter with results coming in below analysts estimates. The revenue was $22m below consensus estimates. "The disappointing performance was driven by a nearly $124 million decline in the Times Co.'s ad revenue from the same time last year. While most of the erosion was concentrated in the Times Co.'s newspapers, its Internet ad revenue also sagged by 8 percent, or $3.6 million."
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Kevin: Patricio Robles dissects pollster Mark Penn's numbers in a Wall Street Journal article claiming that there are more professional bloggers in the US than lawyers. I have to say that I was a bit sceptical of the numbers, and Patricio finds them wanting. Penn's biggest problem is mixing statistics and studies, but Penn also writes the piece in such a way that it leads the casual reader to believe that the number of paid up bloggers comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. I will wait to see if Penn or the Wall Street Journal responds.
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Kevin: This is an interesting post from 2002 by Tim O'Reilly about piracy. In 2009, I suspect that has got renewed attention in light of The Pirate Bay verdict in Sweden. Tim lists several lessons from the file-sharing wars including: Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. and Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
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Kevin: Hat Tip to Nieman Labs for tweeting this. Erica Smith, designer and programmer, has an excellent graphic to help editors think about the kind of graphic they should create for a given set of data. It's such a simple but powerful chart.
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Kevin: The headline says it all. The New York Times sees continued erosion of advertising in this recession, leading to a $61.6m for Q1 2009. The Business Insider breaks down the numbers.
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Kevin: Mathew Ingram calls on newspapers to think more creatively as Google News launches a feature that allows you to navigate news by time. He asks: "One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this?" This has been done, back in 2007 by El Comercio in Peru. But I still take his point. There is a lot of room in innovation in all parts of the newspaper business, both on the editorial side and the commercial side.
links for 2009-04-21
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Kevin: Michael Wolff makes the hyperbolic prediction that 80% of newspapers (in the US although he doesn't qualify it as being specific to the US) will be gone in 18 months. He doesn't provide much support or evidence for his prediction. He also blames CraigsList for the collapse of newspapers, which founder Craig Newmark took exception to saying that newspapers failed the public trust on several high profile subjects such as the weapons of mass destruction justification for the war in Iraq and the financial crisis. I think they are both wrong. CraigsList is only one online service that undercut newspapers' traditional sources of revenue, and the decline of newspapers is as much about relevance as it is about trust. One prediction Wolff made that is much more likely is that New York Times will be owned by another company in 18 months.
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Kevin: Guardian Information Architect Martin Belam talks about his role and also some of the core principles of the Guardian's web development. "These are that URLs should be PERMANENT, that all content should be uniquely ADDRESSABLE, that multiple routes to content make everything DISCOVERABLE, and that everything should be as OPEN as possible."
links for 2009-04-20
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Kevin: Steve Yelvington looks at the idea of the Boston Globe moving to a paid content model based on Amazon's Kindle. Rolling out a Kindle will require a lot of upfront capital, something hard to come by during the credit crunch. He suggests looking at the mobile phone industry for the kind of costs you'd need to amortise over six years. Moreover, he looks at the loss of revenue from classifieds, display advertising and banner advertising on a device like the Kindle. He also worries about Amazon as a middleman who will take a slice of an already lower margin business than newspapers.
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis looks the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, which he is conducting with his students. This is worth watching, especially because they will be "doing this in the open, so we can get as much help as possible". They will begin looking at hyperlocal from a local perspective, 'a news ecosystem that comes after a metro paper," and paid content models. This is one to watch and possibly help with.
Social technology and civil society
I’ve just started a research project for Carnegie UK Trust looking at the way in which civil society associations are using social technology to communicate, collaborate and organise. This is a three month project during which we will cover three main areas:
- An examination of the current use of social technology by civil society organisations
- An exploration of what the future may hold, how social technology might evolve over the next fifteen years
- A set of ideas and recommendations for civil society organisations to help them make the most of social technology
I will be writing about as much of this research as I can and hope that by doing so, we can collectively explore some of the ideas, assumptions and issues that I uncover.
My first question for you is this:
Which civil society organisations are doing the best job of using social and/or new media to fulfil their remit?
To dig a little deeper into what we mean by “civil society organisations”, Carnegie UK Trust have provided this as part of their definition of “civil society”:
Civil Society as associational life. Civil society is the ‘space’ of organised activity not undertaken by either the government or for-private-profit business. It includes formal and informal associations such as: voluntary and community organisations, trade unions, faith-based organisations, co-operatives and mutuals, political parties, professional and business associations, philanthropic organisations, informal citizen groups and social movements. Participation in or membership of such organisations is voluntary in nature.
If we take that as a working definition, it’s pretty broad, so we can be very inclusive. As for the definition of “social and/or new media”, I think at a minimum we should be looking at organisations that are utilising any of these tools:
- Social networking sites (third party or bespoke)
- Blogs
- Twitter, Identica or other micro-conversation tools
- Wikis
- Social bookmarking
- Forums, bulletin boards, or other thread-based communications tools
- Audio, whether stand-alone streams/downloads, podcasts, or other digital formats
- Video, whether stand-alone streams/downloads, videocasts or on video sharing sites
- Photo sharing sites
- Virtual worlds
- Multimedia, whether online or CD-ROMs
- Interactive television
- The mobile web in any way
That’s a pretty long list, so there should be plenty of organisations and individuals out there who are doing good work in this arena. So, who are they? And what are they doing? Although the main focus of this research is UK organisations, we are interested in exemplars from around the world, so if someone abroad is doing something amazingly stunning, then they count!
What’s missing from the Google/newspapers discussion
It seems to have become fashionable recently for members of the media to rail against Google, claiming that the search giant is significantly to blame for the demise of newspapers. The arguments appear to include:
- Google is a parasite that makes money off newspapers content through aggregating it
- Google, by acting as a middleman, deprives newspapers of control and therefore income
- Visitors from Google are of low value because they do not stay to explore a site and therefore are not exposed to enough ads to make their visit worthwhile to the news outlet
In my opinion, these arguments are all wrong, but rather than debate them here (other people are already doing it), I’m curious to ask why two key parts of the problem are being utterly ignored.
Google enables existing behaviours
Before newspapers started publishing on the web, newspaper readers had a limited number of choices if they wanted to read what the paper had printed: read someone else’s copy, or buy and read their own. Once someone has bought a paper, the tendency is to read substantial portions of it, or even read it cover-to-cover including the bits one doesn’t really care about.
I am sure that there are psychological forces at work here, perhaps cognitive biases such as ownership bias. After all, who hasn’t felt the desire to get the most value for money out of a newspaper or magazine purchase by reading as much as one can manage, even when one has run out of any real interest?
That behaviour, and the forces that encourage it, is absent online. Instead of feeling obliged to oneself to make the most of a newspaper purchase, people are now searching for only the information that they need or want. They become promiscuous browsers, instead of dedicated readers.
Google facilitates that behaviour, a behaviour which was present before Google existed, and which will continue after Google is gone. The news outlets, however, are fixated on the idea of a dedicated reader and I’ve heard some journalists get positively indignant at the suggestion that promiscuous browsing is not just a normal behaviour, but rapidly becoming the default. They think that dedicated reading is the one true way to absorb news, and look down upon anything else.
This prejudice is damaging the news industry badly, because if your whole revenue generating mechanism, not to mention your metrics for success, is built upon the idea of people spending lots of time on your site, reading lots of articles, then your business is built on sand. Instead of working from a set of assumptions that are no longer valid, how about the news industry learns how their readers’ lives, attitudes and behaviours have changed, and uses that as a basis for developing a more robust business model. After all, people aren’t going to go back to their old habits. Ever.
Advertising innovation can be done by companies other than Google
Whilst Google News runs no adverts, news content does make its way into the general search results where advertising does very well for Google. This, for reasons unclear to me, is seen by some in the news industry as a grave assault, to be fought and destroyed.
Yet Google, alongside Craigslist, Gumtree and their brethren, are ripe for advertising disruption. The sites that were the disrupters can themselves be sideswiped, by the very sort of clever innovation that appears to be almost entirely lacking in the news industry. Why have news outlets not put together their own versions of TextAds and AdSense, allowing advertisers to buy text ads on certain topics, categories, or keywords? Can I go to a major news website and buy a keyword directly from them? Why are news organisations, who have been in the advertising game forever, relying on third party tools to spread excess ad inventory across their extended blog network? Why give away that slice of the pie to someone else?
Where is the advertising innovation? And no, annoying pop-ups, rich-media ads and irritatingly loud audio ads do not count. They are about as innovative as a slap round the face with a wet haddock – they are old school, scattershot, relying on interruption instead of relevance, and worst of all, they infuriate the visitor so much that even if the ads had been of interest, their childishness is terminally off-putting.
It feels like the news outlets have abdicated responsibility for finding new and better ways for their advertisers to buy space, time and keywords, to manage their own accounts, make their own decisions on where they want their ads to appear and manage their own budget.
It’s time for the news outlets to reclaim advertising, to learn from Google, Craigslist and Gumtree and beat them at their own game. Railing away at Google or any other site that’s eating their lunch is, however, a waste of time and a distraction that the industry can ill afford at the moment.
links for 2009-04-17
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Kevin: "Newsroom employment at U.S. dailies plunged 11 percent last year, the most in at least 31 years, to levels unseen since the early 1980s, the American Society of News Editors said. Newsrooms lost 5,900 workers to 46,700 in 2008, after shedding 2,400 jobs a year earlier, the Reston, Virginia-based newspaper organization said in a report today."