Jun 28th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Time magazine managed to land an exclusive interview with Rupert Murdoch (maybe it was by promising him the cover and a cover line like “The Last Tycoon”), and — as is typical for the blunt-spoken Australian — he holds nothing back. While some of the reporters for the illustrious Wall Street Journal took some unauthorized time off to protest Murdoch’s acquisition of the paper, the billionaire came out with jewels like this:
– “They’re taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control,” Rupert Murdoch was saying into the phone, “in an industry in crisis! They can’t sell their company and still control it — that’s not how it works. I’m sorry!”
– “The price of the Journal,” says Murdoch, “is $60 plus vitriol.”
– “When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls,” he jokes late one night, “we’ll make sure they have M.B.A.s.”
and finally:
– “What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global — a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts.
And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you’d make … a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and the Times make very little money now.”
Classic Murdoch. Kevin Maney says in Portfolio magazine that he hopes Murdoch starts a bidding war for journalists.
Jun 24th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 4 Comments
This is a follow-up to an earlier post about the controversy swirling around Microsoft paying bloggers — including Mike Arrington, Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, Richard MacManus and Fred Wilson — to provide quotes for an ad campaign about being “people ready” (at this point there’s a fair bit of irony in that phrase, which should probably be changed to “blogosphere ready” — which Microsoft clearly is not). People like Frank Shaw of Waggener Erdstrom (Microsoft’s PR company) see this as just another swarm in the blogosphere echo chamber, but I think there are important issues at stake.
John Battelle says (if I read him correctly) that it’s important to experiment with new forms of conversation, and that the primary issue in this case was disclosure, which Mike Arrington takes him to task for, since he sees it as foisting all the responsibility onto the authors in this case — or “throwing them under the bus,” in Mike’s colourful phrase (the comments on Mike’s post have other opinions, including a fairly snotty one from Rogers Cadenhead). Some have argued that this whole affair is much ado about nothing, since “advertorial” and endorsements occur all the time — including radio ads with TWiT’s Leo Laporte, as Scoble points out (and there’s some more discussion worth reading in Scoble’s comments).
One thing to remember, I think, is that ultimately all the metaphors — comparing this to magazine advertorials or radio ads or Tom Cruise pitching scotch in Japan or whatever — fail because we’re talking about a relatively new medium. Yes, it’s true that TechCrunch.com and GigaOm.com are a lot like magazines, and that makes Mike and Om a lot like journalists (and of course Om has actually been one, and arguably still is) and so people expect them to behave in certain ways. Is that fair? Maybe. Maybe not.
In a lot of ways, we’re watching what is effectively a new medium develop its own way of dealing with issues of credibility in real time. Whenever there’s something like Edelman and Wal-Mart, or Microsoft and the Ferrari laptops, or even PayPerPost, it brings up the same questions: How do we judge someone’s credibility? How do we know whom to trust? It’s something I get asked all the time by people still grappling with the blogosphere.
As my friend and fellow mesh organizer Rob Hyndman has suggested — in comments like this one — I think every blogger effectively negotiates a trust relationship with his or her readers every time they write a new post, or submit a quote for an ad, or agree to an endorsement. That’s a lot more complicated and messy than relying on a masthead to carry the freight for you, but at least it puts you in control of your own fate.
The only thing to remember is that trust is a slippery slope — by the time you’ve lost ground, it may already be too late.
Jun 23rd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Rafat Ali and the team at PaidContent have been putting up video clips from their Economics of Social Media conference, a conference I would very much like to have gone to. One of the latest clips is from a panel I definitely would have attended had I been there: Vivian Schiller of NYTimes.com, Kara Swisher of the WSJ, Rich Skrenta of Topix.net and Ken Stern from NPR talking about social media and “old” media.
The panel talks about how they approach the Web, whether there is such a thing as “citizen journalism,” the financial pressures on newspapers and traditional media, whether Google is friend or foe, and a bit about Kara Swisher’s new site AllThingsD — which is a joint venture with gadget guru Walt Mossberg and is owned by Dow Jones but separate from the WSJ. There’s a transcript of the panel at PaidContent, and the video is embedded below.
Jun 23rd, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
I haven’t posted anything about the current “blog storm” over Microsoft’s ad campaign involving FM Publishing (which started with this post at Valleywag) because I wanted to take some time and think about it a bit — and in the blogosphere, waiting even a few hours seems to be an eternity 
We’ve got a whole spectrum of opinion out there about the propriety of “A-list” bloggers providing quotes for Microsoft to use in advertising: Mike Arrington, for example, is poo-poohing the whole controversy.
Paul Kedrosky is also leaning towards that end of the spectrum — although he admits that he now thinks the decision to provide a quote was probably unwise. And Fred Wilson seems to see it as a mountain built from a molehill as well. He takes Nick Denton of Valleywag to task for being “old school,” and not recognizing that bloggers might want to participate in a “conversation” with advertisers. Om Malik, meanwhile, has been beating himself up about it and has apologized profusely for his decision to take part.
I appreciate Mike’s point — the FM ads are obviously ads, and the company has done the same thing with Cisco and other companies, which never became the subject of controversy (perhaps because no one realized they even existed). So no big deal, right? Except that I think there is a deal — maybe not a big deal, but a medium-sized deal. And as usual, my friend Tony Hung puts his finger on it in his post: this is not a “conversation” the way we would normally think of one, as much as Fred wants to make it one.
Let’s imagine it this way: If I’m talking to a bunch of people in a bar, and an advertising guy working for Coke comes up and tries to change the subject to the idea of “refreshment,” and says that he plans to tape-record my comments and use them on a billboard, then I am going to react pretty negatively to that idea. That’s not a “conversation” the way I would define it.
And for Mike and Om to take part in an ad campaign — to lend their words to Microsoft’s ownership of a slogan, as Tony notes, does seem more than a little awkward given the role they are trying to play in new media. Fred and Paul have slightly different roles to play, as my friend Rob Hyndman notes in his post on the subject, and therefore different considerations to make.
I haven’t lost any respect for Mike or Om (or Paul or Fred) as a result of the campaign, but I still think being involved was probably a mistake.
Jun 22nd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
John Duncan, the former managing editor of The Observer in Britain, is a newspaper consultant who writes a blog called The Inksniffer, and has lots of interesting things to say about what the industry should be doing. In one of his latest posts, however, I think he does more harm than good — or rather, he starts off on a good foot and then goes off the rails (to mix a metaphor). The post is entitled How Internet Metrics Promote the Myth of the Dying Newspaper, and his argument is that poor Internet traffic measurement makes the paper-Web balance look worse than it really is.
He is quite right about that, of course. As I have mentioned before (most recently in this post), Internet traffic rankings from all of the major firms — Compete, Alexa, comScore, Nielsen and Hitwise — are flawed in all sorts of ways, and combined with a continuing obsession with page views rather than unique visitors, it’s easy for Web audiences to look larger than they really are. And if John had stopped there I would have been totally onside. But after going through the numbers with admirable dedication, he arrives at the conclusion that “in the UK there were 310,788 people buying the Guardian or Observer on average each day in April 2007 [and] there were 270,576 reading guardian.co.uk online.” Not bad, right?
But then, he says that “We need to compare readers to readers, not readers to purchasers,” and falls back on what has become accepted wisdom in the newspaper business: that anywhere from three to five readers look at every purchased copy of a newspaper. In other words, the Guardian gets to multiply its readership by three at a minimum, which gives the paper more than 970,000 readers and online only 270,000.
As I mentioned in a comment on John’s post, this is complete rubbish — some of those copies might be read by two people, or maybe three, but plenty of them are read by no one. Steve Yelvington agrees with me, as he points out in a comment and on his own blog. He says: “the notion that a newspaper’s daily print sales figures should be multiplied by some factor to derive actual readers is wishful-thinking crap.” As Steve says, if we are to get anywhere, we need to be clear about what we’re talking about.
