Jun 17th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Newsweek has a story in the latest issue that looks at the success of Major League Baseball’s online strategy, which the magazine says is making about $400-million a year through MLB Advanced Media (or BAM, as everyone apparently calls it). It is growing at about 30 per cent per year and has about 50 million visitors a month. A million subscribers are apparently paying for video and audio of games and other services, and the whole enterprise is said to be a model for how a sport approached the Internet.
The only problem with that, however, is that MLB is doing exactly what I would argue you shouldn’t do — and what all sorts of other media is being encouraged (or convinced by failure) not to do — and that is to stomp around waving lawsuits and trying to control every aspect of the content. This is something the Newsweek piece doesn’t really get into until the end of the story, and even then it doesn’t really deal with it in depth. It does mention the lawsuit against Slingbox, which has the nerve to allow people to watch baseball games wherever they are, instead of where MLB says they should watch them as a result of deals it has signed with broadcasters.
It doesn’t mention the recent clash between baseball and bloggers — although that involved the ejection of a newspaper blogger from a college baseball game, not a Major League game (there are suggestions that ESPN is to blame). Still, the issue is the same: broadcast rights versus the Internet. It’s a clash that is only going to grow in importance, I would argue.
And then there’s the even more ridiculous phenomenon of MLB trying to argue in court that fantasy sports teams should pay the league for the right to use the names of baseball players. What if someone talks about a game with friends at a bar? Presumably they should pay for that too.
Jun 17th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
I missed this the other day, but my friend Scott Karp had a great, in-depth look at the New York Times and its advertising revenue picture — trying to sift through the various financial tea leaves and figure out in dollar terms (as opposed to percentage terms) just how much the Grey Lady’s print revenue has been declining, and how much its online revenue has been increasing, and whether the latter is enough to offset the former.
I don’t want to spoil the ending, but according to Scott’s math — which looks fairly comprehensive to me (although I am an English major) — the answers are a) a lot, b) somewhat and c) not even close. Part of the problem with trying to do what Scott did is that the Times, much like other newspapers, doesn’t like to break out exact numbers for either its newspaper revenue declines or its online revenue increases, which may have something to do with the fact that “online is growing by 20 per cent” sounds a whole lot better than “grew by $3-million,” especially when your print revenue sank by almost ten times that amount and your top line is about $483-million. Steve Boriss at the Future of News has some thoughts on Scott’s detective work.
Note:
The title of this post, for anyone not familiar with Alice in Wonderland, refers to the chess game in that book, in which the Red Queen says “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Jun 16th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
“Whether you’re a blogger or whether you’re The New York Times or CBS or The Wall Street Journal, if what you are doing is aimed at informing the public, then you’re a journalist, whether you get paid for it or not.”
Safire is quoted in this CNet story about a proposal in the U.S. to create a federal “journalist shield” law that would protect reporters — and possibly bloggers as well — from being forced to reveal their sources and/or testify in court. There are state laws that protect journalists, but not federal ones, which is why Josh Wolf wound up in court for refusing to testify and turn over his videotape of an anarchist demonstration.
Jun 14th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Couple of things I came across in the feed reader and elsewhere concerning bloggers — one sort of funny (but with a serious point) and one that looks great on first glance, but less great on second glance. First, the funny: PSFK, the marketing and fashion blog, points us towards a rant from celebrity chef Mario Batali at the blog Eater.com about foodie bloggers. The great man says that:
Many of the anonymous authors who vent on blogs rant their snarky vituperatives from behind the smoky curtain of the web. This allows them a peculiar and nasty vocabulary that seems to be taken as truth by virtue of the fact that it has been printed somewhere.
Batali goes on to mention some scurrilous rumours that were picked up by blogs (after being reported in the New York Post) and spread far and wide.
“This bit of shoddy journalism will be picked up and promulgated by the rest of the gray zone and march its merry way toward the center of the road. Eventually these blog posts become factual information lost in the sauce. But, in the end, I do not hate the blogger. I just expect, and want, more from many of them.”
Points to the chef for the use of the word “vituperatives” — nice work there. And he raises a fair point about blogs and the desire for gossip. But it seems as though Batali’s real issue is with the New York Post writer, not the bloggers. Tabloids have been dishing out questionable gossip since newspapers were first invented.
The second tidbit came from the sporting world, where the New York Islanders have set up a “blog box” for bloggers to cover their games (a slightly different approach from college baseball, which kicks bloggers out). Anyone can sit there provided they want to write about the game, and this seems like a great way to get fans involved in a game that seems to not have a very big audience in the U.S.
The only question in my mind is: Why a special box? Why not just put them in the press box? Presumably that would irritate the real journalists — although as Deadspin (which has an interview with the Islanders about the idea) noted in a post last year, bloggers should count themselves lucky they’re not in the press box, for a whole bunch of reasons.
Jun 14th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
From TVWeek comes this howler from former President Bill Clinton:
Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd of marketers, branders and media executives from around the country, former President Bill Clinton challenged the press to “render complex messages to audiences without turning them into two-dimensional cartoons” as the next election approaches.
Pot, meet kettle.
