Aug 15th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 2 Comments
I had a feeling that my friend Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 was up to something, and now I see the fruits of his secret labours — or rather, I’ve read his description of what he’s been up to over at the Publish2 blog. The final pieces of the puzzle likely won’t come into focus until the site launches in beta, which Scott says is coming next month.
Like Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, I’m a little fuzzy on what Publish2 is going to be exactly, or how it’s going to work — but I will say that Scott is a smart guy (with some smart backers such as Robert Young, Howard Weaver and Jeff Jarvis), and I am very interested in seeing what he comes up with.
It seems obvious from Scott’s preamble that Publish2 is based in part on a Digg-style model, in which journalists (and he appears to be defining that term broadly, as he should) submit and then vote for news stories. Publish2 will also apparently incorporate some of the social bookmarking features of sites like del.icio.us, and stored bookmarks may also feed into the service.
How the participants in the site will be chosen is a little unclear. It sounds as though it will begin with a selected number of journalists, and then spread out from there to journalists who are not part of a mainstream entity, and to what Scott refers to as “news bloggers.”
This reminds me of the model that Citizendium.com has been trying to use to fix what it sees as the flaws in Wikipedia, by using some form of “expert” sources. And it seems clear that Scott wants to use journalists as the core of his news aggregation engine in order to address some of the flaws of the Digg model.
Jason Calacanis tried to do something similar when he revamped Netscape.com, by using editors who select and highlight — and in some cases even report on — stories and content. And in Publish2 there also seem to be aspects of what Newsvine.com and Daylife.com (which Jeff Jarvis is also involved in) are doing, as well as Topix.com. Whether Publish2 can make it work better than any of these remains to be seen.
One of the first things I thought when I read Scott’s description was: “This sounds like exactly what newspapers should already be doing.” And part of what he implies in his post is that not enough journalists, and not enough publications, are really making use of social networking tools to improve the news generation or aggregation process. I would definitely agree with that.
Can Publish2 help to change that? I’m looking forward to finding out.
Aug 14th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Want to get lots of traffic to your blog, and hundreds of comments from readers? Post something in which you speculate about how terrorists could attack the U.S. — and then ask your readers for their own suggestions. Better still, post this at the New York Times website.
I missed it when it originally happened last week, but that’s pretty much what the two Steves — that is, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt — did over at Freakonomics, which recently became part of the NYT web operation (I wrote about the fuss over them adopting partial RSS feeds here, a topic that was later taken up by my friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt).
Levitt, who is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, wrote about “what I would do to maximize terror if I were a terrorist with limited resources.” After laying out some of his thoughts about different approaches, he said: “I’m sure many readers have far better ideas. I would love to hear them. Consider that posting them could be a form of public service.”
Almost 600 commenters didn’t see it that way, however. Dozens wondered what on earth the subject had to do with economics, while others said posting such ideas was reprehensible. The post generated an editorial in the New York Post, a scathing blog entry by my friend Rachel Sklar at The Huffington Post and a follow-up post in which Levitt tried to explain himself (a little). The latter has so far gotten about 300 or so comments.
Damn — I wish I’d thought of that 
I’m sure there will be those who believe this was a deliberate strategy to boost readership, but I doubt it — I think Levitt is just like that, which is part of what makes the blog so thought-provoking. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis uses the post as part of an argument for why he thinks blogs should be affiliated with newspapers rather than “owned.”
Aug 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Henry Blodget — who used to be a Wall Street analyst and now runs a content hub called Silicon Alley Insider — recently wrote a provocative analysis of the online newspaper business entitled Running the Numbers: Why Newspapers Are Screwed, which ran at the Insider as well as Blodget’s personal blog, Internet Outsider (I guess he’s an insider and an outsider).
Henry’s point is a relatively simple one: publishing content online costs a lot less than publishing it on paper, and therefore newspapers can save a lot of money by running their stuff online. Unfortunately, online content also generates a lot less revenue than printed content does, so newspapers actually wind up worse off if they move online.
To justify this line of argument, Henry looks at the New York Times — presumably because if the New York Times can’t make the math work, no one can. Using (for the sake of argument) the idea that the Times immediately stops publishing in print and moves entirely online, here’s what Blodget says would happen to the company’s bottom line:
Revenue drops by more than half, 40%-50% of employees get fired, and the company still loses money. Using the NYT’s Q2 numbers and these assumptions, for example, revenue would have dropped from $789 million to $285 million.
More importantly, EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) would have dropped from $118 million to -$64 million.
Not a great picture, is it? But there are a number of problems with Henry’s analysis, as several people — including my friend Mark Evans, who has posted some thoughts on the subject, and Seamus McCauley of Virtual Economics. Seamus in particular takes issue with many of Blodget’s assumptions.
Among other things, Seamus makes the point that a proliferation of online content actually makes certain kinds of content more valuable — particuarly content that has been verified by trusted sources, which he believes is the true core competency of mainstream media organizations (Jack Trout has some ideas about what makes newspapers valuable here, while others think a paper’s most valuable asset is its useability).
Are Blodget’s projections unrealistic? Pretty much, yes. Obviously, printed newspapers aren’t going to vanish overnight, nor is online advertising going to remain static. But thinking about what might happen if they did is definitely a worthwhile exercise.
Aug 10th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
I’m a huge fan of the Freakonomics guys, and a subscriber to their RSS feed, but I didn’t realize until I saw a MediaPost item on Techmeme that they had been “acquired” by the New York Times. I also didn’t realize until I read through the item that they have switched to partial RSS feeds, which I absolutely loathe.
That loathing appears to be shared by dozens of commenters and formerly faithful readers who left their thoughts on Stephen Dubner’s post about the move to the Times. Many have said they will be unsubscribing from the blog, which will hopefully make the NYT smarten up.
I realize that — as Tish Grier points out on the MediaPost item — the Times is looking to make their content pay, especially if they decide to lose the Times Select pay wall (as has been rumoured), and getting readers to click through to the website is probably one way of doing that. But I still think it sucks.
Some of the reasons are enumerated in this comment on the Freakonomics post. The bottom line is this: if I wanted to click through to the website, then I would just go to the damn website in the first place. Partial feeds defeat almost the entire purpose of reading RSS feeds in the first place. Bad idea, guys.
Aug 8th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Although Mike Arrington seems less than impressed with it, I think Google’s plan to allow comments on Google News stories — but only from people involved in a news event — is actually a pretty interesting idea. There’s no question that it’s going to be a lot of effort, and that it may in fact fail as a result, but I think the impulse behind it (as described on the Google blog) is a valuable one.
In effect, this is a step towards “crowdsourcing” of the news, but in a very focused way. Instead of allowing anyone to comment on a news event or story, Google’s plan is to only allow comments from those who are a part of the story (although how the company plans to verify that remains to be seen). I think — as Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests does — that this has the potential to expand the journalistic process.
For many newspapers and other news organizations, a story has a limited lifespan, unless it is one of a small number of big headliners that get followed up day after day, or month after month. Whoever responds in time to get their comments included in the story makes it into print, and those that don’t are rarely heard from.
I found it interesting that in the Wall Street Journal story on the new feature, a professor of pediatrics who was asked by Google to comment on a story in which he was quoted said this:
“I’ll do a 15- to 20-minute interview, and two sentences will appear about what I’ve said… So the Google feature is really a chance to flesh out those two sentences and to include some more of what I ordinarily talk about in a 15- to 20-minute interview.”
Google’s proposal has the potential to allow unheard-from participants to make themselves heard, and thus make news stories more complete — as pointed out at Poynter Online and by my mesh friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt — and I think that would be a great idea, at least in principle. In any case, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.
Update:
As Mike notes at TechCrunch (courtesy of Gabe “Techmeme” Rivera), the terms of service at Google News prevent anyone from crawling the site and aggregating any of its content — but this doesn’t seem very kosher if Google is now effectively creating (or expanding on) the news. And Danny Sullivan has some responses from Google to questions about the new feature.
