Aug 7th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
According to a report in the New York Post, the New York Times has decided to drop the Times Select pay wall that keeps most of its opinion and editorial content, including its popular op-ed columnists, locked up for paying customers only. The Post says that publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has made the decision but the paper is trying to resolve various software issues before announcing it.
The story also notes that the Times has seen its subscription base for Times Select flatten (the Post report says the number dipped in June to 221,000 from 224,000 in April, but the Times has said those figures are wrong). As Henry Blodget points out at Silicon Alley Insider, it has been obvious for some time that Times Select was not growing and would never become a substantial part of the newspaper company’s business.
One could argue that getting people to pay $11-million is better than nothing, but $11 million in revenue for an operation the size of the NYT is a rounding error. It hardly seems worth it — especially when columnists like Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman (love them or hate them) are among the best draws the paper has. To keep them locked up for paying customers only instead of maximizing their traffic-drawing abilities seems increasingly absurd.
I hope the Post report is for real. In other newspaper-related news, a new report says that online advertising revenue is expected to eclipse newspaper advertising revenue by 2011.
Aug 6th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
By now, anyone who isn’t living in a cave probably knows that the blogger behind Fake Steve Jobs has been exposed as Forbes writer Daniel Lyons. If you need to find out more, you can read one of the eight thousand posts about it on Techmeme. I’m not all that interested in finding out FSJ’s secret identity — in fact, I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t be found out.
What I find really fascinating, like Anil Dash of SixApart and my friend Joey deVilla from Global Nerdy, is that Daniel Lyons is also the guy who wrote the Forbes magazine screed about blogs not so long ago. Does that make him a hypocrite? Perhaps — although I would argue that, like many magazine writers (or newspaper writers for that matter) Lyons likely took a stance for the article that he knew would be controversial, as a rhetorical device, and may or may not have actually felt that way personally.
In any case, that clearly didn’t stop him from seeing the power of having a blog. As Anil puts it: “The benefits of blogging for one’s career or business are so profound that they were even able to persuade a dedicated detractor.” And Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 notes that Lyons clearly felt compelled to do something more creative than Forbes allowed him to do, and as a result he is likely to benefit from it — at Forbes’ expense.
Aug 2nd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
In an effort to stay on top of the overflowing collection of links I have amassed through del.icio.us and my Google Reader shared items, I am going to start posting short items in batches. Let me know if this practice delights and/or annoys you and I will pretend to take that into consideration when it comes to continuing and/or stopping it.
- Vin Crosbie has a great essay over at Corante that is a response to BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine’s piece about newspapers entitled When Do You Stop The Presses? Vin’s point: it’s not just the package — it might just be the content too. (This one came from Paul Bradshaw’s online journalism blog).
- Ben Laurie makes an excellent point about traditional media and their Web stories, which frequently either don’t have links or don’t make them obvious — something that is even true of my employer, the Globe and Mail. (got this one from Adriana Lukas)
- Newser.com is a news aggregation site not unlike Daylife.com or Newsvine.com, and according to a post at PaidContent it is the brainchild of author Michael Wolff, former Hoover’s CEO Patrick Spain, and Caroline Miller — former editor-in-chief of New York magazine. It uses a combination of human editors and a ranking algorithm.
Got something you think I might be interested in? Feel free to email it to me, or share it with me through del.icio.us, where I am user “mathewi” — just tag the page as “share:mathewi.”
Aug 1st, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
Update (Aug. 3):
Leonard Brody of NowPublic posted a response to Jay’s note on Facebook saying: “Jay, thanks so much for this…great analysis. We really would love to have you as an advisor to the company. Interested?”
Original post:
Given that New York University professor Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net is at the forefront of “citizen journalism” (or “crowdsourced” journalism or “networked” journalism, or whatever you choose to call it) it’s probably not surprising that he has some thoughts on the recent announcement by Vancouver-based NowPublic that it has landed $10.6-million in venture funding and is also expanding its relationship with the Associated Press — all of which I wrote about in a Globe and Mail news story and a blog post.
Jay recently wrote a Facebook note about the deal, in which he said that he sees great potential for NowPublic to evolve from what it is now into a true “networked journalism” site with full-fledged news reports as well as photos and videos — but he says that doing so will likely take more co-ordination and editorial oversight than the site is currently doing (at the moment NowPublic has no staff editors, although it does have former CTV reporter Mark Schneider overseeing things).
Jay has been through his own experiment with networked journalism in the Assignment Zero project, which was a co-venture with Wired magazine writer Jeff “Crowdsourcing” Howe and a host of others (more on that in this post by Jeff and a follow-up here) and is currently engaged in another with HuffingtonPost.com — a political reporting effort called OffTheBus. Jay did an interview about Assignment Zero here.
After I read his note, I asked Jay whether I could excerpt some of his thoughts here (for you non-Facebook types), and he graciously agreed. One of the points he made is that NowPublic has so far been “most effective as a spot photo site.” Its distribution deal with AP, he says:
“Was mostly for the network of photographers who can get to sudden news events (like the proverbial plane crash in a cornfield) more quickly than AP could dispatch one of its pros…
This is the continued unfolding of a sudden realization that struck with the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, and again with the London train bombings, two events that put “user generated content” on the map of the world’s news.”
Jay quotes a comment from Reuters CEO Tom Glocer about the tsunami, in which he said that the news agency had 2,300 journalists and 1,000 stringers around the world but none near the site, “so for the first 24 hours the best and the only photos and video came from tourists armed with 1.3 megapixel portable telephones, digital cameras and camcorders. And if you didn’t have those pictures you weren’t on the story.”
But so far, Jay says, NowPublic hasn’t really done much in terms of organizing an editorial team that can be mobilized for such events, perhaps in part because the site is hoping people will spontaneously organize themselves.
“There’s a tendency to think that citizen journalism will happen by itself if you build a good platform and let the community emerge because a) it sometimes happens, usually around crisis events, and b) if it did arise ‘naturally’ the elusive dream of radically reduced labor costs might be around the corner, and c) it’s appealingly bottom-up logic to say: give people the tools and get out of the way.”
Rosen says that if NowPublic is going to go beyond just supplying photos or videos and the occasional eyewitness report, it will take a change in focus.
“It will have to decide that it’s a content (editorial) company with an open participation platform. And then it will have to figure out how to make its contributors into an editorial community, or news-breaking social network. Head down this path and pretty soon you’re needing editors.”
And not just editors but editors who can do some hand-holding and outreach, as Jeff points out here. In the end, Jay says that NowPublic is “something of a sleeping athlete, ready to compete in the worlds when it wakes up.”
I think there’s some truth to that — and that the company’s expanded arrangement with Associated Press gives NowPublic an incredible platform for distributing what its members produce to traditional media. It’s like the world’s largest network of “stringers,” as newspapers and other media outlets call them. That could be an amazing resource.
Aug 1st, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
If you’re a traditional journalist with any interest in online media whatsoever, one of the central questions hovering over the acquisition of the Wall Street Journal is whether the Journal’s new proprietor, Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, will remove the pay wall and give the Journal away for free. He has said several times that he is considering such a move, but he has also mused about whether it would be worth it or not.
I know that many newspapers have looked to the Journal as a model for what a paper can do online, because it is one of the few that has charged for its content from the very beginning and built what appears to be a successful business doing so. But does it make sense now? This Wall Street Journal story notes that Murdoch commissioned a study that looked at what going free would mean for the paper, and from that he concluded that while readership would grow by a factor of 10, advertising would likely only grow by a factor of five, and the loss of subscription revenue would effectively make the whole thing a wash. In other words, maybe’s it’s not worth it. However, Murdoch has asked questions like this:
“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.”
Fred Wilson has made it clear what his view is: Murdoch should make the WSJ free online, before he does anything else. Fred points out that the New York Times gets 10 times the traffic that the Wall Street Journal does, and is far more often the centre of an online discussion about business or financial matters. That kind of thing is going to drive Murdoch crazy.
Larry Kramer, formerly with Marketwatch, has a different idea about how Murdoch can keep charging for the Journal and use Marketwatch as a free alternative, an adjunct to his much-anticipated Fox Business Channel, but I’m not sure that would work. I’m going with Fred on this one. The Journal could be so much more relevant online if it were free, and Murdoch is just the guy to do it.
Further reading:
Darian Benkoil at Corante, a former AP correspondent and ABCNews editor, does the math and says that it doesn’t make sense for the Journal to go free (although I think one could question some of his assumptions), and Joe Wiesenthal has some thoughts over at Techdirt. Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests isn’t so sure going free would be such a good thing for the Journal.
