Jan 30th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Patrick Ruffini at Tech President has a great post about Twitter starting to become a news-delivery system, a post I came across because it was linked to by Josh Catone over at Read/Write Web, who says Twitter is becoming a “platform for serious discourse.” Not all of what we see on Twitter is serious discourse, mind you — there are still people who insist on telling me everything they’re doing (yes, I’m talking about you, Scoble) and there are performance issues, but Patrick and Josh both have a point.
Like Patrick, and probably lots of other people, I started noticing Twitter becoming a news-delivery system when a news event came along — like the fires in California, or the death of Heath Ledger — and probably noticed it the most when the U.S. primaries came along. The volume of Twitter posts during the debates and the voting was incredible, and it was like a front-row seat to the action. Some people were watching CNN, some watching other shows, some were at actual events; it was quite a sea of information and opinion all blended together.
Josh has a great rundown of why Twitter works for news, including the fact that it’s fast, it’s open, and it’s two-way — and Patrick makes many of the same points. Like Mitch Joel, I have found out about news events through Twitter, including several takeovers, financial results and other stories. And journalists are taking note, including Steve Outing and Jack Lail, as well as Bruno Giussani. Newspapers are feeding their news alerts straight to Twitter, and reporters are starting to do likewise. It’s fascinating to watch a new medium evolve the way Twitter has.
Jan 30th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, did the opening keynote at the National Association of Television Program Executives in Las Vegas and talked about how — surprise, surprise — the industry is “under pressure.” I’ll bet that got some big laughs. It’s probably also not that surprising that he didn’t spend much time talking about the writers’ strike and its effect on the industry, although he did drop in that old line about “trading analog dollars for digital pennies,” just for good measure.
The part that I found really striking, though, was near the end, where Zucker starts talking about how he thinks the system of making dozens of expensive — and ultimately futile — TV pilots is a dumb way to do things. And when you listen to the numbers involved, it’s hard not to agree: The big five networks spent $500-million last year on about 80 pilots, he says, of which only eight were brought back for a second season. And even among those, “none could be considered a big success.”
What kind of crazy business spends a half a billion dollars on 80 prototypes, and gets less than 10 per cent that actually work? That might make sense if you’re an experimental research lab — preferably government funded, so that your success rate doesn’t actually matter — but shouldn’t the mass-market TV business have a bit better idea of what it’s doing than that? I assume that every one of those was greenlighted by someone who hoped they would get a monster hit like CSI or Law & Order, and then they could afford to write off all the other losers.
If I were a TV executive, I would put down the crack pipe or whatever they’re smoking over there and put some small amounts of money into a few Webisodes, or maybe look around at what’s catching the eye of my target market at FunnyorDie.com or Break.com or places like that. Finance some things on the cheap and then turn them into something when they take off — flushing billions of dollars down the drain on pilots in hope that you’ll magically hit the CSI jackpot is insane.
Jan 26th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Allen Stern of Centernetworks has a provocative post in which he asks whether people would be willing to pay $1 for a full-text RSS feed, or to pay $4.95 for a bundle of 10 feeds, etc. His point (I’m pretty sure) is that advertising in RSS feeds doesn’t really work that well, and that it’s hard to monetize a blog if no one ever comes to the website and looks at the feeds. Allen has very kindly suggested that my feed could be part of the tech-blog “bundle,” but I don’t think his idea is going to work.
Many of the commenters on Allen’s blog argue that this would be good value, that full feeds without ads would be better than either partial feeds or feeds with advertising, and so on. MG Siegler at ParisLemon says that he thought the idea was ridiculous at first, but that he has warmed up to it. I’ve given it some time and thought about it a fair bit, but I’m not warming up to it at all. If anything, I’m getting colder towards the idea. I just don’t think making people pay for feeds makes any sense.
If any of the blogs that Allen has in mind were producing content that was highly valuable — inside information, valuable tips — then you might be able to argue that charging for them would make sense. But I can only think of a few blogs that fall into that category (and no, I’m not including my own), and here’s the thing: most of them are already making money from those things, just not through their blogs. As Rex Hammock said, my blog doesn’t carry advertising, my blog is advertising.
I can totally understand the desire for something like a paid-feed model — I just don’t think it would work, and it kind of goes against what I see as the whole point of having a blog. Sorry Allen.
Jan 26th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
We can all debate the wisdom of the Wall Street Journal maintaining a pay wall (or at least part of one — see my recent post), and even the wisdom of newspapers and media sites having registration walls. But surely we’ve gotten beyond the point where anyone would argue that publications should try to control where and how you link to them, right? Wrong. According to a post by Don McAskill, CEO of image-sharing site SmugMug, BusinessWeek specifically asked him not to link directly to a recent article they wrote about his company.
When I first read that, I confess that my jaw dropped open in amazement. Did I go through a time warp of some kind that put me back in the mid-1990s? No. But reading through BusinessWeek’s bizarre and long-winded “user agreement” is like going back a decade or more, to a time when traditional media — and companies of all kinds — thought they could control how users accessed or made use of the material on their websites, right down to preventing them from linking to certain things.
In fact, if you read through the part of the policy that covers “deep-linking,” which is made to sound like something heinous and clearly illegal, it also forbids “bots” from going through the site, which would seem to cover what Google and pretty much every other search engine on earth does. That’s smart. Don’t just try to block people from linking to your articles — try to prevent them from ever being found at all! Brilliant. (The BusinessWeek article is here, in case you want to read it).
Don also writes about how a story the L.A. Times wrote about SmugMug isn’t available easily either, because of the site’s registration wall. I know I’ve been stopped short before by the Times wall (check the comment at that link — the registration wall pops up after a certain number of visits), and each time I go away and never read the article that has been linked to. I know I could just use BugMeNot, but I just can’t be bothered, and so the story goes unread. How is that doing anyone any good? That’s pretty dumb — but BusinessWeek takes the cake.
Jan 25th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Is this really the best we can do for a Friday frenzy on Techmeme? Scoble decides to put ads on his blog — woop-de-frickin-doo. If someone wants to advertise on the Scobleizer’s blog, they can go right ahead. I certainly don’t think it’s going to affect anyone’s perceptions of whether what Robert does is actual journalism or not. Or maybe Scoble and other bloggers should receive some kind of government support, like the tall foreheads at Davos were apparently discussing when Mike Arrington was there.
Is the practice of journalism in danger? Hardly. If anything, there’s more of it going on all the time, depending on how you define the term (and no, I’m not including Digg). Sure the newspaper — and I emphasize the term *paper* — business might be having a rough time, although plenty of people have pointed out that Sam Zell and Rupert Murdoch seem to see the newspaper business as pretty appealing, even if they are probably going to fire a whole bunch of people in the process.
Columbia Journalism School dean Nick Leman makes a half-hearted case for government support of the media in a response to Forbes magazine’s piece from Davos, noting that the BBC is government funded (with the money coming from a TV tax), and that PBS and other public media play a role. But it’s one thing to point to the BBC and PBS as a success — which some might argue with — and another to argue that the government should actively get into financing the journalism business.
If people want long-form, investigative journalism then I assume they will indicate that desire in the traditional way: by reading it, and in some cases even paying for it. The idea that government support is required because some newspapers aren’t making 30-per-cent returns on invested capital the way they used to is ridiculous.
