Mar 31st, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0, Social Media | 2 Comments
Congratulations to Scott Karp and his team at Publish2, who just announced that they have closed a $2.75-million round of Series A funding from Ross Levinsohn’s Velocity Interactive Group. Scott was one of the most perceptive writers about the future of digital media while he was with Atlantic Media (which publishes The Atlantic magazine), and last year he left that job to pursue his vision of how traditional media can use social tools — such as the Publish2 social bookmarking platform — to improve and extend their reporting onto the Web. I’ve been trying out the beta for awhile and reading what Scott has written about the trials he has done with U.S. papers, and I think he is definitely on to something. I’m looking forward to finding out what else he has up his sleeve. Steven Hodson at Winextra thinks that by focusing on journalists, Scott has turned his back on the blogosphere (but see Scott’s comment on Steven’s post for clarification).
Update:
Om Malik (a former journalist himself) says he thinks Scott is a smart guy, but he doesn’t see the business potential in Publish2. Mike Arrington also seems skeptical — or maybe it’s just because he didn’t get an invite to the beta 
Mar 29th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
We’re long past the writing-on-the-wall stage for newspapers and advertising, it seems — the recent report from the Newspaper Association of America is more like a billboard, with one of those huge searchlight things they use for movie premieres and the opening of new car dealerships. And what it says is (pardon my French): You guys are totally screwed. Advertising has been declining for the past few years or so, but now the NAA is talking about the biggest decline since the association started keeping data — bigger than after September 11, 2001.
Some of that (full data here) is undoubtedly a result of the U.S. economic situation, which has everyone from banks to car dealers pulling back the reins and spending less. But the uncomfortable reality is that advertising in newspapers is declining for a bunch of other reasons as well, including the fact that newspapers appeal primarily to an aging population. At a recent meeting at one newspaper, an editor said that she felt a piece on hip-replacement surgery should be played more prominently because “that’s our core demographic.” Sad, but true.
But an even more important reason why paper ads are declining is that their cost-to-value ratio is way out of whack with what advertisers can get elsewhere, particularly the Internet. And it’s not just Craigslist.org decimating the classified business. Even traditional newspaper ads are difficult (if not impossible) to measure. Online ads can not only be targeted more specifically, they can also be tracked a dozen ways, and it quickly becomes obvious which ones are working — plus they are an order of magnitude cheaper than the paper version.
The NAA’s press release, of course, focuses on the much more positive news that online advertising for newspapers continues to grow at double-digit rates — but it still only accounted for revenue of $3.2-billion, compared with overall print revenue of more than $42-billion. It’s going to have to start growing a heck of a lot faster than that before it even starts to make a dent in the decline of print advertising.
Mar 28th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
In a piece posted at the New York Times’ Bits blog, Saul Hansell pits Mike Arrington’s “vision of blogging’s future” against that of PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. One is personal and filled with lots of emotion (guess which one) and the other is more analytical and has more traditional journalistic integrity, at least according to PaidContent’s new CEO. Rafat quite freely admits that his model has very little to do with the rough-and-tumble of the blogosphere and more to do with the large trade publishers like Reed Elsevier and Informa, which cover industries like a blanket but don’t get into pissing matches about personalities.
I have nothing but respect for what Rafat and his team have built. He and Staci and the rest have doggedly pursued their model, and they have covered the media business within an inch of its life, and they should be congratulated for that. I think Rafat is totally right when he says he is going after the big trade publishers, and I have no doubt that one or the other of them will eventually come to their senses and just buy the operation outright, or Rafat might just buy them.
But I also find that PaidContent.org isn’t that… well, interesting. If I were a mid-level media executive, trying to figure out where the next layoffs were coming from, or who was rising up the ranks of whichever entity, then I might read it for information purposes. But it doesn’t have much in the way of colour to it — and to be fair, Rafat has never made any secret of the fact that colour isn’t what he’s after. I also notice that while PaidContent is set up like a blog, with comments and everything, there aren’t a whole lot of comments on the stories I read.
To me, however, part of the power that blogs have is that they are personal and direct, that they give you a connection of some kind to a person (or people, in the case of a blog like Gawker), and that they have a voice that either interests or amuses or enrages you. PaidContent doesn’t have that for me — it is pure information. That’s why it commands triple-digit CPM rates for its ads, no doubt. But while I wish Rafat and the rest of the team all the best, and I think they are doing a heck of a job, I hope that not all blogs are going to become just trade press in another form.
Mar 27th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
I don’t like to pick on a colleague from the Globe and Mail, but in Russell Smith’s case I’m willing to make an exception. I like Russell, and I know he enjoys playing the curmudgeon — in fact, I think he would make a pretty good blogger. But in his latest column I think he goes for the facile, blog-bashing argument because, well… it’s easy. In the piece, which is entitled “Way more news sites, way less news,” he looks at the recent report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism which looked at the state of the news media in the U.S. and compared the number of unique news stories both in print and online in various forms, including blogs. One of the comments from the study is:
“News consumers may have had more choices than ever for where to find news in 2007, but that does not mean they had more news to choose from. The news agenda for the year was, in fact, quite narrow, dominated by a few major general topic areas.”
Russell uses this as a stick with which to beat the Web and particularly the blogosphere, saying blogs and websites focus on only a few stories and blow them out of proportion, and also that sites such as Digg (which the report barely mentions) accelerate this process. He says the report showed that “more than a quarter of the news stories on television and online last year in the United States were about the Iraq war and the presidential campaign” and says that
“this kind of concentration of attention runs against what was expected of the kind of information universe the Web would provide. What we expected, 10 years ago, was a wild diversity, a babble of voices bringing light to the stories that the supposedly stodgy, politics-and-economics-obsessed newspaper newsrooms were not connected to.”
I’m not sure who expected that (other than maybe Russell). In any case, is he saying that TV and news websites shouldn’t have focused on the Iraq war and the presidential campaign? Surely those were a couple of pretty important topics. Russell goes on to say that instead of the wonderful diversity that we expected from the Web, “what we’ve ended up with is a million sources reporting the same story.”
Two things about that: 1) Lots of the blogs and websites writing about those topics aren’t reporting them at all, they’re analyzing and commenting on them (people might take issue with that, but it’s a separate argument from the one Russell is advancing; and 2) What do plenty of newspapers do? Run the same set of a dozen or so newswire stories or press releases to fill out their pages — and often get them wrong, as Tim Burden notes in his post. How is that any different? Most of the report’s criticisms seem to extend primarily to cable television, rather than online, but Russell has his axe and he’s apparently determined to grind it.
Mar 27th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Brian Stelter has a great piece in the New York Times that I urge anyone interested in the media business to go and read right now — I’ll wait — and that includes reporters, editors and (most of all) managers, and probably IT departments and designers as well. The context of the piece is political reporting and political news, but I think the points Brian is making are relevant to the entire industry as a whole.
It’s not that there is anything earth-shatteringly new in the piece, mind you. But I think it does a great job of describing how digital “word of mouth” — in other words, social networking of all kinds including Twitter, IM, Facebook and so on — has become a dominant means of news delivery for young people in a way that I’m not sure old geezers like myself quite grasp, no matter how often people describe it (and Stelter knows whereof he speaks, since he was still in university when the NYT hired him away from TV Newser). As Brian describes it in the story:
In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.
And then Stelter mentions Jane Buckingham of the Intelligence Group, a market research company, and says that during a focus group, one of the subjects — a college student — said to her:
“If the news is that important, it will find me.”
Think about that for a second — or longer, if necessary. I think that sums up, in ten simple words, what has happened to the way that many people (and not just young people, but those who use RSS readers and blogs and social networks as well) consume the news. Not only is there just so much of it out there that it’s virtually impossible to consume it all, but the very fact that someone you know — or trust — has passed on or blogged or Twittered or posted a link makes it more likely that you will read it.
Are most websites designed with this kind of principle in mind? Not really. Most of them are still designed as though people read the news the same way they do in the paper — starting at the front and moving page by page towards the back (of course, many people don’t read the newspaper this way either, but that’s another story). In reality, people come from every conceivable angle, dropping into stories and then disappearing, finding them through links and posts and Digg and elsewhere.
If the news is that important, it will find me.
