Sep 18th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | No Comments
Vin Crosbie, who has been around online media from the beginning of the first bubble, has posted some of his remarks from a recent conference on what newspapers are doing right online, and how much they still have left to do:
After 12 years of our efforts at publishing on the Web, our sites earn one-twentieth to one-hundredth the revenue per user as do our companies’ legacy products. The average newspaper website earns between USD 5 and USD 14 annually per user, comparied to USD 250 to USD 900 annually per printed edition subscriber or daily single-copy purchaser. The comparisons for broadcast sites are even worse.
Sep 18th, 2006 | Citizen Media, Reimagination | No Comments
Some recent developments on the “citizen journalism” or “user-generated content” front, depending on which irritating buzzword you prefer:
– Gigaom.com has a piece about JPG magazine, which is an interesting blend of online and real (i.e., paper) publishing: started by blogger Derek Powazek and a friend, it takes high-quality photo submissions from amateur photographers and then Web voters choose the best of the submissions, which are then published in a print magazine.
– TechCrunch has a post about a new “citizen journalism” site called Citizenbay, which hasn’t launched yet (TechCrunch got access to the beta). According to the post, it’s “a city centered citizen journalism project that will pay users whose contributions are voted the ten best by readers each day in 60 cities around the US and France.”
Sep 18th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | No Comments
In a recent post mirroring his media column for The Guardian, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine wrote about what he sees as an online media success story called Netzeitung. Based in Germany, he describes it thus:
A grand experiment in the future of news is succeeding. Pity most of you can’t read it, since it’s in German. But thanks to an accident of school scheduling that plopped me into a German class, I’ve been able to follow Netzeitung.de since it was founded in Berlin in 2000 as a net-only newspaper.
It’s not a blog, a search engine or an aggregator. It is a newspaper without the paper, but with 60 journalists reporting the news. Netzeitung has not only survived the internet bubble and a ping-pong game of corporate sales, it has acquired other media properties; it is starting an ambitious effort in networked journalism with citizen reporters; and it is set to be profitable this year.
Sep 13th, 2006 | Reimagination, Social Media | No Comments
Ross Mayfield of Socialtext — a company that helps create “wikis” — has a post on the blog of Telegraph news editor Shane Richmond (who is on vacation) about how a newspaper can help develop a community online. Here’s an excerpt:
Newspapers have a tremendous opportunity to host and extend the communities they serve. By now, most have taken the baby steps of offering RSS feeds, enabling journalists to blog and reconsidering costwalls. This lets them tap into the conversational networks that may intersect their communities. It is important to be tapped into these networks, but this is just staying on par with the industry, and shouldn’t be confused with engaging their core community.
If you are open to sharing control to create value, the economics favour you. Social software, especially because of the leverage provided by open source, isn’t a significant expense. If you can foster community, participants have a propensity to contribute what you used to call content (and they may simply call conversations).
Sep 11th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | No Comments
Chris Anderson, the Wired editor who wrote the book “The Long Tail” — about how content on the Internet has a longer life than in traditional media, was interviewed by the Press-Gazette in Britain recently, and talked a little about online media outlets and the Long Tail concept. There are some excerpts on the Online Journalism blog, and the full interview is here. Here’s a sample of his thoughts on subscription sites:
“There are some who require you to log in; there are some that require you to pay for content. Our sense is that if you do that, you will get some revenues, but you will not be part of the conversation. You will not have access to that extraordinary word-of-mouth effect out there in the wide-open world.”
