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 
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.
Jul 30th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 writes about the NowPublic financing and takes issue with the terms “citizen journalism” (which I admit is a terrible term) and “crowdsourcing” (which I actually kind of like). He says that what is going on at NowPublic is just journalism, period — or perhaps “networked journalism,” which Jeff Jarvis suggested as an alternative here.
Update:
My mesh friend Jeff Howe — who coined the term “crowdsourcing” — has a post in response to Scott’s, in which he effectively agrees that it’s really just journalism, extended to new sources.
Jun 18th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has a great post about how newspapers can work with aggregators and the distributed ecosystem of the Web, instead of just moaning about how Google and Yahoo are stealing their business, as Tribune owner Sam Zell and others like to do from time to time. Scott nails it when he says that:
The problem that newspapers and other traditional media brands have is that they still see branding as a function of controlling the distribution channel, rather than branding each unit of content that must now live and survive on its own in a disaggregated online media ecosystem.
Using aggregators and search wisely can make a big difference, Scott points out, using the New York Times “Topics” pages as an example. Putting together pages of content that match what people are searching for is a good way of making the rest of your publishing entity that much more appealing. And Scott notes that this works for his site as well.
Publishing 2.0 gets 73% of its traffic from search and referring sites, which include aggregators like Techmeme. Some of my content is also syndicated in full text on Seeking Alpha, Yahoo, and Digital Media Wire (with links back to the site, which yield significant traffic) — this is anathema to the traditional media mindset.
But the result, he says, is that his RSS and email subscriptions keep growing, and so is his brand — by effectively leveraging search, and by giving his content away.
Jun 17th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
I missed this the other day, but my friend Scott Karp had a great, in-depth look at the New York Times and its advertising revenue picture — trying to sift through the various financial tea leaves and figure out in dollar terms (as opposed to percentage terms) just how much the Grey Lady’s print revenue has been declining, and how much its online revenue has been increasing, and whether the latter is enough to offset the former.
I don’t want to spoil the ending, but according to Scott’s math — which looks fairly comprehensive to me (although I am an English major) — the answers are a) a lot, b) somewhat and c) not even close. Part of the problem with trying to do what Scott did is that the Times, much like other newspapers, doesn’t like to break out exact numbers for either its newspaper revenue declines or its online revenue increases, which may have something to do with the fact that “online is growing by 20 per cent” sounds a whole lot better than “grew by $3-million,” especially when your print revenue sank by almost ten times that amount and your top line is about $483-million. Steve Boriss at the Future of News has some thoughts on Scott’s detective work.
Note:
The title of this post, for anyone not familiar with Alice in Wonderland, refers to the chess game in that book, in which the Red Queen says “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
