Dec 29th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
The answer is inherently unknowable, of course, but my friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 had a great post recently about the ROI (return on investment) of registration systems — something he only thought of when he got prompted to log in at the New York Times after somehow getting logged out. How many potential readers get turned away by such prompts, he wondered.
It’s something I’ve wondered from time to time as well, whenever I hit a registration page — as I did the other day at the Los Angeles Times. I only wanted to read one particular article, which someone had blogged about (ironically, it was David Lazarus writing a dim-witted piece about how newspapers give away the store by not charging for their content). But the registration was just too much hassle. I couldn’t even be bothered to go find a BugMeNot login. (Time magazine’s Curious Capitalist blog has a nice rebuttal of Lazarus).
What did the LA Times lose by not having me read that article? Not much, perhaps. Advertisers and management types would no doubt argue that I wasn’t worth much anyway, since I’m not a regular reader and don’t live in LA, and therefore advertising would be wasted on me. But it’s also true that my view of the LA Times and its website has gone down just a little, and I’m unlikely to link to anything there — and that is a real long-term risk, I think.
In any case, Scott’s post is well worth reading, and Mark Potts has some thoughts over at Recovering Journalist as well.
Dec 10th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
The data points continue to pile up in favour of the decision by the New York Times to drop its subscription service: according to a post over at TechCrunch, traffic to the NYT website has climbed by more than 60 per cent since the wall was removed at the beginning of September. ComScore’s latest survey apparently shows that the Times got 19.4 million visitors in October, compared with about 12 million in August — for an increase of 7.5 million or 64 per cent. There are issues with comScore, as there are with most of the major measurement firms, but when combined with the New York Times traffic numbers that I recently mentioned from Nielsen, it’s obvious where the overall trend is going.
Nov 21st, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Yet another in a long (and I mean long — we’re talking a decade or so) line of depressing declines in newspaper advertising levels, as detailed in a release by the Newspaper Association of America and in this Reuters story. And just to add insult to injury, Alan Mutter of Newsosaur notes both on his own blog and at Silicon Alley Insider that it’s even worse when you take inflation into account. I bet Alan is a lot of fun at parties.
As the Reuters story notes, there is some good news — while regular print advertising fell by 10 per cent in the third quarter, online ads rose by about 21 per cent. That’s good, right? Sure. Except for the fact that online advertising only amounted to about $770-million, and traditional newspaper ads accounted for more than 10 times that amount or about $10-billion. That’s a pretty dramatic gap, as Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has pointed out before — something he calls the “10-per-cent problem.”
Nov 2nd, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
It would be funny, if it didn’t hit quite so close to home for a long-time newspaper guy like me. Aw, what the heck, it’s still pretty funny, even if it does hit pretty close to home — kind of like when someone makes a crack about your weight and you find yourself laughing along with them, despite the fact that they effectively just called you a lard-ass.
What’s so funny? Before I had a chance to read AP chief executive Tom Curley’s closing speech at the Knight-Bagehot dinner on Thursday, I read Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget’s summary and rather pointed annotations of the speech at Silicon Alley Insider. Many of the jabs that Blodget took were well-deserved, including the ones that seemed to suggest an inspirational talk such as Curley’s might be coming, well… a little bit late in the game, shall we say. At the same time, however, it’s nice to hear the senior executive of a news organization — any organization — saying some of the things he says, including these tidbits:
“I’ve been inside many major news organizations the last couple years, and, invariably, I hear the same refrain. We know what to do, but we can’t get it done.
Or, sadly, we’re in worse shape than we were two years ago because we’re spending even more proportionately trying to keep the old model functioning.
More than a few persist in trying to make their online sites life rafts for newspapers or newscasts.”
At one point, Curley says “we who rule the content,” which is a little much — but then you have to consider the audience he’s speaking to. No one would have even flinched at that phrase. He also talks about how AP and other news providers have to “get control” of their content, which I would argue is a losing battle — and it’s an odd statement given the deal that the AP struck with Google to host stories at the Googleplex.
But a little later the AP chief almost makes up for all of that by saying “The first thing that has to go is the attitude. Our institutional arrogance has done more to harm us than any portal.” If only saying it would make it so. Rafat Ali has more coverage at PaidContent.
Oct 19th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Anyone who has read my blog probably knows that I have been hard on Dave Winer occasionally (and I think with good reason, but I don’t want to get into that right now).
The fact remains, however, that Dave is a pretty smart guy when it comes to things like RSS — let’s not get into whether he “invented” it or not — and he also thinks outside the box when it comes to things like how newspapers and other media present their content, and that is something I’m interested in as well. So I think it’s only fair that I point out when I think he’s doing something interesting.
The thing in this case is his New York Times keyword index. It’s a simple thing, in a lot of ways, since it just scans the newspaper’s index and comes up with the number of times a certain word is used, then ranks them from top to bottom — but it also has a couple of additional features, including the fact that it displays the headline of a story when you hover over the number.
That’s a nice touch. And it’s an interesting companion to Dave’s “river of news” NYT feed (something I tried to recreate with my Twitter feed of Globe and Mail headlines).
I don’t understand why the Times — or other newspapers, for that matter — don’t provide that kind of alternative search or browsing tool themselves. It’s not rocket science (no offence, Dave) and it might even attract users who don’t want to use the linear approach that most papers default to. Why not have a keyword tag cloud too? The Washington Post had a demo of such a feature awhile back as part of its Post Remix lab project, but it never became part of the actual site, which I think is a shame.
I think plenty of readers would be interested in alternative ways of finding stories, just as they now use features such as the “most read” and “most emailed” lists the Times and other papers have. Why not add even more ways of slicing and dicing the news?
