Feb 7th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
There’s a piece in the New York Times today that takes a look at the newspaper industry in the United States and concludes — not surprisingly — that these are dark times indeed. That won’t come as news to anyone who has been following the industry over the past couple of years, as papers across the U.S. have been downsizing, selling assets, getting bought by “grave dancers” like Sam Zell, and so on.
Is this a national tragedy? Some would have you believe that it is. And I’m sure many of those being downsized at the newspapers in question would like to think that it is — not to mention many of those doing the downsizing and selling off assets. But just because newspapers aren’t doing well doesn’t mean that journalism or media or the news business itself isn’t doing well. If anything, people are searching for more and more news all the time. They’re just doing it online instead of on paper.
Amy Gahran has a great column putting things in perspective at the Poynter Institute site. As she puts it:
“Personally, I’d be surprised if many dailies are left standing after the next 7-10 years, if they don’t make fast, fundamental changes to their revenue strategies. I realize this is dire news to people who can’t envision doing anything but working for a traditional newspaper.
But on the bright side, for those with flexibility and a bit of business savvy, I think that right now there is more space than ever in the news market for entrepreneurial journalistic ventures.”
As Amy describes it, monolithic newspapers and paper chains may not do well in this new environment (although there’s no reason to think that they can’t, especially with advertisers looking for trusted brands to latch onto), but that doesn’t mean journalism or media is ailing. “Smaller, more numerous, entrepreneurial ventures with less overhead and inertia could be the future of journalism,” she says.
Dan Kennedy — whose post I found through Amy’s column, and she in turn found through the Wired Journalists network that Ryan Sholin set up — says the evolution that the media industry is going through feels like it’s the end of something, but it could turn out to be the beginning of something at the same time. As he puts it:
The news business has been through several paradigm shifts since taking on a form we’d recognize beginning in the 1830s. The current one may be unusually wrenching. But it only looks like the end of the world because it happens to be the one we’re living through.
Kennedy suggests that many newspapers will have to refocus on local markets instead of trying to get by on wire stories that everyone else has, and that maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Feb 2nd, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
Alexander Rose at The Long Now blog has a post about how the foundation has determined a winner in the 2002 wager between Dave “I invented blogs” Winer and Martin Niezenholtz of the New York Times. The bet was whether a search of the top news stories from 2007 would produce more results from blogs or more from The New York Times. According to Rose, blogs won — although he also notes that the bet was poorly worded, and therefore ambiguous in many ways.
I think the bet was more than just poorly worded, however. The whole idea behind was flawed to begin with, and is even more flawed now. The wager pits blogs against the New York Times as though one is somehow a replacement for the other. That may have made some sense in 2002 but makes very little sense now — especially since the NYT and plenty of other mainstream media have blogs of their own.
Let’s recap: Blogs and media are not opposing forces. Blogs aren’t replacing “mainstream media,” they’re enhancing it and expanding it — connecting it to the conversations that are going on around it and through it and with it. Blogs take stories and commentary from the traditional media and extend them out into the world. Arguing that blogs will replace the traditional media is like saying forks are going to replace spoons.
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 15th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
More ammunition (for those who need more) for the dropping of the New York Times’ pay wall: according to Nielsen data for October, the paper’s readership — in terms of unique visitors — jumped to 17.5 million in October, up from 14.6 million the month before. A rise of almost 3 million uniques in a single month is pretty incredible. Maybe it was all that Britney Spears coverage. Hat tip for the link goes to Beet, which has posted a video interview with Vivian Schiller of the Times.
Nov 1st, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
An interesting move by the New York Times: it has effectively added a blog-aggregation news feature to its technology pages, as described by Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web. In the middle of the site there’s a column of the top tech headlines from around the blogosphere — in other words, a very Techmeme-like feature — and you can click below each one to see other posts about the same story.
When you click, you go to BlogRunner.com, which is a blog aggregator/headline engine that the New York Times acquired last year. I wasn’t initially that impressed with it when I first saw it (before the Times bought it), but I’ve been back several times since and I think it does a pretty good job. As Erick Schonfeld notes at TechCrunch, the Times is also building content aggregated by BlogRunner into other parts of its site, including at the bottom of news stories (the same way I use Sphere on my posts).
One small design point that I like about BlogRunner, and wish that Gabe would duplicate at Techmeme: there’s an expand/collapse button for the discussion links on each topic heading (Techmeme lets you expand or collapse them all, but then your preference is set until the next time). The Times has also done some syndication deals with PaidContent and IDG, among others.
I think this is a very smart move by the Times, and by tech editor Saul Hansell (who also writes for the Bits blog). Newspapers by definition have always been aggregators and curators of information — both their own and that culled from news wires and other sources. Aggregating Web content from many different sources seems to me like a natural extension of that.
