Sep 30th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
An interesting piece in the New York Times today (although it was in the Fashion & Style section, which I thought was a little odd). I’m not sure if the topic signals some kind of evolution in the way the Times looks at the blogosphere or an evolution in the blogosphere itself — or maybe a bit of both.
It’s about people who have become known — “Internet famous” — not for having a popular blog, or for being a YouTube star, but for commenting on other people’s blogs and content (no doubt an academic somewhere will call this “meta-blogging.”) As the Times piece puts it:
“Since many blogs have a readership of one — or, at best, the writer, his mother and some guy he sat next to in seventh grade who found him on Google — piggybacking on a more popular site offers a wider audience for a keyboard jockey’s gripes and quips.
Not everyone is up to the task of creating a blog with the kind of consistent tone and provocative topics that attract visitors.”
The Times piece profiles a Metafilter commenter known as DaShiv, as well as Seth Chadwick, who posts on a food-related site called Chowhound. But my favourite quote comes from Marshall Poe, a professor of new media at the University of Iowa, who describes the motivation of commenters in this way:
“You are one of the millions of people who sit at a computer all day… every hour you have 10 minutes where you’re not doing anything productive at work, and you can’t look at porn.
So you make a comment and fulfill this desire to show yourself off as a smarty-pants.”
The Times piece also talks about a commenter on Gawker, where the site picks and chooses who will be allowed to comment, and so a competition has developed where people try to post the wittiest comments so that they can join the club. Now that’s social networking. And DaShiv explains why he prefers to comment at Metafilter rather than starting his own blog:
“It’s easier to join in on a conversation than to start one,” he said matter of factly.
And it takes both kinds to make the blogosphere tick.
Sep 17th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 2 Comments
After many rumours and crossed fingers (at least on my part), the New York Times has finally bitten the bullet and removed the pay wall from its website. Columnists and other content have finally been set free to find an audience wherever they can — and that’s not all. The site is also removing the pay wall from its newspaper archives going back 10 years.
Not everyone is celebrating the death of Times Select. Former journalist Mark Potts — co-founder of Backfence.com, a “citizen journalism” site that recently shut down — still thinks the pay service was the right idea, but says the newspaper chose to put the wrong content behind the wall. He thinks in-depth and feature coverage should have been charged for instead of columnists.
I happen to think Mark is wrong. In any case, I think allowing bloggers and other sites to link freely to columnists and other writers at the Times will help increase the discussion around the issues the paper writes about, and that will benefit the Times in the long run. It may be hard to prove that case to the CFO with hard numbers, but I still believe it to be true.
If anything, however, I think the decision to remove the pay wall on the archives could be even more important than the removal of Times Select. This is clearly a “long tail” gamble if ever there was one, and it will be interesting to see whether the newspaper can make that work economically. I would suspect that if it even manages to sell a few ads on archived pages, it will exceed the amount of money it made by charging for its archives.
Update:
More on the New York Times decision from the always insightful Mike Masnick at Techdirt, from Scott Karp at Publish2.0, from Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis — who calls it a “cynical act” that was “doomed from the start” — from Jimmy Guterman at O’Reilly and from online media pioneer Scott Rosenberg of Salon. And of course the big question still remains: Will the Wall Street Journal be next?
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Aug 24th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As plenty of others are reporting elsewhere, the New York Times has launched the public version of its MyTimes customizable home page, which has been in beta for almost a year now. I tried it out when it first launched and I confess my reaction was very similar to some of the other responses out there — in other words, the new offering has some not bad features, but nothing that’s going to alter the fabric of the Web or cause the earth to stop rotating.
I think one of the most interesting features is the ability to check out — and add the RSS feeds for — some of the sites that New York Times reporters and columnists like to go to. I confess I haven’t really spent much time on the site since I checked it out initially, but the last time I looked they hadn’t done much apart from letting you add feeds from NYT writers and add tabs specific to each of your favourite authors.
My friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt isn’t very impressed with the site, and I share his lack of enthusiasm. While it’s not a bad offering, I wonder why the Times bothered with MyTimes when there are others offering much the same features. I assume they’re hoping faithful readers will gravitate to the site because of their love for the brand, but I’m not sure that’s true. If I were them, I would have spent a bit more time trying to make it unique.
Jul 25th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
The New York Times Co. released its financial results for the latest quarter Wednesday (PaidContent has a good overview), and it was pretty much the same picture as in previous quarters, but painted with a newer brush: advertising revenue is growing online, but nowhere near fast enough to make up for the downturn in newspaper ad revenue. As a result, ad revenues overall were down 5.7 per cent over the same quarter the previous year, despite a growth in Internet revenue of 27 per cent, including an online ad revenue increase of 22 per cent. This is a story that my friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has told before and will likely be told again.
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!”
