Nov 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
It seems like everyone is getting into the TV game, but not on the talking box (as Forrest Gump called it) — on the Web. And in some cases, TV networks are trying to take the Web and turn it into television. Good luck to them. Here’s a roundup of some of the news:
— News Corp. unit Twentieth TV is working with Yahoo on a “Web on TV” show, which will no doubt feature the latest hilarious clips of skateboarders hurting themselves or kittens on an icy pond.
— Lifetime Networks is launching a TV-style platform as part of its relaunched website, and will create new shows just for the Web as well as streaming Lifetime content.
— Newsweek says it is going to create a political talk show that will run weekly on its website, and the magazine has hired the former producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC to put it together.
In other media-related announcements, MSNBC’s redesign is live (just in time for Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz to leave and an old friend of mine to arrive) and it has a very cool Ajax-y feature that lets you move chunks of the page up or down depending on your interests.
And in the old-time newspaper world, a number of chains have done a deal with real-estate site Zillow to put their ads on the Zillow site and use Zillow features on their newspaper websites. For more, see this piece of commentary on CNET about newspapers and the classified conundrum, and see Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing for a post on the Zillow deal.
Oct 16th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As expected, the New York Times appears to be seeing a substantial traffic jump now that its columnists and other opinion/editorial content are outside the newspaper’s “pay wall,” which was recently dismantled in favour of the Wild West known as the Interweb. According to traffic measurement firm Compete, the opinion section of the Times websites has seen traffic more than double since the move, and overall traffic to the newspaper’s site is up by 10 per cent.
As Valleywag notes, those extra pageviews are going to help the site’s bottom line, although they are likely still not enough to make up for the lost revenue from the death of TimesSelect. The important thing is that the newspaper’s columnists and other content are now part of the gigantic link-farm known as the Internet — and the growth in readership that they are likely to attract over time will almost certainly make up for the loss of the TimesSelect gravy train.
Oct 3rd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
This is almost like a follow-up to my previous post on TechCrunch and CNET (be sure to read the updates, because I added some worthwhile links), but PaidContent has a post up about a new report from Jordan Edmiston Group looking at M&A activity in the media sector: according to the report, the total value of media M&A during the third quarter was $95-billion, up 110 per cent from last year — and the largest single segment was online media, with 232 deals worth a total of $8.3 billion — up from 136 deals worth $5.7 billion last year.
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 15th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Doc Searls has an excellent post up with some advice for newspapers trying to make their websites better. One quibble: he’s still trying to push the “charge for the new, give away the old” idea, which I gave him some grief for last time be brought it up (and he gracefully admitted that he might not be right about the “charge for the new” part).
In any case, the rest of his advice — including the “give away the old” part of the above statement — makes perfect sense and should be laminated and posted in every newsroom from sea to shining sea. Bon mots include the following:
Start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You’re not the only game in town anymore, and haven’t been for some time.
The whole “bloggers vs. journalism” thing is a red herring, and a rotten one at that. There’s a symbiosis that needs to happen, and it’s barely beginning. Get in front of it, and everybody will benefit.
Stop calling everything “content”. It’s a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the ’90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online… Your job is journalism, not container cargo.
There’s plenty more where those came from. Go read the whole thing — I’ll wait.
