Mar 27th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Brian Stelter has a great piece in the New York Times that I urge anyone interested in the media business to go and read right now — I’ll wait — and that includes reporters, editors and (most of all) managers, and probably IT departments and designers as well. The context of the piece is political reporting and political news, but I think the points Brian is making are relevant to the entire industry as a whole.
It’s not that there is anything earth-shatteringly new in the piece, mind you. But I think it does a great job of describing how digital “word of mouth” — in other words, social networking of all kinds including Twitter, IM, Facebook and so on — has become a dominant means of news delivery for young people in a way that I’m not sure old geezers like myself quite grasp, no matter how often people describe it (and Stelter knows whereof he speaks, since he was still in university when the NYT hired him away from TV Newser). As Brian describes it in the story:
In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.
And then Stelter mentions Jane Buckingham of the Intelligence Group, a market research company, and says that during a focus group, one of the subjects — a college student — said to her:
“If the news is that important, it will find me.”
Think about that for a second — or longer, if necessary. I think that sums up, in ten simple words, what has happened to the way that many people (and not just young people, but those who use RSS readers and blogs and social networks as well) consume the news. Not only is there just so much of it out there that it’s virtually impossible to consume it all, but the very fact that someone you know — or trust — has passed on or blogged or Twittered or posted a link makes it more likely that you will read it.
Are most websites designed with this kind of principle in mind? Not really. Most of them are still designed as though people read the news the same way they do in the paper — starting at the front and moving page by page towards the back (of course, many people don’t read the newspaper this way either, but that’s another story). In reality, people come from every conceivable angle, dropping into stories and then disappearing, finding them through links and posts and Digg and elsewhere.
If the news is that important, it will find me.
Dec 12th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
The double entendres pretty much throw themselves at you when you come across news like this: that the media group behind Penthouse is buying the company that runs the Adult Friendfinder service (among other things) for half a billion dollars. Various Inc., which runs a wide variety of other websites — including BigChurch.com and GuanXi.com — has reportedly been shopping itself around for some time, but investors tend to shy away from the adult-entertainment market.
The company isn’t getting much of a premium for the deal either, since it has annual revenues of about $200-million, or about 5 times what Facebook had last year. There was a fascinating profile of the founder of Various, a guy named Andrew Conru, in Business 2.0 magazine earlier this year, which described the nondescript industrial mall the company operates out of and Conru’s unremarkable background.
Penthouse also has an interesting history — a Porn 1.0 company founded by legendary party animal Bob Guccione as a more crude competitor to Playboy, it became a media and entertainment giant. Like many of its non-porn counterparts in media, however, the company failed to adapt to the digital age and eventually filed for bankruptcy (there were apparently some other backroom shenanigans as well).
With the Adult Friendfinder purchase, new owner Mark Bell — a Florida real estate developer and former owner of an Internet hosting company — is obviously trying to create a Porn 2.0 empire in its place.
Dec 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Matt Bai, who is starting a new political blog next week covering the U.S. election campaign, has a piece in the New York Times today about what might loosely be called Politics 2.0 — the use of blogs and Facebook and other social media as part of a campaign. He says the major parties have tried to adopt the tactics first used by the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, but have missed the point on a number of things:
“It seems clear that the candidates and their advisers absorbed the wrong lessons from Dean’s moment, or at least they failed to grasp an essential truth of it, which is that these things can’t really be orchestrated.
Dean’s campaign didn’t explode online because he somehow figured out a way to channel online politics; he managed this feat because his campaign, almost by accident, became channeled by people he had never met.”
Bai describes how Ron Paul supporters — who had nothing to do with the official campaign — organized their own online fundraiser for the candidate on Guy Fawkes Day and pulled in more than $4-million and over 20,000 contributors in a single day, which turns out to be the largest one-day haul of any Republican candidate to date. Even Ron Paul’s campaign probably doesn’t have a clue how or why it happened.
The point Matt Bai is trying to make is related to my point about online community: You can’t create one, just as you can’t create a “viral” hit, or in fact an online sensation of any kind. You can create what you think are the right conditions for such a thing to grow, and hope to encourage one that already exists to adopt you, but other than that you have very little control. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.
Nov 28th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
I moderated an interesting new-media panel today at the nextMedia conference in Toronto, with Leonard Brody, CEO of Vancouver-based “citizen journalism” outfit NowPublic.com; Jon Dube, who heads up digital media operations for CBC News (and runs Cyberjournalist.net), and Mark Lukasiewicz, vice-president of digital media for NBC News and a former Canadian print and TV journalist.
The topic of the panel was “Adapting to Digital Threats and Opportunities,” and I started by asking all three panelists whether they thought it was one of the most exciting times to be in media or one of the most terrifying times — which, as Jon quickly noted, was a bit of softball. All three said that it was exciting because of the limitless possibilities of new media, although Jon admitted that while it was exciting for him, it might not be so exciting for people who fear that their jobs are threatened.
I also asked whether the panelists felt that Canadian media entities were behind their U.S. counterparts when it came to embracing new media opportunities, and if so why. Jon said that he thought Canada might have had a harder time getting started with some new ventures, if only because the population is smaller and there isn’t the advertising base to support a lot of new ventures. Leonard said that he thought Canadian media giants were much more hesitant, and that at least U.S. broadcasters and other media entities were trying new things.
On the topic of “citizen journalism,” both Mark and Jon said opening up their organizations to more interaction with viewers was something they were very interested in — and Mark said that was the primary motivation behind MSNBC buying Newsvine.com. Leonard said that existing media outlets were still struggling with the idea that to a large extent breaking news and the function of adding analysis or context to that news have become separated, and in many cases the breaking news is occurring through outlets such as NowPublic and Facebook.
Leonard also made the point that journalism is a skill and a craft, and that much of what we call “user-generated content” is not very high quality, and that while the distribution models might be changing, there is still a need for journalists to package news and analysis and make sense of it for people, and to pick out the best of the UGC. Mark and Jon both said that while TV and other media might be changing, and the distribution models were being disrupted, that the need for people with skills to tell compelling stories or make sense of things was still there.
The panel closed with a question about what each of the panelists would tell journalism students. Mark said he would tell them to learn how to write, Jon said he would tell them that and also tell them to learn to think critically, and to think outside the box and be flexible enough to adapt to these new media models, and Leonard said he would advise them not just to learn how to write but to learn how to market themselves and their skills — in other words, he said, get a blog.
Nov 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As several sites are reporting — including PaidContent’s UK division and Mashable — Bebo has launched a social-media platform with a pile of traditional TV and media partners including the BBC. Bebo often gets forgotten when people are writing about social networking, because the majority of coverage focuses on Facebook and MySpace.
But while Bebo was created in the U.S., it has developed a large European user base and has about 40 million users or so, which puts it not that far behind Facebook. And the partners it has lined up for its social-media launch include some major names — such as CBS, BSkyB, Channel 4, ESPN and MTV, as well as some smaller players. According to the press release, the Open Media launch will allow Bebo users to:
“store and curate within their personal profiles their favorite music and video content, and virally distribute that content throughout their ‘friends network’ and the wider Bebo community.”
On a related note, the word “curate” has become increasingly popular as a way of describing what users are doing when they pick clips they like and post them somewhere, or send them to friends — makes it sound all Latin and important, doesn’t it? A lot better than saying something like “I was goofing off and watching kittens on YouTube.”
Further reading:
– CNET’s Caroline McCarthy has some details
– info on ad revenue splits over at Contentinople
– the Telegraph has a take, along with some really craptacular ads
– Silicon Alley Insider calls Bebo’s offering the “anti-Hulu”
– PaidContent has a video interview with a Bebo exec
