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(cross-posted from my media blog)

There have been plenty of announcements over the past few months of newspapers merging their print and online operations (like the London Telegraph) or pushing their staff to do other things such as multimedia, blogs, etc. (like Business 2.0 magazine requiring all of its writers to start blogging). Now Gannett has said that its newsrooms will now become “information centers.”

What does Gannett mean by that? Although the term is sure to be the subject of much derision from newsroom veterans — and it definitely has a kind of 1984-ish feel to it — the idea seems to be to get away from the newsroom as the place where news is created (which has never really been the case) to looking at it as a place where reporters and editors filter all kinds of information that readers/viewers/listeners might want, including information that comes from “the people formerly known as the audience,” as Jay Rosen likes to call them.

This latter concept was dubbed “crowdsourcing” by Wired magazine (which has a story about Gannett’s move here), and involves being open to contributions from non-journalists, whether those contributions are stories, pictures, contacts or just opinions. This is the kind of thing that many outlets, including the BBC, dabble in from time to time. But Gannett wants to make it a staple of its news-gathering process, and has already seen the benefits.

According to the Gannett memo announcing the initiative, pilot projects in a number of locations have seen positive feedback in a number of ways:

What they found is remarkable: Breaking news on the Web and updating for the newspaper draws more people to both those media. Asking the community for help, gets it – and delivers the newspaper into the heart of community conversations once again.

As Doug Fisher describes it in his excellent post: “The palpable arrogance in too many modern newsrooms — that somehow we are above it all and are indispensible to our readers/viewers/users/customers — has got to go. We aren’t, and they could care less. We squandered much of that public support long ago. We continue to do so.” Gannett is trying to find a different way, and they should get some props for doing so.

Update:

Jeff Howe, who wrote the piece for Wired on Gannett’s move to crowdsource news, has more details on his blog about crowdsourcing. Hat tip to PaidContent for the link. And Tim at eBiquity says (quite rightly) that this kind of initiative is great, provided it isn’t just an excuse for getting by with fewer journalists. Greg Yardley wonders whether such a system wouldn’t be open to “gaming,” and my friend Rob Hyndman notes that in some cases he would rather have Pulitzer Prize winners on the ground reporting a story rather than “pyjamas media.” And Drums ‘n Whistles says there are risks to crowdsourcing too.

If you spend a lot of time cruising around the Interweb, you may have come across a site called PhilTube.com, which — apart from looking an awful lot like YouTube, to the point where the trademark lawyers are probably salivating — hosts a bunch of videos featuring a guy named (you guessed it) Phil, doing things like sitting at his desk in a non-descript office somewhere, asking people to hold his calls because he’s busy blogging, or telling his staff to film ordinary objects around the office and upload the clips to YouTube, which they do.

Kudos to the gang over at Huffington Post’s great Eat The Press site, who tracked down the back story (or meta-story) behind PhilTube. As it turns out, the site was created by Hart+Larsson, a New York ad agency that is represented by PGM Artists. And the CEO of PGM Artists just happens to be a guy named Phil McIntyre — yes, that Phil. Phil apparently asked the agency to put together a parody site with some clips for a big commercial advertising summit.

In that inside-out way that things in New York and Hollywood sometimes turn out, Eat The Press says there have already been feelers put out about getting PGM to produce content for some sort of Web TV venture. First it’s a joke, then it’s reality.

Note: Eat The Press correspondent Rachel Sklar (a Canadian) has a great feature piece on Saturday Night Live in the latest issue of Village Voice magazine.

frantic: (adj.) excessively agitated; transported with rage or other violent emotion

Like my friend Paul Kedrosky, I find myself somewhat bemused by the recent story from the Financial Times, in which Google is described as being engaged in a “frantic” round of negotiations with content providers for licensing rights. Paul notes that in another story, Google’s quest is described as a “slog,” which leads him to wonder whether it’s even possible to be in a frantic slog (and then to suggest that “frantic slog” would be a great band name, which it definitely would).

This is one of those cases where the choice of a single word can twist the perception of a story almost irrevocably, especially when it appears in the lead paragraph. The folks at the pink paper, as some Brits calls it, aren’t normally known for cranking up the rhetoric the way some of the tabloids do, but I think this time they let their enthusiasm get the better of them. The rest of the story is a relatively straight-forward look at what Google is trying to do, but the word “frantic” is all out of proportion and that ultimately hurts the story.

As the ever-perceptive Cynthia Brumfield notes at IPDemocracy, sometimes it’s just more exciting to think of a gigantic multibillion-dollar behemoth like Google getting “frantic” about something, or facing a “potentially crippling” round of lawsuits, in the same way that financial reporters like to talk about an earnings “bloodbath” or how a company is “hemorrhaging” money. It makes it sound more interesting. Unfortunately, it’s also hyperbole.

Here’s a Web 2.0 story for you: I got an email pitch from a guy named Kevin the other day, letting me know about the Web-based classified ad service that he and his buddy Chad put together in their spare time. Called Listifieds.com, it’s based in the thriving metropolis of Bowling Green, Kentucky (which I remember primarily because it’s where John Prine says his grandmother taught school in the great old song Grampaw was a Carpenter).

Kevin says he and Chad at first planned to focus their service on Bowling Green exclusively, but then they got lots of positive feedback and decided to take it national. Of course, the first thing that came into my mind was how crowded the national classifieds market is, what with newspapers fighting to stay competitive, Craigslist dominating in dozens of major cities and newer entries such as Edgeio.com going after the Web business aggressively.

Is Kevin worried about any of this? Nope. He says “we realize it’s a crowded market but believe we can stand out with our combination of clean design, usability and feature list. We’re not looking to get rich off of it.” He figures they will sell featured listing spots and maybe banner ads to local businesses. In other words, putting together the site — in relative terms — probably didn’t take that long or cost that much, and scaling it larger probably won’t either (here’s a tip, Kevin: check out Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services if you start to get a lot bigger).

I asked Kevin in an email about Craigslist and eBay and Edgeio and others, and here is what he said (some sections clipped for space):

Clearly we don’t have the brand awareness, the marketing resources, or the money that these other sites have. But I also think the market is fragmented and in transition right now.

I think craigslist isn’t that well known outside of the big cities it operates in. I think eBay is almost always associated with auctions, which some people don’t like… I don’t put Edgeio in the same category as the other sites because I believe it has an identity crisis, isn’t that well known beyond the web 2.0 crowd, and in my personal opinion, it is confounding to use.

In my opinion, we have the cleanest, clearest, easiest to use interface; We aren’t limited to big cities like craigslist; We have longer listing run times — up to 180 days for certain listing types; We offer plenty of photos and ways to describe your listing; We offer some nice tools… rss feeds, listing alerts, saved listings, recently viewed listings, website widget.

We think we have something good to offer, so we intend to give it a try and have fun doing it. If nothing else, we can say “our service is free too, why not list with us also?”

If I were being brutally honest, I would say Kevin and Chad’s service doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming a major force in classifieds nationwide. However, it could probably become a pretty good little business in some smaller regional markets, and there is nothing wrong with that at all — and Kevin and his friend should be congratulated for giving it a shot. What do they have to lose? That’s Web 2.0 in a nutshell.

Am I the only one who is slightly gob-smacked at the amount of money that mobile television company MobiTV has collected in its recent round of financing? (Looks like Down The Avenue shares my amazement). Just months after getting a whopping $70-million — which already seemed a little excessive — the company has been handed another $30-million. Is MobiTV really that great, or is there just so much money sloshing around in the Valley that people can’t get rid of it fast enough?

I expect it’s probably a little bit of both. As more than one person has noted, Web 2.0 companies (or whatever you want to call them) in many cases require a whole lot less financing than traditional technology companies, and that combined with a conspicuous lack of IPOs has left VCs with truckloads of cash backing up and effectively going to waste. And there’s no question that MobiTV is cool — or rather, still cool, since it’s been around since 1999 — although I question how big the market for watching TV on a cellphone really is.

In any case, $100-million is a gigantic pile of money. I just hope that MobiTV can find something worthwhile to do with it. Greg Sterling wonders if MobiTV is becoming the next Webvan. Let’s put it this way: If they start having rooftop parties with free drinks and performances by hot bands, look out. Rafat Ali at PaidContent is also bearish.

As my Toronto blogging friend Tony Hung writes here, Mike Arrington is venting some anger over the shots that he and TechCrunch have been taking over issues of conflict and impartiality, with a long post about how he feels like he is under attack. The first thing I would tell Mike is that he should be glad he’s coming under fire, particularly if it’s coming from the traditional media — it means he is successful enough to be making people worried (Jeneane is afraid he is channeling Dave Winer).

At one point, Mike says that TechCrunch is “a new kind of publication” and that it doesn’t “fit into a neat little box like traditional media, who refrain from financial conflicts of interest with their readers and feel that they are therefore above reproach.” He says that his site is different because it’s “all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends.”

I would certainly agree that TechCrunch is different, but not in those ways. Traditional journalism is full of columnists, commentators and beat reporters who are every bit as close to their sources, friendly with them and conflicted by those relationships as Mike. As Mitch Ratcliffe notes at ZDNet, there are lots of other online journalists in the same boat too. Nothing that TechCrunch is going through is different in that sense from dozens of investment newsletters.

As with any type of publication — online or off — the relationship with readers is by far the most important thing, since that is the foundation on which the rest of the business (if it is a business) is built. Most of Mike’s readers know that he hangs around with VCs and startups and the like, and that many of them have likely become friends. Provided he discloses obvious conflicts when they arise, most people are probably going to be perfectly happy with that.

As many people have argued before and likely will after me, journalistic objectivity is pretty much a fiction — or at least an unattainable goal in most cases. What journalists and bloggers should strive for if they want to be taken seriously is fairness, balance and honesty. All else is secondary. As my friend Scott Karp said recently, trust is the only asset we have.

It’s still early, but according to one unconfirmed report from a blog called 606Tech, Viacom — which ordered YouTube to remove clips from Comedy Central, including Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart clips — has reached a deal with YouTube to license its content. According to the report, the switftness with which YouTube moved to take down the clips impressed the media conglomerate and the two found some common ground. A piece in Ad Week seems to support this idea as well.

All of which lends some credence to Techdirt’s view that Viacom’s takedown notices were effectively a bargaining tactic, just like when Universal was waving its arms and threatening legal action. And it would explain why Howard Owens and others (including the site No Fact Zone) have been struggling with the fact that some Comedy Central content has been removed while other content hasn’t.

Advertising Age magazine has a great story about the recent Dove “Evolution” marketing campaign, which included a video uploaded to YouTube of a fashion model before and after the makeup and Photoshop artists get to work on her. At the beginning, she is an average looking woman with blemishes and stringy hair, and after some makeup and digital effects, she is on a billboard.

Dove’s campaign is aimed at showing young women how unreal the fashion industry is, and according to the Ad Age piece it has been more successful than a Super Bowl ad: In less than a month, the ad (created by a Toronto ad shop) got more than 1.7 million views on YouTube, was mentioned on “Ellen” and “The View” and caused a huge traffic spike to Dove’s CampaignForRealBeauty.com site.

Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests isn’t all that impressed — with good reason. He points out that the Ad Age article doesn’t mention anything about whether all of that traffic and views turned into more donations for the Dove fund, or caused any appreciable gain in any other metric. He also notes that traffic spikes from things such as Digg and Slashdot are notorious for overloading a site’s servers without resulting in many clicks or other tangible impact.

To be fair, it may be a little early to see that kind of effect from a campaign such as Dove’s — and there’s no question that the kind of reach it has gotten will eventually pay off in some form or another, even just in increased awareness. Another thing that occurred to me: just how successful are those Super Bowl ads anyway? I bet they aren’t that much better at turning a hot ad into real revenue than Dove’s web ad, and they’re orders of magnitude more expensive.

More acquisition news: Reddit, the Digg-style social bookmarking or social-news site, has been acquired by Conde Nast, the magazine publisher behind Wired, The New Yorker, Vogue, GQ and a bunch of other magazines. The announcement from the Reddit team — which includes just four people — is here. No word so far on whether the rumoured price of $65-million has any relationship to reality (I would be suprised if it was anything close to that).

Reddit is to become part of Wired media, and its voting-style service is expected to be incorporated into or Digg-ify some of Conde Nast’s other sites. As more than one observer has commented, it seems likely that the magazine empire got to know the guys at Reddit — including Alexis Ohanian, who I did a short email interview with last year — when they put together lipstick.com, a celebrity news site. They also did a similar kind of private label thing for Slate.

Maybe it’s just because I work for an old-fashioned media entity, but I happen to think that the kind of thing Digg and Reddit and Netscape.com are doing makes a lot of sense as part of a media property of some kind. The interesting thing to watch will be whether the magazine sites that Conde Nast tries to Digg-ify will be restricted to content from those magazines, or whether they will open them up.

In any case, congrats to Alexis and his team (who got their start working in someone’s apartment as part of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, a kind of summer camp for startups). I hope the deal works out for them. Matt Sparkes has an email interview with Alexis here.

So Google now has a wiki service to add to its online document, spreadsheet, calendar and email suite. JotSpot, the wiki-maker founded several years ago by Excite co-founder Joe Kraus, has been absorbed by the Borg and is now part of the Googleplex (incidentally, I think it makes much more sense for the Borg to be all about free candy and scooters and video games rather than the creepy robots in S&M outfits — but hey, that’s just me).

To me, it makes perfect sense for Google to offer a wiki engine for anyone wanting a Web Office suite — I think a good wiki (put to good use) is potentially a bigger game-changer for a corporation than just about anything else, especially online spreadsheets or email, or even instant messaging. And I think JotSpot is pretty good, although I’m a big fan of both Socialtext and Wetpaint.com. Ross Mayfield of Socialtext has posted his reaction here.

Now all Google is missing is a presentation engine. You ready to get the call up to the big leagues, Thumbstacks? Or maybe Google wants something that is more along the Web conference line — in which case, I would recommend Vyew.com. Steve Newson has a pretty good roundup of the other contenders here.

Inside the chest of Megaphone Mark Cuban beats the heart of a frustrated journalist, I think. After all, not only has he started Sharesleuth.com, which does investigative journalism of a sort (which Mark gets to trade on before it is released to the public) but his latest post on the shadowy details of the Google-YouTube negotiations suggests that he knows a good story when he sees one — and is more than happy to pass it on regardless of whether it passes the smell test or not.

Okay, that isn’t really journalism, but it’s pretty close to what passes for the real thing in a lot of circles — including some newspapers I could name. And why not run with it? After all, Mark specifically said (without punctuation, for some unknown reason): “I cant say this has been fact checked. It hasnt. I cant say its 100 pct accurate, I dont know. But it rings true, and as I said, I trust the source.” Hey, if it’s good enough for Mark it should be good enough for us, right?

The only problem is that much of it doesn’t ring true. As it happens, I read the same description on the Pho list, and while some of it sounded perfectly plausible — the six-month grace period given to Google, the structuring of the deal with the music labels as equity so that they could avoid having to pay artists, and so on — I would have to agree with Don Dodge (who used to work at Napster) that the part about getting the labels to sue Bolt and Grouper to somehow take the heat off doesn’t make any sense at all.

Someone else on the Pho list had a similar response to the “industry insider’s” description of what happened: “I would say the bit about piling on lawsuits against competitors to YouTube is wildly unlikely as an agreed-upon strategy,” this knowledgeable person said. “If true, it is certainly unlawful and potentially criminal… and there are just too many good, smart lawyers at UMG, YouTube’s backers and at Google to permit that kind of arrogant lame-ass conduct to occur.”

Not only that, but this person pointed out that such lawsuits could easily wind up setting an unfortunate precedent for Google, which makes it even more unlikely they would support such a strategy. Still, aren’t conspiracy theories fun?

Two announcements that indicate the process of evolution in the TV 2.0 business is really picking up a head of steam: Brightcove — which until recently was like the wizard behind the curtains, powering online TV ventures such as the recently announced music video deal with Warner Music — remakes itself with a consumer-facing site and service that plans to compensate users for video content, and Metacafe announces its “producer awards” feature, which pays video uploaders $5 for every 1,000 views their video gets above the 20,000 mark.

Plenty of people wondering what this means for GooTube, of course, now that Google has paid $1.6-billion out of petty cash for the thing — but it’s also worth wondering how the folks over at Revver are feeling, since they more or less pioneered the whole “pay the users” video thing. Thanks to Revver, the guys at Eepybird.com who made the Diet Coke-Mentos video got $30,000 or so for all the views that their clip got (Revver pays creators 50 per cent of the ad revenue they get, and you can also get paid based on how many places the video is embedded).

As Matt Marshall explains over at VentureBeat, Metacafe not only pays producers of video, it also tries to filter out the chaff by submitting videos to a group of reviewers who give it the thumbs up or down before it hits the site, adding a kind of Digg-style (or American Idol-style) voting aspect to it. And then there’s Brightcove, which will give content owners 50 per cent of the revenue from ads, or the ability to offer paid downloads of their content, for which they get 70 per cent.

In a sense, YouTube and its ilk are coming at the market from the opposite end of things as Brightcove: they started with videos of kittens and skateboarders hurting themselves and so on, and are now trying to become more mainstream and legitimate, while Brightcove started as the corporate stooge who works with the networks and now wants to layer some popular, viral video on top of all that. Who will win? The betting window is now open.

Update:

Marshall at TechCrunch notes that Google also tweaked its video service today, by adding a “sponsored” video category aimed at major TV production outfits (those with at least 1,000 hours of video). The new feature launched with a Coke video with none other than the Eepybird Mentos guys.

In case you hadn’t heard already, the blog-vertising startup called PayPerPost is “officially absurd” — according to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch anyway. In a recent post, he describes how the company (which compensates bloggers who write about PayPerPost clients), has set up a site called DisclosurePolicy.org, and is encouraging bloggers to adopt a disclosure policy for their blogs by either choosing one from the site or crafting their own.

The idea is to disclose as openly as possible the conflicts of interest or compensation that one might receive for blogging, whether it’s free products or ads or whatever. One of the knocks against PayPerPost has been that it doesn’t require bloggers to disclose that they are being paid, something I have been critical of in the past (although not quite as critical as Jason Calacanis, who calls it “stupid and evil”). Other startups doing similar things, such as ReviewMe, do require that bloggers disclose their compensation.

In his post, Mike argues that the setting up of DisclosurePolicy.org is effectively a distraction tactic, a way of throwing a bone to critics while still maintaining PayPerPost’s evil agenda. He also says that DisclosurePolicy deliberately blurs the line between the kind of paid blogging PayPerPost engages in and other, more subtle forms of compensation such as free products, personal relationships with blogging subjects, etc. (something that many critics have accused Mike himself of not disclosing properly).

For what it’s worth, I think Mike is letting his hatred of PayPerPost get the better of him. I actually think something like the DisclosurePolicy website is a pretty good idea, regardless of whether there’s a bit of PR prestidigitation (i.e., sleight of hand) going on. As Dave Taylor points out, one of the difficulties with blogging is that there aren’t really any rules. Things like DisclosurePolicy and the Blog Honor code could theoretically help make things a little more “transparent,” to use an overused term.

TDavid points out that all of Mike’s bluster, ironically, is really just free advertising for PayPerPost — and includes a video commentary from Loren of 1938 Media on Jason Calacanis which I think is hilarious. Drumsnwhistles is similarly unimpressed with Mike, and Minic has more on the issue over at The Blogging Times.

I’d love to know which journalist Jason Calacanis of Netscape was emailing with recently when he decided to post a big chunk of the interview and his responses on his blog (something Megaphone Mark Cuban has been known to do from time to time). Was he frustrated by the dumb questions about whether blogging can be a business or not, or was he just trying to share his thoughts with the blogosphere? Hard to say with Jason. In any case, his comments about the blogging business are pretty much to the point, and worth a read. Here’s an excerpt:

We are an eight figure a year business today. In terms of profitability the blogging business is better than the magazine or newspaper business in two main ways: 1. there is no distribution cost to blogging (i.e. printing, shipping, and postage), and 2. we don’t have the large management cost structure because our bloggers are not edited.

Jason goes on to say that blogging is “the most profitable media business today” and describes a good blog as being almost as hard as working at CNN, because the pressure to produce never stops. And then he tells the journalist this:

I think so far you’re looking at blogs are one big thing, and they are not one thing — they are many things. There are blogs done by companies to promote their products. There are blogs done by friends and family to keep in touch with each other. There are “faux blogs” created by unscrupulous marketers to abuse the public. There are blogs that are run as publications in order to make a profit.

And Jason adds that blogs have become “a vital part of the media ecosystem,” in that bloggers are interacting with journalists and “helping them build their stories.” He says the media business has moved from a handful of people speaking on their pedestals, to dozens of folks at hundreds of tables having conversations about an issue. Not a bad description. More chaotic? Definitely. Far from perfect? Absolutely. But in my opinion, still an improvement.

Is MySpace losing its edge? A piece in the Washington Post entitled “In Teens’ Web World, MySpace is So Last Year” seems to suggest that it is. Teens say the social networking site is old news, and they are moving on to other things. Ironically, some of them seem to be moving to Facebook now that the formerly restricted site has opened itself up — something that critics said might lead to a loss of users (for what it’s worth, my 17-year-old daughter and all her friends have signed up with Facebook, and so have I).

This question of whether MySpace might fade in popularity has been going around for some time now. My friend Scott Karp wrote about it back in May, and coincidentally enough I wrote about it back then too, including a column in the Globe and Mail in which I compared social networks for teens to nightclubs, in the sense that there’s always a new one coming along (Cynthia Brumfield chooses a different metaphor that is just as apt: the TV show). Here’s what I wrote then, which is now behind a pay wall:

In the end, [Friendster] may simply have been a victim of the shifting enthusiasms of its young audience, who grew up and moved on. In many ways, social networking sites are like hot nightclubs — they become popular and then flame out as the hip crowd moves on, and they are very difficult to manufacture.

My friend Rob Hyndman has also written about MySpace and the social networking phenomenon, and wonders whether it isn’t time to question the received wisdom about how smart Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace was. Maybe MySpace just isn’t cool because so many mainstream media outlets and unhip dads like myself are writing about it, or because it’s so popular. As Yogi Berra said about one of his favourite restaurants: “It’s so crowded no one goes there any more.”