Media organizations are “leaving money on the table” if they are not charging for their iPad apps, says Steve Outing. After a month with an iPad, he writes that he likely would have paid for any of the news apps he uses, as long as they were sold as permanent apps, not individual stand-alone editions as Time magazine originally was. “This approach completely misunderstands the device,” he writes. “First, the single-edition iPad purchase is fleeting; psychologically, I resist buying iPad apps that are read or viewed once and then deleted.”
Assuming the app is a one-time download that can contain multiple issues of a publication, Outing suggests that it’s worth paying for if the experience surpasses that of using the news org’s website.
“Indeed, to not charge for the apps seems, well, crazy. If an iPad reader of any of those news brands doesn’t want to pay a couple bucks for their apps, then all he/she has to do is launch the iPad’s Safari browser and go to their websites, paying nothing.”
Source: Poynter.org
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Friday, November 12, 2010
The extinction timeline
A futurist's advice: Newspapers will need to apply existing capabilities in new ways
According to the predictions of futurist Ross Dawson, we can be guaranteed newspaper jobs in the UAE until at least 2030. He has created a map to serve as a timeline of the eventual demise of print media worldwide. The map indicates newspapers will be “insignificant” in 52 countries by 2040; in USA the date is near 2017, it’s 2019 for England, 2034 for Saudi Arabia and 2040 for India.
In a exclusive interview, Ross answered five questions:
In contrast with America, Middle East and Asia newspapers are still doing good business. What’s your opinion about the future for newspapers in these regions?
As suggested in my Newspaper Extinction Timeline, there is a wide divergence in the success of newspapers around the world. In many countries, newspaper circulation and revenue are increasing. In time, the same forces that are making newspapers struggle in countries such as the US and UK will apply, but these challenges could be many years away.
Do you think there a way to revitalise newspapers and save them from extinction?
The future of the global economy will be largely centred on media in the broadest sense. The media organisations of today, such as newspapers, are well positioned to take advantage of that, in creating and editing content, and tapping large audiences. The challenge will be to take existing capabilities and apply them in new ways. The path forward for every newspaper will be different.
Do you still read newspapers? If so which ones rate as favourites?
I never buy newspapers, and only read them if they are in an airport lounge, coffee shop, or hotel. However if they are around, I enjoy reading many papers, such as New York Times, Financial Times, or Le Monde.
What is your advice for newspapers in regions like the Middle East and Asia where print media are still strong?
Many newspapers are threatened today because they didn’t fundamentally change their business even when the writing was on the wall years ago. Those newspapers in parts of the world where the industry is doing better will in turn hit the wall and collapse in time if they don’t start changing today. The imperative is to build new channels, reposition, and shift for the reality of a changing world.
What comes next? After the internet and social networking, is there anything more to be discovered in the media world?
Some of the emerging trends in media are reputation measures for media organisations and individual journalists, the social curation of news to give insights that are uniquely relevant to us, building new transaction-based revenue models, and media becoming a real hub for communities in a way that we still rarely see today. Media will dominate the economy, and in many ways be barely recognisable from the industry we see today.
Source: gulfnews.com
Thursday, September 10, 2009
What Media Companies Could Learn From Microsoft: Smart Bundling
The media industry is desperately trying to find new business models for the online age. A lot of the current discussion revolves around micro payments: Is it possible to get users to pay small amounts for each newspaper article? The metaphor “iTunes for news” seems to become a favorite model of many media people, and major players such as News Corp. are already planning to roll out micro payments.
I think they couldn’t be more wrong about this. It’s actually amazing that traditional media companies seem to be largely blind to the factors that made their traditional business models successful.
One factor is the control of distribution channels (I blogged about this earlier). This is difficult to replicate in the digital world, because digital content is so easy to replicate and distribute.
But the second element is actually much easier to implement for digital content: Bundling.
When you buy a CD (if you are still old-fashioned enough to do that), you pay $15 or so for a collection of around 10 songs. Chances are that you are only interested in one or two of these songs. So why don’t you just buy the single? Mainly because the music industry since the 50s consciously pushed the album format, suggesting more value. Look, you only pay $1.50 per song on the album, but singles often cost $5 or more for just one song.
How about your newspaper (if you still read one)? How much would you be willing to pay for today’s front page story in the New York Times? How much for the top article in the business section or sports section? A dollar? A few cents? Nothing at all? This probably depends strongly on your interests. On any given day, there are probably a handful of articles in a newspaper that you would be willing to pay for specifically. Most of the rest are worth almost nothing to you. But you are willing to pay a couple of dollars for the whole thing.
This is bundling at work. It’s extremely difficult to set the right price for a piece of content, since different people will see very different value in it. Therefore, it’s often the most profitable solution to sell bundles of content items at a relatively low total price to extract the maximum value from customers.
A great example for this from another industry is Microsoft Office. This suite of productivity programs today completely dominates the market. Most people would probably agree that that’s not because Microsoft had the best programs –some people still have nostalgic feelings for WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. It’s because Microsoft sold the most attractive bundle of adequate programs at a very nice total price.
Here’s a simplified example that explains why this is smart: Let’s assume that User A wants to do a lot of word processing. He’s willing to pay $250 for a good word processor. He also wants a spreadsheet program, but is only willing to pay $50 for it.
User B is a finance guy and needs a good spreadsheet, for which he is willing to pay $350. He has no use for a word processor, but will pay $50 for a presentation program. And User C, a consultant, is willing to pay $200 for a presentation program, $100 for a word processor and $50 for a spreadsheet.
So, if you’re a spreadsheet vendor, what’s your ideal price? You could charge $350 and only sell to User B. You could charge $50 and sell to all three users, but that would leave money on the table. It’s really difficult to set the right price.
The best solution for this is to sell a bundle of a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program and charge $300 for it. At this price point, all our fictional users will buy the whole package and will be very happy, because they get a solution at a price they are willing to pay, but with much more overall functionality. The vendor could only make more money if he were able to charge each user an individual price (what economists call perfect price discrimination), but in most markets, that’s impossible.
Microsoft is great at coming up with bundled editions of its software. There are five different versions of Microsoft Office, all with different elements and at different price points, but of course all based on the same code base. Of course, it’s dangerous to overdo this. The seven different versions of Windows Vista were just confusing.
Obviously, bundling works for software. It also works for most forms of content, and it can work particularly well for digital content, because it’s so easy to build bundles of digital content at almost no additional cost.
Unfortunately, the music business largely missed the boat on this. By allowing Apple to sell individual songs through iTunes, the music industry broke the album model, and there’s probably no way to get it back. The new subscription models that some record labels are experimenting with are of course nothing but another form of bundling, although at a much lower average price point.
Newspaper publishers don’t seem to get bundling at all. That’s probably because in the world of the physical paper, they can only sell a very limited number of different bundles (maybe a local and a national edition). Even the only two newspapers that successfully charge for online editions, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, only sell one or two different online bundles. That’s simply stupid. Why isn’t there an expensive Pro version of the FT with full access to all market data, maybe even bundled with additional data sources? A cheap student version? A standard version just with the news and opinion columns? A version for people who want to read the FT primarily on their mobile device and just want the most important headlines? This kind of creative price differentiation would certainly extend the number of subscribers dramatically.
And the same applies to other parts of the media industry: Why doesn’t Hulu (or iTunes) sell an attractively priced subscription for its most popular shows, for instance a bundle that gives you The Office, Family Guy and Saturday Night Live, but also throws in a number of less well-known shows? If that’s the easiest way to get these shows, many people will sign up. The TV industry seems to believe that many people are going to pay $2 or more per episode on iTunes, they are almost certainly wrong. Nobody does that in traditional media. People pay for a satellite or cable subscription, which is a classic bundle. Deciding for each show individually if it is worth $2 is simply too much work. Pay-per-view only works for big-ticket items, and there’s no reason why this should be different in online media.
It’s really remarkable how little media companies seem to get the basic rules of bundling: Sell a bundle of products that have different value to different people at a price that seems really, really attractive when compared to the prices of the individual items. Make sure that you offer different editions that appeal to different target markets. That’s all. Just ask Bill Gates.
Source: Andreas Goeldi
I think they couldn’t be more wrong about this. It’s actually amazing that traditional media companies seem to be largely blind to the factors that made their traditional business models successful.
One factor is the control of distribution channels (I blogged about this earlier). This is difficult to replicate in the digital world, because digital content is so easy to replicate and distribute.
But the second element is actually much easier to implement for digital content: Bundling.
When you buy a CD (if you are still old-fashioned enough to do that), you pay $15 or so for a collection of around 10 songs. Chances are that you are only interested in one or two of these songs. So why don’t you just buy the single? Mainly because the music industry since the 50s consciously pushed the album format, suggesting more value. Look, you only pay $1.50 per song on the album, but singles often cost $5 or more for just one song.
How about your newspaper (if you still read one)? How much would you be willing to pay for today’s front page story in the New York Times? How much for the top article in the business section or sports section? A dollar? A few cents? Nothing at all? This probably depends strongly on your interests. On any given day, there are probably a handful of articles in a newspaper that you would be willing to pay for specifically. Most of the rest are worth almost nothing to you. But you are willing to pay a couple of dollars for the whole thing.
This is bundling at work. It’s extremely difficult to set the right price for a piece of content, since different people will see very different value in it. Therefore, it’s often the most profitable solution to sell bundles of content items at a relatively low total price to extract the maximum value from customers.
A great example for this from another industry is Microsoft Office. This suite of productivity programs today completely dominates the market. Most people would probably agree that that’s not because Microsoft had the best programs –some people still have nostalgic feelings for WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. It’s because Microsoft sold the most attractive bundle of adequate programs at a very nice total price.
Here’s a simplified example that explains why this is smart: Let’s assume that User A wants to do a lot of word processing. He’s willing to pay $250 for a good word processor. He also wants a spreadsheet program, but is only willing to pay $50 for it.
User B is a finance guy and needs a good spreadsheet, for which he is willing to pay $350. He has no use for a word processor, but will pay $50 for a presentation program. And User C, a consultant, is willing to pay $200 for a presentation program, $100 for a word processor and $50 for a spreadsheet.
So, if you’re a spreadsheet vendor, what’s your ideal price? You could charge $350 and only sell to User B. You could charge $50 and sell to all three users, but that would leave money on the table. It’s really difficult to set the right price.
The best solution for this is to sell a bundle of a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program and charge $300 for it. At this price point, all our fictional users will buy the whole package and will be very happy, because they get a solution at a price they are willing to pay, but with much more overall functionality. The vendor could only make more money if he were able to charge each user an individual price (what economists call perfect price discrimination), but in most markets, that’s impossible.
Microsoft is great at coming up with bundled editions of its software. There are five different versions of Microsoft Office, all with different elements and at different price points, but of course all based on the same code base. Of course, it’s dangerous to overdo this. The seven different versions of Windows Vista were just confusing.
Obviously, bundling works for software. It also works for most forms of content, and it can work particularly well for digital content, because it’s so easy to build bundles of digital content at almost no additional cost.
Unfortunately, the music business largely missed the boat on this. By allowing Apple to sell individual songs through iTunes, the music industry broke the album model, and there’s probably no way to get it back. The new subscription models that some record labels are experimenting with are of course nothing but another form of bundling, although at a much lower average price point.
Newspaper publishers don’t seem to get bundling at all. That’s probably because in the world of the physical paper, they can only sell a very limited number of different bundles (maybe a local and a national edition). Even the only two newspapers that successfully charge for online editions, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, only sell one or two different online bundles. That’s simply stupid. Why isn’t there an expensive Pro version of the FT with full access to all market data, maybe even bundled with additional data sources? A cheap student version? A standard version just with the news and opinion columns? A version for people who want to read the FT primarily on their mobile device and just want the most important headlines? This kind of creative price differentiation would certainly extend the number of subscribers dramatically.
And the same applies to other parts of the media industry: Why doesn’t Hulu (or iTunes) sell an attractively priced subscription for its most popular shows, for instance a bundle that gives you The Office, Family Guy and Saturday Night Live, but also throws in a number of less well-known shows? If that’s the easiest way to get these shows, many people will sign up. The TV industry seems to believe that many people are going to pay $2 or more per episode on iTunes, they are almost certainly wrong. Nobody does that in traditional media. People pay for a satellite or cable subscription, which is a classic bundle. Deciding for each show individually if it is worth $2 is simply too much work. Pay-per-view only works for big-ticket items, and there’s no reason why this should be different in online media.
It’s really remarkable how little media companies seem to get the basic rules of bundling: Sell a bundle of products that have different value to different people at a price that seems really, really attractive when compared to the prices of the individual items. Make sure that you offer different editions that appeal to different target markets. That’s all. Just ask Bill Gates.
Source: Andreas Goeldi
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Saving journalism, a farthing at a time
Newspapers are struggling to make ends meet online. The answer is not to give content away but to sell it – for peanuts
Ever since Rupert Murdoch announced plans to put his digital titles behind a paywall, claiming the "free" web was dead, the rest of the media have either pooh-poohed his proposals, or nervously wondered if they should do likewise.
A great deal of online content is profitably charged for – notably music and porn – but news struggles. With the exception of some high-value material from publications like the Wall Street Journal, news doesn't seem able to turn a buck. Experiments in charging have largely failed – and the advertising-subsidised model has reigned supreme.
However, with recession, advertising revenues, always marginal at best, have dried up. Publishers are in a nightmarish situation; they know the print side of their business is struggling, they know punters want their news online, but they can't see how to make it pay. In desperation others may follow Murdoch's retreat behind the paywall. Not good news for news addicts. It isn't so much the money, it's the usernames, passwords, subscriptions ... Actually, it is the money. But publishers need a profit. Information might want to be free – but food and housing isn't. So is there another way? Some model that brings in more than advertising, but doesn't exclude casual visitors, either by cost or inconvenience? Well yes – an idea that won't go away: micropayments.
The basic concept of micropayments is that you charge at a price that doesn't deter consumers at all, but will aggregate enough profit, via mass sales, to sustain a business. Classical micropayment theory (yes, there is a classical and neo theory – probably a superstring version too) states that payments should be of the order of 1/1000 of a US cent. A cent would be the minimum now. Fans claim this is beneath the mental threshold at which resistance to a purchase sets in. Critics divide into two camps – those who feel it's a dumb idea, and those who feel it's evil. Dumb because similar schemes have failed in the past. Evil because it swipes your money under the radar, and an effective scheme could easily expand to diminish the entire web by fencing off vast quantities of content. The dumb argument can be countered – we can implement a scheme today that beats previous implementations hands down – I'll explain how in a moment. I pretty much accept the evil argument, but it's the lesser of several evils – the main one being that journalism goes down the pan unless we find a way to fund mainstream media online.
So, how could it work? Step forward Google. Many of you will be familiar with Google Ads – perhaps not with how the system works. Basically, you sign up, create a bundle of code using their site tools, wrap it into your own pages and presto, ads appear, and when your visitors click on those ads, you get paid. Not immediately. Payments – tiny payments – are tracked and added up. To reduce payment transaction costs, you're paid one sum, once a month. The code has unique identifiers, the code is smart enough to tell Google to look at your pages, providing content-targeted ads. The database in the background keeps track. You just watch the money roll in. The transfer potential of this technology to a micropayments scenario is clear: individuals would sign up with Google, deposit funds. They'd have a unique ID attached to them at that point – an encrypted cookie stored on whichever PC they happen to log in with. When they visit a site with GoogleDosh embedded they're allowed in, a fraction of a penny is switched to the content provider's account for every item they read – if visitors aren't GoogleDosh members, they're re-routed, perhaps, to a précis, or a sign-up form, or even to a limited trial. The key difference from other micropayment schemes is scale – and that's what beats individual site subscriptions too – sign up with one scheme, and you get access to thousands of sites. That's my theory, at least. It's technically simple – an easy step if publishers accept a single standard, and the success of Google Ads suggests they will. Publishers win, consumers win long-term by supporting content providers, and in the short term, if good sense among sellers prevails, they get a bargain: spending pennies a day for all the content they need. Not just news of course – anything could be paid for in the same way.
Googlephobics will no doubt hold their hands up in horror. Tough. This needs a big player – there are two: Google and Microsoft. Of the two, Google already has the infrastructure and the reputation for managing situations like this. Not only that, but they're touted as news content's No 1 enemy, via GoogleNews. They "owe" the press one. Yes, there are issues. Privacy. Exclusion, perhaps. And further entrenching a near-monopoly position. But these can be countered, technically and economically – and nothing stops parallel schemes running, once the concept is established. The fact is that in the boom years micropayments looked like a lot of fuss, and a leap into the unknown. I get the impression publishers' pride got in the way of being asked to sell for pennies. But now the boom is over, micropayments aren't an option – they may be the only way forward.
Source: guardian.co.uk
Ever since Rupert Murdoch announced plans to put his digital titles behind a paywall, claiming the "free" web was dead, the rest of the media have either pooh-poohed his proposals, or nervously wondered if they should do likewise.
A great deal of online content is profitably charged for – notably music and porn – but news struggles. With the exception of some high-value material from publications like the Wall Street Journal, news doesn't seem able to turn a buck. Experiments in charging have largely failed – and the advertising-subsidised model has reigned supreme.
However, with recession, advertising revenues, always marginal at best, have dried up. Publishers are in a nightmarish situation; they know the print side of their business is struggling, they know punters want their news online, but they can't see how to make it pay. In desperation others may follow Murdoch's retreat behind the paywall. Not good news for news addicts. It isn't so much the money, it's the usernames, passwords, subscriptions ... Actually, it is the money. But publishers need a profit. Information might want to be free – but food and housing isn't. So is there another way? Some model that brings in more than advertising, but doesn't exclude casual visitors, either by cost or inconvenience? Well yes – an idea that won't go away: micropayments.
The basic concept of micropayments is that you charge at a price that doesn't deter consumers at all, but will aggregate enough profit, via mass sales, to sustain a business. Classical micropayment theory (yes, there is a classical and neo theory – probably a superstring version too) states that payments should be of the order of 1/1000 of a US cent. A cent would be the minimum now. Fans claim this is beneath the mental threshold at which resistance to a purchase sets in. Critics divide into two camps – those who feel it's a dumb idea, and those who feel it's evil. Dumb because similar schemes have failed in the past. Evil because it swipes your money under the radar, and an effective scheme could easily expand to diminish the entire web by fencing off vast quantities of content. The dumb argument can be countered – we can implement a scheme today that beats previous implementations hands down – I'll explain how in a moment. I pretty much accept the evil argument, but it's the lesser of several evils – the main one being that journalism goes down the pan unless we find a way to fund mainstream media online.
So, how could it work? Step forward Google. Many of you will be familiar with Google Ads – perhaps not with how the system works. Basically, you sign up, create a bundle of code using their site tools, wrap it into your own pages and presto, ads appear, and when your visitors click on those ads, you get paid. Not immediately. Payments – tiny payments – are tracked and added up. To reduce payment transaction costs, you're paid one sum, once a month. The code has unique identifiers, the code is smart enough to tell Google to look at your pages, providing content-targeted ads. The database in the background keeps track. You just watch the money roll in. The transfer potential of this technology to a micropayments scenario is clear: individuals would sign up with Google, deposit funds. They'd have a unique ID attached to them at that point – an encrypted cookie stored on whichever PC they happen to log in with. When they visit a site with GoogleDosh embedded they're allowed in, a fraction of a penny is switched to the content provider's account for every item they read – if visitors aren't GoogleDosh members, they're re-routed, perhaps, to a précis, or a sign-up form, or even to a limited trial. The key difference from other micropayment schemes is scale – and that's what beats individual site subscriptions too – sign up with one scheme, and you get access to thousands of sites. That's my theory, at least. It's technically simple – an easy step if publishers accept a single standard, and the success of Google Ads suggests they will. Publishers win, consumers win long-term by supporting content providers, and in the short term, if good sense among sellers prevails, they get a bargain: spending pennies a day for all the content they need. Not just news of course – anything could be paid for in the same way.
Googlephobics will no doubt hold their hands up in horror. Tough. This needs a big player – there are two: Google and Microsoft. Of the two, Google already has the infrastructure and the reputation for managing situations like this. Not only that, but they're touted as news content's No 1 enemy, via GoogleNews. They "owe" the press one. Yes, there are issues. Privacy. Exclusion, perhaps. And further entrenching a near-monopoly position. But these can be countered, technically and economically – and nothing stops parallel schemes running, once the concept is established. The fact is that in the boom years micropayments looked like a lot of fuss, and a leap into the unknown. I get the impression publishers' pride got in the way of being asked to sell for pennies. But now the boom is over, micropayments aren't an option – they may be the only way forward.
Source: guardian.co.uk
Monday, May 18, 2009
"The rebirth of the news business" without traditional media?
THE Economist has made the news industry the special focus of its business section for its latest edition. "Established" news is described as "being blown away" but news in general is otherwise considered to be "thriving."
In an opening paragraph which does not bode well for advocates of traditional media, the Economist ponders if "the surest sign that newspapers are doomed is that politicians, so often their targets, are beginning to feel sorry for them," in reference to Barack Obama's pledge to newspapers last weekend at an industry dinner in Washington, as well as Massachusetts senator, John Kerry's commitment to help the "endangered species" and, in particular, his region's beloved Boston Globe.
Survey statistics from the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and information from consultants OC&C are used to build a picture of a fading industry: last month, the former said that newsroom unemployment in the States had reached a 30-year low, while the latter calculated that 70 British local newspapers have disappeared since the beginning of 2008. Of course, the trend is not limited to Anglo-speaking countries, with the press in France and Spain, for example, also suffering: "French newspapers have avoided the same fate only by securing an increase in their already hefty government subsidies," notes the Economist, with regards to a 600 million euro government bail-out.
News consumption is changing, says the Economist, talking about a study carried out by the Pew Research Centre, in which for the first time in 2008, internet overtook print as the primary news source. Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, is cited as saying that online news has come to be viewed as "an all-you-can-eat buffet for which you pay a cable company the only charge."
Traditional news outlets, including print and broadcast, as well the original "internet pioneers" such as AOL.com and MSN.com, are depicted as "old-fashioned department stores." A business model that once worked on account of its ability to offer consumers a wide-range of quality goods all under one roof no longer holds. Instead, customers are enticed by the giveaway discount culture of the Internet; Google has taken over as the new one-stop shop.
The Economist argues that news aggregators - seen by many within the news industry as "parasites" who feed off the work of others - do more good than they do harm and is right to point out that "interest in a story about Iraq in, say, the Los Angeles Times extends far beyond that city. Before the aggregators appeared, a reader in Seville or even San Francisco probably would not have known it existed."
The Huffington Post is singled out as a model aggregator for what the Economist describes as its ability to enlist "an unpaid army of some 3,000 mostly left-wing bloggers" to cater for the 4.2m unique readers that visit the site monthly. "The inherent benefit of spreading stories around helps explain why some established news outfits are coming to resemble aggregators," says the Economist.
British and American news publication, the Week, is an example of a print news aggregator. We would also add here France's Courrier International, an excellent editorial product with sadly circulation figures that do not reflect this (despite a steady increase over recent years). Established in 1987, the weekly title today offers a look at the leading articles from around the world, with more than 900 international publications within its scope. Recurring themes are chosen from several newspapers from different parts of the globe and are translated into French for the home audience. For instance, in the latest edition (printed Thursday), the cover story concentrates on India's "awakening" with 10 articles translated from 8 of India's leading papers. Additionally, every week, stories outlining outside perception of France and the French also appear and Thursday's edition coincidentally kicks off the "France" section with the cover story which appeared on last week's edition of the Economist: "Europe's new pecking order" (France was considered to come out top, although the Economist does not expect it to hold onto this position for long).
With regards to pay walls, while the Economist believes that newspapers and magazines are more likely to be saved thanks to "a careful combination of free and paid-for content," it believes general news will largely remain free on the web, although it seems to contradict this view in another article - also part of the same series, with the role of the Internet in "killing the newspaper" at its core - claiming this approach is unsustainable in the long term.
On the one hand, the Economist is clearly optimistic about the prospect of news, going forward: "As large branches of the industry wither, new shoots are rising. The result is a business that is smaller and less profitable, but also more efficient and innovative." Yet, its stance on the future of print media is vague. Does it believe that newspapers (along with the established press) are heading for extinction? Or does it think there is still hope?
The Economist seems to think there may no longer be a place for traditional media in today's increasingly digital society and hints at a world where such media eventually dies out, in what it sees as the "end of a certain kind of civic sensibility." What's odd is that such a tone should come from a publication which has always referred to itself as a "newspaper." Interestingly, it avoids doing so in these specific articles.
We must not overlook emerging markets such as India and China, where despite some stagnation, the newspaper industry (not just news) is flourishing, as recent investments show. Some may argue that rising literacy levels will eventually lead to news consumption moving online even in these parts of the world, and once internet penetration becomes more substantial, this is a possibility. Although, coming back to the West, Canada is proof that a solid internet network does not necessarily mean that print must suffer.
The argument that Obama has every "intention to bypass the news filter" is unconvincing and it seems more likely that he and his multimedia-savvy team are simply engaging with all branches of the media community, in what some have called a "new spirit of inclusion," which includes the social networking community.
While newspapers may be in decline, it is premature to write newspapers off entirely, although there is no doubt that some aspects of the original business model need to be revised and adapted to the needs of today's readers and advertisers. Newspapers have generally been battered and bruised and bounced about from one would-be proprietor to the next, obliged to cut back staff and, in many cases, forced to shutdown altogether. This is not the result of dwindling circulation, for despite drops, there is still a large contingent of people for whom reading the newspaper is an essential part of keeping themselves informed.
Source: Economist.com
In an opening paragraph which does not bode well for advocates of traditional media, the Economist ponders if "the surest sign that newspapers are doomed is that politicians, so often their targets, are beginning to feel sorry for them," in reference to Barack Obama's pledge to newspapers last weekend at an industry dinner in Washington, as well as Massachusetts senator, John Kerry's commitment to help the "endangered species" and, in particular, his region's beloved Boston Globe.Survey statistics from the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and information from consultants OC&C are used to build a picture of a fading industry: last month, the former said that newsroom unemployment in the States had reached a 30-year low, while the latter calculated that 70 British local newspapers have disappeared since the beginning of 2008. Of course, the trend is not limited to Anglo-speaking countries, with the press in France and Spain, for example, also suffering: "French newspapers have avoided the same fate only by securing an increase in their already hefty government subsidies," notes the Economist, with regards to a 600 million euro government bail-out.
News consumption is changing, says the Economist, talking about a study carried out by the Pew Research Centre, in which for the first time in 2008, internet overtook print as the primary news source. Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, is cited as saying that online news has come to be viewed as "an all-you-can-eat buffet for which you pay a cable company the only charge."
Traditional news outlets, including print and broadcast, as well the original "internet pioneers" such as AOL.com and MSN.com, are depicted as "old-fashioned department stores." A business model that once worked on account of its ability to offer consumers a wide-range of quality goods all under one roof no longer holds. Instead, customers are enticed by the giveaway discount culture of the Internet; Google has taken over as the new one-stop shop.
The Economist argues that news aggregators - seen by many within the news industry as "parasites" who feed off the work of others - do more good than they do harm and is right to point out that "interest in a story about Iraq in, say, the Los Angeles Times extends far beyond that city. Before the aggregators appeared, a reader in Seville or even San Francisco probably would not have known it existed."
The Huffington Post is singled out as a model aggregator for what the Economist describes as its ability to enlist "an unpaid army of some 3,000 mostly left-wing bloggers" to cater for the 4.2m unique readers that visit the site monthly. "The inherent benefit of spreading stories around helps explain why some established news outfits are coming to resemble aggregators," says the Economist.
British and American news publication, the Week, is an example of a print news aggregator. We would also add here France's Courrier International, an excellent editorial product with sadly circulation figures that do not reflect this (despite a steady increase over recent years). Established in 1987, the weekly title today offers a look at the leading articles from around the world, with more than 900 international publications within its scope. Recurring themes are chosen from several newspapers from different parts of the globe and are translated into French for the home audience. For instance, in the latest edition (printed Thursday), the cover story concentrates on India's "awakening" with 10 articles translated from 8 of India's leading papers. Additionally, every week, stories outlining outside perception of France and the French also appear and Thursday's edition coincidentally kicks off the "France" section with the cover story which appeared on last week's edition of the Economist: "Europe's new pecking order" (France was considered to come out top, although the Economist does not expect it to hold onto this position for long).
With regards to pay walls, while the Economist believes that newspapers and magazines are more likely to be saved thanks to "a careful combination of free and paid-for content," it believes general news will largely remain free on the web, although it seems to contradict this view in another article - also part of the same series, with the role of the Internet in "killing the newspaper" at its core - claiming this approach is unsustainable in the long term.
On the one hand, the Economist is clearly optimistic about the prospect of news, going forward: "As large branches of the industry wither, new shoots are rising. The result is a business that is smaller and less profitable, but also more efficient and innovative." Yet, its stance on the future of print media is vague. Does it believe that newspapers (along with the established press) are heading for extinction? Or does it think there is still hope?
The Economist seems to think there may no longer be a place for traditional media in today's increasingly digital society and hints at a world where such media eventually dies out, in what it sees as the "end of a certain kind of civic sensibility." What's odd is that such a tone should come from a publication which has always referred to itself as a "newspaper." Interestingly, it avoids doing so in these specific articles.
We must not overlook emerging markets such as India and China, where despite some stagnation, the newspaper industry (not just news) is flourishing, as recent investments show. Some may argue that rising literacy levels will eventually lead to news consumption moving online even in these parts of the world, and once internet penetration becomes more substantial, this is a possibility. Although, coming back to the West, Canada is proof that a solid internet network does not necessarily mean that print must suffer.
The argument that Obama has every "intention to bypass the news filter" is unconvincing and it seems more likely that he and his multimedia-savvy team are simply engaging with all branches of the media community, in what some have called a "new spirit of inclusion," which includes the social networking community.
While newspapers may be in decline, it is premature to write newspapers off entirely, although there is no doubt that some aspects of the original business model need to be revised and adapted to the needs of today's readers and advertisers. Newspapers have generally been battered and bruised and bounced about from one would-be proprietor to the next, obliged to cut back staff and, in many cases, forced to shutdown altogether. This is not the result of dwindling circulation, for despite drops, there is still a large contingent of people for whom reading the newspaper is an essential part of keeping themselves informed.
Source: Economist.com
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Is the worst of the advertising recession over?
Media companies including ITV, Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press reporting signs of let-up in ad revenue decline
It's not the end. It's not even the beginning of the end. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it may be the end of the beginning of the brutal advertising recession that has battered UK media over the past six to nine months.
Media companies including ITV, Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press are starting to see some positive signs of a bottoming out of the vertiginous year-on-year advertising revenue declines the industry has endured since mid-2008.
In the wider economy, voices are also being tentatively raised to say that the worst of the recession may be over.
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, today painted a mixed picture of the timeline for an economic recovery in the UK. On the one hand, King put back the forecast for a return to economic growth from the end of this year to mid-2010. On the other, he said that it was true that there were reasons for optimism as the pace of economic decline had now moderated.
However, analysts warn that the real litmus test of the road to recovery for the media industry will be how advertisers react in the months leading up to Christmas 2009.
Trinity Mirror today pointed out some glimmers of light in its May performance for its national newspaper operation – if not the ailing regional division.
The Daily Mirror publisher also said that it expects a better performance, at least on a relative basis, in the second half of 2009.
This is to be expected – when you're comparing quarterly advertising revenue with year on year declines of 30% and more for the same period in 2008, the new figures are likely to look rosier.
But it also alleviates at least some of pressure on publicly listed media companies that have had only horror stories to tell the City in their recent results announcements.
Johnston Press also today indicated that there had been "some stability" in ad revenue in recent weeks. John Fry, the company's chief executive, said:
"We have go to the part where it starts to get easier. Ads have stabilised, albeit at a much lower level, but stable week to week.
"It would be dangerous for me to start talking about economic recovery, but we are not seeing it [ad revenue] drop like last year. We are not in the green shoots area yet, we are still bumping along the bottom."
Daily Mail & General Trust in March reported signs of stabilisation in classified revenues outside of the recruitment sector.
"The industry buzz word is stabilisation," said Alex de Groote, a media analyst at Panmure Gordon, today. De Groote added:
"Things are not really getting better at this point but a bottoming out means they are not getting worse. The feeling is that in the fourth quarter last year and the first in 2009 things hit a nadir.
"The second quarter has not been that much better, fractionally maybe, but the hope is that the secong half will see the situation get a little better."
ITV, which is set to put out an interim management statement early tomorrow ahead of its annual general meeting, has also started to see some signs of stabilisation.
Brokers Numis expect ITV1's approximate 20% year-on-year fall in ad revenue in the first half of this year to narrow to a 10% fall in the second half.
However, one senior ITV executive warned that there is likely to be a W-shaped bounce for the struggling broadcaster. The predictions is for ITV to show signs of improvement, on a relative basis, in the final three months of 2009, followed by a challenging first quarter in 2010.
ITV is then is expected to see an advertising boost from the second quarter of 2010, fuelled by the football World Cup in South Africa and spending across the board in the run-up to a general election.
"Current trading is bumping along the bottom. There will be good months and bad months but things seem to be stabilising," said Paul Richards, an analyst at Numis. He added:
"The question is when are they going to get better. The fourth quarter is the key quarter. If we can see mid-single digit declines [at ITV] then we can safely say that things are stabilising, that the worst may be over and that we can then look forward to recovery."
The changing mood of the City about the prospects for media companies has also been reflected in an improved share price performance for some in the sector in recent weeks.
"The stock market priced some of these [media] names at almost zero worth, mega-distressed, when in fact in the last six weeks to two months there has been a clear, strong and concerted rally in these businesses in equity prices," says De Groote.
De Groote points out that, relative to the performance of the FTSE 100, Trinity Mirror's share price has risen 46% over the past three months; while Johnston Press - a worse than expected set of figures today notwithstanding - is up 286%, and DMGT up 20% over the same period.
However, de Groote less optimistic on when the UK ad market will return to real growth. "In terms of ad growth at some stage next year we may see positive growth in traditional media," he said. "Perhaps close to the end of the year."
Source: guardian.co.uk
It's not the end. It's not even the beginning of the end. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it may be the end of the beginning of the brutal advertising recession that has battered UK media over the past six to nine months.
Media companies including ITV, Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press are starting to see some positive signs of a bottoming out of the vertiginous year-on-year advertising revenue declines the industry has endured since mid-2008.
In the wider economy, voices are also being tentatively raised to say that the worst of the recession may be over.
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, today painted a mixed picture of the timeline for an economic recovery in the UK. On the one hand, King put back the forecast for a return to economic growth from the end of this year to mid-2010. On the other, he said that it was true that there were reasons for optimism as the pace of economic decline had now moderated.
However, analysts warn that the real litmus test of the road to recovery for the media industry will be how advertisers react in the months leading up to Christmas 2009.
Trinity Mirror today pointed out some glimmers of light in its May performance for its national newspaper operation – if not the ailing regional division.
The Daily Mirror publisher also said that it expects a better performance, at least on a relative basis, in the second half of 2009.
This is to be expected – when you're comparing quarterly advertising revenue with year on year declines of 30% and more for the same period in 2008, the new figures are likely to look rosier.
But it also alleviates at least some of pressure on publicly listed media companies that have had only horror stories to tell the City in their recent results announcements.
Johnston Press also today indicated that there had been "some stability" in ad revenue in recent weeks. John Fry, the company's chief executive, said:
"We have go to the part where it starts to get easier. Ads have stabilised, albeit at a much lower level, but stable week to week.
"It would be dangerous for me to start talking about economic recovery, but we are not seeing it [ad revenue] drop like last year. We are not in the green shoots area yet, we are still bumping along the bottom."
Daily Mail & General Trust in March reported signs of stabilisation in classified revenues outside of the recruitment sector.
"The industry buzz word is stabilisation," said Alex de Groote, a media analyst at Panmure Gordon, today. De Groote added:
"Things are not really getting better at this point but a bottoming out means they are not getting worse. The feeling is that in the fourth quarter last year and the first in 2009 things hit a nadir.
"The second quarter has not been that much better, fractionally maybe, but the hope is that the secong half will see the situation get a little better."
ITV, which is set to put out an interim management statement early tomorrow ahead of its annual general meeting, has also started to see some signs of stabilisation.
Brokers Numis expect ITV1's approximate 20% year-on-year fall in ad revenue in the first half of this year to narrow to a 10% fall in the second half.
However, one senior ITV executive warned that there is likely to be a W-shaped bounce for the struggling broadcaster. The predictions is for ITV to show signs of improvement, on a relative basis, in the final three months of 2009, followed by a challenging first quarter in 2010.
ITV is then is expected to see an advertising boost from the second quarter of 2010, fuelled by the football World Cup in South Africa and spending across the board in the run-up to a general election.
"Current trading is bumping along the bottom. There will be good months and bad months but things seem to be stabilising," said Paul Richards, an analyst at Numis. He added:
"The question is when are they going to get better. The fourth quarter is the key quarter. If we can see mid-single digit declines [at ITV] then we can safely say that things are stabilising, that the worst may be over and that we can then look forward to recovery."
The changing mood of the City about the prospects for media companies has also been reflected in an improved share price performance for some in the sector in recent weeks.
"The stock market priced some of these [media] names at almost zero worth, mega-distressed, when in fact in the last six weeks to two months there has been a clear, strong and concerted rally in these businesses in equity prices," says De Groote.
De Groote points out that, relative to the performance of the FTSE 100, Trinity Mirror's share price has risen 46% over the past three months; while Johnston Press - a worse than expected set of figures today notwithstanding - is up 286%, and DMGT up 20% over the same period.
However, de Groote less optimistic on when the UK ad market will return to real growth. "In terms of ad growth at some stage next year we may see positive growth in traditional media," he said. "Perhaps close to the end of the year."
Source: guardian.co.uk
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Leading the charge
WHEN Rupert Murdoch indicates a shift in strategy, the rest of the media industry takes notice. So the News Corp boss's clear signal last week that his newspapers, such as the Sun and the Times, could start charging for online access over the next year gave fresh momentum to a debate that is dominating internal newspaper discussions.
"The inchoate days of the internet will soon be over," Murdoch pronounced, citing an "epochal" debate in the industry. Having flirted with the idea of turning the Wall Street Journal website free before realising he had bought one of the world's few newspaper sites that makes money, Murdoch has come down in favour of online charging.
For a long time many journalists have been bemused and frustrated that their work merits a price in one medium but is given away free in another. Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of Guardian Media Group which publishes MediaGuardian, believes publishers need to think about where they might be able to charge in the future. "There's no review of the charging model, there's no formal kind of agreement that we should be charging at all, but it would be wrong not to think about what we would do in the future," she says.
Charging for business-to-business content, however, is a "no-brainer", says McCall, who led GMG's acquisition of Emap's B2B operation on the strength of its capacity to generate digital revenues. The model supporting so-called business-to-professional sites, such as MediaGuardian.co.uk, is "something we need to keep revisiting". But, in general news, the presence of the BBC makes charging impossible: "You basically have a fully funded and publicly funded news organisation on your doorstep. How can you compete with that?"
The BBC is what makes all newspaper executives think twice when it comes to making the internet pay. It has played its part in creating the notion that news should be free, which stands as a barrier to introducing any element of pay to newspaper websites.
Until now, the most important aim for newspapers has been to grow online readership: the higher a site's unique user numbers, the more advertising it could hope to sell. And the numbers have been impressive – titles used to falling paper sales now have millions of new readers. There is no doubt that online readership has massively extended the reach of British newspapers.
Indeed, the combined online audience for the seven audited UK national newspaper networks – the websites of the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Independent, Mail, Sun and Mirror – peaked in January at around 140 million unique users, when Guardian.co.uk hit a record of 29.8 million. It has tailed off very slightly since then, the first sign that online readership may have reached a plateau now that broadband access has become so widespread and online habits more settled.
To some extent, revenues have followed the trend for readership growth – but not fast enough to make up for the fall in print advertising. Trinity Mirror, for instance, reported that total digital revenues in 2008 grew by 27.1% to £43.6m. But they also represented just 5% of the group total, albeit an increase from 3.7% in 2007, at a time when overall revenues dropped by more than £60m.
Advertisers have always seen a difference between consumers of print products who might be expected to spend considerable time reading them and looking at many of the adverts in the process, and a web user who may have merely strayed on to a web page by chance or as the result of making a speculative search.
And even if online readership has yet to reach saturation point, some industry executives think that growing overall numbers may no longer make much difference to their ability to generate new revenues – although they will not find it easy, initially at least, to allow competitors to overtake their traffic figures. Not only is there a finite amount of money available for online advertising, but there are also many, many sites competing for the cash. Newspapers are wondering whether they backed the wrong horse by going for volume rather than subscription.
The focus is now moving to the handful of pay models that have already been developed in publishing. The only British paper that has successfully introduced charging is the Financial Times which, seven years after doing so, has around 110,000 subscribers. A basic subscription to FT.com costs £2.99 a week – £155.48 a year – while a premium deal that includes mobile news and the Lex column costs £3.99 a week, or £207.48 a year.
At less than a third of the £650 cost of buying the print FT every day, and less than half the £468 required to take out a print subscription, the online deal looks like bad business for the company. But Rob Grimshaw, the managing director of FT.com, says the cost of online distribution is far less than printing and distributing a paper. "Online, the marginal cost of adding a new subscription to FT.com from anywhere in the world is pretty much zero. Once you look at it from that aspect, the online business model is extremely favourable. You don't tend to make nearly as much revenue as print but you make the same profit or even more profit."
But without the FT's business niche to target, can other papers charge for content? The fear is that their product is too disposable and substitutable – with multiple versions of the same story online. "Consumers aren't stupid," says Grimshaw. "If they can find something for free they won't pay for it."
Then there is the problem of how to charge. Rather than relying on a subscription model, a solution could involve micropayments – although there is no consensus on how much they would be. Newspapers will have to ensure that whichever system they use is efficient and easy, like Amazon or iTunes. Indeed, newspapers look hopefully towards these other areas of the media where a pay model has already been introduced. The music industry, after its crippling battle against piracy, has finally found a way to sell digital content, albeit at a discount compared with CD sales.
The broadcasting industry offers a less clear picture. The principle of paying for TV, mainly on the back of premium content, has become enshrined after 20 years of Sky, and on-demand viewing through subscriptions has become popular. But there is little evidence that people are willing to go online and pay for individual programmes. The success of the licence-fee funded BBC iPlayer has encouraged ITV to follow suit with a free, ad-funded model, while Channel 4's 4OD service has shifted away from pay-per-view since launching in 2006. Project Kangaroo, the three free-to-air broadcasters' attempt to develop an online home where they might have sold their programmes, was thwarted by competition concerns. (Equally, if newspapers were to make a collective decision to charge for content, which would avoid losing market share to other titles that remained free, there might be similar concerns.)
Perhaps the best hope for newspapers is technological. In the same way that the iPod helped sales of digital music, newspapers hope that there is a device on its way to make the online paper seem more valuable than it does on a computer screen. Some newspaper groups are believed to have had discussions with Amazon about getting their product on to the Kindle reader, a new version of which was launched in the US last week by Jeff Bezos (pictured left). But few believe these first-generation digital readers represent an iPod moment.
Murdoch last week hinted at some of the work News Corp has been doing. "We are looking at lots of things, models for charging, mobile readers," he said. "I don't believe in the Kindle model but I do think it is very interesting that people are going to that and to their BlackBerrys to view content."
In two years' time he hopes that charges for online content will produce digital revenues that make up for newspapers' print losses. That may be optimistic, but there is no doubt the recession has concentrated minds on moving out of the free era.
"There are not many companies out there that make a successful living by giving away their product for free," says Grimshaw. "In the future, quite a lot will be written about how an entire industry managed to persuade itself that it would be smart to give away its product to everybody."
Source: Guardian.co.uk
"The inchoate days of the internet will soon be over," Murdoch pronounced, citing an "epochal" debate in the industry. Having flirted with the idea of turning the Wall Street Journal website free before realising he had bought one of the world's few newspaper sites that makes money, Murdoch has come down in favour of online charging.
For a long time many journalists have been bemused and frustrated that their work merits a price in one medium but is given away free in another. Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of Guardian Media Group which publishes MediaGuardian, believes publishers need to think about where they might be able to charge in the future. "There's no review of the charging model, there's no formal kind of agreement that we should be charging at all, but it would be wrong not to think about what we would do in the future," she says.
Charging for business-to-business content, however, is a "no-brainer", says McCall, who led GMG's acquisition of Emap's B2B operation on the strength of its capacity to generate digital revenues. The model supporting so-called business-to-professional sites, such as MediaGuardian.co.uk, is "something we need to keep revisiting". But, in general news, the presence of the BBC makes charging impossible: "You basically have a fully funded and publicly funded news organisation on your doorstep. How can you compete with that?"
The BBC is what makes all newspaper executives think twice when it comes to making the internet pay. It has played its part in creating the notion that news should be free, which stands as a barrier to introducing any element of pay to newspaper websites.
Until now, the most important aim for newspapers has been to grow online readership: the higher a site's unique user numbers, the more advertising it could hope to sell. And the numbers have been impressive – titles used to falling paper sales now have millions of new readers. There is no doubt that online readership has massively extended the reach of British newspapers.
Indeed, the combined online audience for the seven audited UK national newspaper networks – the websites of the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Independent, Mail, Sun and Mirror – peaked in January at around 140 million unique users, when Guardian.co.uk hit a record of 29.8 million. It has tailed off very slightly since then, the first sign that online readership may have reached a plateau now that broadband access has become so widespread and online habits more settled.
To some extent, revenues have followed the trend for readership growth – but not fast enough to make up for the fall in print advertising. Trinity Mirror, for instance, reported that total digital revenues in 2008 grew by 27.1% to £43.6m. But they also represented just 5% of the group total, albeit an increase from 3.7% in 2007, at a time when overall revenues dropped by more than £60m.
Advertisers have always seen a difference between consumers of print products who might be expected to spend considerable time reading them and looking at many of the adverts in the process, and a web user who may have merely strayed on to a web page by chance or as the result of making a speculative search.
And even if online readership has yet to reach saturation point, some industry executives think that growing overall numbers may no longer make much difference to their ability to generate new revenues – although they will not find it easy, initially at least, to allow competitors to overtake their traffic figures. Not only is there a finite amount of money available for online advertising, but there are also many, many sites competing for the cash. Newspapers are wondering whether they backed the wrong horse by going for volume rather than subscription.
The focus is now moving to the handful of pay models that have already been developed in publishing. The only British paper that has successfully introduced charging is the Financial Times which, seven years after doing so, has around 110,000 subscribers. A basic subscription to FT.com costs £2.99 a week – £155.48 a year – while a premium deal that includes mobile news and the Lex column costs £3.99 a week, or £207.48 a year.
At less than a third of the £650 cost of buying the print FT every day, and less than half the £468 required to take out a print subscription, the online deal looks like bad business for the company. But Rob Grimshaw, the managing director of FT.com, says the cost of online distribution is far less than printing and distributing a paper. "Online, the marginal cost of adding a new subscription to FT.com from anywhere in the world is pretty much zero. Once you look at it from that aspect, the online business model is extremely favourable. You don't tend to make nearly as much revenue as print but you make the same profit or even more profit."
But without the FT's business niche to target, can other papers charge for content? The fear is that their product is too disposable and substitutable – with multiple versions of the same story online. "Consumers aren't stupid," says Grimshaw. "If they can find something for free they won't pay for it."
Then there is the problem of how to charge. Rather than relying on a subscription model, a solution could involve micropayments – although there is no consensus on how much they would be. Newspapers will have to ensure that whichever system they use is efficient and easy, like Amazon or iTunes. Indeed, newspapers look hopefully towards these other areas of the media where a pay model has already been introduced. The music industry, after its crippling battle against piracy, has finally found a way to sell digital content, albeit at a discount compared with CD sales.
The broadcasting industry offers a less clear picture. The principle of paying for TV, mainly on the back of premium content, has become enshrined after 20 years of Sky, and on-demand viewing through subscriptions has become popular. But there is little evidence that people are willing to go online and pay for individual programmes. The success of the licence-fee funded BBC iPlayer has encouraged ITV to follow suit with a free, ad-funded model, while Channel 4's 4OD service has shifted away from pay-per-view since launching in 2006. Project Kangaroo, the three free-to-air broadcasters' attempt to develop an online home where they might have sold their programmes, was thwarted by competition concerns. (Equally, if newspapers were to make a collective decision to charge for content, which would avoid losing market share to other titles that remained free, there might be similar concerns.)
Perhaps the best hope for newspapers is technological. In the same way that the iPod helped sales of digital music, newspapers hope that there is a device on its way to make the online paper seem more valuable than it does on a computer screen. Some newspaper groups are believed to have had discussions with Amazon about getting their product on to the Kindle reader, a new version of which was launched in the US last week by Jeff Bezos (pictured left). But few believe these first-generation digital readers represent an iPod moment.
Murdoch last week hinted at some of the work News Corp has been doing. "We are looking at lots of things, models for charging, mobile readers," he said. "I don't believe in the Kindle model but I do think it is very interesting that people are going to that and to their BlackBerrys to view content."
In two years' time he hopes that charges for online content will produce digital revenues that make up for newspapers' print losses. That may be optimistic, but there is no doubt the recession has concentrated minds on moving out of the free era.
"There are not many companies out there that make a successful living by giving away their product for free," says Grimshaw. "In the future, quite a lot will be written about how an entire industry managed to persuade itself that it would be smart to give away its product to everybody."
Source: Guardian.co.uk
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Print media model is broken
THE business model for print media is broken and publishers should be looking to create their own equivalent of the iPod instead of misguidedly waiting for advertising spend to return, according to Maurice Levy, chief executive and chairman of Publicis Groupe.
Speaking to more than 600 delegates at the FIPP 2009 World Magazine Congress today, the head of one of the world's largest advertising and communications groups shared some sobering observations for both newspapers and magazines, which he labelled "analogue" media.
The chief executive did see a future for print media, but said it required "innovative thinking" and warned it would be necessary to "shatter common views, traditional sentiment and cliché" along the way.
"The end of the economic crisis will not be the end of the crisis for analogue media," he warned. "You are facing a deep, profound structural revolution and have to be prepared for a new world."
He urged publishers not to fall into the waiting-for-a-better-day-trap, in which the automotive sector finds itself, and realise they must adapt to survive.
"Circulation has been decreasing for years now and no stimulus package can stop this long-term trend," he said. "Moreover, who can believe, honestly, that young people, who we call the digital natives, are going to ditch their computers, their iPods, their mobile phones, and go back to print?"
Conference-goers, who had assembled from more than 50 publishing markets, were then told that, in the long term, magazines will not attract as much advertising.
Using forecasts from ZenithOptimedia, a Publicis Groupe agency, Levy said magazines' share of global ad spend is set to continue to contract right through to 2011, regardless of any financial recovery.
Publishers were also told not to expect a sudden "spurt of philanthropy" from advertisers, who are increasingly focused on digital opportunities, but to seize digital as an opportunity.
"Magazines own what is the most important thing to succeed in the world of media and particularly on the net: content," he said.
Citing Bill Gates' well-used mantra, the chief executive said content is still king, which means magazines are well-positioned to find new revenue streams online.
He noted that, although display advertising has proved disappointing for publishers and CPMs remain low, the internet is a very young media and its rules and framework are still being stabilised and finalised.
Using the music industry by way of example, he said it was possible to change free-content models into paid ones, but publishers will "need to think out of the box".
He confessed to being surprised by how little publishers take advantage of their brands and their already well-defined communities (readership).
Why, asked Levy, had magazine publishers not paved the way in user-generated content, performance-based advertising or social networking? And why could publishers not have invented the likes of Twitter and micro-blogging and the use of mobile applications?
Concluding, Levy warned there will not be one business model, no Holy Grail, no one-size fits all solution.
"Each company, each title, each media will have to find its own model," he said. "Do not stand still. Run and don't stop running, at least then your competitors will have to strive to catch you."
Source: MediaWeek.co.uk
Speaking to more than 600 delegates at the FIPP 2009 World Magazine Congress today, the head of one of the world's largest advertising and communications groups shared some sobering observations for both newspapers and magazines, which he labelled "analogue" media.
The chief executive did see a future for print media, but said it required "innovative thinking" and warned it would be necessary to "shatter common views, traditional sentiment and cliché" along the way.
"The end of the economic crisis will not be the end of the crisis for analogue media," he warned. "You are facing a deep, profound structural revolution and have to be prepared for a new world."
He urged publishers not to fall into the waiting-for-a-better-day-trap, in which the automotive sector finds itself, and realise they must adapt to survive.
"Circulation has been decreasing for years now and no stimulus package can stop this long-term trend," he said. "Moreover, who can believe, honestly, that young people, who we call the digital natives, are going to ditch their computers, their iPods, their mobile phones, and go back to print?"
Conference-goers, who had assembled from more than 50 publishing markets, were then told that, in the long term, magazines will not attract as much advertising.
Using forecasts from ZenithOptimedia, a Publicis Groupe agency, Levy said magazines' share of global ad spend is set to continue to contract right through to 2011, regardless of any financial recovery.
Publishers were also told not to expect a sudden "spurt of philanthropy" from advertisers, who are increasingly focused on digital opportunities, but to seize digital as an opportunity.
"Magazines own what is the most important thing to succeed in the world of media and particularly on the net: content," he said.
Citing Bill Gates' well-used mantra, the chief executive said content is still king, which means magazines are well-positioned to find new revenue streams online.
He noted that, although display advertising has proved disappointing for publishers and CPMs remain low, the internet is a very young media and its rules and framework are still being stabilised and finalised.
Using the music industry by way of example, he said it was possible to change free-content models into paid ones, but publishers will "need to think out of the box".
He confessed to being surprised by how little publishers take advantage of their brands and their already well-defined communities (readership).
Why, asked Levy, had magazine publishers not paved the way in user-generated content, performance-based advertising or social networking? And why could publishers not have invented the likes of Twitter and micro-blogging and the use of mobile applications?
Concluding, Levy warned there will not be one business model, no Holy Grail, no one-size fits all solution.
"Each company, each title, each media will have to find its own model," he said. "Do not stand still. Run and don't stop running, at least then your competitors will have to strive to catch you."
Source: MediaWeek.co.uk
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Nielsen: Future Looks Bright for Online Media
DISCUSSING the trajectory of the online medium in the midst of an historic economic downturn is a perilous business. Assaulted every day with downward-facing red arrows, many of the indicators concerning all things digital veer to the negative:
* Online media's "favorite child" status (i.e., a long track record of outstripping the growth of every other medium by a wide margin) appears to have diminished over the past few months.
* Online advertising by the financial services, retail and auto industries has shrunk at a dizzying pace over the past six months.
* Online display advertising's share of revenue has plateaued at 20 percent of the total online ad spend in the U.S., and no panacea appears to be on the horizon.
* Despite online video's persistent positive buzz, actual usage is averaging around six minutes per day in the U.S.
* The social media trend is today's industry darling, but a monetization formula continues to elude the globe's brightest marketers.
Opportunities Abound
But even the most cynical observer has to be swayed by positive developments that define the longer-term opportunities for the online medium and the e-commerce channel. Around the globe, the online population is looking more and more like the overall population -- meaning that in a few short years, online access has moved from being a luxury or something cool to an essential, basic requirement. In addition, packaged-goods manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and telecommunications firms -- historically three of the largest spenders on traditional media -- are moving online at a pace not seen before, even as the recession continues to deepen.
The audience growth and engagement quotient of online video is forcing marketers to positively reassess the value of the online experience. Adoption of social networking capabilities, by both consumers and corporations, has crossed the chasm in what appears to be the blink of an eye.
In the age of Twitter, feedback barriers have all but disappeared, creating a near friction-free environment for playing back brand experience, campaign reactions or brand events.
Search continues to be an indispensable tool for all online denizens and opportunities for additional growth continue to emerge. Search across social media networks is likely to be the next opportunity for search engines. And as consumers increasingly turn to their phones for a wide range of online content -- improved network speeds and rising smart phone penetration helped to grow the mobile Web in the U.S. -- prospects continue to improve.
Bright Future
While 2009 will not be a banner year for online advertising revenues, online will once again outperform all other media in terms of growth. China will likely be flat to down, partially due to the global slowdown, but more importantly, because it will be hard to match the Olympics-related surge during 2008. The U.S. and Japan will be flat to slightly up. There will be pockets of significant (+25 percent) growth, but it will be limited to small to midsize advertising countries such as Brazil and throughout Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.
The longer-term prospects for the global online medium continue to be bright. Led by social media, search, video and the continued online ramp up of the leading marketers, online's share of total advertising spend will continue its steady upward trend as we emerge from the current recession. And given the increased focus on all things digital by the leading packaged-goods companies, online's share of commerce will continue to rise as well.
When all is said and done, brands see tremendous opportunity to increasingly exploit the digital environment to maximize brand-favorable media impressions, but they are starting to look at the mix more holistically. Consumer-generated content has gained inclusion into the "earned media" club of marketing preferences, and the big question going forward will be how paid and earned media share the marketing expenditure pie.
Growth Leaders
Today, online video and social media lead the way in terms of growth. It is rare to see segments significantly grow from both an audience and an engagement standpoint, but there has been exceptional growth over the past couple of years in both video and social media sites. While member communities (i.e., social networking sites) have been garnering impressive audience numbers for the past five years, video audiences have been growing at meteoric rates, surpassing personal e-mail audiences in November 2007. And from a time-spent perspective, member communities surpassed personal e-mail for the first time in February 2009.
The growth in social media is the single most significant story in the online media space today. Social networking sites eclipsed personal e-mail in global reach at 68.4 percent vs. 64.8 percent in February 2009. And even more significant -- in only the first few months of 2009 -- the reach of these sites is growing at a brisk pace, faster than any other online sector.
Mobile Moves
Any discussion about online audience behavior would be incomplete without understanding the mobile dynamic. In the U.S. today, nearly 50 million mobile subscribers access the Web via mobile devices on a monthly basis. In the U.S., the mobile Internet audience grew 74 percent between February 2007 and February 2009. Internationally, the U.S. is one of the leading markets for mobile Internet penetration, with more than 18 percent of subscribers accessing the mobile Web. This is the highest penetration of mobile subscribers among the markets for which Nielsen reports mobile Internet adoption, followed by the U.K., where nearly 17 percent of subscribers used mobile Web in Q1 2008.
There's an increasingly broad range of content consumed over mobile Web, too. While many initially expected the platform to be dominated by e-mail, news and weather, Nielsen's latest U.S. mobile Internet research reveals a long tail of content interest. Portals, e-mail, weather and news do garner audiences of more than 20 million unique mobile users each, but categories such as food and dining, travel and health and fitness also attract millions of mobile Internet users each month.
Recessionary Impact
From an advertising perspective, it seems funeral dirges for online display advertising were heard throughout 2008, and things went from bad to worse in the fourth quarter, when the bottom fell out of the economy and all forms of advertising were hammered. As the dreary holiday season came to a close and 2008 ended with a whimper, many were wondering if the days of online advertising's favorite-child status were at an end.
While many other metrics registered all-time worst numbers in 2008, Nielsen reports that online advertising overall did a bit better than the doomsayers thought. Quarter four showed a 4.5 percent uptick from Q3, and a 2.6 percent increase from Q4 2007. And for the full year, online ad revenues grew more than 10 percent. Despite the slightly-better-than-expected year-end performance of online advertising, the true impact of the deep recession will be told in the 2009 numbers.
Global Roundup
When scanning the globe, the country-by-country online advertising experience is a true patchwork quilt. The Scandinavian countries, Australia and China are clearly in the fast lane, while the U.K., France, Spain and Japan are moving ahead, but at a slower pace. Germany, Switzerland and Italy are barely growing, and the Benelux countries appear to be moving backwards.
It's clear that the global economic downturn is having an effect on all markets. And while online ad volumes appear to be brisk in some quarters, online ad rates are under such pressure that many advertisers are finding that rates from publishers are essentially the same rates they're receiving from ad networks. As many of these international markets are starting from a significantly lower base of online advertising, their growth rates will outstrip the U.S. in many cases as the global economy picks up again.
Source: adweek.com
* Online media's "favorite child" status (i.e., a long track record of outstripping the growth of every other medium by a wide margin) appears to have diminished over the past few months.
* Online advertising by the financial services, retail and auto industries has shrunk at a dizzying pace over the past six months.
* Online display advertising's share of revenue has plateaued at 20 percent of the total online ad spend in the U.S., and no panacea appears to be on the horizon.
* Despite online video's persistent positive buzz, actual usage is averaging around six minutes per day in the U.S.
* The social media trend is today's industry darling, but a monetization formula continues to elude the globe's brightest marketers.
Opportunities Abound
But even the most cynical observer has to be swayed by positive developments that define the longer-term opportunities for the online medium and the e-commerce channel. Around the globe, the online population is looking more and more like the overall population -- meaning that in a few short years, online access has moved from being a luxury or something cool to an essential, basic requirement. In addition, packaged-goods manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and telecommunications firms -- historically three of the largest spenders on traditional media -- are moving online at a pace not seen before, even as the recession continues to deepen.The audience growth and engagement quotient of online video is forcing marketers to positively reassess the value of the online experience. Adoption of social networking capabilities, by both consumers and corporations, has crossed the chasm in what appears to be the blink of an eye.
In the age of Twitter, feedback barriers have all but disappeared, creating a near friction-free environment for playing back brand experience, campaign reactions or brand events.
Search continues to be an indispensable tool for all online denizens and opportunities for additional growth continue to emerge. Search across social media networks is likely to be the next opportunity for search engines. And as consumers increasingly turn to their phones for a wide range of online content -- improved network speeds and rising smart phone penetration helped to grow the mobile Web in the U.S. -- prospects continue to improve.
Bright Future
While 2009 will not be a banner year for online advertising revenues, online will once again outperform all other media in terms of growth. China will likely be flat to down, partially due to the global slowdown, but more importantly, because it will be hard to match the Olympics-related surge during 2008. The U.S. and Japan will be flat to slightly up. There will be pockets of significant (+25 percent) growth, but it will be limited to small to midsize advertising countries such as Brazil and throughout Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.
The longer-term prospects for the global online medium continue to be bright. Led by social media, search, video and the continued online ramp up of the leading marketers, online's share of total advertising spend will continue its steady upward trend as we emerge from the current recession. And given the increased focus on all things digital by the leading packaged-goods companies, online's share of commerce will continue to rise as well.
When all is said and done, brands see tremendous opportunity to increasingly exploit the digital environment to maximize brand-favorable media impressions, but they are starting to look at the mix more holistically. Consumer-generated content has gained inclusion into the "earned media" club of marketing preferences, and the big question going forward will be how paid and earned media share the marketing expenditure pie.
Growth Leaders
Today, online video and social media lead the way in terms of growth. It is rare to see segments significantly grow from both an audience and an engagement standpoint, but there has been exceptional growth over the past couple of years in both video and social media sites. While member communities (i.e., social networking sites) have been garnering impressive audience numbers for the past five years, video audiences have been growing at meteoric rates, surpassing personal e-mail audiences in November 2007. And from a time-spent perspective, member communities surpassed personal e-mail for the first time in February 2009.
The growth in social media is the single most significant story in the online media space today. Social networking sites eclipsed personal e-mail in global reach at 68.4 percent vs. 64.8 percent in February 2009. And even more significant -- in only the first few months of 2009 -- the reach of these sites is growing at a brisk pace, faster than any other online sector.
Mobile Moves
Any discussion about online audience behavior would be incomplete without understanding the mobile dynamic. In the U.S. today, nearly 50 million mobile subscribers access the Web via mobile devices on a monthly basis. In the U.S., the mobile Internet audience grew 74 percent between February 2007 and February 2009. Internationally, the U.S. is one of the leading markets for mobile Internet penetration, with more than 18 percent of subscribers accessing the mobile Web. This is the highest penetration of mobile subscribers among the markets for which Nielsen reports mobile Internet adoption, followed by the U.K., where nearly 17 percent of subscribers used mobile Web in Q1 2008.
There's an increasingly broad range of content consumed over mobile Web, too. While many initially expected the platform to be dominated by e-mail, news and weather, Nielsen's latest U.S. mobile Internet research reveals a long tail of content interest. Portals, e-mail, weather and news do garner audiences of more than 20 million unique mobile users each, but categories such as food and dining, travel and health and fitness also attract millions of mobile Internet users each month.
Recessionary Impact
From an advertising perspective, it seems funeral dirges for online display advertising were heard throughout 2008, and things went from bad to worse in the fourth quarter, when the bottom fell out of the economy and all forms of advertising were hammered. As the dreary holiday season came to a close and 2008 ended with a whimper, many were wondering if the days of online advertising's favorite-child status were at an end.
While many other metrics registered all-time worst numbers in 2008, Nielsen reports that online advertising overall did a bit better than the doomsayers thought. Quarter four showed a 4.5 percent uptick from Q3, and a 2.6 percent increase from Q4 2007. And for the full year, online ad revenues grew more than 10 percent. Despite the slightly-better-than-expected year-end performance of online advertising, the true impact of the deep recession will be told in the 2009 numbers.
Global Roundup
When scanning the globe, the country-by-country online advertising experience is a true patchwork quilt. The Scandinavian countries, Australia and China are clearly in the fast lane, while the U.K., France, Spain and Japan are moving ahead, but at a slower pace. Germany, Switzerland and Italy are barely growing, and the Benelux countries appear to be moving backwards.It's clear that the global economic downturn is having an effect on all markets. And while online ad volumes appear to be brisk in some quarters, online ad rates are under such pressure that many advertisers are finding that rates from publishers are essentially the same rates they're receiving from ad networks. As many of these international markets are starting from a significantly lower base of online advertising, their growth rates will outstrip the U.S. in many cases as the global economy picks up again.
Source: adweek.com
Buffett: Wouldn’t Buy More Newspapers ‘At Any Price’
WARREN Buffett will keep the Buffalo News and a stake in the Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO)—but won’t play white knight for the newspaper industry. The billionaire financier told shareholders at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting taking place today in Omaha, Neb., that newspapers face possible “unending losses” and that the company would not buy most U.S. newspaper “at any price,” according to MarketWatch and WSJ.
Buffett also spoke of how newspapers once had been essential to readers—and thus to advertisers—but that was no longer the case. But what of Berkshire’s current holdings?
Buffalo News: He said the paper is working with unions on a new business model.
WaPoCo: Buffett, who is on the Washington Post board, spoke of its attractive businesses—singling out cable—but said “does not have answers to the problems of the newspaper business.”
Twittering from the stage: The NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, one of the journalists participating in the Q&A at the meeting, twittered live from the stage via BlackBerry, with the feed running in a widget on the DealBook blog. His take on the newspaper discussion: “Buffett says newspaper biz is no longer “essential” sigh. tho he’s not selling washpo or buffalo news.”
Update: Fox Business News anchor Liz Claman has this exchange with Buffett and his business partner Charlie Munger:
Question: At what price does it become compelling to invest in newspaper business or is there no price in today’s environment?
Buffett: The current environment is accentuating problem in newspapers -but it’s not the basic cause. Charlie and I read 5 a day. We’ll never give them up. We would not buy them at any price. They have the possibility of going to unending losses. They were essential to the public 20 years ago. Their pricing power was essential with customer. They lost the essential nature. The erosion has accelerated dramatically. They were only essential to advertiser as long as essential to reader. No one liked buying ads in the paper - it’s just that they worked. I don’t see anything on the horizon that causes that erosion to end.
Munger: It’s really a national tragedy. As they disappear - I think what replaces them won’t be as desirable as what we’re losing.
Source: PaidContent.org
Buffett also spoke of how newspapers once had been essential to readers—and thus to advertisers—but that was no longer the case. But what of Berkshire’s current holdings?
Buffalo News: He said the paper is working with unions on a new business model.
WaPoCo: Buffett, who is on the Washington Post board, spoke of its attractive businesses—singling out cable—but said “does not have answers to the problems of the newspaper business.”
Twittering from the stage: The NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, one of the journalists participating in the Q&A at the meeting, twittered live from the stage via BlackBerry, with the feed running in a widget on the DealBook blog. His take on the newspaper discussion: “Buffett says newspaper biz is no longer “essential” sigh. tho he’s not selling washpo or buffalo news.”
Update: Fox Business News anchor Liz Claman has this exchange with Buffett and his business partner Charlie Munger:
Question: At what price does it become compelling to invest in newspaper business or is there no price in today’s environment?
Buffett: The current environment is accentuating problem in newspapers -but it’s not the basic cause. Charlie and I read 5 a day. We’ll never give them up. We would not buy them at any price. They have the possibility of going to unending losses. They were essential to the public 20 years ago. Their pricing power was essential with customer. They lost the essential nature. The erosion has accelerated dramatically. They were only essential to advertiser as long as essential to reader. No one liked buying ads in the paper - it’s just that they worked. I don’t see anything on the horizon that causes that erosion to end.
Munger: It’s really a national tragedy. As they disappear - I think what replaces them won’t be as desirable as what we’re losing.
Source: PaidContent.org
Friday, May 1, 2009
'You're either a journalist or not a journalist': Parky on journalism, jobs and training
IT was seeing the original plans that made Nottingham Trent University (NTU) chancellor and veteran journalist Sir Michael Parkinson determined to get involved in the University's new broadcasting and journalism centre, he told those gathered for the facility's opening on Friday.
The new centre - the result of £250,000 investment - boasts three radio studios, two voice over studios and a student newsroom equipped with 85 workstations.
"When I entered journalism the only things you needed were shorthand and the capacity to write English under the influence of hard drink," joked Parkinson in his opening speech.
But in today's industry, students must prepare themselves for the new challenges of multimedia working and a diminishing number of entry-level jobs, he added.
A job for life
The media landscape and journalism industry is unrecognisable from the one he started out in, the one-time regional newspaper and renowned television journalist tells Journalism.co.uk.
"I could walk into a job - and I did walk into a job - when I was 16, that not only allowed me to work at an apprenticeship but actually gave me a job for life. I've been nearly 60 years in the job," he tells Journalism.co.uk in an interview in the new NTU newsroom.
"It's a problem that the jobs aren't there, and certainly that continuity, the job for life I was given, isn't there."
Would-be journalists should not be entering the industry if they are after a glamorous career, adds Parkinson, who before hosting his television chat show worked for a number of local titles including the - as it was called back then - Manchester Guardian.
"Journalism is about the pursuit of something far more important than being recognised in the supermarket. While recognition might be a by-product it must never be the sole ambition," he says.
Parky the multimedia journalist?
So perhaps Parkinson was a multimedia journalist ahead of his time? "I was very proud of the fact that I was at one point on radio, national radio, national television and writing for a national newspaper," he says.
"I saw no delineation - you're either a journalist or not a journalist; you're either a writer or not a writer. If you're not a journalist then none of it works and I think that's important."
Today's generation of journalism students must also think in this way, and increasingly so, as jobs in specific, traditional industry sectors become harder to find, adds Parkinson.
Local media
Traditional entry routes into the industry, through local newspapers and television - the one Parkinson himself took - are no longer the obvious path for trainees and are threatened further by dwindling resources at local level, he says.
"There's no difference between being a good journalist at a local paper and a good journalist at a national paper - you fulfil the same function in journalism," he explains.
"It's happening in local television too - on the ITV network there are great redundancies among local programming. They were always the way into national television: you started there, you learned your trade and you moved through."
The plight of local media is clearly close to Parkinson's heart - they are under great threat, but remain an important part of the democratic process, he stresses.
Local newspapers exist as guardians and watchdogs in the community, as well as collectors of social history and minutiae, he adds.
"What you can do about it I don't know - I don't have a clue about that. None of us know at present, even those who have been in the industry for a very long time," says Parkinson.
"In my area the local paper had a change of management about two years ago and they've become a better paper. It's not become a receptacle for advertising; it's become a paper with quite a vigorous editorial policy. I think that's their purpose and that's what they should do. That's why local newspapers are important."
While cutbacks in local media - a result of the economic downturn coupled with changing patterns in how readers get their news, says Parkinson - are worrying, the trivialisation of the national media is also of concern, the former Daily Express journalist adds.
"The other day the Daily Telegraph, as an example, had pictures of Barack Obama's dog on the front page. We're in the middle of the biggest economic recession the world's ever seen and we've got Barack Obama's dog on the front page?" explains Parkinson.
"I have sympathy with newspapers - people aren't buying them for the same reasons that they used to buy them. They're buying them for different reasons. The newspapers are only reacting to society, so the problem's with all of us if there's a problem."
Source: journalism.co.uk.
The new centre - the result of £250,000 investment - boasts three radio studios, two voice over studios and a student newsroom equipped with 85 workstations.
"When I entered journalism the only things you needed were shorthand and the capacity to write English under the influence of hard drink," joked Parkinson in his opening speech.
But in today's industry, students must prepare themselves for the new challenges of multimedia working and a diminishing number of entry-level jobs, he added.
A job for life
The media landscape and journalism industry is unrecognisable from the one he started out in, the one-time regional newspaper and renowned television journalist tells Journalism.co.uk.
"I could walk into a job - and I did walk into a job - when I was 16, that not only allowed me to work at an apprenticeship but actually gave me a job for life. I've been nearly 60 years in the job," he tells Journalism.co.uk in an interview in the new NTU newsroom.
"It's a problem that the jobs aren't there, and certainly that continuity, the job for life I was given, isn't there."
Would-be journalists should not be entering the industry if they are after a glamorous career, adds Parkinson, who before hosting his television chat show worked for a number of local titles including the - as it was called back then - Manchester Guardian.
"Journalism is about the pursuit of something far more important than being recognised in the supermarket. While recognition might be a by-product it must never be the sole ambition," he says.
Parky the multimedia journalist?
So perhaps Parkinson was a multimedia journalist ahead of his time? "I was very proud of the fact that I was at one point on radio, national radio, national television and writing for a national newspaper," he says.
"I saw no delineation - you're either a journalist or not a journalist; you're either a writer or not a writer. If you're not a journalist then none of it works and I think that's important."
Today's generation of journalism students must also think in this way, and increasingly so, as jobs in specific, traditional industry sectors become harder to find, adds Parkinson.
Local media
Traditional entry routes into the industry, through local newspapers and television - the one Parkinson himself took - are no longer the obvious path for trainees and are threatened further by dwindling resources at local level, he says.
"There's no difference between being a good journalist at a local paper and a good journalist at a national paper - you fulfil the same function in journalism," he explains.
"It's happening in local television too - on the ITV network there are great redundancies among local programming. They were always the way into national television: you started there, you learned your trade and you moved through."
The plight of local media is clearly close to Parkinson's heart - they are under great threat, but remain an important part of the democratic process, he stresses.
Local newspapers exist as guardians and watchdogs in the community, as well as collectors of social history and minutiae, he adds.
"What you can do about it I don't know - I don't have a clue about that. None of us know at present, even those who have been in the industry for a very long time," says Parkinson.
"In my area the local paper had a change of management about two years ago and they've become a better paper. It's not become a receptacle for advertising; it's become a paper with quite a vigorous editorial policy. I think that's their purpose and that's what they should do. That's why local newspapers are important."
While cutbacks in local media - a result of the economic downturn coupled with changing patterns in how readers get their news, says Parkinson - are worrying, the trivialisation of the national media is also of concern, the former Daily Express journalist adds.
"The other day the Daily Telegraph, as an example, had pictures of Barack Obama's dog on the front page. We're in the middle of the biggest economic recession the world's ever seen and we've got Barack Obama's dog on the front page?" explains Parkinson.
"I have sympathy with newspapers - people aren't buying them for the same reasons that they used to buy them. They're buying them for different reasons. The newspapers are only reacting to society, so the problem's with all of us if there's a problem."
Source: journalism.co.uk.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
In 18 Months, 80 Percent Of Newspapers Will Be Gone—Give Or Take….
Media columnist Michael Wolff certainly knows an attention-getting quote. Appearing with Air America CEO Bennett Zier and CraigsList’s Craig Newmark in a panel discussion sponsored by Gotham Media Ventures, the head of aggregation site Newser, predicted that big media, whether it’s newspapers or conglomerates, are just months away from the dustbin of history. “About 18 months from now, 80 percent of newspapers will be gone. The Washington Post is supported by Kaplan’s testing business. The testing business will still be around in 18 months, and they will probably continue to support the newspaper. But that’ll be an exception.”
Later on, Wolff was challenged by a devoted, if vehement, NYT reader over some criticisms he didn’t make, he was pressed on whether the NYT would survive. He conceded that he was being a bit hyperbolic, but was dead serious when he said, “The NYT will not be owned by the same company 18 months from now. I stand by that.”
As many before him have done, Wolff pinned the cause of newspapers’ impending death on CraigsList, which took away newspapers’ auto, jobs and real estate ads. Newmark shook his head at that, saying that newspapers did not fulfill the public’s trust. “They failed on that weapons of mass destruction thing. And they failed on that financial collapse thing,” Newmark protested. Wolff: “CraigsList did it by taking away the ads. And they did it for good or bad, I would say for the better. They distribute ads more efficiently. But that’s what supported newspapers for 100 years. People don’t want to pay for content. And you could argue newspapers haven’t done their jobs. But that’s separate from the real story. They were supported by those three legs and they have gone to Craig’s List. 18 months from now, 80 percent of newspapers will be gone. “
The panel, which took place at the back of the Samsung Experience store in the Time Warner Center, Wolff also forecast that in another 18 months, the media and entertainment company’s home—which houses a mall filled with luxury retailers—would also fade from the scene.
Source: paidcontent.org
Later on, Wolff was challenged by a devoted, if vehement, NYT reader over some criticisms he didn’t make, he was pressed on whether the NYT would survive. He conceded that he was being a bit hyperbolic, but was dead serious when he said, “The NYT will not be owned by the same company 18 months from now. I stand by that.”
As many before him have done, Wolff pinned the cause of newspapers’ impending death on CraigsList, which took away newspapers’ auto, jobs and real estate ads. Newmark shook his head at that, saying that newspapers did not fulfill the public’s trust. “They failed on that weapons of mass destruction thing. And they failed on that financial collapse thing,” Newmark protested. Wolff: “CraigsList did it by taking away the ads. And they did it for good or bad, I would say for the better. They distribute ads more efficiently. But that’s what supported newspapers for 100 years. People don’t want to pay for content. And you could argue newspapers haven’t done their jobs. But that’s separate from the real story. They were supported by those three legs and they have gone to Craig’s List. 18 months from now, 80 percent of newspapers will be gone. “
The panel, which took place at the back of the Samsung Experience store in the Time Warner Center, Wolff also forecast that in another 18 months, the media and entertainment company’s home—which houses a mall filled with luxury retailers—would also fade from the scene.
Source: paidcontent.org
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Traditional Media Provide More Comprehensive News Than Citizen Media And Blogs, Researchers Find
Researchers from the University of Missouri School of Journalism recently completed a comprehensive comparison of citizen journalism sites (news sites and blogs) and traditional media Web sites. They found that despite ongoing reports of financial troubles and cutbacks, legacy media are more comprehensive and more technologically advanced than citizen media and bloggers.
"We found that legacy sites offered almost double the percent of news (89 percent) in comparison with citizen news sites (56 percent) and three times that of blogs (27 percent)," said Margaret Duffy, faculty chair in strategic communication in the Journalism School. "The topic coverage on blogs and citizen new sites is generally narrow and the sourcing is light."
Duffy and Esther Thorson, associate dean for graduate studies at the school, along with Steve Lacy, professor at Michigan State University, and Dan Riffe, professor at the University of North Carolina, analyzed citizen news sites in 47 towns and cities across the United States. They found an average of fewer than two citizen news sites per city. Two-thirds of the sites were blogs, and the other sites contained news content.
"One of the biggest surprises we found was that mainstream media Web sites were almost as welcoming to citizen participation as citizen journalism sites, and they were far more welcoming than blogs," Thorson said. "Many industry professionals hope that citizen sites will democratize news media, but that hope has yet to be realized."
Results from second phase of the two-part study revealed that many of the citizen sites and blogs examined in the first phase had become dormant or disappeared. While some citizen sites and bloggers are doing well, many are struggling to survive and support their efforts, Duffy said.
Other key findings from the report include:
* Blogs were less likely than citizen news sites to permit posting comments or emailing the site.
* The majority of mainstream sites provided rules and policies for contributing stories and photos.
* Blogs and news sites were more likely than legacy media to post links within stories to outside sources. However, citizen sites linked to legacy news sites twice as often as legacy sites linked to citizen sites. Citizen sites used legacy sites as news sources.
The study "Tracking and Analyzing Community News Models" was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Knight Foundation. It recently was published in the State of the Media 2009 report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Source: sciencedaily.com
"We found that legacy sites offered almost double the percent of news (89 percent) in comparison with citizen news sites (56 percent) and three times that of blogs (27 percent)," said Margaret Duffy, faculty chair in strategic communication in the Journalism School. "The topic coverage on blogs and citizen new sites is generally narrow and the sourcing is light."
Duffy and Esther Thorson, associate dean for graduate studies at the school, along with Steve Lacy, professor at Michigan State University, and Dan Riffe, professor at the University of North Carolina, analyzed citizen news sites in 47 towns and cities across the United States. They found an average of fewer than two citizen news sites per city. Two-thirds of the sites were blogs, and the other sites contained news content.
"One of the biggest surprises we found was that mainstream media Web sites were almost as welcoming to citizen participation as citizen journalism sites, and they were far more welcoming than blogs," Thorson said. "Many industry professionals hope that citizen sites will democratize news media, but that hope has yet to be realized."
Results from second phase of the two-part study revealed that many of the citizen sites and blogs examined in the first phase had become dormant or disappeared. While some citizen sites and bloggers are doing well, many are struggling to survive and support their efforts, Duffy said.
Other key findings from the report include:
* Blogs were less likely than citizen news sites to permit posting comments or emailing the site.
* The majority of mainstream sites provided rules and policies for contributing stories and photos.
* Blogs and news sites were more likely than legacy media to post links within stories to outside sources. However, citizen sites linked to legacy news sites twice as often as legacy sites linked to citizen sites. Citizen sites used legacy sites as news sources.
The study "Tracking and Analyzing Community News Models" was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Knight Foundation. It recently was published in the State of the Media 2009 report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Source: sciencedaily.com
Social Journalism: Past, Present, and Future
Social media has changed journalism. The Web is now the sole distribution channel for newspapers that can no longer afford to publish hardcopy, and those that don’t follow the best practices of social media may see their brands marginalized in cyberspace as well. Social journalism, an extension of those practices, is now an essential component of any news organization’s strategy.
Citizen journalists post photos of fast-breaking events, and cover stories from a different angle than legacy news organizations, but it’s the premeditated watchdog or advocacy role that defines a social journalist. Another factor is the network effect: people using social media to communicate and collaboratively produce content. Editors are still important, but the pieces are shaped by crowd dynamics and the velocity of information.
Here’s a look at the past, present, and future of social journalism:
The Past
As Mark Glaser of the PBS site Mediashift points out in his summary of Dan Gillmor’s “We the Media,” a book about grassroots media, the people who recorded the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King nearly thirty years later did so out of a sense of social duty: they could have turned off their cameras, but kept them rolling, and contacted mainstream media with the results. This was a crowd of social journalists who broke the story before any editor could slow it down.
The Independent Media Center, formed in 1999 to cover the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, was an early aggregator of social journalism. Run by a collective of alternative journalists and activists who provided minimal editing, the IMC allowed individuals to upload their own coverage of political events. Today, Indymedia hosts a network of IMCs serving cities around the world.
In 2005, social journalists responded to Hurricane Katrina by filing coverage from the field that was more detailed, and often more accurate, than that seen on mainstream media. Sites like the Interdictor, self-described as “A small pocket of New Orleans web guys blogging, running off a generator, with a web cam,” provided a firsthand account of the disaster. One person even declared a Katrina Blog Relief Day in an attempt to start a groundswell movement.
The Present
The Huffington Post might not be the first organization that comes to mind when talking about today’s social journalism, but it’s actually a leader in this area. Last year, it co-sponsored OffTheBus, described by director Amanda Michel as a “citizen-powered campaign news site.” The idea was to offer alternative coverage of the presidential election by ordinary people, but the process uncovered a market that Michel describes:
“Our market was defined by our access to on-the-ground information that other news outlets lacked, and collaborative, crowd-powered methods of newsgathering that made some traditional journalists uncomfortable. Private fundraisers, official campaign conference calls, volunteer meetings, and rallies—where mainstream reporters found themselves stuck in pens—were our specialty. We wanted to tell stories inaccessible to the national press. This required replacing objectivity with an ethic of transparency…”
Recently, HuffPost announced The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, a nonprofit that will produce investigative journalism created by staff reporters and freelance writers. One of the Fund’s advisers is Jay Rosen, who directs NewAssignment.Net, the NYU research project that co-sponsored OffTheBus.
The Future
Rosen’s Flying Seminar in the Future of News cites Dan Conover’s piece “2020 vision: What’s next for news” as a definitive source for predictions. Conover, a reporter turned blogger, offers a number of observations about the next decade of journalism. He talks about the continued demise of newspapers: the metro dailies in major cities, not the “web/print nationals” (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), or local papers serving communities of up to 30,000 readers. His assertion that the Semantic Web and open-source technologies will drive revenue from sources other than advertising and paid subscriptions anticipates data-mining and machine-readable news feeds, and he even mentions the trend of newspapers opening up their APIs, correctly pointing out this won’t mean much unless developers and end-users are given more freedom.
Conover offers a cautionary statement about crowdfunding, citing Spot.us, a Bay area site where writers and individual donors can collaborate to fund stories. He says that “volunteers” who are paid neither directly nor substantially will produce much of the next decade’s writing, editing and producing.
The future of social journalism will be driven by disintermediation, the replacement or removal of middlemen in the supply chain. This has already happened on the revenue side, with CraigslistCraigslist reviewsCraigslist reviews and other online resources taking classified ads from newspapers. As the newspaper industry consolidates, and social media matures, journalists will increasingly work as independents, forming transient relationships with multiple publishers. A handful of national brands will survive, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of new microbrands will flourish. The public good will be preserved, and society will be more transparent.
Source: mashable.com
Citizen journalists post photos of fast-breaking events, and cover stories from a different angle than legacy news organizations, but it’s the premeditated watchdog or advocacy role that defines a social journalist. Another factor is the network effect: people using social media to communicate and collaboratively produce content. Editors are still important, but the pieces are shaped by crowd dynamics and the velocity of information.
Here’s a look at the past, present, and future of social journalism:
The Past
As Mark Glaser of the PBS site Mediashift points out in his summary of Dan Gillmor’s “We the Media,” a book about grassroots media, the people who recorded the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King nearly thirty years later did so out of a sense of social duty: they could have turned off their cameras, but kept them rolling, and contacted mainstream media with the results. This was a crowd of social journalists who broke the story before any editor could slow it down.
The Independent Media Center, formed in 1999 to cover the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, was an early aggregator of social journalism. Run by a collective of alternative journalists and activists who provided minimal editing, the IMC allowed individuals to upload their own coverage of political events. Today, Indymedia hosts a network of IMCs serving cities around the world.
In 2005, social journalists responded to Hurricane Katrina by filing coverage from the field that was more detailed, and often more accurate, than that seen on mainstream media. Sites like the Interdictor, self-described as “A small pocket of New Orleans web guys blogging, running off a generator, with a web cam,” provided a firsthand account of the disaster. One person even declared a Katrina Blog Relief Day in an attempt to start a groundswell movement.
The Present
The Huffington Post might not be the first organization that comes to mind when talking about today’s social journalism, but it’s actually a leader in this area. Last year, it co-sponsored OffTheBus, described by director Amanda Michel as a “citizen-powered campaign news site.” The idea was to offer alternative coverage of the presidential election by ordinary people, but the process uncovered a market that Michel describes:
“Our market was defined by our access to on-the-ground information that other news outlets lacked, and collaborative, crowd-powered methods of newsgathering that made some traditional journalists uncomfortable. Private fundraisers, official campaign conference calls, volunteer meetings, and rallies—where mainstream reporters found themselves stuck in pens—were our specialty. We wanted to tell stories inaccessible to the national press. This required replacing objectivity with an ethic of transparency…”
Recently, HuffPost announced The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, a nonprofit that will produce investigative journalism created by staff reporters and freelance writers. One of the Fund’s advisers is Jay Rosen, who directs NewAssignment.Net, the NYU research project that co-sponsored OffTheBus.
The Future
Rosen’s Flying Seminar in the Future of News cites Dan Conover’s piece “2020 vision: What’s next for news” as a definitive source for predictions. Conover, a reporter turned blogger, offers a number of observations about the next decade of journalism. He talks about the continued demise of newspapers: the metro dailies in major cities, not the “web/print nationals” (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), or local papers serving communities of up to 30,000 readers. His assertion that the Semantic Web and open-source technologies will drive revenue from sources other than advertising and paid subscriptions anticipates data-mining and machine-readable news feeds, and he even mentions the trend of newspapers opening up their APIs, correctly pointing out this won’t mean much unless developers and end-users are given more freedom.
Conover offers a cautionary statement about crowdfunding, citing Spot.us, a Bay area site where writers and individual donors can collaborate to fund stories. He says that “volunteers” who are paid neither directly nor substantially will produce much of the next decade’s writing, editing and producing.
The future of social journalism will be driven by disintermediation, the replacement or removal of middlemen in the supply chain. This has already happened on the revenue side, with CraigslistCraigslist reviewsCraigslist reviews and other online resources taking classified ads from newspapers. As the newspaper industry consolidates, and social media matures, journalists will increasingly work as independents, forming transient relationships with multiple publishers. A handful of national brands will survive, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of new microbrands will flourish. The public good will be preserved, and society will be more transparent.
Source: mashable.com
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Mobile media use on the rise
LONDON: More than four out of five mobile media users access mobile media once a week, research by Orange reveals.
Based on its survey of 2,000 mobile phone media users from all five UK mobile networks, Orange found that 70% of consumers are attracted to interactive mobile
Meanwhile, Orange found click-through ads are the most popular form of mobile marketing, with 47% of participants preferring to click on ads that go straight to a brand's website; 43% preferring to click on voucher codes or coupons and 34% using click-throughs to enter competitions.
The average age for mobile media users is 36 and 81% use mobile media more than once a week, with 46% using it daily. Mobile internet pages viewed most often are search engines, e-mail, news, music and film, although 55% of people browse mobile internet with no specific agenda.
Source: Brand Republic
Based on its survey of 2,000 mobile phone media users from all five UK mobile networks, Orange found that 70% of consumers are attracted to interactive mobile
Meanwhile, Orange found click-through ads are the most popular form of mobile marketing, with 47% of participants preferring to click on ads that go straight to a brand's website; 43% preferring to click on voucher codes or coupons and 34% using click-throughs to enter competitions.
The average age for mobile media users is 36 and 81% use mobile media more than once a week, with 46% using it daily. Mobile internet pages viewed most often are search engines, e-mail, news, music and film, although 55% of people browse mobile internet with no specific agenda.
Source: Brand Republic
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Newspapers continue fight to beat the crunch
THE TV news channels and national media continue to be awash with depressing tales of mass-scale redundancies, recessions and a global credit crisis.
But in a bid to fight back, more local and regional papers are continuing to battle for their own communities and bolster business on their doorstep.
HoldtheFrontPage has reported on several campaigns across the UK press in recent weeks and here are a few more.
Newsquest daily The Press is running York Means Business and making a big deal of those local companies which are bucking the downward trend.
Recent good news story for the East and North Yorkshire area include the creation of new packing factory worth 100 jobs, HSBC's £300m proposal to build a new data centre creating 2,000 construction jobs, the expansion of the University of York and 50 new posts at a growing local law firm.
The Press says it will do everything it can to promote the York area as a centre of business excellence and also help unemployed people find fresh employment.
And Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote an exclusive first-person piece for The Press about his support for the campaign.
Not content with helping Southampton's unemployed get back to work, the Southern Daily Echo has now launched Buy Local, Shop Local.
As the name suggests, the Echo wants Hampshire shoppers to stay local and support butchers, greengrocers and local cafes and restaurants.
To launch the campaign, Echo reporters and staff took to streets with campaign posters for local business to display in their shop windows.
Buy Local, Shop Local follows on from the Echo's Sell Yourself campaign which it launched in January.
The paper offered unemployed people the chance to show off their skills for free in a special in-paper supplement, in the hope local firms would offer them an interview.
The independently-owned Henley Standard has been garnering support from north of the border for its 'Think Local' campaign launched earlier this month.
After featuring on the BBC Breakfast news programme, the Standard was contacted by Strathaven Echo editor Bill Howat who said he would launch his own campaign after his after seeing the piece on TV.
The Standard's campaign is highlight local businesses, groups and individuals going out of their way to help other members of the community.
The Southport Visiter has joined forces with other local media to promote 'I Love Southport' – a campaign run by Southport Business Enterprise, a body responsible for maintaining the town centre.
The campaign is being run in conjunction with the Visiter's own 'Shop Local' initiative which it launched before Christmas to encourage people to shop in the Merseyside town.
I Love Southport is aimed specifically at boosting the resort's retail and hospitality trade and, as part of the campaign, a loyalty scheme has been set up with local businesses.
The lucky winner will receive £1,000 in cash just for using local shops regularly while the Visiter and other newspapers will be running competitions to win short breaks and shopping experiences in the town.
Source: HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk
But in a bid to fight back, more local and regional papers are continuing to battle for their own communities and bolster business on their doorstep.
HoldtheFrontPage has reported on several campaigns across the UK press in recent weeks and here are a few more.
Newsquest daily The Press is running York Means Business and making a big deal of those local companies which are bucking the downward trend.
Recent good news story for the East and North Yorkshire area include the creation of new packing factory worth 100 jobs, HSBC's £300m proposal to build a new data centre creating 2,000 construction jobs, the expansion of the University of York and 50 new posts at a growing local law firm.
The Press says it will do everything it can to promote the York area as a centre of business excellence and also help unemployed people find fresh employment.
And Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote an exclusive first-person piece for The Press about his support for the campaign.
Not content with helping Southampton's unemployed get back to work, the Southern Daily Echo has now launched Buy Local, Shop Local.
As the name suggests, the Echo wants Hampshire shoppers to stay local and support butchers, greengrocers and local cafes and restaurants.
To launch the campaign, Echo reporters and staff took to streets with campaign posters for local business to display in their shop windows.
Buy Local, Shop Local follows on from the Echo's Sell Yourself campaign which it launched in January.
The paper offered unemployed people the chance to show off their skills for free in a special in-paper supplement, in the hope local firms would offer them an interview.
The independently-owned Henley Standard has been garnering support from north of the border for its 'Think Local' campaign launched earlier this month.
After featuring on the BBC Breakfast news programme, the Standard was contacted by Strathaven Echo editor Bill Howat who said he would launch his own campaign after his after seeing the piece on TV.
The Standard's campaign is highlight local businesses, groups and individuals going out of their way to help other members of the community.
The Southport Visiter has joined forces with other local media to promote 'I Love Southport' – a campaign run by Southport Business Enterprise, a body responsible for maintaining the town centre.
The campaign is being run in conjunction with the Visiter's own 'Shop Local' initiative which it launched before Christmas to encourage people to shop in the Merseyside town.
I Love Southport is aimed specifically at boosting the resort's retail and hospitality trade and, as part of the campaign, a loyalty scheme has been set up with local businesses.
The lucky winner will receive £1,000 in cash just for using local shops regularly while the Visiter and other newspapers will be running competitions to win short breaks and shopping experiences in the town.
Source: HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Old Growth Media And The Future Of News
By Steven Berlin Johnson
(I)
IF you happened to being hanging out in front of the old College Hill Bookstore in Providence Rhode Island in 1987, on the third week of every month you would have seen a skinny 19-year-old in baggy pants, sporting a vaguely Morrissey-like haircut, walking into the bookstore several times a day.
That kid was me. I wish I could tell you that I was making those compulsive return visits out of a passionate love of books. While I do, in fact, have a passionate love of books, and bought plenty of them during my college years, I was making those tactical strikes on the College Hill Bookstore for another reason.
I was looking for the latest issue of MacWorld.
I had learned from experience that new issues of the monthly magazine devoted to all things Macintosh arrived at College Hill reliably in the third week of the month. Yes, you could subscribe, but for some reason, subscription copies tended to arrive a few days later than the copies in the College Hill bookstore. And so when that time of the month rolled around, I’d organize my week around regular check-ins at College Hill to see if a shipment of MacWorlds had landed on their magazine rack.
This was obsessive behavior, I admit, but not entirely irrational. It was the result of a kind of imbalance: not a chemical imbalance, an information imbalance. To understand what I want to say about the future of the news ecosystem, it’s essential that we travel back to my holding pattern outside the College Hill Bookstore -- which continued unabated, by the way, for three years. It’s essential to travel back because we’re in the middle of an epic conversation about the potentially devastating effect that the web is having on our news institutions. And so if we’re going to have a responsible conversation about the future of news, we need to start by talking about the past.
We need to be reminded of what life was like before the web.
I made my monthly pilgrimages to College Hill because I was interested in the Mac, which was, it should be said, a niche interest in 1987, though not that much of a niche. Apple was one of the world’s largest creators of personal computers, and by far the most innovative. But if you wanted to find out news about the Mac -- new machines from Apple, the latest word on the upcoming System 7 or HyperCard, or any new releases from the thousands of software developers or peripheral manufacturers -- if you wanted to keep up with any of this, there was just about one channel available to you, as a college student in Providence Rhode Island. You read MacWorld.
And even then, even if you staked out the College Hill Bookstore waiting for issues hot off the press, you were still getting the news a month or two late, given the long-lead times of a print magazine back then. Yes, if Apple had a major product announcement, or fired Steve Jobs, it would make it into the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal the next day. And you could occasionally steal a few nuggets of news by hanging around the University computer store. But that was pretty much it.
When I left college and came to New York in the early nineties, the technology channels began to widen ever so slightly. At some point in that period, I joined Compuserve, and discovered that MacWeek magazine was uploading its articles every Friday night at around six, which quickly became a kind of nerd version of appointment television for me. The information lag went from months to days. In 1993, Wired Magazine launched, and suddenly I had access not only to an amazing monthly repository of technology news, but also a new kind of in-depth analysis that had never appeared in the pages of MacWorld.
Within a few years, the web arrived, and soon after I was reading a site called Macintouch, which featured daily updates and commentary on everything from new printer driver releases to the future of the Mac clone business. Tech critics like Scott Rosenberg and Andrew Leonard at Salon wrote tens of thousands of words on the latest developments at Apple. (I wrote a few thousand myself at FEED.) Sometime around then, Apple launched its first official web site; now I could get breaking news about the company directly from them, the second they announced it.
We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers like Jon Gruber or Don Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user interface issues. (I probably read twenty mini-essays about Safari’s new tab design.) The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews, or Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology site. And that’s not even mentioning the rumor blogs.
And of course, MacWorld is still around as a print magazine, but they also now have a web site. Yesterday alone, they published twenty-six different articles on Apple-related topics.
(II)
The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.
To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.
When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists. Will the bloggers get out of their pajamas and head up the Baghdad bureau? Will they do the kind of relentless shoe-leather detective work that made Woodward and Bernstein household names? These are genuinely important questions, and I think we have good reason to be optimistic about their answers. But you can’t see the reasons for that optimism by looking at the current state of investigative journalism in the blogosphere, because the new ecosystem of investigative journalism is in its infancy. There are dozens of interesting projects being spearheaded by very smart people, some of them nonprofits, some for-profit. But they are seedlings.
I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.
That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of Macworld to the rich diversity of today’s tech coverage is happening in all areas of news. Like William Gibson’s future, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
(III)
Consider another – slightly less nerdy -- case study: politics. The first Presidential election that I followed in an obsessive way was the 1992 election that Clinton won. I was as compulsive a news junkie about that campaign as I was about the Mac in college: every day the Times would have a handful of stories about the campaign stops or debates or latest polls. Every night I would dutifully tune into Crossfire to hear what the punditocracy had to say about the day’s events. I read Newsweek and Time and the New Republic, and scoured the New Yorker for its occasional political pieces. When the debates aired, I’d watch religiously and stay up late soaking in the commentary from the assembled experts.
That was hardly a desert, to be sure. But compare it to the information channels that were available to me following the 2008 election. Everything I relied on in 1992 was still around of course – except for the late, lamented Crossfire – but it was now part of a vast new forest of news, data, opinion, satire – and perhaps most importantly, direct experience. Sites like Talking Points Memo and Politico did extensive direct reporting. Daily Kos provided in-depth surveys and field reports on state races that the Times would never have had the ink to cover. Individual bloggers like Andrew Sullivan responded to each twist in the news cycle; HuffPo culled the most provocative opinion pieces from the rest of the blogosphere. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com did meta-analysis of polling that blew away anything William Schneider dreamed of doing on CNN in 1992. When the economy imploded in September, I followed economist bloggers like Brad DeLong to get their expert take the candidates’ responses to the crisis. (Yochai Benchler talks about this phenomenon of academics engaging with the news cycle in a smart response here.) I watched the debates with a thousand virtual friends live-Twittering alongside me on the couch. All this was filtered and remixed through the extraordinary political satire of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, which I watched via viral clips on the Web as much as I watched on TV.
What’s more: the ecosystem of political news also included information coming directly from the candidates. Think about the Philadelphia race speech, arguably one of the two or three most important events in the whole campaign. Eight million people watched it on YouTube alone. Now, what would have happened to that speech had it been delivered in 1992? Would any of the networks have aired it in its entirety? Certainly not. It would have been reduced to a minute-long soundbite on the evening news. CNN probably would have aired it live, which might have meant that 500,000 people caught it. Fox News and MSNBC? They didn’t exist yet. A few serious newspaper might have reprinted it in its entirety, which might have added another million to the audience. Online perhaps someone would have uploaded a transcript to Compuserve or The Well, but that’s about the most we could have hoped for.
There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers.
The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. I loved reading Frank Rich’s reliably sensible responses to each passing media frenzy; and certainly Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin was every bit as important as Obama’s race speech in shaping our sense of the candidates. (Though I suspect Couric’s interview would have had much less impact without CBS’s viral distribution of the clips on the Web.) But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a "citizen reporter" named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen's Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.
I think the political web covering the 2008 campaign was so rich for precisely the same reasons that the technology web is so rich: because it’s old-growth media. The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state.
What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only started maturing.
In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
But of course, that’s what the web can do. That’s one of the main reasons we created outside.in, because I found myself waking up in the morning and turning to local Brooklyn bloggers like Brownstoner, who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two years later, there are close to a thousand bloggers writing about Brooklyn: there are multiple blogs devoted to the Atlantic Yards real estate development; dozens following the Brooklyn foodie scene; music blogs, politics blogs, parenting blogs. The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great. As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve. We’re going to go through the same evolution that I did from reading two-month-old news in MacWorld, to expecting an instantaneous liveblog of a keynote announcement. Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half mile of my house, and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.
(IV)
So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce. This is Jeff Jarvis’ motto: do what you do best, and link to the rest. My guess is that the venerable tradition of the muckraking journalist will be alive and well ten years from: partially supported by newspapers and magazines, partially by non-profit foundations and innovative programs like Newassignment.net, and partially by enterprising bloggers who make a name for themselves by breaking important stories.
Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever. I’m confident that I get far more useful information from the new ecosystem than I did from traditional media along fifteen years ago, but I pride myself on being a very savvy information navigator. Can we expect the general public to navigate the new ecosystem with the same skill and discretion?
Let’s say for the sake of argument that we can’t. Let’s say it’s just too overwhelming for the average consumer to sort through all the new voices available online, to separate fact from fiction, reporting from rumor-mongering. Let’s say they need some kind of authoritative guide, to help them find all the useful information that’s proliferating out there in the wild.
If only there were some institution that had a reputation for journalistic integrity that had a staff of trained editors and a growing audience arriving at its web site every day seeking quality information. If only…
Of course, we have thousands of these institutions. They’re called newspapers.
The funny thing about newspapers today is that their audience is growing at a remarkable clip. Their underlying business model is being attacked by multiple forces, but their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking. As of January, print circulation had declined from 62 million to 49 million since my days at the College Hill Bookstore. But their online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period. Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.
This is what I think the ecosystem will ultimately look like:
Will this system be perfect? Of course not. But I think we have every reason to believe that it will be an improvement on the paradigm that we’ve been living with for the past century.
Let me say one final thing. I am bullish on the future of news, as you can tell. But I am not bullish on what is happening right now in the newspaper industry. It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists and editors are going to lose their jobs, and cities are going to lose their papers. There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two. That is bad news for two reasons. First because it is going to inflict a lot of stress on people inside the industry who do great things, and who provide an important social good with their work. But it’s also bad news because it’s going to distract us from the long-term view; we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.
So that’s why I wanted to take us back to the College Hill bookstore in 1987: to remind us that the emerging news ecosystem is already around us, and already doing wonderful things. Most of us in this room, I suspect, are already living in the old-growth forests now. It’s up to us to remind everyone else how promising those ecosystems really are -- or, even better, to help them live up to that promise.
Source: Stevenberlinjohnson.com
(I)
IF you happened to being hanging out in front of the old College Hill Bookstore in Providence Rhode Island in 1987, on the third week of every month you would have seen a skinny 19-year-old in baggy pants, sporting a vaguely Morrissey-like haircut, walking into the bookstore several times a day.
That kid was me. I wish I could tell you that I was making those compulsive return visits out of a passionate love of books. While I do, in fact, have a passionate love of books, and bought plenty of them during my college years, I was making those tactical strikes on the College Hill Bookstore for another reason.
I was looking for the latest issue of MacWorld.
I had learned from experience that new issues of the monthly magazine devoted to all things Macintosh arrived at College Hill reliably in the third week of the month. Yes, you could subscribe, but for some reason, subscription copies tended to arrive a few days later than the copies in the College Hill bookstore. And so when that time of the month rolled around, I’d organize my week around regular check-ins at College Hill to see if a shipment of MacWorlds had landed on their magazine rack.
This was obsessive behavior, I admit, but not entirely irrational. It was the result of a kind of imbalance: not a chemical imbalance, an information imbalance. To understand what I want to say about the future of the news ecosystem, it’s essential that we travel back to my holding pattern outside the College Hill Bookstore -- which continued unabated, by the way, for three years. It’s essential to travel back because we’re in the middle of an epic conversation about the potentially devastating effect that the web is having on our news institutions. And so if we’re going to have a responsible conversation about the future of news, we need to start by talking about the past.
We need to be reminded of what life was like before the web.
I made my monthly pilgrimages to College Hill because I was interested in the Mac, which was, it should be said, a niche interest in 1987, though not that much of a niche. Apple was one of the world’s largest creators of personal computers, and by far the most innovative. But if you wanted to find out news about the Mac -- new machines from Apple, the latest word on the upcoming System 7 or HyperCard, or any new releases from the thousands of software developers or peripheral manufacturers -- if you wanted to keep up with any of this, there was just about one channel available to you, as a college student in Providence Rhode Island. You read MacWorld.
And even then, even if you staked out the College Hill Bookstore waiting for issues hot off the press, you were still getting the news a month or two late, given the long-lead times of a print magazine back then. Yes, if Apple had a major product announcement, or fired Steve Jobs, it would make it into the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal the next day. And you could occasionally steal a few nuggets of news by hanging around the University computer store. But that was pretty much it.
When I left college and came to New York in the early nineties, the technology channels began to widen ever so slightly. At some point in that period, I joined Compuserve, and discovered that MacWeek magazine was uploading its articles every Friday night at around six, which quickly became a kind of nerd version of appointment television for me. The information lag went from months to days. In 1993, Wired Magazine launched, and suddenly I had access not only to an amazing monthly repository of technology news, but also a new kind of in-depth analysis that had never appeared in the pages of MacWorld.
Within a few years, the web arrived, and soon after I was reading a site called Macintouch, which featured daily updates and commentary on everything from new printer driver releases to the future of the Mac clone business. Tech critics like Scott Rosenberg and Andrew Leonard at Salon wrote tens of thousands of words on the latest developments at Apple. (I wrote a few thousand myself at FEED.) Sometime around then, Apple launched its first official web site; now I could get breaking news about the company directly from them, the second they announced it.
We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers like Jon Gruber or Don Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user interface issues. (I probably read twenty mini-essays about Safari’s new tab design.) The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews, or Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology site. And that’s not even mentioning the rumor blogs.
And of course, MacWorld is still around as a print magazine, but they also now have a web site. Yesterday alone, they published twenty-six different articles on Apple-related topics.
(II)
The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.
To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.
When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists. Will the bloggers get out of their pajamas and head up the Baghdad bureau? Will they do the kind of relentless shoe-leather detective work that made Woodward and Bernstein household names? These are genuinely important questions, and I think we have good reason to be optimistic about their answers. But you can’t see the reasons for that optimism by looking at the current state of investigative journalism in the blogosphere, because the new ecosystem of investigative journalism is in its infancy. There are dozens of interesting projects being spearheaded by very smart people, some of them nonprofits, some for-profit. But they are seedlings.
I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.
That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of Macworld to the rich diversity of today’s tech coverage is happening in all areas of news. Like William Gibson’s future, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
(III)
Consider another – slightly less nerdy -- case study: politics. The first Presidential election that I followed in an obsessive way was the 1992 election that Clinton won. I was as compulsive a news junkie about that campaign as I was about the Mac in college: every day the Times would have a handful of stories about the campaign stops or debates or latest polls. Every night I would dutifully tune into Crossfire to hear what the punditocracy had to say about the day’s events. I read Newsweek and Time and the New Republic, and scoured the New Yorker for its occasional political pieces. When the debates aired, I’d watch religiously and stay up late soaking in the commentary from the assembled experts.
That was hardly a desert, to be sure. But compare it to the information channels that were available to me following the 2008 election. Everything I relied on in 1992 was still around of course – except for the late, lamented Crossfire – but it was now part of a vast new forest of news, data, opinion, satire – and perhaps most importantly, direct experience. Sites like Talking Points Memo and Politico did extensive direct reporting. Daily Kos provided in-depth surveys and field reports on state races that the Times would never have had the ink to cover. Individual bloggers like Andrew Sullivan responded to each twist in the news cycle; HuffPo culled the most provocative opinion pieces from the rest of the blogosphere. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com did meta-analysis of polling that blew away anything William Schneider dreamed of doing on CNN in 1992. When the economy imploded in September, I followed economist bloggers like Brad DeLong to get their expert take the candidates’ responses to the crisis. (Yochai Benchler talks about this phenomenon of academics engaging with the news cycle in a smart response here.) I watched the debates with a thousand virtual friends live-Twittering alongside me on the couch. All this was filtered and remixed through the extraordinary political satire of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, which I watched via viral clips on the Web as much as I watched on TV.
What’s more: the ecosystem of political news also included information coming directly from the candidates. Think about the Philadelphia race speech, arguably one of the two or three most important events in the whole campaign. Eight million people watched it on YouTube alone. Now, what would have happened to that speech had it been delivered in 1992? Would any of the networks have aired it in its entirety? Certainly not. It would have been reduced to a minute-long soundbite on the evening news. CNN probably would have aired it live, which might have meant that 500,000 people caught it. Fox News and MSNBC? They didn’t exist yet. A few serious newspaper might have reprinted it in its entirety, which might have added another million to the audience. Online perhaps someone would have uploaded a transcript to Compuserve or The Well, but that’s about the most we could have hoped for.
There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers.
The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. I loved reading Frank Rich’s reliably sensible responses to each passing media frenzy; and certainly Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin was every bit as important as Obama’s race speech in shaping our sense of the candidates. (Though I suspect Couric’s interview would have had much less impact without CBS’s viral distribution of the clips on the Web.) But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a "citizen reporter" named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen's Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.
I think the political web covering the 2008 campaign was so rich for precisely the same reasons that the technology web is so rich: because it’s old-growth media. The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state.
What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only started maturing.
In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
But of course, that’s what the web can do. That’s one of the main reasons we created outside.in, because I found myself waking up in the morning and turning to local Brooklyn bloggers like Brownstoner, who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two years later, there are close to a thousand bloggers writing about Brooklyn: there are multiple blogs devoted to the Atlantic Yards real estate development; dozens following the Brooklyn foodie scene; music blogs, politics blogs, parenting blogs. The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great. As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve. We’re going to go through the same evolution that I did from reading two-month-old news in MacWorld, to expecting an instantaneous liveblog of a keynote announcement. Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half mile of my house, and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.
(IV)
So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce. This is Jeff Jarvis’ motto: do what you do best, and link to the rest. My guess is that the venerable tradition of the muckraking journalist will be alive and well ten years from: partially supported by newspapers and magazines, partially by non-profit foundations and innovative programs like Newassignment.net, and partially by enterprising bloggers who make a name for themselves by breaking important stories.
Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever. I’m confident that I get far more useful information from the new ecosystem than I did from traditional media along fifteen years ago, but I pride myself on being a very savvy information navigator. Can we expect the general public to navigate the new ecosystem with the same skill and discretion?
Let’s say for the sake of argument that we can’t. Let’s say it’s just too overwhelming for the average consumer to sort through all the new voices available online, to separate fact from fiction, reporting from rumor-mongering. Let’s say they need some kind of authoritative guide, to help them find all the useful information that’s proliferating out there in the wild.
If only there were some institution that had a reputation for journalistic integrity that had a staff of trained editors and a growing audience arriving at its web site every day seeking quality information. If only…
Of course, we have thousands of these institutions. They’re called newspapers.
The funny thing about newspapers today is that their audience is growing at a remarkable clip. Their underlying business model is being attacked by multiple forces, but their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking. As of January, print circulation had declined from 62 million to 49 million since my days at the College Hill Bookstore. But their online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period. Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.
This is what I think the ecosystem will ultimately look like:
Will this system be perfect? Of course not. But I think we have every reason to believe that it will be an improvement on the paradigm that we’ve been living with for the past century.
Let me say one final thing. I am bullish on the future of news, as you can tell. But I am not bullish on what is happening right now in the newspaper industry. It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists and editors are going to lose their jobs, and cities are going to lose their papers. There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two. That is bad news for two reasons. First because it is going to inflict a lot of stress on people inside the industry who do great things, and who provide an important social good with their work. But it’s also bad news because it’s going to distract us from the long-term view; we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.
So that’s why I wanted to take us back to the College Hill bookstore in 1987: to remind us that the emerging news ecosystem is already around us, and already doing wonderful things. Most of us in this room, I suspect, are already living in the old-growth forests now. It’s up to us to remind everyone else how promising those ecosystems really are -- or, even better, to help them live up to that promise.
Source: Stevenberlinjohnson.com
Thursday, March 12, 2009
For The New York Times, the digital future is now
BY now, just about everyone who follows the media industry has heard of the deep fiscal troubles of The New York Times. But even as the paper does its best for all the news that's fit for newsprint, it is also conducting experiments aimed at moving itself into the forefront of digital journalism.
At the Emerging Technologies conference (ETech) on Tuesday, Nick Bilton, the design integration editor and user interface specialist at the Times' research and development lab, spoke about "sensors, smart content, and the future of news," essentially a recap of some of the most forward-thinking projects coming from the tech-savvy minds at the paper of record.
Bilton explained that the Times' R&D lab is divided into three main subject areas: emerging platforms, analytics, and core R&D. As a member of the latter team, Bilton said he and four colleagues are devoting their time to researching new technologies that are 5 to 10 years out, particularly at systems involving innovative digital advertising.
Among the projects he talked about, one done in conjunction with software maker Adobe Systems seemed particularly appropriate in a world where everyone has a different size display and uses windows of infinitely varied sizes within their browsers. Bilton explained that the project is aimed at automatically resizing and reformatting data onscreen for whatever sized window in which the user is reading the Times, or its sister publication, the International Herald Tribune.
"When I resize the screen, it re-lays out and reformats the (data)," Bilton said. "It's a really unique way to resize and reformat data for different sized displays.
And he said that the Times' R&D lab is also looking intently at touch-screen devices in an attempt to best understand how usage of such technology impacts how readers experience the news.
Another innovative concept he talked about is what he called "smart content," a system that would keep track of what users have read digitally across all devices. So, under this system, for example, if a reader has looked at a story on their computer and then loads the Times on their iPhone, that story would be grayed out on the assumption that the reader wants to be presented only with the most meaningful data.
Bilton then talked about a digital take on the traditional street newspaper box, those banal metal containers which take your quarters and (usually) give you a copy of the paper. In the lab, the Times is experimenting with a machine, called "CustomTimes," that looks like a newspaper box with a computer monitor on it. The idea is that those who find the boxes--most likely in controlled indoor settings so that they aren't stolen--will be able to peruse Times content in the manner that best suits their needs, allowing them to print the stories they want at the touch of a few buttons.
And in a nod to the fact that newspaper printing deadlines often force publications like the Times to close their earliest editions before results from things like elections or sporting events are known, the paper is also experimenting with a system in which users reading stories with incomplete results can send text messages and have final tallies sent to their mobile devices.
Similarly, Bilton said the paper is trying out a semacode system in which users with cell phone cameras can take pictures of the special, digital codes embedded in, say, movie advertisements and their phones could auto-load trailers for the film. The same would be true of any kind of video content the Times might offer, including its latest video stories, all of which could be available to users with mobile phones with cameras.
And, leveraging mobile phones with built-in GPS, the Times is also thinking about serving up localized content to users, Bilton said, as well as technology that could determine that if a user travels between cell towers at high speeds--likely because they're in a car--stories could be served up in an audio format.
Another interesting system Bilton talked about was one that could integrates Times' content in readers' homes, and in particular, on their Internet-connected TVs. He explained that the Times may offer APIs and that an example of how they could be used would be to auto-detect how far a reader is from their TV. And depending on the distance, the system could automatically change the layout of the content to match the distance and the optimal size of text.
To be sure, much of these ideas are quite a ways off, but some might be in the near future. And for the Times, this is definitely an important time to be taking the lead on digital innovation given that the paper is in serious financial shape and there's been talk about it shutting down its print edition.
Bilton seemed to say that the end of printed newspapers was nowhere near, and that no matter what technology comes along, there will always be a printed edition of the Times. But that may be wishful thinking. Still, regardless of whether you can still pick up an actual paper New York Times or not, there is little doubt that digital is the direction that will dominate in the future. And it's fitting, and crucial, that the journalistic institution that just about everyone else looks to for leadership takes the lead in moving the profession forward.
Source: cnet news
At the Emerging Technologies conference (ETech) on Tuesday, Nick Bilton, the design integration editor and user interface specialist at the Times' research and development lab, spoke about "sensors, smart content, and the future of news," essentially a recap of some of the most forward-thinking projects coming from the tech-savvy minds at the paper of record.
Bilton explained that the Times' R&D lab is divided into three main subject areas: emerging platforms, analytics, and core R&D. As a member of the latter team, Bilton said he and four colleagues are devoting their time to researching new technologies that are 5 to 10 years out, particularly at systems involving innovative digital advertising.
Among the projects he talked about, one done in conjunction with software maker Adobe Systems seemed particularly appropriate in a world where everyone has a different size display and uses windows of infinitely varied sizes within their browsers. Bilton explained that the project is aimed at automatically resizing and reformatting data onscreen for whatever sized window in which the user is reading the Times, or its sister publication, the International Herald Tribune.
"When I resize the screen, it re-lays out and reformats the (data)," Bilton said. "It's a really unique way to resize and reformat data for different sized displays.
And he said that the Times' R&D lab is also looking intently at touch-screen devices in an attempt to best understand how usage of such technology impacts how readers experience the news.
Another innovative concept he talked about is what he called "smart content," a system that would keep track of what users have read digitally across all devices. So, under this system, for example, if a reader has looked at a story on their computer and then loads the Times on their iPhone, that story would be grayed out on the assumption that the reader wants to be presented only with the most meaningful data.
Bilton then talked about a digital take on the traditional street newspaper box, those banal metal containers which take your quarters and (usually) give you a copy of the paper. In the lab, the Times is experimenting with a machine, called "CustomTimes," that looks like a newspaper box with a computer monitor on it. The idea is that those who find the boxes--most likely in controlled indoor settings so that they aren't stolen--will be able to peruse Times content in the manner that best suits their needs, allowing them to print the stories they want at the touch of a few buttons.
And in a nod to the fact that newspaper printing deadlines often force publications like the Times to close their earliest editions before results from things like elections or sporting events are known, the paper is also experimenting with a system in which users reading stories with incomplete results can send text messages and have final tallies sent to their mobile devices.
Similarly, Bilton said the paper is trying out a semacode system in which users with cell phone cameras can take pictures of the special, digital codes embedded in, say, movie advertisements and their phones could auto-load trailers for the film. The same would be true of any kind of video content the Times might offer, including its latest video stories, all of which could be available to users with mobile phones with cameras.
And, leveraging mobile phones with built-in GPS, the Times is also thinking about serving up localized content to users, Bilton said, as well as technology that could determine that if a user travels between cell towers at high speeds--likely because they're in a car--stories could be served up in an audio format.
Another interesting system Bilton talked about was one that could integrates Times' content in readers' homes, and in particular, on their Internet-connected TVs. He explained that the Times may offer APIs and that an example of how they could be used would be to auto-detect how far a reader is from their TV. And depending on the distance, the system could automatically change the layout of the content to match the distance and the optimal size of text.
To be sure, much of these ideas are quite a ways off, but some might be in the near future. And for the Times, this is definitely an important time to be taking the lead on digital innovation given that the paper is in serious financial shape and there's been talk about it shutting down its print edition.
Bilton seemed to say that the end of printed newspapers was nowhere near, and that no matter what technology comes along, there will always be a printed edition of the Times. But that may be wishful thinking. Still, regardless of whether you can still pick up an actual paper New York Times or not, there is little doubt that digital is the direction that will dominate in the future. And it's fitting, and crucial, that the journalistic institution that just about everyone else looks to for leadership takes the lead in moving the profession forward.
Source: cnet news
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