The ‘new media’ evolution according to a millennial photographer.

Posts Tagged ‘Advertising’

Whiteboard of Mindmapping: ‘New Media’

I'm a visual person, so over the last month or so I've been trying to map out the state of the new information based industry. This is part of a massive post I'm working on, but I figured I'd toss my visual up on this blog and maybe start a conversation. (If anyone can read my chicken scratch.)

Mindmapping on a whiteboard

Mindmapping on a whiteboard

May 21, 2009 | Journalism, Media Industry | View Comments

An Economist Approach to the Newspaper Industry

You should really hear my brother and me argue.

It sounds sounds a lot like we disagree on everything, but sit and listen to us, and you realize that we often have the same point of view, just different ways of expressing it.

My brother is the guy who got me inspired/angry enough to write You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce. Phill Baker (who has no online profile to link to), who studies economics and engineering at UPenn and was assigned a massive project – to write a 80 page paper on an industry effected by technological change.

I’m pretty certain that his decision to write on the newspaper industry was in part to piss me off, but in reality, I’m glad he’s doing it. It’s interesting to see how an economist approaches the industry from a macro perspective.

He’s asked me to publish the paper when he’s done, mostly to see what the “industry insiders” think. I’ve agreed, so look for it in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we're in the process of another email exchange, in which I play futurist and defend us blogging “ilk.”

What follows is excerpts from his email (small edits), interspaced with my responses. Any emphasis or links are my own.

Uh, yea, definitely, as to the last point you made. It's interesting b/c this is a 'classic' example of how success breeds failure under the pressure of technological change. There's some fascinating literature in that topic, but the poignant example is Kodak: they were so focused on being a film camera company, that they completely missed digital. They thought they were in the business of film (they were a pretty sophisticated chemical engineering company), whereas they should have seen themselves in the photography business.

Where we differ is the extent of the change. So the business model has lost its exclusivity and newspapers missed the boat. Now they're facing established competitors in their markets with serious competitive advantages and the benefits of network effects through first mover status (e.g. if the NYTimes had been craigslist, we wouldn't be hearing of the end of newspapers).

Newspapers are not going anywhere. Print will not disappear, there's simply too much demand. 15% profit margins (20% is a bit high, actually the industry average is about 17%), should disappear (they can be maintained at the cost of cutting everything in the paper, but that'd be stupid). Circulation will likely stabilize in the next few years as the cannibalization of the print edition by the internet edition faces diminishing returns.

What's fascinating is that their business model has been co-opted by search. I don't think, and the research backs me up here, that display advertising online will ever come close to replacing the lost advertising revenue that was enjoyed in print. The 'national' papers, or those that are big enough to scale and aren't trapped under burdens of debt due (some serendipity comes into play there), will likely find stability first as they can portray themselves as the replacements to the four TV networks. At the head of long tail, they'll be able to differentiate themselves from commodity news through designer websites, cool visualizations, (hopefully) good journalism and (hopefully) their brand names.

  • Agreed. Ads will very likely not be able to fund the entirety of a newsorg in the future. I can say this with maybe… 90% certainty.
  • Newspapers enjoyed a profit margin of 20% and higher.
  • The issue here is largely mindset. Newspapers are used to thinking of themselves as …newspapers. As they realize that they are really just a specialized subset of the tech sector, they'll come to have a revenue model that is more inline with the industry. Which is to say, one that relies on multiple sources of revenue.
  • We really agree on your last three points here. Newsorgs need a great UI, ability to inform using data, and to maintain a solid reputation.

Read the rest of this post →

Apr 28, 2009 | Battle, Media Industry | View Comments

Rev2oh | Classifieds: Use a Tiered Selling Strategy

RevenueTwoPointZero is a new group of very smart folks who are trying to rethink the business model behind journalism. After their conference last weekend, they've published a series of blog posts on their brainstorming sessions. I'll be responding to many (if not all of them) with the rev2oh slug.

A mockup from the rev2oh team.

The rev2oh team came up with a really solid plan for how newspaper platforms can redo their classifieds sales online. I was really please to see them include aggregating craigslist as one of the goals. After all, why should newsorgs try to create a new social network when a perfectly good one already exists?

The one concern I had when reading their plan was that the premium content is very much a micro-payment model. This does work, (see: ebay), but it's not very user friendly.

In part, this response is applying Jeff Jarvis’ question: “what would Google do?” Or, more appropriately, “What would Apple do?”

Apple is the master of simplifying their offerings. You can’t buy options for an iphone to get a brighter screen, bluetooth, extra data every month, and a fingerprint-proof backing. That many options is confusing. iPhone comes in two versions that differ in just one way: memory. A customer only has one decision to make, and that simplifies their experience.

And that, after all, is what this entire proposal hinges on: a better user experience.

Read the rest of this post →

Mar 24, 2009 | Media Industry | View Comments

LINKS | Inspiration Only

Spotted: The Chicago Tribune puts Twitter in their masthead

This has been a really inspiring week for me. Everything from my talks with John Lowe, to activity at CoPress, to a phone conversation with Daniel about the future, to progress at The Daily Orange to this fantastic piece at Nieman Labs. With that in mind, I'm going to limit myself to links that inspire this week. (Also, it's been two weeks since I did one of these posts due to vacation. There's a lot of links.)

These are my links for March 8th through March 20th:

Mar 21, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

Newspapers Should Repurpose Craigslist to Save Their Classifieds

craigslistrssCraigslist has totally changed the way customers approach classifieds. We now expect to get free ads with an unlimited runtime. They must be searchable, and easily browsable. Print newspapers can’t hold an candle to the easy of use, or the price.

RevenueTwoPointZero, a new consortium (@rev2oh) that aims to invent new business models for the news industry has stated that one of their goals is to "build a better Craigslist." I suggest that this is an exercise in futility.

Craigslist is an established social network. Trying to take them on is a bit like saying you want to build a better facebook. The idea that you can build a website, no matter how much better that doesn't use the old social paradigm is ludicrous. No one is going to use both sites, and no one is going to move to a new site that doesn't have all their friends on it. Same applies to a new craigslist.

But, in looking at

newspapers as a platform, a portal to their community, there becomes an obvious way to utilize Craigslist to the mutual benefit of the customer, newsorg, and Craigslist. Read the rest of this post →

Mar 18, 2009 | Media Industry, Reviews | View Comments

LINKS | the Rocky Dies and the Daily Emerald Strikes

So, I'll be on vacation (woot!) for the coming week which means a couple of things:

  1. I'll have limited Internet access, so don't expect a my LINKS post to be very long/exist next week.
  2. I'll have limited Internet access and don't plan on being able to get any work done. At all. Not too sure how I feel about that.
  3. My Thursday resolution to try out TweetDeck for twitter is gonna have to wait a while.

On a similar note, if any of you have any requests on how to better lay this post out or better formating or etc… lemme know.

Here we go: these are my links for February 26th through March 5th:

OMG! (and other news that broke this week)

Journalism, Examples of

Nifty Online Things

Online Journalism

Journalism Business Models

    Pew Research Center: Newspapers Face a Challenging Calculus

    Mar 06, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    LINKS | Google’s Church

    Since I've decided to start giving my links rankings, starting next week, I will only be posting links with a 3 star or greater ranking.

    Lots of links on journalism this week (not unusual). There's a very long article from The New Republic that's very long, but exceedingly good. Also, check out my post on newspapers as a platform – I promise it's shorter. :)

    Photography

    J-School

    • Skills training is not enough for the digital journalist: A list of things that journos aren’t doing right in terms on thinking/training. It a topic that’s been overwritten on, but it’s very well thought out.
    • brightkite.com: Skills all J-Students need to know. A pic of a whiteboard from what I can only presume was a brainstorming session at News Innovation PDX
    • Journalism degree applications up 24%: Apparently, the number of jDegrees are up by 24% in the UK. Makes me wonder how US numbers compare. I suspect that most would guess that US numbers are down, but that never sounded right to me.

    Journalism Business Models

    • A suggestion for The New York Times: Monetize your superior platform by sharing it with smaller news outletsA suggestion for The New York Times: Monetize your superior platform by sharing it with smaller news outlets:Interview at Times Open with Michael Veytsel, founder of a semantic-web startup he’s tentatively calling Factbox.Cast: Nieman Journalism Lab
    • 25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers: A really solid list for creating a successful online newsorg that is user-friendly and “open source”
    • Op-Ed Columnist - Start Up the Risk-Takers - NYTimes.com: Don’t bail out the failed businesses, use the money to start new ones.
    • Printed Matters Paywall madness: Dec. 2008 - Feb. 2009 A roundup of the paywall argument from the last few months.
    • Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance: A good look at the problems facing Mass marketing with the rise of the Internet. Basically: the web allows adverts to cut the middle man out of the picture, taking a lot of the wind out of Madison…

      “The online display advertising paradigm was pulled directly from the print industry, the group that originally designed the Web for media. Assumptions were made that
      simply don’t apply, because the Web is not a one-to-many, mass marketing medium. It’s a place where horizontal connectivity replaces the vertical, top-down model of communications. We weren’t aware of this in the early days of the Web (or at least the media and advertising businesses weren’t aware), so display advertising seemed a logical choice.”
      - Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance

    • The follow is a list of quotes from a very long, very in depth article in The New Republic on the state of the newspaper industry.

      “The other standard means of supporting the production of public goods is through private non-profit organization. In fact, non-profit support of journalism has recently been increasing. But much of the discussion about non-profit journalism has failed to recognize that it can mean at least three different things. The first, though not necessarily the most relevant, is the conversion of newspapers from commercial to non-profit status as a way of preserving their public-service role.
      …a second approach is philanthropic support of specific kinds of journalism, available through multiple outlets, whether they are commercial or non-profit. The best-known example of this solution is ProPublica.
      …a third use of non-profits—and it is for underwriting new models of journalism in the online environment. A good example of this approach is the Center for Independent Media.”
      -       Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

    “When a society requires public goods, the solution is often to use government to subsidize them or to produce them directly. But if we want a press that is independent of political control, we cannot have government sponsoring or bailing out specific papers.”
    -     Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

    “News distributed to the public is a public good in two respects. First, from a political standpoint, news contributes to a well-functioning society inasmuch as it enables the public to hold government and other institutions accountable for their performance. Second, news is a public good in the sense economists use that concept.”

    - Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

    Journalism

    Offbeat

    Common, you know you wanna click on that picture to see where it leads.

    Feb 27, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    LINKS | Newspapers Don’t Need Micropayments

    These are my links for February 6th through February 8th:

    MBB SyrAtUconn

    Newspaper Business Models

    Feb 13, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    BATTLE | What We Need, Is Infastructure

     I’ve challenged myself to battle the management at my school’s newspaper The Daily Orange with a new ‘new media’ topic every week. BATTLE look at the struggle of a college paper trying to evolve to succeed on the Internet.

    As a follow up to my BATTLE post, What we need, is a plan, I'd like to share some the continued converstation between myself, and the ever skeptical (and it's a good thing to be skeptical), staff of The Daily Orange.

    Eight reasons why College Publisher is a problem

    1. I'm worried that other universities that produce a product inferior to our own, are so far ahead of us in the online space. This is ass backwards, and cannot be allowed to continue if we expect to keep bragging about the great tradition of the DO. It very well might become the 'once great tradition'
    2. College Publisher has ceased development of their next generation of software – CP5. No future growth does not bode well for their continued success. I'd be wary of thinking of College Publisher as a platform that will always be there.
    3. Online is both the future and the present reality. Every newsorg needs to exist online in a meaningful way. Many don't get it right, but we blatantly get it wrong.

      Read the rest of this post →

    Feb 11, 2009 | Battle | View Comments

    Newspapers Oughta Sell Their New Expertise

     

    new-media-gears

    Inspired by a small point made by Jeff Jarvis, I left a comment on his blog saying that I thought he had struck gold — a way to supplement ad revenue at local newspapers.

    To adapt to the Internet, newspapers have been forced to evolve, some have become experts in ‘new media.’ A term that I hate because, really what is ‘new media?’ When does it stop becoming new, and what will we call the media that comes after it? Is everything just eternally ‘new media?’

    The current definition means that a ‘new media’ expert is up-to-speed on blogging, linking, short form video, Facebook, Twitter, other social networks, etc… All of this expertise is a real commodity that many businesses would love to tap into.

    Read the rest of this post →

    Feb 11, 2009 | Media Industry | View Comments

    Links for January 8th Through January 9th

    These are my links for January 8th through January 9th:

    Jan 09, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    Links for January 6th Through January 7th

    These are my links for January 6th through January 7th:

    • Mainebiz - A new freesheet practicing the Guerilla journalism style is starting in Portland.
    • How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine - The claim: Newspapers were early to get online, they just didn't get on the open web soon enough.
      The problem: Newspaper structure is inherently flawed for internet consumption. Ad rates alone cannot sustain the newsroom, newspapers have become distracted by video as their answer, and stock price is too much of a concern. There's probably more to add to that list too.
    • Public Press FAQ | The Public Press - Here's a radical idea: share your published articles with Public Press, a non-profit that receives its money NPR fashion, so there are no ads.

    Jan 07, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    Links for January 6th

    These are my links for January 6th from 00:38 to 02:52:

    • Blogging, a new journalistic genre ? | Monday Note - Pretty strong argument that blogs are a great new form of journalism.
      Problem: they don't make money. Adverts don't value them and they just don't generate the pageviews an article does.
    • What is literacy? BuzzMachine - If online journalism is expected to work, the audience must be able to do the following:
      Media literacy, then, must embrace all those activities and skills, not just reading but:
      * knowing how to focus on a need for information and express that by crafting a query to find an answer;
      * knowing how to judge the relevance and reliability of sources - including the PageRank-like skill of judging sources on sources;
      * knowing how to create (and remix) content across all media types;
      * knowing how to collaborate;
      * understanding the impact of facts on perspective and perspective on opinion;
      * understanding the impact of identity and anonymity;
      * understanding the relationship of pieces of information that make up a larger story via links;
      * understanding how to make and find corrections
    • On The Media: Transcript of "You Are What You Is" (November 28, 2008) - Jeff Jarvis makes a good case for convergence. The media is now a singular: no longer do jounos choose, video, print, photo, whatever. We're cross-medium.
    • Twelve months of top journalism blog posts in 2008 Christopher Wink - Title says it all. It's a pretty darn good list of the top posts of last year. Worth reading through the list at least.
    • HuffPo Worth $200M? Em, More Like $2M - Business news | Newser - Sounds like the $25 million dollar investment that HuffPo just got may have inflated the value of the blogging newspaper. Instead of the $100-$200 million the investment was based on, it might be worth closer to $2 million. Ouch.
    • Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper share value fell $64B in '08 - A look at the stock prices and market cap. of the major newspapers in 2008.
    • The Turning Gate / TTG iPhone Portfolio - iphone friendly photo gallery direct from Lightroom: Cool!
    • Lee Enterprises: A poster child for the ownership crisis | yelvington.com - Steve Yelvington breaks down the economic crisis for newspapers:
      1. The internet means long term changes, newspapers weren't ready.
      2. Global economic crisis = less adverts = less income.
      3. Newspapers borrowed when the borrowing was good, and are in the same place as everyone else in this economic crisis. They debt they can't pay back.

    Jan 06, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    Steve to Craigslist: Open Up!

    Steve Outing, of reinventingclassifieds.com, has posted an open letter to the folks at craigslist, essentially asking them to open their platform to newspapers.

    Steve asks for the following:

    Allow local newspapers to scrape Craigslist ads.

    Allow consumers to place ads on Craigslist via newspaper websites.

    Add links on Craigslist to newspaper website classified sections.

    Add a news component to Craigslist.

    -An open letter to Craigslist | ReinventingClassifieds.com

    None of these seem unreasonable, they even have the potential to make Craigslist some money.

    Steve is not asking the world, and who knows, there might be some really money-making ideas here. The problem, as commentors have posted, is that newspapers are not setup to accept outside support. Therefore, even if Craigslist listens to Steve chances are that no one will care.

    This just goes back to the main problem of the Newspaper industry – they need to stop behaving like corperations and more like the smart and nimble web 2.0 companies that they are striving to be.

    Jul 15, 2008 | Media Industry | View Comments

    Make Money by Removing Ads

    thumbs on ads.jpg

    The TrustE numbers cited by eMarketer said that only 12.6 percent of respondents said that more than a quarter of the targeted ads they were delivered were relevant. Ouch.

    -Survey: Advertisers should acknowledge targeted ad concerns | The Social - CNET News.com

    I was on facebook today (a rarity for me) and I happened to notice the ad to the right.

    Yes, it's fairly creepy, but that wasn't what caught my eye. Notice the links below the ad? That "Advertise' link is fairly commonly found on sites, if you want to advertise through Facebook, click that and off you go. (By the way, Facebook makes it insanely simple to do that.)

    But, the other links are, in my experience, rather unique. The "More Ads" link gets you to the full listing of ads that Facebook might provide you. Users can pick their own advertising. Nifty.

    But wait, there's more!

    Facebook also has those two nifty thumbs up/thumbs down buttons. Unfortunately I couldn't get them to work. I clicked on them multiple times on multiple browsers and nothing happened. But… I really like the idea.

    Imagine a site (newspapers, listen up!) that targets advertising to users, in part,
    based directly on what they decide they want. The links should be simple and unobtrusive like Facebook's example.

    Why would anybody bother to spend the time telling a site which ads they like (or more likely, which ads they don't like)?

    Simple. The site can give them the reward of removing the ads they don't like -- completely.

    If a user clicks on the 'thumbs down' button, the site shouldn't simply replace that ad with another. Give the user the incentive – remove the ad; remove the hole on the page that was made for it. Get rid of it completely, make it a sort of "sorry to bother you with that trash" message to the user.

    Design

    As a sidenote of sorts:

    Facebook's ads are great in part because they all conform to a similar design standard that in turn conforms with the rest of the site. Facebook insures ads are un-obtrusive.

    One common complaint about online ads that they are not nearly as "informative" as print ads are.

    a recent survey of American consumers which found that more than three-quarters of respondents said online ads were more annoying than those in print.

    -Hard sell - The Economist.com

    In general people don't like flashy moving ads and prefer smaller, Google-like, text ads.

    "Ironically, the one type of ads that really work on the Web are the small, text-only ads on search engines.

    -New online ads squeeze news pages - CNet.com

    Make online ads more like print

    Therefore, online ads should be made to looks more like print ads. In my own, non-scientific observations of print newspaper ads, there's an obvious pattern that appears in print that does not appear online.

    Print ads, generally, list prices, provide coupons, or tell the consumer when a sale is going to be. In contrast, online ads try to get you to make 'free money.' No wonder people prefer print.

    The ads newspapers carry are necessarily focused on a local market. Fortunately, this is easy to replicate online.

    Faulty logic

    I recall watching a video (I can't remember where, otherwise I'd link to it), where an expert explained the newspaper advertising is struggling because of the way advertisers determine the total percentage of the site's visitors that might be interested in their ads.

    The gentleman presented the following logic: if the San Francisco Chronicle has an online readership of 1 million, but only half live in the SF Bay Area, then a car dealership that wants to advertise on the paper's site assumes that their ads are only applicable to half of the paper's audience and therefore worth half as much.

    This is ludicrous!

    If the car dealership has places a print ad, it misses out on the the half million people who visit the site, but have no chance of seeing the print edition. The dealership has effectively doubled its audience.

    Not only can the Newspaper offer a greater audience, but technology allows it to localize ads - automatically. If that dealership doesn't want to pay for ads that don't effect users outside the Bay Area, then the newspaper doesn't have to show that ad to the irrelevant users. Instead, they can find car dealerships that are applicable to their non-local users.

    A theoretical step

    I have no idea how much of the above is already done (or not done), but I here is a proposition for something that surely is not occuring.

    A way to solve this problem:

    Newspapers need to team up. Not in the media conglomeration sense, but in the Ohio sense. If national newspapers cooperated on advertising, a user from San Francisco visiting the NY Times site could still see advertising from that car dealership near San Francisco.

    The NY Times can pocket the revenue and pay a small commission to The Chronicle for arranging the whole deal. The user gets relevant ads that are informative.

    The key here is to provide relevant, local, ads that users find helpful, not gaudy.

    Jul 05, 2008 | Creative, Media Industry, Reviews | View Comments

    Newspapers Selling Off Assets

    Tribune, meanwhile, told its employees Wednesday that it hoped to wring more value out of its "underutilized" real estate in Chicago and Los Angeles, extending an asset-selling program Tribune is pursuing to service a $13 billion debt load, much of which it took on from going private.

    -Washington Times - In 'survival mode,' newspapers slashing jobs

    Fantastic, the newspaper industry is in freefall. Selling assets just to cover your own costs is not a winning strategy. (I know, I played Railroad Tycoon ;) )

    Looks like the Tribune Co. is especially in trouble.

    Jul 01, 2008 | Media Industry | View Comments

    Google Tries Tighter Aim for Web Ads – NYTimes.Com

    Mr. Fox said that Google’s approach was different from what Yahoo, AOL and others call behavioral targeting. Those companies look at what a user did a few days earlier to show them ads about the same topic today. Google says it believes that search engine advertising is most effective if it relates to what the user has most recently searched for.

    “We are trying to understand what the user is trying to do right now,” Mr. Fox said. “In some cases, those queries are ambiguous, so you need a little more context.”

    -Google Tries Tighter Aim for Web Ads - NYTimes.com

    Quick post:

    Google being smart yet again. This is what everyone should be doing.

    In the same way that if I'm reading the sports section of the paper, I want to see ads about golf balls, I don't want to see ads for photo equipment when I'm searching for movie times.

    Cheers to Google.

    Jun 27, 2008 | Creative, Tech | View Comments

    Levy: Gone, Without a Trace | Newsweek Voices – Steven Levy | Newsweek.com

    Here's a great real-life ad for the MacBook Air.

     This tech columnist's wife threw his laptop out with the newspaper. That's just funny.

    Levy: Gone, Without a Trace | Newsweek Voices - Steven Levy | Newsweek.com

    Mar 11, 2008 | Tech, tumblr post | View Comments