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

Posts Tagged ‘Business Model’

Newsorgs Should Offer Freemium Live Interviews

Through Steve Outing’s blog I discovered a video interview of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. The interview is a short seven and half minutes long, but is insanely interesting. So interesting in fact, that I’d be willing to pay to see the full, unedited interview. Especially if paying meant I could have watched it live and asked questions during the interview.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Which lead me to the following idea – newspapers are very good at interviewing people. Further, their brand recognition can get them access to folks that the typical blogger doesn’t have access to.
Interviews of industry leaders talking about things they don’t typically present in public is certainly premium content that people would be willing to pay for – especially if they can write it off as a business expense.

What a great application of freemium to newspaper online content. Offer a shorter video like the one above for free, and then charge a monthly rate if people want live access.

Of course, there’s a major problem. People are already doing this and providing the content for free. This Week in Startups (TWiST), started just a few weeks ago by Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.com . The show concept is very cool: he uses ustream to livestream an hour long interview with founders and CEOs of interesting startups. He uses a Twitter hashtag as a backchannel to the whole show, allowing people to converse and ask questions. Best of all, this is free.

If Calacanis, who is undoubtedly a busy man, can do this, for free. There must be countless other examples of the same. Just check the iTunes Podcast directory for more.

Mark another lost opportunity for newspapers.

TWiST Episode 1

May 21, 2009 | Battle, Media Industry | Comments

Paid Content = Paid Wifi

Wi-Fi logo
Image via Wikipedia

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve paid for WiFi access. Like most geeks, I pride myself on being able to find free internet access wherever I go. If I can’t find it, (like some airports) then web access nearly always goes into the “it can wait” column of my todo list.

Taking a step back, a service that I can find for free elsewhere is not one I’m likely to pay for, and I’m willing to sacrifice timeliness to save money.

This will be the a huge problem for newsorgs who want to go the paid content route.

Actually, the phrase Paid Content is flawed. It presumes that you’re paying for a product. Paying customers of the WSJ, aren’t really paying for the content, they pay for access to that content. You aren’t buying a product, you’re buying a service.

Let’s call Paid Content what it really is: Paid Access.

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May 07, 2009 | Media Industry | Comments

You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce

My brother sent me an email tonight after he heard, Peter Fader speak. Fader is a professor at Wharton School of business at UPenn “doing datamining - they call it marketing.” Apparently, my brother found this talk inspiring, ending his first email in our resulting exchange with:

…he made some damn good points about the subscription model. b2c already is doing ok (campfire, github, etc.), it's time for consumers to pony up. His bottom line: if facebook decided to charge you $10/month, you'd pay it. No questions asked.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or know me, or have listened to some of the top minds in this ‘new media’ business, you’ll be pretty easily pick out how totally my brother has drunk the kool-aid of the bass-akwards mind fuck that the ‘old media’ folks try to sell you.

First there was the stone age

Deep breath.

Let’s try to break this down: We are now in the information age. Where once the pinacle of technology was an iron sword, the new tech is information.

Our economy is based on the trade of IP, and yet, paradoxically, the internet has made information practically infinite. Therefore, attempting to make money by controlling the amount of information is doomed to fail.

Put another way: controlling the scarcity of something that isn't scarce can't work.

History is not a good guide here: The internet is a fundamental shift from anything we’ve experienced before. It’s as revolutionary as the printing press and as radical as the written word.  It’s both asynchronous and instant two-way communication.

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Apr 02, 2009 | Journalism, Media Industry | 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.

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Mar 24, 2009 | Media Industry | Comments

Newsflow: How Journalism Is and Will Be Generated

The News Ecosystem according to Steve Johnson. Click for a larger version.

Steven Johnson, co-founder of outside.in, gave a very good, well thought out, speech at SXSW on the state of the news industry last week. In the transcript on his blog, he shares a slide on how he envisions the future of the news industry.

Steven has a good, albeit simplistic break down of how this new paradigm is working. I'm sure I agree with the flow of the information News → Commentary → Curation → Distribution. Seems to me that you'd have to distribute before you can get comments back, and that you'd need to curate the commentary… Forget it, the the chart is simplistic.

Steven does have the right context for this though:

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 agree whole heartily with his point and I like the broad strokes of his chart. But, I suggest that this diagram far too simple to describe the new paradigm.

As Steven says, “The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.” What his model is missing is the intricacies of linking, how data will be distributed to not only the customer, but among all of those gathering and generating news.

Hypothesizing on the new newsflow

newsflow

Licensed under Creative Commons. Click for a larger version.

Yea… not as easy to understand right? I’ve got arrows going all over the place, and there’s not clear rhyme or reason to the way information flows. My apologies, these relationships are chaotic and often have many nodes. Let me make the key points:

Data is key. As Tim Berners Lee has predicted, the future of the web is “linked data.” This is is something that Steven addresses, but only briefly. As the semantic web becomes reality, displaying and accessing data will become the important role for journalism to fill.

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Mar 19, 2009 | Journalism, Media Industry | Comments

Gut Punch: TIME Experimenting With Paid Content

I've had a long time love affair with TIME.com . I'm constantly impressed with the quality of their content, and they have made many progressive steps to move into the online space in a meaningful way.

Today, buried in a press event to announce some new mobile apps, they announced that they would start experimenting with paid content.

My gut reaction was very similar to Zach Wise

WTF! Goodbye Time.com…

-@zlwise

But, then I watched the video, and regained some hope for my favorite online publisher. They're not just going to enact a paywall. They've given them selves 8 months to "experiment" with making portions of their sites paid content.

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Mar 18, 2009 | Media Industry | 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 | Comments

    LINKS | Micropayments Don’t Work, but Everyone Has a Better Idea

    Somehow, I missed the links from the latter part of last week, and have been bookmarking like crazy this last week. So, ya'll get a ton of links. Apologies for the long, long list, but I've broken it up with some good videos — and I've edited down! These are the cream of the crop from February 10th through February 20th:

    Journalism Business Models

    Web Journalism

    Feb 21, 2009 | tumblr post | 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 | 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.

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    Feb 11, 2009 | Media Industry | Comments

    BATTLE | What We Need, Is a Plan

    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.

    My battle this week stems from a series of emails exchanged between myself, the IT staff, and the Business Director that originally stemmed from the ad department securing online sponsorship for a weekly print feature: Thirsy Thursday — a beer (mmh… beer) reviewing column.

    The effort has devolved into a struggle to get the new IT staff up to speed, launch a new blog for Thirsty Thursday, and even redoing parts of the main website. My suggestions on that front were:

    • decisions about web design by non-web designers is usually a poor choice.
    • unilateral decisions about the structure of an editorial site by business staff is not a good move
    • I'd strongly suggest that many of our design issues are centered around college publisher inadequacies. 

    The Way Forward

    This whole process lead me to realize that what the DO needs more than anything else, is a planned approach to the Internet, which until this point, has been haphazard at best. We have no plan for forward growth, and that means that we're likely going to continue to be frustrated with each other and with our own efforts. At this point there are plenty of other colleges out there that have easily surpassed our own efforts to both make money online and leverage it as a platform.

    I for one, find this to be unacceptable. The Daily Orange has a strong tradition of … everything, and it's rather shameful to see us falling so far behind on technology that is both the present and future of the neworg.
    There are already schools that have seen their traditional college newspaper challenged (and in the case of NYU, replaced) by an online only news startup. I do honestly fear that the DO stands to suffer the same fate if things continue at the current pace.

    Feb 10, 2009 | Battle | Comments

    How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong

    But Apple's radical opacity hasn't hurt the company — rather, the approach has been critical to its success, allowing the company to attack new product categories and grab market share before competitors wake up. It took Apple nearly three years to develop the iPhone in secret; that was a three-year head start on rivals. Likewise, while there are dozens of iPod knockoffs, they have hit the market just as Apple has rendered them obsolete. For example, Microsoft introduced the Zune 2, with its iPod-like touch-sensitive scroll wheel, in October 2007, a month after Apple announced it was moving toward a new interface for the iPod touch. Apple has been known to poke fun at its rivals' catch-up strategies. The company announced Tiger, the latest version of its operating system, with posters taunting, REDMOND, START YOUR PHOTOCOPIERS.)

    How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

    Apple is an evil genius, if you believe this article. It makes many good points, and though long is well worth the read.

     

    Mar 19, 2008 | Creative, Tech | Comments