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

Posts Tagged ‘Freemium’

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 | View Comments

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

The Wall Street Journal Has Their iPhone App All Wrong


Alan Murray is executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online. This interview was taped on April 4, 2009 at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

This is the first video in this series great series by Nieman Labs where I've really disagreed with Alan Murray. His logic that "when you're done, you're done" with a newspaper just doesn't hold. Especially with a paper like the Journal that is intended to have a huge depth of information. I'd predict that very few people actually sit down with the paper for 45 minutes to get that 'completed' experience.

Further, regardless of either of our opinion on print, the iPhone is a different medium as Mr. Murray points out. It's not a blackberry, but it's certainly not print! With constant web access and push notifications coming in full force with iPhone OS 3.0, why limit your app to the 'you're done' feeling?

Instead, recognize that a cell phone, and an iPhone in particular is a uniquely customizable experience. Especially for a paper like the WSJ, which is trying to follow the freemium model, that want for customization is something that can be capitalized on.

Allow users to select what kind of business news they want to receive, maybe even allow them to pick stocks to have news alerts on. Heck, you could even micro-charge for that feature, 15 cents for every company you track, 3 bucks for each industry. Then, deliver them the news on that particular topic, instantly. Use push, use the notification system of the phone to alert them of the most important stuff.

Utilizing the iPhone medium the way it's intended to be used (it is opinionated design after all) is really the only way to have good odds at a successful app. Mobile is and is increasingly a huge deal for the media industry. It would be great to see someone get it right.

Apr 16, 2009 | Media Industry | View 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 | View Comments

Links for January 11th

These are my delicious links for January 11th from 08:06 to 22:57:

Jan 12, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments