LINKS | Down With the AP?
- Image via CrunchBase
There's been a growing feeling that the AP is not our friend in the media industry, but this week, that feeling seemed to bubble over. We've got some rough numbers to show that they're not helping us, and with the rise of ESPN local sites, the AP is rapidly loosing it's marketplace.
I don't know if I'm ready to sign their death sentence yet, they do seem to have some smart people working for 'em (I look to the New Model for News study and their iPhone app). Yet, it's painfully obvious (after the youtube fiasco) that the AP is a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.
These are my links for April 14th through April 18th:
The AP is outdated and increasingly irrelevant; so are Printies
AP thinking of future:http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf - Interesting 'atomization of news' but still top-down publishing model. –@GregElin on March 23
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- Image via Wikipedia
Daily Kos: State of the Nation: Newspapers make up 20% of the sources for The Daily Kos, but blogs make up near 13%, the second most. The AP? Less than 1%.
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“On the other hand, I will be gleeful when the AP goes out of business. I’m actually shocked at how little we depend on those jerks.”- Daily Kos: State of the Nation
- Hanging Tough: Financial Page: The New Yorker: This is the mindset the media industry needs to have: take risks, experiment. Either you’re going to fail, or come out on top. Non-risk isn’t gonna make you succeed.
- Why top-down syndication is broken: This is it: the newswire isn’t going to be top down, but bottom up. We’re crowdsourcing news, that means you can’t control abundancy. Take that AP.
- Garca Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin 26 and what to do about it: Common sense on what to do about saving your niche before someone scoops it up from under you. My favorite: fire the management. They’ve failed, bring someone new in.
- Journalism Online Just in case you were wondering what a plan for failure looks like…
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“A strategy is a product of a big vision of the market and where it’s going. It’s about abandoning some markets to concentrate on others. Newspaper companies don’t have a strategy. Newspaper companies have tactics, things they do to respond to other people’s strategies. Until newspapers get a strategy of their own that helps them decide what to do and what not to do, they are doomed to see all the high-potential market strategies owned by everyone else. Which leaves newspaper companies to grumble about unfair everything is and not much more.”- García Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin … and what to do about it
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“Let me be the first to tell you that saying you aim to be a “world-class platform-neutral news information provider” just tells me you haven’t got a clue about the future, are too scared to make a guess and are hoping someone else will get it right so you can copy them.”- García Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin … and what to do about it
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"Instead of feeling diminished by the Huff Post's excerpts, more publications might want to pre-empt the site by serving distilled versions of their own articles. That's right: Even the Post and the Times and the Journal can learn something about how to serve readers from the Huffington Post." –Hey, journalists! Stop getting all huffy about the Huffington Post's "lifting" of stories. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine
Numbers
- Measuring user engagement: Lessons from BusinessWeek: It’s a good breakdown of how to measure user engagement on a story. This is a valuable metric, that we really need.
Engagement is high, now we just need to harness it.
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Lest there be any doubt, the internet is used by all age groups.
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.
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.
AppleInsider | Apple Announces iPhone 2.0 Software and SDK Beta
This is pretty nifty if you're a iPhone user … even better if you're an enterprise client. Apple's got Microsoft Exchange server in a way that's much better than any Blackberry. If you watch the demo, you get to see the nearly instant communication between a laptop and the iPhone. Oh, and they've got PC level games on this thing now too. Really AppleInsider | Apple announces iPhone 2.0 software and SDK beta
