The Inquisitr » jeff jarvis

Will wire services fall first as newspapers decline?

Duncan Riley — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:15:13 +0000

As print revenues rapidly fall, cost cutting must follow as newspapers struggle to stay alive. We’ve already seen cuts to traditional services such as foreign bureaus, where as once newspapers had reporters in foreign cities, today only the top papers have a local presence, and even then with a lesser presence that in the past (for example, allowing a reporter in London to cover all of Europe). That vacuum should be a boost to wire services such as AP and Reuters, who can fill the gaps left. And yet, as margins become tighter, the concept of a middle-man offering syndicated news is under threat.

Jeff Jarvis notes today that the New Jersey’s Star-Ledger has published a full edition without using anything from AP, instead running lots of local stories and content from the Washington Post, LA Times, McClatchy, the Glouceseter County Times and Sportsticker. Jarvis notes that the issue isn’t that AP isn’t providing a great service, the issue is cost, with small papers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer having to pay $1 million a year for the right to publish AP stories.

Jarvis suggests that what we are seeing is the start of reverse syndication, where newspapers will enter into revenue sharing deals based on traffic pushed to their sites, bypassing the need for a wire service.

It’s an interesting idea, and you can read Jarvis’ full explanation in this post. It is possible that one day a model some what like what Jarvis is suggesting will come to the fore, but I don’t believe we are anywhere close just yet. The New Jersey’s Star-Ledger isn’t pushing people to other sites, it is taking content from other papers for its print edition. The relationship is still content based, presumably with a financial exchange involved, but one that is significantly less than access fees for AP.

What we are seeing is newspapers willing to work with one and other collectively to reduce costs by cutting out the middleman. A small start perhaps, but if it’s embraced, and newspapers realize that other papers aren’t their main threat, declining readership and subsequently revenues are, it’s the start of something bigger, and AP and Reuters are about to take a serious hit.

It would be wrong to presume though that AP is completely stupid. PaidContent reports that AP is to begin sharing advertising and syndication revenue with more of its subscribers, through an extension of a program that turns its clients in to online sales affiliates. The short version: you run an AP story, you include an ad, and you share in the revenue. This is one example I found, complete with what I presume is the AP resource box in the footer. Not exactly inspiring, but it’s start. If AP opens the program up further, and drops the need to subscribe to play, things start to get interesting as demand for AP content will grow at a time newspaper users drop. Reuters and AP already attract a large amount of traffic to their own sites, imagine that this content goes out with ads, driving new revenue streams. It’s not impossible that both could end up standing alone as online news powerhouses that don’t rely on traditional syndication deals.

Meritocracy Part 2: the remnant cultural elite

Duncan Riley — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:54:57 +0000

We covered Jeff Jarvis’ excellent post on meritocracy online this morning, but one of the responses to the piece is so staggering it’s worth repeating, if only so we can identify the cultural elite the online world is facing. Serious trolling from Broadband Politics:

Most people are stupid, and the Googlenet hasn’t changed that. The wisdom of crowds isn’t wise, it tends to the lowest common denominator. You don’t get popularity in the Googlenet by saying things that are intelligent or insightful, you do by showing naked women in various states of compromise and by inflaming the emotions in other equally manipulative ways. So this commentary simply ignores these truths of human nature. The link economy isn’t about “merit;” people link indiscriminately to things that made them laugh, get sexually aroused, pissed off, or confused.

If you want a culture that rewards excellence, you aren’t going to get it by ranking pages by the number of morons who saw fit to link to them, you rank them by the number of intelligent people who found them valuable. And that evidence shows up in the real world, not on the Googlenet.

Don’t think that is a view held by few as it’s a common view among significant portions of the self appointed cultural elite globally.

That some people are stupid may be a given, but who defines who is stupid or not? Who gave that right to the cultural elite, people who have gained their positions not through skill nor talent alone, but often through money and birth.

That naked women or humor ranks highly online does not mean that they live in a vacuum of higher knowledge, it simply means that sometimes the cultural elite focus on them via the media, after all what better way to denigrate the internet then to suggest it is dangerous, full or porn or any other negative angle you can think of. And who are we to say that some of the humor online today may not be considered fine art by future generations?

How do we define who is intelligence when the constructs of the high priests of culture restrict access to all but a few, a system that has denied knowledge to others by limiting its distribution? It’s the ultimate closed shop, one rife with cronyism and corruption by money. That the intelligent should select the intelligent is a form of cultural eugenics.

The internet may not be perfect, but Jarvis sums it up nicely:

The internet doesn’t make us more creative, I don’t think. But it does enable what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. And that takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative class.

We have already seen some of the backlash, and as the world changes expect to see more elitist rubbish such as this.

Meritocracy and marketing

Duncan Riley — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:21:40 +0000

Jeff Jarvis, one of the preeminent thinkers of the internet age, has written a great post on the democratization of content and talent on Buzz Machine. In the post, he argues that the internet removes big media and cultural institutions as the high priests of culture:

Internet curmudgeons argue that Google et al are bringing society to ruin precisely because they rob the creative class of its financial support and exclusivity: its pedestal. But internet triumphalists, like me, argue that the internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all mass measurements and priestly definitions and lets us not only find what we like but find people who like what we do. The internet kills the mass, once and for all. With it comes the death of mass economics and mass media, but I don’t lament that, not for a moment.

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. I’ll argue just the opposite: Only the playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit – as defined by the public rather than the priests – which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.

It’s an argument so well put that the next time I’ll be speaking to a new media crowd I’ll be using it myself.

However, while I agree with Jarvis that the key shift to the internet levels the playing field and brings us to something more like a meritocracy, to suggest that the playing field in now truly flat or online content lives in a pure meritocracy is, in my belief at least, incorrect.

The internet is an enabling conduit for talent that offers just rewards for those that warrant merit, but a culture of links does not necessarily allow the most talented to rise to the top. Sadly perhaps the rules of old media and old marketing still play a significant role in promotion. Internet advertising is proof immediately that the level playing field Jarvis suggests does not always exist. Talent cannot rise to the top if it is not found, even if the internet age makes the process of rising easier. A blogger who in another age may have been a poet laureate remains unknown unless they are read. The culture of linking can create stars, but does the discovery process exist without promotion? Cannot a solid marketing campaign or good PR create buzz that sets forward the rise to the top, presuming that the content is something above average to start with?

Today we see big media advertise and spin their online content with mixed results, but we still see hits. Viral marketing can be manipulated to give a push to content not based on meritocracy but the craftiness or expense accounts of those involved.

Is the ability to market and manipulate a fair component of merit in itself? It could be fairly argued that someone with talent in self promotion rises higher because that skill is part of the talent mix, but that doesn’t necessarily deliver the best content.

I agree with Jarvis that the internet has democratized the process away from the high priests of old, but in accepting that things are better today, we should not confuse a shift to something better with a notion that what the internet has created is somehow pure. That the days of the cultural elites who decided alone one-size-fits-all mass measurements and priestly definitions of creativity are passing is a given, but the new world creates new challenges. The internet may enable anyone with talent to be a star, but getting there will still show a divide between those with the money or skills to promote, and those without.

(img credit: ZDNet)