The Inquisitr » new media

What’s Old is New: Why Murdoch Doesn’t Get New Media

Duncan Riley — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:59:42 +0000

Much has been written online over the last two days following News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch’s chit-chat with Sky News Australia (see our coverage here and here.)

There’s a ton a different points that can be dissected and debated in the interview, but there was one thing Murdoch said that has been bugging me since I heard him say it: “no web sites anywhere in the world make serious money.”

I don’t dispute that the statement is wrong, but it lacks context and a broader understanding of the space. The obvious point is the definition of “serious money,” which to Murdoch means the hundreds of millions that News Corp makes. He’s entitled to define serious that way, but in reflecting on that we need only to take a look at the rise of News Corp to see that the “serious” money he talks about was a short term aberration over the much longer period of media as a whole.

The News Corp story is one of those Australian fairytale stories that many in Australia know something about. But the best history I’ve read recently came from an American, in the form of Michael Wolff’s biography “The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.”

The biography charts the rise of Murdoch from his inheritance of a single Adelaide newspaper through to the takeover by News Corp of the Wall Street Journal. The book places in context the newspaper (and broader media) industry as it was, and how Murdoch came to change the scene as part of the rise of the media barons in the late 70s and 1980s.

It details succinctly how newspapers were previously often small or family run affairs, often without huge profits or managed to their full potential. Couple to this was the stratospheric rise in newspaper advertising throughout the 1980’s, and the media consolidation as smaller outlets closed or sold out.

Indeed you could say that before the likes of Rupert Murdoch, no one was making serious money from newspapers. Where have we heard that line before?

Unlike newspapers, many with histories going back hundreds of years, the current crop of new media startups are often only years old. This is a time of immense competition online where new models are being experimented on, with the successful models being used as a basis to grow and expand (see AOL for one classic example.) Some are making money, others aren’t, but of course none are making “serious” money yet, just like newspapers once weren’t either.

Perhaps in old age, and combined with a self professed obsession with print, Murdoch can’t see the parallels starring him in the face?

Bronwen Clune told the Media140 conference in Sydney last week that she doesn’t like the label of new media because what we label new media really is just a part of the broader media landscape. Not only was she right, I’d extend that further, because although the online nature may make it new of sorts, the progression of the industry really isn’t anything of the sort, because what we’ve seen in the past with heritage media is now being reflected online, be it at a much faster pace.

Online media may not be making “serious” money yet, but what’s to stop a 21st century Murdoch buying up online outlets to create an entity that does make serious money, or for an existing conglomerate to grow and compete with the media of old? History can and does repeat itself, rich with the knowledge of those that have succeeded and failed before.

(Image: Department of the Internets)

Mainstream Media’s Death – Pending

Kyle Brady — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:10:10 +0000

Everyone has seen it coming but those effected by it: the mainstream media has been in a long, slow slide that will inevitably end in its death, and they have long since decried this as outrageous – but the cracks are beginning to show. Newspapers are asking for federal permission to collude as an industry, magazines are failing left and right, and all forms of publishing media has seen extensive layoffs and the closure of “extras” like non-local bureaus.

But what about the venerable media institutions that fall somewhere in-between newspapers and magazines? These are the TIME Magazine’s, Newsweek’s, and U.S. News‘ of the world.

TIME, along with it’s weekly brethren, typically has historically had more journalistic integrity per paragraph than any newspaper does per page – this is common knowledge, and it was assumed by many that they would weather the perfect storm of media collapse better than most. This, apparently, was an incorrect assumption.

Looking over the last three issues, disturbing trends begin to emerge.

The November 9th, 2009 issue of TIME has 64 pages: 25 are ads, and 11 are the beginning filler nonsense no-one reads – that’s over half the magazine, and another 5 pages are dedicated for entertainment “news” that doesn’t belong in a publication like TIME. But here’s where it gets good: there’s two “book adaptation” articles that total 6 pages. All told, that leaves just 17 pages for true journalism, half of which are actually commentary pieces.

The November 2nd, 2009 issue has 80 pages: 44 are ads, 11 are introductory filler, 10 are entertainment “news”, and there’s another 5 for commentary – leaving just 10 pages for journalism. The trend continues in the October 26, 2009 issue: 64 pages in length, 17 are ads, 5 are full-page “infographics”, 12 are intro filler, 3 are full-page pictures, 5 used for entertainment, and another 5 for commentary – 17 for journalism.

Did TIME think its readers wouldn’t notice? That people who care enough about politics and world issues to read lengthy stories are somehow too busy or ignorant to realize the content they pay for is dwindling substantially? The content I personally pay for now only represents somewhere around 20% of the magazine each week, and this is somehow supposed to be acceptable?

There was a time, just a few years ago, where the magazine took well over an hour to read – and it was an enjoyable, informed, educational timesink. Now it takes less than half an hour of mostly brainless reading, depending on the week’s content, because the majority of the magazine gets ignored. It’s understandable that such publications are going through tough financial times, due to a decreased readership and a number of other issues, but the way to increase your membership, or even maintain the status quo, is most definitively NOT to follow TIME’s current behavior.

To all the media moguls out there, here’s an important point you might want to write down for future use: when you need to increase your publication’s readership, replacing content with ads and journalism with reprints or filler is not going to net you the results you desire. This, in all honesty, should be common sense.

It goes without saying that I am not only disappointed in TIME for such behavior, but also that it deserves to fail in a miserable and public fashion, because it has proven itself incapable of making rational editorial decisions when threatened with existential questions. Since I don’t subscribe to Newsweek or U.S. Magazine, it’s hard to say definitively whether they are acting similarly, but this industry has proven to be very open to groupthink…

In short, let TIME and its ilk die the slow, painful death that they deserve.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction. He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Epic Win: US Reporter Protections Legislation Extends To New Media

Duncan Riley — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:39:58 +0000

Legislation that will protect reporters from being forced to disclose their confidential sources in the US Federal Court will recognize new media alongside heritage media.

The legislation, a compromise between the US Senate, media representatives and the White House, protects reporters while giving the government authority to override those rights in certain national security cases, reports The Huffington Post.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press were strongly recommending that the larger media coalition backing reporter protections endorse the agreement, saying that “it is a compromise we can live with and it seems to be a compromise the White House can live with. It’s certainly better than the status quo.”

While reporter protections should be welcomed, the original proposal unfairly excluded new media writers by defining reporters by the outlets they worked for. The revised bill extends “protections for freelance or citizen journalists by defining a journalist by the nature of activity engaged in.”

While the bill primarily deals with Federal law, and does not necessarily extend to US States, the recognition of new media is an important step forward in Government recognition of the changing media landscape. The inclusion of new media may also help drive efforts at the State level in the United States, and further encourage other Western countries to recognize new media in similar local laws.

Is the FTC being used to marginalize independent bloggers?

Steven Hodson — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:40:06 +0000

See that line in the sand?

The one that was drawn yesterday by the FTC and their new guidelines about bloggers having to disclose any and all interactions with advertisers, book publishers, movie companies that might result in a review being written about a product, a movie or a book. The result of failing to do this could result in a fine of up to $11,000 for the blogger and or provider of the item to be reviewed.

In effect the grassroots of blogging just got weed whacked all to hell. Not to mention that there is a shitload of FUD being spread around and some important questions being left either unanswered or obfuscated by enough legalese to choke a horse.

Yesterday I asked some of those questions in a post here as well as making a few comments on blogs that were talking about the subject. One in particular was a post by Daniel Tunkelang, a blogger who I hold in high regard, were he was comparing the points raised by posts made by Jeff Jarvis and Google’s own Matt Cutts. Now to be clear here – Matt Cutts has come out solidly on the side of the FTC rulings which he made clear in a comment on Jeff Jarvis’ post:

As a Google engineer who has seen the damage done by fake blogs, sock puppets, and endless scams on the internet, I’m happy to take the opposite position: I think the FTC guidelines will make the web more useful and more trustworthy for consumers. Consumers don’t want to be shilled and they don’t want payola; they want a web that they can trust. The FTC guidelines just say that material connections should be disclosed. From having dealt with these issues over several years, I believe that will be a good thing for the web.

You can read the complete comment stream at Daniel’s blog but when I posted my comment I also pointed to the inequity over the fact that bloggers are being held to FTC guidelines for exactly the same thing that newspapers (traditional media) has been doing for years but without any FTC oversight.

And thus began the FUD courtesy of Matt Cutts in his reply to me:

“If the FTC thinks that this is a problem then why are not those in traditional media having to play by the same rules”

The same rules do apply to traditional media, and that’s how traditional media interpreted the updated guidelines. For example, the WSJ said “The [FTC] move is an effort to apply the same rules that already cover broadcast stations, newspapers and magazines to the Wild West marketplace of the World Wide Web.”

As for David Pogue on neither his private page full of links to his books and other assorted stuff – not a disclosure to be found and the same goes for his posts on The New York Times. Walter Mossberg has a single blanket “Statement of Ethics” which seems to work for traditional news journalists/reviewers but from what the FTC says this wouldn’t fly for independent bloggers. Kara Swisher also sports almost the exact same “Ethics Statement” as Walter but again this wouldn’t fly for indie bloggers who are expected to have a disclosure with every post that the FTC deems needs to have one.

The problem is that there is no FTC guidelines like the ones that have been enforced on bloggers and there has never been any. I have spent the last three hours scouring the web for even the slightest proof that the FTC has any purview over traditional media in the same way that they now have over independent bloggers (this will become an important distinction shortly).

In fact these are some of the quotes I have found that suggest otherwise Mr. Cutts

Never mind that TV, radio, and print publications have never had any such disclosure requirement (and still won’t).

Source: Business Insider – FTC Issues Ludicrous Blogger Disclosure Policy

The problem here is that mainstream media journalists receive goods for free on a regular basis, and only rarely is any relationship disclosed. There may be a line (mostly) between directly paid content and editorial in newspapers, but there is a wealth of other ways companies court attention from the mainstream media. It also doesn’t have to be goods: how regularly are journalists offered free trips to conferences and events, and at such events they might receive free goods, accommodation, food and even entertainment? It doesn’t even have to be that extreme: a free lunch or drinks could all be counted as indirect compensation by this criteria.

Source: Duncan Riley – The Inquisitr – FTC targets bloggers, ignores newspapers

These new guidelines have nothing to do at all with established traditional media, and to a certain extent with the new media conglomerates e.g.: TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat. This was made abundantly clear in a quote from Michael Cleland, assistant director for the FTC’s division of advertising practices in a post by Robert Wenzel of the Economic Policy Journal blog where a telephone interview between Edward Champion and Cleland.

Cleland informed me that the FTC’s main criteria is the degree of relationship between the advertiser and the blogger.
“The primary situation is where there’s a link to the sponsoring seller and the blogger,” said Cleland. And if a blogger repeatedly reviewed similar products (say, books or smartphones), then the FTC would raise an eyebrow if the blogger either held onto the product or there was any link to an advertisement.

As to why newspapers don’t need to be regulated the same way that scummy bloggers do comes out in this quote

But why shouldn’t a newspaper have to disclose about the many free books that it receives? According to Cleland, it was because a newspaper, as an institution, retains the ownership of a book. The newspaper then decides to assign the book to somebody on staff and therefore maintains the “ownership” of the book until the reviewer dispenses with it….

To which Robert Wenzel quite rightly points out the following

Note: Cleland is completely clueless if he thinks reviewers’ copies from mainstream media don’t end up with reviewers and then sold. All he has to do is walk into Strand’s bookstore in NYC. They have half their basement devoted to current books that have been sold to them by reviewers.

Another good point that was brought up by Jane over at Dear Author – what are the trigger points that will spark the FTC to come down on you like a ton of bricks?

As it is the FTC is making Twitter a prime example of where disclosure is going to be watched for but what about affiliate links. After all how many people who have reviewed books add a link to Amazon or Barnes and Noble that include affiliate links so that they can make a few bucks. Are we going to have to disclose those and any other affiliate links we might use – say for advertisings?

So regardless of the FUD that people like Matt Cutts like to put forth the fact is that traditional news organizations are not being regulated by the FTC. In fact it would also seem that major blog networks like the ones mentioned about may even be exempt from this type of watchdog behavior.

In all that I have read so far everything to do with the new FTC guidelines have to do with independent bloggers, much like when I write over at Shooting at Bubbles or at WinExtra but maybe not so much for here at The Inquisitr since it seems there is a dividing line between being a paid writer and being a writer sucking up for freebies.

Other than the FUD being thrown around I still haven’t seen any solid answers to my original questions from yesterday

1. Will these same ‘guidelines’ be applied against “traditional media” and if not – why not?

2. What exact form do these disclosure need to take? Per post? Per page? Per comment?

3. Is this retroactive? Does this mean that sites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, – well every single blog past and present will have to go through all their archives and add a disclaimer. Because we all know that posts that are even months or years old can resurface.

4.Will book publishers make signing a disclosure form a part of bloggers doing book reviews and is it really worth the effort at that point?

5. Does the country of origin of the writer matter as to whether a disclosure is included?

6. Does it matter the country of origin of where the blog served from come into play?

7 Does the country of origin of the product, service or book come into play at all?

No, all we are being left with is a threat to play nice by a totally different set of rules that either traditional media and possibly big blog networks or face the threat of being fined into oblivion.

Talk about stacking the deck.

The Stars Will Align For New Media In 2010

Duncan Riley — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:28:44 +0000

The landscape for media globally in 2009 has never in recent history been in a more state of flux. The rise of the internet, coupled with old media asleep at the wheel even before they were hit by the global financial crisis has seen unprecedented upheaval and change.

Economies run in cycles, and already things are starting to look up for those left standing. I spent the last two weeks in the United States talking to a variety of people in new and old media, and in the advertising industry. The message from most was the same: we’ve past the bottom of the market, advertisers are starting to spend more, and the quarter ahead and into 2010 will see more money in the space.

An often overlooked consideration of any economic downturn is that what emerges at the end is often more efficient, and advertising is no different. Advertisers are looking for better value and better reach, and online is the space that many are heading. That money needs to find a home, and old media is poised to cut themselves off.

The Newspaper suicide pact

2010 will be the year newspapers throw themselves off a collective cliff with only the strongest to survive, some by sheer luck. Headed globally by News Corp, newspapers will collectively throw up paywalls around their content, cutting off the very readers who drive the page view counts that advertisers are looking for. Whether you believe or not that newspapers might be able to make pay for view work, everyone agrees that page views will suffer, and that means a big drop in available inventory for advertisers.

Newspapers with paywalls will not only affect advertising, but will also drive a huge shift in reading habits. Online newspaper readers will look elsewhere for their news, and new media is poised to grab a big slice of those readers. You couldn’t paint a better scenario for new media: some of the biggest competitors in old media taking themselves out of the market, first with a paywall, and then later altogether as they die from their collective suicide pact.

The stars align

Taking newspapers out of play will see a boom for new media readership, but couple that to an increased advertising spend that is already starting to gather steam, and you have the stars align. New media gets more readers, and more ads, driving a cycle of upwards growth.

The combination of the two will also drive further innovation in the space. Already hyperlocal is experiencing a second renaissance, and unlike last time round there’s some serious money (and even some traditional media companies) getting involved. Hyperlocal is a difficult space for the one reason: scale, specifically lack there of, but smarter people than I think that this time it can work. If hyperlocal can be successful, the future is even brighter for new media that does compete on scale.

Conclusion

Even the most hardened skeptic of new media would agree that what we are witnessing now is a diametric shift in the overall media landscape. Newspapers are dying, helped along the way by their failure to take full advantage of what an online, always on world has offered. New media doesn’t really need to prove itself; it already has, but collectively the space is poised to become the biggest media source online, and eventually as heritage media assets fade, the dominant force of media across the globe.

Unlike their competitors the NPR rolls with change

Steven Hodson — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 05:25:00 +0000

Earlier today I wrote a post wondering if radio and newspapers joining forces could save them each from oblivion and now I just spotted this post at the New York Times about the NPR, the public radio network, moving to reboot its approach to the web. Unlike like much of their brethren in the business NPR is revamping its web site, NPR.org, to make navigating easier for their users as well as emphasizing written reports over audio reports.

The idea is to raise the level of their journalistic output and at the same time make public radio more widely available. Ms. Schiller, NPR’s president and chief executive, says “We are a news content organization, not just a radio organization”. As well these changes to their web site is intended to make finding NPR news reports easier on a less cluttered main page, or to easily jump to other areas of emphasis like Arts and Life as well as Music.

To make the site more of a news destination breaking news is being posted faster helped along by a merging of NPR’s radio and digital news desks. Further rounding out this change the searching for, sharing and commenting on NPR articles has been made simpler. As well for the first time there will be free transcripts made available.

The Web site changes are part of a strategy meant to increase NPR’s share of the midday audience, between its “Morning Edition” and the late afternoon “All Things Considered,” when listening to NPR stations drops considerably, said Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media.

Instead of short paragraphs that direct users to click on links to audio reports taken from NPR’s programs, the Web site will now offer fully reported text versions of articles, so users can click from their cubicles. “We think the midday experience is much more text-driven,” Mr. Wilson said.

The Web site will flip “from being a companion to radio to being a news destination in its own right,” Ms. Schiller said.

It will not be as comprehensive as some sites, like CNN’s, are, Mr. Wilson said, but will “concentrate on areas where we can be particularly authoritative.” He added, “We’re not in a battle for share with established players who’ve been doing this for 15 years.”

Source: New York Times – NPR Moves to Rewire Its Approach to the Web

Here is a screen shot of the new look for the NPR site, and I must say they sure have seems to have taken to the new “white” look we are seeing on a growing number of tech blog sites.

Would someone please give the AP the facepalm

Steven Hodson — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:16:50 +0000

Even within archaic systems and services there are some that are even more out of touch with reality and do everything they can to perpetuate old and outdated ways of doing things. The Associated Press (AP) is one of those services and they have proven yet once again just how out of touch both they and management heavy news organizations are.

Rather than finding ways to make their content more useful, and as a result more valuable, they like much of the old media are struggling to find ways to keep everything within the existing status quo of where they control the dissemination of other people’s interpretation of the events happening around us – otherwise known as …. the news. Along those lines Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP Board of Director and vice chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group Inc (wow that’s a mouthful isn’t it), announced today that the AP would be creating a news registry that would allow them to tag and track all their content to make sure that ~~those useless lying sacks of industry destroying bloggers~~ everyone is in compliance of the AP “terms of use”.

The idea of course is that this way given their exclusive microformat the AP can control who can use their content and how much of that content they can use.

"The registry will employ a microformat for news developed by AP and which was endorsed two weeks ago by the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit research and development organization that has called on news organizations to adopt consistent news formats for online content," the announcement explained. "The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational ‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage."

The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.

Source: Editor & Publisher :: AP To Create Registry to ‘Track’ and Protect Online Content

As PaidContent noted on their post this is going to piss off a whole lot of people

This is sure to raise a howl from people who a) don’t like efforts to manage content use, b) don’t like the idea of tracking and c) don’t like anything AP does when it comes to trying to protect content. (We’ll also probably hear a lot about genies and bottles.) AP is trying to position it as not being about Google or bloggers, but about giving news orgs tools to enhance and protect revenue—and as an alternative to going completely behind a pay wall.

Newspapers really need to learn to share

Steven Hodson — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:35:00 +0000

Generally when blogs talk condescendingly about the newspapers moving online we like to point out how they never link out to blogs that they mention or one’s that they quote. To a point I can understand the reasoning behind why they go this route, I don’t agree but I understand, however when it comes to other kinds of linking the policy is just stupid.

The reason I mention this is because I saw a mention of some music tagging software on Friendfeed and the link provided was to a Wall Street Journal Technology online post. The post by Geoffrey Fowler talked about two specific software packages that you could use with your MP3 files to help clean them up. The two programs were TuneUp Media and MusicBrainz Picard neither of which I had heard of before so I was interested in taking a look.

Except there was a problem with trying to do that – no links. The only link in the whole post was for Apple because iTunes was mentioned in relation to TuneUp Media and it only lead to a WSJ page for stock information for Apple. When it came to the two software packages though nada.Zip. Zero links.

The thing that gets me is that neither of of the products mentioned had anything to do with what WSJ could construe to be a competitor. They would have been links to products that maybe their readers would have appreciated being able to check out. This would have been an added value (although blogs would have linked out naturally) for the WSJ readers.

There was no ‘threat’ to WSJ losing readers. In fact they would have been helping their readers. It is this kind of attitude regarding linking that is only going to make people look for alternatives to these old media online efforts. It might seem like a simple thing to get bitchy about but sometimes consumers really appreciate those little things – especially when they don’t cost anything to give.

Myth: Reporting the news is what makes it news

Steven Hodson — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:29:39 +0000

If journalists don’t write about it does that mean that news doesn’t happen and if they do does that mean they have some sort of copyright over the reporting of that news?

For as long as there has been a news industry what is considered important enough to take up so-called valuable space on a printed collection of paper or take up valuable airtime has been limited to a select few. It is the people in editorial boardroom or producer’s offices who decide what they think we need to see or read each day. The majority of the time it is the news that is most likely aimed to promote our most visceral responses – hence the popularity of “bad news” being the good news.

It’s good news for the news gatekeepers because it is almost guaranteed to bring in the most readers or viewers. The worst the disaster, the juicier the scandal, or the more heart-wrenching the story, the better. Sure we every once in a while go through our angst ridden worrying that the news is too negative and that there isn’t enough good news. The problem is good news isn’t profitable news and what is important to the news industry is the stuff that keeps the shareholders happy and the management bonuses flowing.

As Jeff Jarvis points out today

The realization of that myth – the myth of necessity – hit me head-on when I read an unselfconsciously narcissistic feature in The New York Times this week about the room where the 4 p.m. news meeting is held. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has likened that meeting to a “religious ceremony.” The Times feature certainly acted as if it were taking us inside the Pope’s chapel: “The table was formidable: oval and elegant, with curves of gleaming wood. The editors no less so: 11 men and 7 women with the power to decide what was important in the world.”

Behold the hubris of that: They decide what is important. Because we can’t. That’s what it says. That’s what they believe.

I was trained to accept that myth: that journalists decide what’s important, that it’s a skill with which they are imbued: news judgment. I worked hard to gain and exercise that judgment. The myth further holds that no judgment of importance is more important than The Times’; that’s why, every night, it sends out to the rest of newspaperdom its choices. News isn’t news until it’s reported and it’s not important until The Times says so.

Our supply of news is dictated to us minute by minute, day by day. That doesn’t mean though that it is the only news out there. An incredible amount of new worthy things are going on everyday – from the bad to the good. Just because the large majority of it doesn’t make it through the editorial “money” filter doesn’t change the fact that those events or information isn’t news.

The news isn’t about the reporting of it. It isn’t about the people writing about it. News is about the event, the happening, the information. It is about the people who were involved with the event. It is about the people who made the happening happen. It is about the people who created the information.

What the new media, blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook (to a lesser degree) did was to allow the people responsible for creating the news to be the ones that distributed the news. Or as Dave Winer put it – “The new world pays the source, indirectly, and obviates the middleman”. No longer is our flow of news being dictated to us by the select few and what they think is important. We are getting to make those decisions now.

However being entrenched as our sole providers of what is important in the world isn’t something that the news industry will give up without a fight. Rather than try and find their way in a new world of news and information distribution that doesn’t flow through their gates, the industry is trying to bend and manipulate this new media into their way of doing business.

The news industry of the past is locked into the believing that if they aren’t the ones reporting the ‘news’ then it doesn’t exist. It is because of this belief that they then turn around and try and claim ownership of the ‘news’. Because they are the ones that paid someone to write about something that happened the industry figures that they have an ownership – a copyright – over it all even right down to barring online linking to that news or information.

In their effort to bend this new media way of getting our news the only thing the news industry is doing is hastening the breaking of their stranglehold on the distribution of the news. They still have all the same abilities to reports the news and the people who are a part of that news. All they are losing is the exclusive rights to distribute it – as they should.

News isn’t distribution and who controls it, news is what is happening in and around our lives except now we are the ones who can distribute it – as it should be.

Comic publishers living in one of their imaginary worlds

Steven Hodson — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:31:56 +0000

We hear a lot about the newspaper industry saying silly things about blogs and social media services like Twitter. From Associated Press wanting money for people using quotes of AP stories if the quotes are more than five words to John Kerry suggesting that democracy is threatened if newspapers fail the industry points to blogs and social media services as the big villains. As archaic and stupid as those assumptions are it would appear that the news industry isn’t alone in these delusions.

In a personal opinion post on the Newsarama blog Lucas Siegel lets us in on how major players in the comic publishing world have fallen into the same trap. According to Lucas three of these people; Tom Brevoort, Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada, have been moaning about how their messages on Twitter have been republished on blogs like Newsarama as part of their reporting of the industry. It is their feeling that this shouldn’t be done without permission or payment to whoever originally made the tweet.

Not only that but he also goes onto talk about some sort of sense of entitlement that people have who repost this kind of stuff

Joe Quesada on the other hand comes right out asks where is his check for the use of his tweets which only goes to show how little these guys have been paying attention to the world around them

I hate to be the one to break it to these guys but this argument has already been hashed out and guess what – it’s called fair usage so no pennies for you. What they also seem to fail to realize, even though Brian Bendis just thinks we are all being lazy, is that at a time when promotion and publicity is hard to find all this talk could be working for them. Instead with attitudes like theirs all they are going to get is negative reactions and discussions that will do nothing to promote their brands.

It is kind of sad to see that this protectionist attitude isn’t just limited to your typical old media outlets.

Associated Press thinking about locking up its content

Steven Hodson — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:17:35 +0000

As the newspaper world continues to crumble around itself it is amazing to read that a major provider of news thinks that its salvation lies in returning everything behind a paywall. Such is the case it would seem with the Associated Press whose CEO, Tom Curley, was quoted in a Business Week article as saying that this is something that has been talked about

"Can I imagine content going behind a pay wall?" asks Tom Curley, the CEO of the Associated Press. "Absolutely. And, yes, we are in conversations about that." These conversations with other content players are informal, he admits.

As Jim Fine points out in the article though this idea doesn’t account for a few roadblocks that already exist

And a gazillion issues arise. One is that the Associated Press has a licensing agreement with Google (GOOG), the particulars of which Curley would not detail, that won’t expire until December. (A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.) It’s also unclear how this would work for a newspaper or a TV operation that does not want to wholly destroy existing traffic. And this solution may not be one-size-fits-all: The Wall Street Journal gets away with charging; The New York Times might; a less illustrious paper a tenth as big may not.

What the AP and everyone else advocating a return to paywalls is as I said before here – news is free, it’s the packaging that isn’t. Until all these antiquated news empires grasp the fundamental fact that they need to make what they do a value added service that people are willing to pay for then they can erect all the paywalls they want – and go broke in the process.

News is free – packaging it isn’t

Steven Hodson — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:04:41 +0000

It’s a simple inescapable fact – news is free.

It will happen at any time of the day and at any point in the world. It use to be that distance is what made it hard for people in one part of the world to know what was going on in another part. With the advent of newspapers it became much easier to keep up with current events – even though the current events might be a couple days old by the time you actually got to read about it. In the process though we became accustom to the idea that newspapers, radio and later television were our eyes to the world of news as it was happening.

This was great for the people who owned those newspapers, radio and television stations because it provide them with a great way to capture people’s attention. Attention that was also used to show them advertisements about all the cool new things that they could buy. Companies with products to sell were more than willing to pay for that ability to get people’s attention – the larger the audience the more they would pay. Fortunes were made in the news business – not on the news itself but on all the packaging that surrounded those little news bites.

Then along comes the big bad Internet and suddenly news was instantaneous and if you knew where to look it was free as well. Sure smart operators would follow the typical business model of including ads with the news; but equally smart surfers either grew blind to them or found ways to remove them. Suddenly the the major providers of the news found themselves with a business model that didn’t work the same way it had in the past.

Scrambling to catch up with the direction the web was heading news providers of the old media hopped on the whole social media train and made their news free but still wrapped in advertising. It was their hope that this hold over from the old days of packaging news would hold true in today’s so-called freenomics markets – the problem was that the economy tanked and along with it so did the ad dollars. For most of the new media bloggers this might mean tightening the belt a little more but this is a situation that they are much better equipped to survive.

Old media on the other hand as it tries desperately to make the transition to a web based world is carrying too much baggage. It is still steeped in a world where they desperately need ad sales to shore up the huge expenses of maintaining a physical world printing and delivery system; and do it while the news is still worth something to the advertisers. This is one reason why we have seen a resurgence in discussions among the old media mavens about bringing back subscriptions; or that new fangled idea of micropayments. In other words return the majority of their content back behind a paywall.

In an excellent post at CenterNetworks one of the questions that Dan Lewis asked was – What broke?

While Dan suggests that it was the arrival of the Web that broke everything I would agree in part; but I would also suggest that people have figured out that you don’t need all the fancy packaging in order to be really up to the minute aware of what is happening in the world. This is the problem that the old news industry hasn’t been willing to grasp as they struggle forward.

The interesting thing is that for all the bitching we read about advertising on the web the biggest complaint is that it is very rarely relevant to what the reader is interested in. It’s not so much that that the packaging of the news has failed it is that it is very rarely packaged in a way that add any value to what we are reading – regardless of what the ad networks would have us believe.

Combine that with operations; and ways of doing business, that no longer match the speed of news delivery that we have become use to and old media news businesses are destine to fail. If they keep believing that it is all about the packaging the way that they have been doing since the first newspaper was published they will disappear.

The thing is that advertising could work but the way it currently behaves whenever we are engaged by it – whether on a blog, the New York Times or an overlay on a video – only serves to push us further away from it. It isn’t that we are struggling with ways to keep the news flowing because that will never stop, the problem is that old media hasn’t figured out yet a new and better way to package something that is inherently free.

Free news isn’t going to kill old media but it’s reliance on the old methods of supporting outdated and expensive methods of packaging the news is what will kill them. After all you can’t kill off something that is free.

Major League Baseball Gets New Media and Piracy

Duncan Riley — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:46:22 +0000

Newsweek has an interesting article up talking about the growing issue of companies using the Slingbox to resell television feeds to people outside of local markets.

One of the primary uses cited in the article is for sport: people who want to watch a local game that isn’t provided on their local stations or limited by sports owners to local markets only. For example, a Knicks fan wanting to watch the latest game if they’re in Texas and can’t see it.

There’s the usual condemnation from cable companies and (oddly unnamed) sporting groups, citing illegal use, breaches of Terms of Service etc. What’s usually missed in this condemnation of piracy of this type is the unmet need: there is demand outside local areas for different sports games, and often people using these methods or similar are dedicated fans who are unable to obtain a live game legally. Instead of looking at better ways to meet demand to starve the desire for this sort of activity, most groups think of the money first, do little to cater for it, and often punish supporters.

Except I’m happy to note: Major League Baseball (MLB).

Live sporting events are slowly creeping on the web, although we’ve still got a long way to go for universal coverage. But the MLB actually understands the reasons why fans do this. Here’s the direct quote from the article:

The major professional sports leagues aren’t big fans either, largely because it enables viewers to skirt the leagues’ multi-million-dollar exclusive broadcast partnerships that restrict regional broadcasts and provide local blackouts for programming when games aren’t sold out. So far, however, none of the leagues seem willing to prosecute unauthorized broadcasts or alienate some of their most avid fans. “Our fans are never wrong,” says MLB.comCEO Bob Bowman. “We can never suggest that a fan shouldn’t do everything he or she is doing to watch a baseball game… the best way to combat these gray activities is to have a better product: higher quality, more streams, high definition, things that [Slingbox] can’t do.“

Hellajuah Bob Bowman. You get it. Now if only other media outlets and sporting groups could as well. There’s hope ahead that artificial constraits on media viewing may encourage legal innovation, not arbitrary pursuit of fans who should be encouraged to watch more games, not have them taken away, even when they’re watching them by gray means.

Foremski gets it right – Foremski gets it wrong

Steven Hodson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:20:48 +0000

Hand wringing is almost becoming a watchable sport when it comes to the nose diving that was once the unshakeable world of old media. Every where we turn lately we are hearing dire prognostications of the death of newspapers. It is a subject that people on both sides of the old media – new media fence love to talk about. New media evangelists rub their hands together in glee over the potential changing of the guard while old media employees start worrying about how the mortgage is going to get paid.

Today saw a once member of old media – Tom Foremski; a former Fortune journalist now a blogger on Silicon Valley Watcher, post some thoughts about what is happening. While he agrees that old media is in a death spiral he doesn’t believe that the citizen journalists of social media are any real replacement for old media news.

This has left media companies in a very tough spot. As their traditional sources of revenue have been disappearing their new sources of revenue are unable to cover their costs. And the current economic crisis is magnifying this trend to an ever greater degree.

The media death spiral has become steeper and faster…

This is a huge problem because as a society, we need media professionals — citizen journalists cannot fill the breach.

He also doesn’t believe that this idea of news being free is sustainable regardless of which side of the argument you are on

News is not free, and it is not a commodity. News has been made available for free, and it has been made into a commodity but that is not its future because there is no future in that model. You will have to pay for it.

That means the end of the news aggregators. That means the end to arguments that the news aggregators send high volumes of traffic to the online publishers. What is the use of more traffic when it cannot be monetized to support the work of the news organizations?

I agree with him that the free model as being evangelized by Web 2.0 and social media mavens isn’t sustainable in the long run. As free flowing with money as advertising might be, even it has a finite limit especially with being able to provide reasonable livings for all parties involved. Just as Tom points out how sliding revenues from traditional advertising is cause failures of paper after paper the same thing could happen within social media.

Where I don’t agree with him – up to a point – is his assertion that citizen journalists can’t fill the void being left by the shrinking of newspapers. His argument is that traditional journalism is what helps maintain high quality standards, prevent misinformation or to counter the spin of corporations and governments. His insinuation is that these aren’t the type of things you will find with citizen journalism and I would definitely disagree with him on this.

Sure the big advantage of old media is that news was a centralized medium and as such was a lot easier to control out it was written, how is was researched and how it was disseminated. The problem with new media is that there is no centralized dissemination which makes it harder for people in general to do their one stop news shopping as it were. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some citizen journalists / bloggers out there writing well researched and quality news type posts.

There is also a problem of perception which isn’t helping the adoption of citizen journalism any easier as a real viable alternative. Old media is perceived as being a news source you can rely on whereas new media has been young kid on the block with no respect for tradition and run by people with mercurial temperaments. In other words new media is all about MTV sound bites of opinionated semi news.

Even though this is really far from the truth until the point where new media can over come these types of perceptions it will always be considered as substandard in relation to the real news.

Forget MSM or Old Media, Heritage Media is the term

Duncan Riley — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:13:24 +0000

I was on a panel at the start of Frocomm’s excellent New Media Summit in Melbourne Monday night, and Laurel Papworth introduced me to a new term: Heritage Media.

Heritage Media describes the mainstream media, or old media depending on your previous preference. It encapsulates the archaic nature of traditional media, in terms of its inefficient one size fits all broadcast model, and also places it correctly in an historical sense as coming from the past, and as it declines today a space to which many may show fondness, but one where we all know its time is passing.

Broadcast television is a heritage media with a known end date. Radio, paired to the bone as it is will malinger on for a bit longer, and newspapers are trying their best to adopt to survive, but both maintain their heritage media models.

The divide between heritage media and new media is more clear in using the term heritage, as it defines a difference in delivery that may not always be obvious from a term such as the mainstream media (a stupid term really given that much of new media is now mainstream anyway) or old media, which does not define the delivery method compared to heritage.

Next time you write or speak on new media, consider using the term Heritage Media when comparing the old and new. We’ll be using the term here in future coverage of the space.