Newspaper online advertising has not benefited greatly from the recent upswing in online ad spending, according to the New York Times and most of the recent newspaper company quarterly results. This is no surprise because most newspaper websites sell SPACE for commodity advertising — display ads and classifieds [...]
In response to the launch of Google’s Fast Flip, I observed that Google is correctly focused on creating a new user interface for news, when most media companies are not. A lot of people responded that Fast Flip is not an innovative or effective UI for news — [...]
Google knows a lot about the future of news — more than many publishers. It’s evident in Google’s new product, Fast Flip, which allows news consumers to “flip” through news stories. What’s striking about Fast Flip is that Google is innovating precisely where publishers used to lead innovation.
Fast [...]
It was a busy Monday morning in two corners of the hacker journalist community: EveryBlock is acquired by MSNBC, and Y Combinator announces a “request for startups” to address that whole “future of journalism” question hanging out there in the open air.
Want to catch up?
Start here:
Why Facebook Wants FriendFeed
GigaOm | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp says: Om Malik calls it “the problem of plenty.” Facebook is trying to solve it by acquiring FriendFeed. Will news orgs compete?
Facebook Takes FriendFeed To Take On Twitter
TechCrunch | August 10, 2009
Scott Karp [...]
Yesterday, URL shortener tr.im announced that they’re shutting down.
Why? What do you need to know about it? What’s going to happen as bit.ly swoops in to the (attempted) rescue? Are we too dependent on services like tr.im to tie the social Web together?
Ten links to answer your questions:
tr.im R.I.P.
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Journalists are news companies’ most valuable assets.
That’s what Mike Arrington asserts, and I think he’s right (disregard the “failing old media” rhetoric):
And earlier today I got a glimpse at what AOL is up to – they are hiring all the journalists being fired and laid off by the newspapers [...]
The New York Times technology blog, Bits, which features original online reporting by all of the NYT technology journalists, has formally launched a new feature called “What We’re Reading.” This feature (powered by Publish2) illustrates a number of important best practices for how journalists and news orgs [...]
Originally posted at BeatBlogging.org, a resource for journalists using social networks, blogs, and other Web tools to improve beat reporting.
Whenever I talk with news organizations of any size about linking to sources, resources and journalism that originated outside the walls of their newsroom, two questions come up: How and [...]
If the wire editor and feature editor roles are becoming obsolete for print newspapers, as Steve Yelvington persuasively argues, then those editors should be retrained — or retrain themselves — as web curators. Rather than become obsolete, these editors could become essential to their news organization’s future on the [...]
Perhaps you’ve noticed a bit of activity online the last few days related to a certain not-quite-pandemic bug that’s going around.
Swine Flu.
Or, to put it in microblogging terms, #swineflu.
The wonderful thing about the ease of communication online is that anyone can start a discussion, carry it on, pass [...]
Today we’re announcing three major additions to the Publish2 team — journalists whose stellar reputations speak for themselves:
Ryan Sholin joins us next week as Director of News Innovation. Greg Linch is the winner of the Publish2 Future of Journalism Contest and will join us in the fall [...]There is so much misunderstanding flying around about the economics of content on the web and the role of Google in the web’s content economy that it’s making my head hurt. So let’s see if we can straighten things out.
Google isn’t stealing content from newspapers and other media companies. It’s [...]
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer today because the first major metro newspaper to stop publishing in print but keep the news brand alive on the web. Seattlepi.com’s Executive Editor Michelle Nicolosi promises bold experiments, “to break a lot of rules that newspaper Web sites stick to.” And to be sure, [...]
Today, with the signing of the largest government stimulus program in history, Publish2 is announcing a new initiative to help newsrooms faced with declining resources continue to play the watchdog role that is so vital in this time of crisis. Digital Sunlight is our code name for a [...]
My post on the Washington state linking project focused on the awesome innovation involved and on the benefits of collaborative linking in general. But the project also shows why this kind of news aggregation is so useful for a local audience.
The biggest danger with news aggregation is that instead [...]
The discussion about journalism’s future so often focuses on Big Changes — Kill the print edition! Flips for everyone! Reinvent business models NOW! — that it’s easy to forget how simple innovation can be.
Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers.
That’s [...]
Entering 2009, the future of media is undoubtedly a quandary, with no end of head-scratching across the industry. As with everything these days, it seems that it all comes down to radically changing economics. There are way too many conversations about the future of media, news, journalism, etc. going on [...]
There’s one week left to submit an entry to the “I Am The Future Of Journalism” Contest. The deadline is December 30.
We’ve gotten some great entries by journalists who are thinking creatively, passionately, and positively about the future. You can show your support for them by helping to [...]
With all the debate over the future of newspapers, here’s a question I haven’t heard anybody ask (much less answer): If a metropolitan newspaper suddenly ceased to publish, leaving the city with no newspaper, what would happen to all of that newspaper’s ad dollars?
Most newspaper companies’ strategy right now [...]
So you’ve got a big breaking story right in your backyard, e.g. the governor gets arrested for trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the President Elect. Your newsroom is on the case, but the story is still developing. There are national ramifications, so reporting goes beyond the [...]
I want to further explore the idea of “scrapbook news” as a way of reframing the crowdsourcing/citizen journalism discussion.
One reason mainstream news organizations haven’t embraced the concepts may be that the spirit (if not the letter) of the cit-j discussion tends to focus on the people involved rather than [...]
Discussions about journalism innovation usually focus on technology: Twitter, RSS, Flash, Django, data visualization, and all the other cool stuff that’s making online news so rich.
But there’s an equally important conceptual aspect of journalism innovation. Newsrooms have to rethink the kind of stories they cover and the way [...]
The “I Am The Future Of Journalism Contest” has its first entry, and it’s awesome. Daniel Bachhuber is a journalism student at the University of Oregon, a photographer, web developer, member of CoPress, and a journalist with a compelling vision of the future:
Here’s the text of [...]
Publish2 is launching a contest for journalists to promote themselves as the future of journalism. We believe journalism has a bright future, and we’re betting everything on that belief.
The winner of the “I Am The Future Of Journalism” Contest receives a prize that we [...]
There’s an article page on GoVolXtra, Knoxnews.com’s sports vertical site for the Tennessee Vols, that accounted for 6% of ALL Knoxnews and GoVolXtra article page views for the last two weeks, and as much as 14% of all article page views one of the days since it was first [...]
Forget the bailout. I have a great new business model for Detroit automakers. Sell Toyotas and Hondas. Detroit already has the dealer networks. There’s great demand for Japanese cars. In fact, Detroit could retool all of their manufacturing plants to make Toyotas and Hondas.
That proposal is similar to one put [...]
An analyst at Screen Digest estimates that in “2008 YouTube will generate about $100m in the US, compared to about $70m at Hulu. Next year both sites will generate about $180m in the US.” That’s very significant because YouTube had 83m unique viewers in the US in September, [...]
The title of this post comes straight from the mind-blowing mind of Seth Godin, preaching to the book industry (promoting his book Tribes), but he could just as easily be preaching to anyone in media:
[T]he market and the internet don’t care if you make money. That’s important to [...]
Reading Eagle has brought their journalists out from behind the curtain to share with readers what they are reading on the web — often beyond what can be found on Reading’s own site. Their new link journalism feature is called, appropriately enough, What We’re Reading:
Most newsrooms have utterly narcissistic Twitter accounts. The worst offenders (which unfortunately is the majority) use services like Twitterfeed to automatically tweet links to the newspaper’s own content. Here’s our RSS feed on Twitter! Don’t get enough of our content on our site or through RSS? Now get it [...]
On the eve of The Guardian’s launch of full text RSS feeds, Matt McAlister, Head of Guardian Developer Network, pinged me looking for examples of other mainstream media companies that have full text RSS feeds. Surely this many years into the age of syndication, Guardian couldn’t be the [...]
The New York Times published an article this week about mainstream news organizations embracing link journalism and news aggregation. Gawker and others scoffed that they are late to the game, which they are, but that misses (predictably) the BIG story.
If news orgs like the NYT, Washington Post, and [...]
There are several reasons why most mainstream news organizations have been slow to embrace link journalism.
First, news orgs typically act as though other news orgs don’t exist (blame long-standing notions of “owning” the news, and more recent unjustified fears of sending readers away). Second, news orgs had few [...]
Will algorithms replace human editors on the web? It’s a bogeyman question on one level, but ask any news site about the percentage of traffic they get from search engines — and what the trend looks like — and you’ll realize that algorithms are increasingly deciding what we pay attention [...]
Matt Thompson and Jeff Jarvis have been doing some important thinking on how news coverage needs to change in the Internet Age. They argue that a flow of shallow, time-dependent stories no longer works as a foundation for helping readers understand the world.
Thompson started a blog devoted to [...]
Someone posted a false report that Steve Jobs had heart attack to CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport. The fallout (which could include an SEC investigation) lead to the inevitable question of whether this is a failure of citizen journalism.
It’s not. It’s a failure of open systems.
washingtonpost.com has launched a new politics page called Political Browser, which features, wait for it… links to the most important and interesting political news around the web. That’s right, the Washington Post, one of the paragons of original political reporting, has dedicated a page to help you find [...]
Yeah, fine, so Drudge gets lots of traffic for links, but we’re not Drudge, so it won’t work for our news site, right? Wrong. Here’s a case example from Knoxnews.com’s sports site GoVolsXtra.com.
This roundup of links to coverage and commentary on the Vols’ loss to Florida [...]
I happened to visit Facebook’s Business Solutions page, and was struck by how, at least on the surface, these advertising formats seem like exactly the kind of innovation that should be helping Facebook achieve Goolge-style revenue — which is of course what Facebook’s $15 billion valuation assumes will happen.
The front page of the newspaper used to set the news agenda. Extra, Extra, read all about it! But that influence has steadily waned through the TV and Cable News era, and the web now threatens to obliterate it entirely.
So who sets the news agenda now? One significant influence is [...]
Just saw this house ad on NYTimes.com:
A print ad offered as added value for online advertising. Now THAT’S a reversal.
Here’s more:
NYT is trying to reverse the economic polarity of its business.
Is this kind of offer a trend?
Scott framed his previous challenge to news sites in general terms: like Drudge, any site could use continuously updated aggregation to become a “destination for links to news of what’s going in the world.” But this kind of aggregation can be just as powerful when applied to [...]
My post on Drudge beating all other news sites on engagement was an aha for many, which is interesting because the lesson of Drudge has been around for a decade. But the lessons of web publishing are all so utterly counterintuitive that I suppose they take a while to [...]
There are two main reasons why news sites are reluctant to send readers away by linking to third-party content. First, you shouldn’t send people away or else they won’t come back to your site. Second, a page with links that sends people away has low engagement, which doesn’t serve advertisers [...]
Jay Rosen of PressThink has started a meme called “spinewatch,” which he’s pursuing on Twitter with the #spinewatch tag and on the Publish2 Spinewatch Newsgroup that he created, where he offers this description:
Spinewatch is a newsgroup and link bank for campaign 2008 stories of a certain narrowly-defined [...]
Jeff Jarvis has post today worth reading, about the emergence of the web as the new newswire and the trend away from traditional newswires like AP:
The old syndication model in the old content economy just won’t work today when all the world needs is one copy of a [...]
Newspapers face the challenge of ensuring that their websites don’t cannibalize more lucrative print audience and revenue — even as more and more people get their news online. Then there’s the challenge of shrinking editorial staffs having to put out both a print paper and a website. It’s enough [...]
The web has become the vanguard of reinventing news distribution in the digital age. And while newspapers have often lagged in seizing new opportunities on the web, they have a golden opportunity to lead the charge in reinventing a foundation of the news ecosystem — the newswire.
Newswires have traditionally been [...]
A lot of research can go into a piece of reporting, and in print the value of that research can only be passed on through brief quotes or references. But on the web, no longer limited by finite column inches, newsrooms can create huge value for readers by providing links [...]
Responding to the investigation of plagiarism on the web by Jody Rosen at Slate, Publish2’s Editorial Director Tammi Marcoullier reflects on her own experience with being plagiarized while blogging for The Washington Post and wonders whether placing more value on link journalism could help with the problem of plagiarism [...]
As newspaper companies lose billions in market capitalization and innovation-minded journalists battle newsroom “curmudgeons” shell-shocked by the rapid pace of change amid increasingly dire economic realities, a lesson in burn-the-rule-book transformation might come from an unexpected source: General Motors. That’s right, the once-dominate car maker, which missed every [...]
For several days my brain has been connecting the blogstorm over AP trying to dictate how much of their content can be quoted on the web with the “quote” that Nick Carr lifted from one of my blog posts in his Atlantic article — I finally figured out [...]
The Associated Press is facing a blog firestorm after issuing take down notices to Drudge Retort for linking to and reproducing snippets of AP stories. AP is now attempting to define how their stories can be linked to and excerpted — and the response from the blogosphere appears [...]
Google is taking a big shot at Facebook in the PR war over data portability and social network interoperability. I signed in to Google Friend Connect, implemented on the Go2Web2.0 blog, and saw this:
Normally, you wouldn’t list a service that [...]
Since I already drilled a nerve with What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web, which is on its way to becoming one of my most linked posts ever — and since everyone loves a sequel — I thought I would do a follow up for magazines. The [...]
On the web, in the age of Google, design has no margin of error, and there are no stupid users, only inadequate designs. Those were the main points of my critique of newspaper websites generally, and WashingtonPost.com in particular, which to be fair, apply to all online publishers, and [...]
Why is Google making more money everyday while newspapers are making less? I’m going to pick on The Washington Post again only because it’s my local paper and this is a local example.
There were severe storms in the Washington area today, and the power went out in our Reston office. [...]
Why is Google transcendent and Yahoo a takeover target? Compare the following:
Sue Decker, president of Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), addressed the advertising industry during a keynote this morning at the 2008 Advertising 2.0 New York conference.
“Yahoo! is helping to accelerate the transformation of how display advertising is both bought and sold,” [...]
All innovation looks inevitable, except while it’s happening.
Google’s search advertising model didn’t spring forth fully formed. It was iterated, and many of the key concepts were borrowed — something many people don’t realize. But a few key market-defying decisions, and one stunning insight, made it all work. Here is a [...]
As media companies struggle to figure out their digital future, the elephant in the room is that they have only been able to monetize online audiences for pennies on the dollar compared to traditional media. Here’s why: Traditional advertising formats FAIL on the web. By traditional advertising formats, I mean [...]
The New York Times has certainly embraced blogging, but it was striking to see in this post from The Lede just how much they’ve embraced link journalism:
Scanning the financial press this morning, readers would have seen a disturbing yet familiar burst of oil news: rising prices, [...]
I’ve read a bunch of interesting observations the last several days that have me pondering the future of the web — I’ve been trying to put it into a coherent blog post, but as this is my third draft and it still hasn’t gelled, I’m going to try thinking out [...]
What’s wrong with the “friends connection” programs announced by Facebook, MySpace, and Google? Many people have been trying to explain the principle of data portability as if it were a new concept, but it’s actually not. It’s been on our PCs for years.
Think about the applications you use [...]
Newspaper brands like the NEW YORK Times, WASHINGTON Post, BOSTON Globe, etc. face a unique challenge in the online media age — how to value non-local readers.
I received this offer in the snail mail this week from the New York Times:
As I [...]
The more I think about the issue of redundant news coverage on the web, the more I’m both perplexed and fascinated. Read the following on Facebook’s announcement of Facebook Connect — seriously, read it all:
Can Facebook Build a Better Passport
It didn’t take long for Facebook to react [...]
Microsoft withdrawing its offer to buy Yahoo is a sufficiently large story to demonstrate the problem of redundant news content on the web. Google News is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of this story. To get a better sense of why it’s a problem to have 2,000 stories about [...]
There are two principal ways advertisers are trying to create value for consumers on the web — and they must create value because, you know, consumers are in control. On the web, advertisers can provide entertainment or information.
How effective is advertising as information on the web? See Google’s $15B in [...]
Some publishers choose a paid subscription model, some choose an ad sales model, and some choose both as a revenue streama business decision with rippling implications for marketing and content strategies. During a panel session at MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions Summit, May 12-13 in New York City, executives from [...]
The other day Erick Schonfeld wrote a post about how he’s feeling even more overwhelmed by new web content steams like Twitter and FriendFeed, and how he’s desperately in need of a better filter. I certainly agree with Erick’s clarion call for a better filter — that’s why I’m [...]
Facebook has had an update feature similar to Twitter for a while. Now Facebook has a feature that lets users add feeds from other web services like Flickr and del.icio.us — just like FriendFeed. From a technology perspective, Twitter and FriendFeed are now reducable to Facebook features. [...]
At the upcoming May 12-13 MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions Summit, Michael McCurdy and Leslie Semegran of premium job site TheLadders.com will present Keep Them Wanting More: Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value through Strategic Offer Development and Delivery.
The study is based on fidings taken directly from TheLadders.coms long-term [...]
For years Digg has had an active comment community, where the comments are submitted and appear on the Digg landing page, rather than on the article linked from Digg. FriendFeed got into this game by making it possible to comment on content pulled in from multiple web services, where [...]
Seems like now would be an opportune moment to clarify the terms of Publish2’s private beta.
It would be an understatement to say that it’s tricky to run a private beta for a user base that includes the same people who cover your industry and write about new technologies.
The whole purpose [...]
Read Publish2’s funding announcement over at the Publish2 Blog. (Yes, you’ll have to click over to find out the details.)
Why isn’t Facebook a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google, Yahoo, and MySpace? Because Facebook is threatened by OpenSocial’s ultimate aim of connecting user profiles and enabling users to easily manage and port their data across any social network.
Facebook is worried that this will enable groups [...]
We all know that news consumption is no longer passive, whether it’s reader comments on a blog post or news article, or individuals starting a blog to have a voice of their own — the evidence is everywhere.
Less evident is how search has fundamentally changed how we consume news. Instead [...]
Nothing like the biggest business story in recent memory — JPMorgan buys Bear Stearns for $2 (a share) — breaking on a Sunday to bring into sharp relief the difference between news on the web and news in print — not to mention differences in how news is presented [...]
What’s the most obvious sign that a traditional news brand is merely reproducing online what they do in print, instead of publishing in a way that makes sense for the web? They way news is organized on the homepage.
Let’s compare three news site homepages — TechCrunch, Digg, and New York [...]
Last month, four major newspaper companies announced a joint ad sales venture to “let national advertisers place ads on local Web sites with a single phone call.” When I read that, I realized suddenly why local newspapers are having so much trouble adapting to the web.
There’s no such thing [...]
The Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is undoubtedly a big story, which every media outlet is covering, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Google News currently shows 2,580 versions of this story. But when you stop and think about, you have to ask — WHY are there 2,580 versions [...]
How can newsrooms do more online with fewer resources? By leveraging the reporting that bloggers in their communities have ALREADY published on the web. Using “local link journalism,” reporters can seek out and link to reporting on a story that’s been published across their local blogosphere and just needs [...]
The Washington Post didn’t respond to my print circulation marketing challenge, but I just subscribed to The Washington Post Sunday print edition anyway. Why?
I don’t think print newspapers are dead — they just need to radically evolve.
But evolution is a process that has to start somewhere, and I [...]
I received the following “offer” from The Washington Post in the mail today — I’m going to pick on the Post just because I happen to live in the DC metro area, but I’m sure almost every newspaper is sending out circulation marketing pieces like this:
The link journalism meme seems to have legs, based on the number of smart people who picked it up. Now it’s time to kick it up a notch, with the concept of NETWORKED link journalism, which can give journalists, collectively, the power of Digg and Google to direct [...]
Tech bloggers and analysts had a collective cow yesterday over the news that January 2008 comScore data suggest clicks on Google’s paid search ads have stopped growing, which implies that Google may be vulnerable to a US recession already underway. Fred Wilson had a sober reflection on why [...]
Microsoft announced today that they are going after the holy grail of advertising: integrated ROI measurement and tracking. The big problem with online ROI measurement that Microsoft is targeting is the inability to assign quantifiable value to brand advertising, e.g. banner ads, and which results in disproportionate value being [...]
I was reading the New York Times public editor’s rebuke of the NYT McCain ethics piece that alleged an affair with a lobbyist, when a line at the end reached out and grabbed me by the collar (bold is mine):
The pity of it is that, without the sex, [...]
I wrote a while back that Facebook is not for business, i.e it’s not clear how an application designed for socializing among students could be used — without any customization — by professionals. There a bit of data and more buzz coming out that offers support for that thesis.
Users [...]
A cornerstone of journalism has always been reporting what key sources say, put in context and given perspective, alongside reported facts.
It’s time to reinvent that process on the web — make it dynamic — using the fundamental mechanism for connecting information and people: the LINK
How long does it take to launch an innovative new feature on a newspaper site? About 48 hours — that’s the standard set by innovative editors like Jack Lail at Knoxnews.com, Tom Meagher at Herald News, and Mark Briggs at Thenewstribune.com.
About two weeks ago, [...]
I was thinking last night about books and why I don’t read them anyone — I was a lit major in college, and used to be voracious book reader. What happened?
I was also thinking about the panel I organized for the O’Reilly TOC conference on Blogs as Books, Books [...]
Jack Lail, an editor and journalist with a deep understanding of the web, big vision, and a “let’s do it” innovator’s spirit, set out to publish “the best Tennessee election coverage that can be found on the Internet” — he rounded up a group of journalists and bloggers, [...]
Perhaps you don’t need any more explanations of the significance of Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo, but I don’t want to lose my media/tech blogger license, so here’s mine.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo is akin to newspaper industry consolidation over the last few years — combining business with solid cash [...]
Publish2 is organizing a network of newsrooms, journalists, freelancers and network-affiliated bloggers to aggregate the best news coverage of the “Super Tuesday” February 5 U.S. primary elections, leading up to it and after. Publish2 is still in private beta, but we’re going to syndicate everything out via RSS feeds.
Publish2’s [...]
In the networked web era, influentials may not be people with a particularly connected temperament or Rolodex, or people who control and influence monopoly distribution channels (e.g. newspapers), but rather people who influence the network by leveraging the most powerful force on the web — the link. People like bloggers, [...]
I was talking to a newsroom last week about adopting Publish2 as an editorial platform for creating news aggregation features for their website — there was a lot of excitement about sketching a big vision, thinking about all of the possibilities. But in a follow-up email, we held [...]
Of all the reasons given why Rupert Murdoch decided to keep the WSJ.com paid subscriber wall in place, the one that I find most interesting is that advertisers are willing to pay a premium for WSJ.com’s audience. If the WSJ went free, it would undoubtedly increase its audience substantially, [...]
Digg is a great experiment in web “democracy” — a site where ANYONE can submit links to content and vote on links to their favorite content. The positive outcome of the Digg experiment has been demonstrating the power of “networked human intelligence” to filter the vast sea of content on [...]
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