Tag: advertising

The arrogance of Rupert Murdoch

A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s writes:

How did [Howard Stern] go from a must-hear personality who was constantly in the news for his antics or his outrageousness to a “whatever happened to?” has been? Simply, he was put behind a pay wall. Oprah has her own channel, but I’ve never heard it mentioned. If the King of All Media and a woman who has enough influence to swing a national election can’t get people to pay, why on earth does Murdoch think he can?

A good point for sure.

Gruber on Charging for Access to News Sites

John Gruber on why news organizations continue to try and force pay walls to work:

And it’s not really surprising that they’re failing to evolve. The decision-makers — the executives sitting atop large non-editorial management bureaucracies — are exactly the people who need to go if newspapers are going to remain profitable.

Upton Sinclair’s adage comes to mind: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

A good point and one that probably rings true in more industries than just news. Vertical hierarchies no longer make sound business strategies.

He’s doing his best

Seth Godin on consumer mindset:

Consumers don’t make choices as much as they react and respond to the inputs and assumptions they have about the marketplace, their life and your brand.

If you don’t like the way someone is acting, understand you can’t change his behavior, you can only change his circumstances.

Is it really “The end of the age of free”?

Vanessa Thorpe of The Observer wrote an article today titled “The end of the age of free.” In it she gives a couple quotes from Chris Anderson, the EIC of Wired:

For Anderson, the changes that lie ahead are more complex than simply introducing entry fees at a few gates on the web. Instead, he is predicting the twin birth of a “reputation economy” and a “time economy”, to exist alongside the battered old “money economy”. As a result, value will be assessed differently by both providers and consumers.

Toward the end of the article Thorpe also quotes Bill Thompson (one of the initial designers and architects of The Guardian’s site) who says that:

“I don’t think we will look back at 2009 and think that was when it all changed,” he says. “We might look back, though, and see that this was the moment when several senior executives realised they needed to change.”

While I’m not entirely positive precisely what Anderson means by “reputation” and “time” I think that his assessment as portrayed by Thorpe is pretty good.

With the big news (and critiques that followed it) that Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp companies will be looking at setting up pay-for-content models this article is even more interesting.

While 2009 certainly looks to be a year of significant change for media, and news organizations in particular, I also don’t think it will be the tipping point. However, it will be an immensely important year to the future of journalism and consequently must be one of progress.

With announcements like Murdoch’s it’s worrisome that some of the senior executives of MSM still “just don’t get it.” Without seeing the fundamental paradigm shift in economies that is necessary in order for journalism to prosper (which I think it can) these senior executives will simply end up running their companies, employees, and stock holders into the ground.

Perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps it will leave more room of innovative start-ups. However, I would like to believe what Thompson says about some corporate media beginning to get it. I think that the reputation of an organization like News Corp or the NY Times could be used to leverage some significant innovation and legitimacy in the online world.

The more I hear statements like Murdoch’s and news like the relationship between the NY Times and Carlos Slim the more I find this acknowledgement of a new economy for news by media executives to be unlikely if not impossible. Here’s hoping though, for everyone’s sake.

The Global Post news model

A few days ago the New York Times posted a piece about a news startup that is garnering some attention for its business model. The company is Global Post and they’re aiming to make global news coverage profitable again by somewhat changing the revenue model.

With 65 correspondents worldwide who make $1000 a month for 4 stories finding the funding for that kind of operation might seem daunting, but it appears as though they’re succeeding (at least in the short term). Traffic to the site is well ahead of the founders’ expectations and they’re acquiring a decent list of paid subscribers.

These paid subscriptions are the crux of the revenue model. Global Post offers a service they call Passport which “offers access to GlobalPost correspondents, including exclusive reports on business topics of less interest to general audiences, conference calls and meetings with reporters, and breaking news e-mail messages from those journalists.” They even allow Passport members to essentially become a part of the editorial staff by suggesting story ideas.

Their website also has some interesting features (as well as some serious failings…more on those in a bit). Below some of the featured articles they’ve compiled Timelines, stats, and more about the topic of the piece. While it’s too bad that these info boxes aren’t more apparent and higher up in the article they’re still a nice touch.

An example of a timeline from Global Post.

However, as much as the Global Post is trying to create a new business model, they are still doing it without breaking the mold of online news. Their homepage is a cluttered mess that tries to convey some information about far too many subjects. This results in a page where one must scroll more than half the way down before finding a section of Global Blogs, 3 of the main content sections, and the multimedia section.

If a homepage is going to serve as a place to draw traffic into the site (as some have suggested) then most of that content needs to be apparent at first glance. As it is the homepage shows 2 ads, a small navigation bar, the search bar, and 2 featured stories.

By designing the homepage for wider screens and scaling down the size of the featured images and ads Global Post would be able to fit more actual content into that first screen. I would be much more inclined to actually use the homepage itself instead of RSS feeds if information was presented in a clear and immediately understandable way. As it is none of the headlines have dates next to them and it seems as though it would be very difficult to track what articles are new content.

While it may provide some interesting aspects of a business model the Global Post ultimately did not create a online home that innovates. It will be interesting to see how the organization does in the coming months/years in terms of profit, but I cannot see it succeeding without a seriously redesigned homepage.

Advertising and skittishness

This was posted by a couple people today and is a short but to the point post concerning the web and distracting advertising. In a post titled “On advertising” Mandy Brown of a working library writes that:

There is no end to this, in that short of eviscerating the content all together (and removing any impetus the reader might have to visit in the first place), our attention to the advertisements is always waning. Sadly, our attention elsewhere also suffers and declines; instead of staying still to read, we skitter from place to place, like frightened prey assured the predators are near.

This is somewhat tangentially related to a point that I was attempting to make a while back concerning the decline of attention spans and print journalism. Unfortunately I think that Brown is right on here. Even some of my favourite companies have devolved into ever more distracting and disrupting advertising.

The iPod Touch ad that Apple has run on the homepage of ESPN as well as on Yahoo! Games is a prime example of this. The ad involves an animated iPod Touch moving and showing the accelerometer feature and how it can be used in games. Instead of staying confined to a box of ad space this one moves beyond that. It moves outside of the traditional ad frame and actually disrupts the content on the page (even major content like navigation menus). For an example, see below:

http://www.youtube.com/v/mnzVXda0Glo&hl=en&fs=1

With ads like this becoming more the norm Brown is exactly right when she writes that, “instead of staying still to read, we skitter from place to place.”

Funding Journalism

From The America Scene comes this article concerning what needs to be done to fund journalism. The article actually takes the stance that local reporting and journalism is part of what needs to go. Peter Suderman, the post’s author, writes that:

Let’s be even more blunt about what it takes to survive in the media world: You have to have information no one else has. That information has to be information that people need or want. And you probably have to charge people for it.

Conor wants to find out what sort of losses are coming with the decline of journalism. If he can answer that (no small task), my next question is: How much is what we’re losing actually worth?

For most of the last century, at least, the newspaper business has been incredibly successful. And as a result, it’s gotten used to certain luxuries — largely in the form of interesting but inessential news coverage, and, of course, the salaries to pay for it.

Put candidly, there are a lot of journalists out there doing work that doesn’t need to be done, that isn’t worth what it costs to produce.

Seems to me that he is essentially arguing for journalism to become something that orients itself toward the needs and desires of advertisers. Frankly, I find this a scary proposition. News organizations already filter enough of their content to make it more profitable and appealing to advertisers; I would hate to believe that the solution is to have more of this.

Link via Funding Journalism | The Media | The American Scene.

Battle Plans for Newspapers

There’s an article on the New York Times right now that is a collection of some different opinions as to what newspapers need to be working toward to remain in business. Some of the contributors simply provide the same arguments that have been heard over and over again (cut back on staff and delivery frequency, charge more for the print, etc.). However, I found one of them to actually be pretty interesting and surprisingly forward-looking. Geneva Overholser, the director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California and former editor of The Des Moines Register, writes a great post that encourages newspapers to be smart about what they cut and to look around in their respective communities for coverage that is already being done by other groups. She writes:

look around the community to see who is doing good information-gathering and sharing. New Web-only publications may be covering various parts of the community. A consortium of arts organizations may have a reliable events calendar. Television or radio stations may have continued some substantial elements of government news coverage. An alternative weekly may have good reviews of films and theater and concerts. Bloggers may be assembling information from parents at various levels of the local school system and a nonprofit group may be gathering well-researched local health information.

It’s this kind of step toward community collaboration that I think is necessary for some newspapers like the Seattle P.I. to survive. She’s right to emphasize the importance of local news, because I think that is the best thing that newspapers have as a selling point right now.

The Courage Campaign for California

It would have been nice to see moving video compositions like this one put together when Proposition 8 was actually on the ballot. As much as I support gay marriage and gay equality I find myself a little bit conflicted as to how much I support the repeal of a ballot measure. Part of living in a Democracy is abiding by the decisions of elections. The pro-gay marriage activists had their chance at stirring up mass support against the passage of Prop 8 and the reality is that they didn’t and the proposition won with close to 60% of the vote. However, now that Kenneth Star is involved in trying to annul the marriages that took place before the passage of the proposition the activists are out in force and doing far more to publicly appeal for support than I saw happening before the election. Anyway, here’s the video:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3089746&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
“Fidelity”: Don’t Divorce… from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Also, from the campaign’s website is this letter that they are trying to submit in opposition to Star’s efforts:

We, the undersigned, share President Barack Obama’s view that “for too long, issues of LGBT rights have been exploited by those seeking to divide us. It’s time to move beyond polarization and live up to our founding promise of equality by treating all our citizens with dignity and respect.”

Yet, on December 19, 2008, Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the 18,000 same-sex marriages conducted between May and November of 2008.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case on March 5, 2009, with a decision expected within the next 90 days. We, the undersigned, ask that the Court invalidate Prop 8 and recognize the marriage rights of these 18,000 couples — and all loving, committed couples in California — under our state’s constitution.

As Americans who believe in the rule of law and fundamental civil rights, we know that Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund’s shameful attempt to nullify these unions will not be vindicated in the eyes of history. We know that, ultimately, love will prevail, no matter how hard they try to fight it.

A return to a NY Times pay wall

After recently posting that newspapers need to find more creative ways of distributing digital content and making a profit off of it comes this article. It appears as though the New York Times is considering re-instituting some type of pay wall in order for readers to view the site’s full content. Executive Editor Bill Keller is quote in the article, which writes that:

Keller said the company was considering charging readers for each page they click on or making the newspaper available on a wider variety of portable electronic devices, as it is on Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle.

“Some people are paying for the Times online,” the executive editor wrote. “Just not enough of them. So far.”

While I believe that charging for content delivery on devices like the Kindle or the iPhone would be a good business move I disagree that any system like the Times’ previous “Times Select” service is a good idea. The fact is that people have become accustomed to viewing and consuming content on the web for free. Companies like Flickr have created pretty successful business models by charging customers for some added features, but unless the dominant paradigm of the web changes people are not going to understand having to pay for the Times’ content on their basic site. They will continue to expect that the basic service of the Times as a news provider remain free.

I see the solution as creating a Times site that is more individualized for the end-user. The Times could offer integration with the Kindle, or even package a Kindle subscription with some other specialized content on the site, but for its own sake I hope it does not put its articles up behind a pay wall again.