The announcement that the New York Times and Linkedin have found a way to provide customized pages to Linkedin users bodes well for future old media-social media alliances. Now it should be possible for an array of such deals to permit content to find new audiences..
In essence the Times is serving sector-related content to sector-working Linkedin users. A good deal for both.
With all apologies to Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, I have stolen that headline --- or that line --- he used some time ago at a conference I attended. I'm not sure if he coined it, but if someone had it trademarked in recent times, they might be in for a killing in the years ahead.
In reading AdAge, it's apparent that the big guys are going to start linking to the others and aggregating content to be the best utility for their audiences. This has started to happen in the New York Times' blogs, but it'll now be a feature of the home page material in the fall. The page itself, says Jonathan Landman, will be more of a blog patch.
The notion of linking out to others' news is coming into its own. The sentiment is that the competitive terrain in future will have a little less to do with who reported what than with who can gather what. In other words, do what you do best, link to the rest.
This is more than a little frightening for organizations that invest in work that then is linked by aggregators, but if everyone starts, no one will be able to stop it.
I am on the other side of the world on what passes for hoidays in the 21st Century and it seems everyone back home is in need of therapy.
A read of Mark Potts' usually-even-handed Recovering Journalist blog is downright depressing. About the best he hopes is that a string of bankruptcies in America will stave off the vultures or precipitate a rethink of the industry.
While I'm taking a break, I tripped on Eric Alterman's latest column for The Nation and how it mourns the tone and disposition of those in the newspaper business as the wide-ranging media industry attempts to predict the future of news.
The dearth of decent ideas to save the business is "curious and depressing."
There's nothing like a power outage for the soul of a newsroom.
Journalists use their wiliest resiliance to defy the odds and produce on deadline. No matter how challenging human dynamics often are, there is something about an outage that builds an exceptional bond.
I'm several time zones away from a massive power outage in the Vancouver downtown that may take another day to restore, but the Sun and Province newsrooms used technology (mainly the Canadian-developed BlackBerry) to get the papers out overnight. Thankfully generators revived the production system by Monday afternoon, but not before many hours of production had been lost. Still only a fragment of the newsroom is fully wired and humming.
Here is a Sun accounting of how it got done, typically reserved in its storytelling about what people had to do to report and edit.
It's time to take a break. My blog will be much more intermittent for a couple of weeks. I'll likely post a few things here and there, but not at a daily clip.
If advertisers are only willing to really pay as their ads are viewed, should publishers only pay if the content is read?
Blogger Tim Anderson is the latest to weigh in on a fledgling debate on the way in which writers should be compensated in the digital sphere. His piece is based on an interesting technical method from Chris Green on quantifying an author's appeal online. Anderson and others have noted the problems in this approach. There are many dynamics in the publisher-writer relationship that transcend click-per-view models.
Forget the click fraud issue; technology can likely address that. Bigger issues are the value attached to a reader (income, education, etc. that an advertiser might cherish), how a particular piece of writing contributes to the value of the publication (its placement and prominence), and how important a publisher wants to retain a writer for competitive purposes --- among many other things. Pay-per-click doesn't encompass those issues in the least.
In recent weeks Gawker has pruned its pay-per-click compensation for its writers.
Anderson notes that a changing model of journalism is going to need rethinking on compensation. Newsrooms essentially pay the same rates for their staff's work. But how that might change is anyone's guess, and a minefield after the guess.
The rush is on to develop a new advertising model for newspapers. The dire results of the U.S. newspaper industry serve as a warning to other countries about how advertising is migrating, splintering and in some cases vaporizing.
Len Kubas has been a consultant on news media for as long as anyone can remember, and he reinvents his thinking routinely to provide some fresh ideas on the future state of affairs. His company's executive vice president, Ed Strapagiel, has produced a useful new set of prescriptions on how newspapers should approach the advertising environment in the digital age.
Largely it comes down to tearing down silos to create a common pricing and sales approach, developing a self-serve model to reduce the troop allotment, and investing in technology.
It's not my conclusion but theirs: Do it like Google.
About as unsurprising as scientific research that several hot dogs each day might not be nutritionally advantageous, Nielsen has produced evidence that young people --- as in children --- are streaming video online like it's no one's business.
With no context of an Internet-less world to confound them, children under the age of 12 are downloading video and watching it with no real apprehension, concern or comparables. Their average take: 51 streams and 118 minutes a month. More surprises: Disney is the main beneficiary.
The 12-17 cohort is hardly shy, either: 74.2 streams and 132.4 minutes a month. The 18 and older set still seem to like the TV: 44.3 streams, 99.6 minutes.
The significance of this is that a wave of Internet fanatics is on its way and screen content is bound to be seen more often with a CPU than an HDTV. While advertisers can't yet capitalize, their time will come.
The Center for Media Research collected some of Nielsen's findings and housed them here.
AllVoices.com is an aggregator of networked and conventional news media, drawing on some 3,500 traditional sources and any number of registered users for content. It validates citizen content and uses algorithms to rank and place them for relevance and context. The merge is optimally a good pro-am blend.
It has been in beta for about a year now, but it's at last being rolled out in public form. The look and feel of the site are quite competitive. The searchable map helps pinpoint geographical content, while the categories reasonably group content (we should all have a section called Conflict and Tragedy). When I went looking for Canadian news this morning, it provided a relative impressive assortment of traditional material --- at this point it seems to have only a smattering of user-generated content.
There are many other crowd-sourcing sites in the mix, but AllVoices is on the surface a worthwhile addition.
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