Jeff Jarvis has put his new book into a precis. The PowerPoint is here.
Rather than propose desperate measures to save journalism, the craft should be looking for ways to take advantage of the online economy instead of fighting them. Jeff Jarvis says so in his latest Buzzmachine post.
He ticks off the boxes on proposals --- charging for content, anti-trust exemption, micropayments, make Google pay, charity, bailouts and PR --- and says time and effort would be better spent developing new business models.
"The real need for the future of journalism is to find business models that exploit the reality of the web with larger audiences, greater efficiencies, working in networks with lower cost and risk."
Jeff Jarvis' new book (150 pages through it, and it's very good so far) is called What Would Google Do?
The real title ought to be What Won't Google Do?
Google already provides tools galore for Web development and an embeddable (is that a word?) search engine. Now it is providing a tailored Google News headline code for blogs.
Google asserts this spreads content to other audiences and permits bloggers to fetch content to suit their audiences. Of course, it also spreads Google that much more into our lives.
I'm going to try a media/journalism/news/online/newspapers headline feed with it and see how it goes.
Jeff Jarvis has a new book, What Would Google Do?
What Google has been doing for years is aggregating and indexing newspaper material and helping people find it with its voracious search engine.
In the last two years it has been selling print ads for newspapers, but the Print Ads initiative hasn't fared well, so the program is being discontinued at the end of February.
Any understanding of new media has to involve redefining authority and influence.
In legacy media, these are relatively firm concepts based on the qualities of the audience (age, income, education) and market surveys on qualities of the content (trustworthiness, loyalty, likeability). In organizational new media it is interesting to see how these qualities are being adopted (age, income, education) as entities decipher the meaning of page views, unique visitors and time spent. There isn't much new imagination being asserted in reconsidering the concepts, which is strange considering there is so much imagination being asserted in reconsidering the way content is delivered.
For my money, a much more interesting area involving these concepts is taking place within personal media in the blogosphere and across social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and here is where there is much work to be done in sorting through the issues.
There are clear indices that can imply influence: the views, uniques and time on your site, the followers and those you follow on Twitter, the degree to which your content is spread socially. There is the softer quality of relevance: how your content ranks in search, on Technorati or other gauges.
(And then there's the age-old show-stopper: Just because you have an audience doesn't mean you're influencing it, and even if you're influencing it, you may not be an authority.)
I am reminded of these issues as a result of a to-and-fro in the last few days by such social media luminaries as Loic Le Meur, Jeff Jarvis, Robert Scoble and Clay Shirky on the need for a filter and ranking of Twitter followers --- and what that ranking might express as one's authority.
A rethinking is necessary that quantifies the value of an idea in this new environment and how it spreads. Given the speed of change in the methods and devices to receive and deliver, we are having trouble developing answers to these questions.
Jarvis like the formula of Message + Spreader/Author. Le Meur seems to like the idea of Message x Audience.
I like the formula of Message + Spreader/Author x Audience. I can be such a fence-sitter.
Buzzmachine and its engine Jeff Jarvis continue to produce some of the most provocative commentary on the direction of news and information. Today's post is an exceptionally long but compelling look at how local news is bound to change. Some of his points;
1. News will not be about news organizations, but their communities.
2. Local news organizations will be smaller.
3. News will emerge from networks.
4. The heart of news organizations will be beats.
5. Editors will be curators, those encouraging and improving creation.
6. Some journalism will be supported by the public.
7. Investigative work will continue.
8. News organizations will do what they do best and link to the rest.
9. Specialization will take over much of journalism.
10. News will find new forms, including reverse syndication, and they'll be disaggregated.
11. Lots of non-news organizations will produce news.
12. Revenue will still come from advertising.
It's worth a full read.
Well, to call either Ron Rosenblum or Jeff Jarvis titans might be a stretch, but Rosenblum (former Los Angeles Times critic) returns to public view today with a column in Slate that suggests Jarvis of Buzzmachine is a little too eager to walk on the downed bodies of print.
Jarvis, in turn, didn't turn his cheek and quickly zinged back on Buzzmachine.
Entertaining reading, somewhat, but talents like them have better things to do with their days ---- like Twitter.
Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine outlines in a Slideshow what he believes are some new business model options for journalism. They are being presented at a New York conference.
Jeff Jarvis writes today that the article is no longer the organizing principle of news. It's the topic. The topic is how people are organized in their consumption, so it is how media should be organized in their production.
By that he doesn't mean topic pages on the Web site, but a blog-style page that is curated and refined and discussed.
"It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized."
Sites spend significant resources on tagging and trying to understand the algorithms that yield search results so they rank more highly, have more of what we know as Googlejuice, even have more value as companies. Paid search is still coveted as icing on that cake.
But in a geo-targeted world with vastly more information on the user, what value will there be in building search engine optimization for a site? If you're not relevant, will there be any value at all in SEO?
In his latest post at Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis rolls this notion around and raises a point: Our searches yield the same results at the moment. But with more data on our patterns and practices bound to be stored --- the definition of our so-called personal relevance --- might that be the more valuable commodity? If so, when will that happen?
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