kirk lapointe's themediamanager.com: how the news business is changing

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.

Two of Canada's largest telecom companies, BCE Inc. and Telus Corp., announced yesterday they are proposing to charge cellular customers 15 cents for each incoming text message. Wanted or unwanted.
The implications for consumers are clear, but the implications for journalism are not far behind in being clear, either. If anyone wants to launch an underwritten text service or a for-a-fee text service, life is about to get much harder.
The Canadian Industry Minister, Jim Prentice, has weighed in today, saying the idea was "ill-thought" and stands to penalize consumers who are spammed or sent unsolicited content. He wants a meeting with the telcos to explain the matter, and one has to believe this will be a major regulatory matter quite soon. Canadian consumers have already been noisy about the arrival of the iPhone and the associated fees, and today the telecom carrying the iPhone, Rogers Inc., has altered its proposed data charges to permit a lower-cost plan.
Certain mobile technologies with journalistic applications have not caught on in Canada because the country has among the highest cellular fees for industrialized countries.
This latest text issue is far from over.

It is a treat to see the revival of Interactive Narratives, which had long ago aggregated the traditional media's bravest work in new media.
The new incarnation is still dazzling but less futuristic. It is mainly a collection of the best and brightest of today's work by conventional media in the digital sphere.
Original showcaser Andrew DeVigal and two others relaunched the site under the auspices and sponsorship of the Online News Association. Already on the site today are recent multimedia packages from the Washington Post on an earthquake in China and Las Vegas Sun on prescription drug consumption. Each offers a different twist on conventional storytelling.

The explosion of GPS, geo-tagged content, and geo-locating cellular phones has opened opportunities for journalism, advertising and marketing. Location-based technologies give rise to Locative Journalism, or LoJo, which provide a more substantially relevant relationship between where you are and what information you consume. This rich relationship is part of our future.
The Readership Institute has published a smart primer from Medill School of Journalism professor Rich Gordon on the qualities of LoJo. It makes a good argument for geo-tagging stories, but it also includes a very good plea for strengthening audio --- the lost art in digital journalism.
As newsrooms transform, it will be necessary to adopt the qualities of this emerging technology. It will impossible to miss the impact of geo-locative advertising and marketing, so journalism clearly has to play along.

Steve Outing, the ahead-of-his-time Editor & Publisher columnist and entrepreneurial journalist/consultant, has an interesting post on the so-called individuated newspaper. He attended a conference on the topic last week.
The notion that a personally-tailored newspaper (or any kind of content product) is futuristic is wrong. The tech is here now and has been for some time. The bigger question is when some company will decide to stake a lot of energy and resources on the bet that people will consume something directed more specifically than conventional media.

When veteran newsman Neil Budde announced recently he was joining DailyMe.com, you had to expect good things would come about. This week the customizing news aggregator rolled out three products: DailyMe (your custom aggregation), DailyWe (a community-built aggregation) and a Top News (a sort of top-down approach aggregated by the editorial team).
The clean part of DailyMe is that it licences all of the content it serves up, so no skirmish with the likes of The Associated Press (a service here) will ensue.
While I found a few services I might like to see (ahem, there is more than just The Canadian Press for Canada, and The New York Times is missing, as are leading British broadsheets), DailyMe has assembled a pretty strong lineup that is only bound to get better.

The rise of Internet advertising at some point had to overtake another medium, so radio is the next rung on the ladder. According to the Publicis advertising group, online will surpass radio this year. Magazines are next. Cinema and outdoors already were passed.
Internet advertising will grow 28 per cent this year. The overall advertising market will grow about 4.7 per cent.

An analysis by AdvertisingAge of the top 100 U.S. advertisers (or about 41 per cent of the market) indicates that about $1 billion of their advertising shifted into the digital space in 2007. The shift came at the expense of newspapers, which lost nearly $650 million, and television, which lost more than $400 million.
The slowing U.S. economy was also reflected in the figures: a mere 1.7-per-cent increase in the year, the most sluggish since 2001.

Just caught up with Jon Fine's latest contribution to Business Week and his look at Daylife, the news aggregator that has been employed by large organizations to create subject-specific sites on just about anything.
Now Daylife plans a more accessible (that is, affordable) version that will permit organizations to build and mount these sites on their own. There isn't a clear plan yet on how to share in the revenue, but the plan has very interesting applications for smaller media looking for a way to harness the Internet's vast supply of content.