outside.in » Newspapers Should Leap, Not Stand - The Diigo Meta page

• 14 Apr 09
  

  John Tulinsky

  newspapers journalism

• 09 Mar 09
  

  Yule Heibel

  Rebuttal by outside.in's CEO to David Carr's NYT wishful thinking piece on locking down content and throttling the aggregators.

  outside.in newspapers business_model aggregators

  • Here’s what is going on out there:

    
    
    • The cost to create and distribute information has dropped to almost zero.
    • Consumers don’t go find news, a recent study (I’ll find attribution) quoted someone saying “if the news is important enough, it will find me!”
    • Audience and therefore ad impressions are diffused to thousands of sites, including, yes, blogs.
    • Ad networks have more inventory in any given market than the big newspaper in town.
  • “no more free rides to aggregators”.  This one hits a bit close to home.  At Outside.in we aggregate local media, but we also add value to that media by organizing by location to make it easier for consumers and for newspapers themselves. (We then pass all that extra metadata onto anyone who wants to use it: newspaper or blogger.)  The problem with Carr’s idea here is that consumers have already decided that they expect an incredibly customized and personal news experience.  It’s “Me-centric” not “newspaper centric”.
  • 3 more annotations...
  • • Consumers are disaggregating the newspaper and folks like Outside.in, the Huffington Post and others are putting it back together in a format that works better.
    • “no more commoditized ads”. Carr bemoans the rise of networks and ad exchanges but glosses over the fact that there are billions of impressions in every market that are not being sold by the best sales teams in those markets — the local media companies themselves!  They’ve ceded their leadership in the local market by trying to hang on for too long to high cpms and scarcity.  That’s not going to last.
    • Local sales needs to embrace the fact that ad networks are a good thing.  They roll up audience at scale that sales teams can bring to their advertisers.

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