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02 Mar 09
Yule HeibelQUOTE
Contributing to this catastrophe has been newspapers’ stubborn refusal to consider any news-gathering and -analysis model other than the one that they were used to, one that, most crucially, relegated consumers to the role of passive readers instead of engaged users. It’s a mistake that happens all over the Big Media Debate: misinterpreting the limitations of our print past as prescriptions for our media future.
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(1) Media platforms should be bundled into technology platforms;
(2) Premium access—one better than the failed TimesSelect project—will bring in revenue;
(3) Publishers should work more on matching advertisers with users, which is a suggestion that might finally help break the growing, pernicious primacy of Google in raking in Internet ad dollars.
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It’s also a holistic point of view that does not raise the phony dichotomies publishers have been beating their heads against for more than a decade: paid content versus advertising; print versus digital; professional journalism versus “user-generated content”; blogging versus reporting.
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“I think a lot of the conversation these days is myopic,” said Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post. “The problem is how to monetize all content, which is not simply how to solve newspapers problems. Our problems are ultimately the same as the movie industry’s, the book industry’s, the magazine industry’s, the music industry’s. We all meet on a vast, flat digital plane, which is a sort of Hobbesian, anarchic, unordered place.”
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Advertisers and Web sites signed up for AdSense because it made advertising easy and cheap. Google’s program matches text, picture and video ads to the particular site’s content and users. Publishers earned money from clicks or “impressions,” or loads of an ad on the site. But Google essentially cut the revenue of newspapers by adding themselves in as middle men.
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“Everybody loves to hate Google and I think that’s quite frankly an excuse,” Ms. Warren said. “You have to figure out how to generate revenue from your readers and/or from your advertisers. And you have to be focused to get that done. To blame Google? Or anyone else? To me, it’s kind of a waste of energy. We don’t do that.”
So perhaps instead of fighting Google for that 60 percent of the pie, news media ought to make themselves first on the next wave of advertising revenue possibilities. That means that The News must make itself a player in the larger online business.
They are already falling behind.
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It’s all about giving users attention, because that’s mostly what people are looking for when they’re online these days.
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Newspapers can also learn something from Facebook’s preference toolbar by making their user experiences more personalized. How about customizable home pages for users? So when they go to NYTimes.com, it will display, say, only international news and science headlines, and eliminate maybe sports- and style-related articles. Users could set preferences to display more new podcasts or video posts and drag and drop any reporters' column into a specific space on their home page. And if they want their Twitter feed or del.icio.us links integrated into their home page, so they can see what their friends are reading, let them set that preference as well.
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Unless newspaper sites can become facilitators of the new status culture, they will be left outside of it. And they will no longer be the places where advertisers want to meet customers.
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“It’s really quite remarkable how much our future is going to be driven by information exhaust from the devices we carry around with us,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “We have to think about that future.”
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The idea is this: The news must go mobile.
And if the news is to attract rather than follow advertisers, it must do so right now.
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News won’t be a once a day update or even once an hour, like on blogs. It will be continuous and ambient—all around us through our handheld devices, according to Bill Spencer, an evangelist for mobile technology and co-founder of viaPlace, a location-based data service for mobile users.
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“As events occur they’ll stream right to the individual,” he said. “You’re going to become entwined with information. Information is no longer a thing that you go to. It’s threaded into the technology.”
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So how will all of this get monetized? Well, if Apple’s iPhone 3G has shown us anything, it’s that people will pay for convenience.
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But publishers can also partner with advertisers to create innovative, interactive applications. For example, on Feb. 2, Lucky magazine released their Lucky At Your Service iPhone application. Designed to supplement their March issue, Lucky app users can browse through more than 70 shoes listed in their shoe guide, including ones chosen by editors and advertisers.
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The irony of news that follows you wherever you go is that it is intensely local—just the kind of stuff news sites are jettisoning these days.
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Consider Patch, the New York–based start-up co-founded by Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president of advertising sales. Funded by Polar Capital Group, Mr. Armstrong’s private investment company, Patch launched three hyperlocal news sites in three New Jersey towns on Feb. 5: Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange. Each individual site combines hard-nosed journalism from professional reporters, information from local government on everything from health department services to volunteer opportunities and various platforms for user participation with pictures, stories and blogs. Patch’s sites don’t just dispatch news articles—they are information portals.
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“It’s the year 2009 and the way people are getting community-news specific information is largely through corkboards and bagel stores and kiosks in town squares,” Jon Brod, Patch’s chief executive officer and co-founder, told The Observer over coffee earlier this month. “There’s a huge opportunity there to really include people’s local lives and strengthen communities through information and that’s really what we’re trying to do.”
“It was a problem everytown, everycommunity U.S.A. was experiencing,” he continued. “Community level news and information was really sparse, fragmented, disorganized and in a bunch of level, archaic.”
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After work, local happy hours and drink specials will be pinged to your phone as soon as you step back outside. This kind of feature is already being developed by small New York-based startup Coovents. In fact, most of these features are already available in various iPhone applications, but perhaps newspapers should start partnering with the start-ups making these new applications so they can add the data sets to their Web and mobile libraries.
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And if Patch came to this town—if it were the new business model for The New York Times, aggressively social, hyperlocal and therefore geo-targeted for advertisers and a better overall service for readers—but on a larger scale, with top-flight reporting and seriously breaking news at every zoom level, would people pay to read the “paper?”
One of the most boring disputes over the future of the media is whether a pay model or an advertising model will ultimately work. Even very hidebound print people forget that they “serve” ads in print only to readers who have already paid. The argument is that readers won’t pay to read content; therefore no eyeballs; therefore no advertisers.
But if news sites entered these other areas—became social, hyperlocal, mobile—perhaps they could retake the center stage and bring paid readers and advertisers to the same place?
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He pointed out that subscriptions and newsstand sales have never been able to support print journalism without serious advertising revenue. So how can any pay model be expected to cover the costs of journalism online?
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So, this promised land, on the other side of the print/advertising divide, with news organizations acting as social networking sites and offering interactive advertising opportunities that work for advertisers, hyperlocal service content delivered to mobile devices and the devices that are yet to come: how do media organizations interested in preserving the future of a free press operating at the highest level of quality?
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27 Feb 09
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