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28 Aug 09

New rule: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest

A 2007 post from Jeff Jarvis in which he gives us the popular catchphrase "Cover what you do best. Link to the rest."

www.buzzmachine.com/...t-you-do-best-link-to-the-rest - Preview

newspapers journalism Jeff Jarvis scarcity local_news

Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.
In the rearchitecture of news, what needs to happen is that people are driven to the best coverage, not the 87th version of the same coverage.
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- News is not one-size-fits-all. We don’t get all our news from one source anymore. We get bombarded with news all around us.

The Future Of News Is Scarcity

Venture capitalist Nic Brisbourne says news organizations must find ways to make money off the scarcer things about their coverage and let the free news be free.

paidcontent.org/...the-future-of-news-is-scarcity - Preview

scarcity Nic Brisbourne newspapers free free is a business model Chris Anderson

The great tragedy of the newspaper industry in the late 20th Century was that, in the pursuit of profit, quality journalism became a dying art. Budgets were reduced, journalists were asked to write more stories per day and were given less time to check facts. At the same time, editors were instructed to avoid stories that might create controversy and the expense of lawsuits. The result was more and more bland articles recycled from paper to paper, more politically motivated editing and the collapse of public trust in the newspaper industry.
the industry is possibly more exposed than any other to the trend towards $0 pricing for online content.
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- the answer to this conundrum is not to swim against the tide and find a way to start charging for news, but, rather, to understand what is becoming commoditized and abundant, and what new scarcities are created as a result
- The good news is that every abundance creates new scarcities and this is where the news industry must go to make money in the 21st century. The scarcities created (and enabled) by abundant news are interesting stories, thought provoking analysis, conversation and community, and trust/verification.
  
  Interesting stories go beyond simple reporting of what has occurred, bringing in relevant context and staying with a topic as it unfolds. Thought provoking analysis will dare to shock, and to be wrong. Conversation and community will both make the experience richer for the active participant and improve the quality of the content on the site for more casual reader. Trust and verification will make you go back to one site rather than another as you know the stories there will be more accurate (note breaking news should be published first and verified second, with appropriate caveats).
- This is, I think, the real business model for news companies in the future - build a community around news and stories and maybe make a little in advertising, but the real money will come from leveraging the position in the community to offer services no one else can.

12 Apr 09

Why Nick Carr is wrong on Google as a middleman for news

Mathew Ingram disagrees with Nicholas Carr's view that Google devalues news content and removes it from its creator's control. Ingram says Google adds value and that news sites need to learn how to use that to their advantage.

www.niemanlab.org/...google-as-middleman-for-news - Preview

Google Matthew Ingram Nicholas Carr syndication aggregation scarcity

The broader the control that Google has over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater its power — but that power doesn’t lessen the power of Google’s suppliers. If anything, in fact, it amplifies it. Does Google indexing my website, and providing a link to it when someone searches for my name, lessen the power that I have over my content? If you think of power as control over who sees the content and where, then yes. But in reality, it provides me with far more reach than I could otherwise achieve on my own, by exposing that content to people.
- There is some confusion about what "control" of content means between Carr's essay and Ingram's. For Carr, "control" seems to mean the ability to make money off of content via ad sales. For Ingram, it means something else, I think. - on 2009-04-12
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After all, if you search for news about something, Google doesn’t show you anything but a bunch of headlines and excerpts from stories at newspaper websites. How can that simple act be seen as demolishing the business model of newspapers? As far as I’m concerned, if your headline and lede paragraph are the sum total of the value you are providing for readers, then you deserve to lose your business to Google.
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- Trying to artificially re-create the kind of scarcity that papers used to enjoy — something that was a function of the control they had over a distribution mechanism, more than anything else — is a mug’s game.

Google in the middle

Nicholas Carr argues that news sources must take control of their content (away from Google) and do more to cut down on syndication -- create scarcity to boost content.

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middleman Google Nicholas Carr business scarcity syndication revenue

We were misinformed. The Web didn't kill mediators. It made them stronger. The way a company makes big money on the Web is by skimming little bits of money off a huge number of transactions, with each click counting as a transaction. (Think trillions of transactions.) The reality of the web is hypermediation, and Google, with its search and search-ad monopolies, is the largest hypermediator.
- The idea that the Web would remove middlemen was misguided. It was only an apparent removal of middlemen. Connecting the buyers and sellers or readers and writers always required a lot of technology. But when the Internet was young, the people who made that technology and provided that connection were smaller, poorer players.
  
  Now that the techies have become rich, we see them. We notice the middlemen, unlike back then. - on 2009-04-12
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It's called leverage: Play by our rules, or die.
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- When it comes to Google and other aggregators, newspapers face a sort of prisoners' dilemma. If one of them escapes, their competitors will pick up the traffic they lose. But if all of them stay, none of them will ever get enough traffic to make sufficient money. So they all stay in the prison, occasionally yelling insults at their jailer through the bars on the door.
- For Google, any concentration of traffic at content sites is anathema; it would represent a shift of power from the middleman to the supplier. Google wants to keep that traffic fragmented. The suppliers of news have precisely the opposite goal.
- I don't mean preventing bloggers from posting fair-use snippets of articles. I mean curbing the rampant syndication, authorized or not, of full-text articles. Syndication makes sense when articles remain on the paper they were printed on. It doesn't make sense when articles float freely across the global web.