everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: media

  • Andrew Keen as Linkbait?

    Unusually passionate post on the YPN Blog about Andrew Keen’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” which represents the latest backlash against the internet and social media in particular.

    Today’s internet is certainly changing our culture. But killing it? Hardly. In fact, I’d argue that the Gutenberg press, which ushered in a new era of print media in the 15th century, was far more disruptive. Then, more efficient printing led to a more rapid dissemination of information that in turn spawned revolutions (social, religious, scientific) that we’re still feeling the effects of half a millennium later.

    Killing it from the perspective of someone who is stuck with a fixed definition of culture. To me, culture is dynamic and evolving, not something you can hold up and compare as if you had some kind of cultural slide rule against which to compare everything.

    Lawrene Lessig skewers Keen’s arguments with an excellent post which holds up Keen as, “our generation’s greatest self-parodist.”

    the real argument of Keen’s book is that traditional media and publishing is just as bad as the worst of the Internet. Here’s a book — Keen’s — that has passed through all the rigor of modern American publishing, yet which is perhaps as reliable as your average blog post: No doubt interesting, sometimes well written, lots of times ridiculously over the top — but also riddled with errors. Keen’s obvious point is to show those with a blind faith in the traditional system that it can be just as bad as the worst of the Internet. Indeed, one might say even worse, since the Internet doesn’t primp itself with the pretense that its words are promised to be true.

    I have to confess, I missed Keen when he spoke most recently at Yahoo. He also spoke to a room of skeptical engineers at Google. I further confess that I have not read his book so I am only looking at the ongoing debate as a bemused spectator.

    What do you think – is the internet killing our culture or is Keen just stirring the pot to get some airtime?

  • All Things Digital launches

    allthingsd.jpg

    Walt Mossberg & Kara Swisher have joined up with my favorite headline writer, John Paczkowski from Good Morning Silicon Valley on a new site run by Dow Jones. All Things Digital is a place where Walt and Kara can stretch out a bit and write in a way that the column inches in The Wall Street Journal would constrain.

    All of Mossberg’s reviews from the past two years are now out from behind the subscription wall in an experiment to see if they monetize better out in the open but they’re going to need to tune the Ad Sense placement a bit better because I don’t think people are going to be interested in the “Mossberg on eBay” links they point to right now. House ads for other Dow Jones properties are running tonight but I’m sure you’ll see others ads rotate in as things get rolling.

    Each writer has a lengthy ethics statement which is as much a primer on their individual style as it is a full frontal of any potential conflicts of interest.

    I don’t own a single share of stock in any of the companies whose products I cover, or any shares in technology-oriented mutual funds. Because of this, I completely missed the giant run-up in tech stocks a few years back, and looked like an idiot. However, when the tech stocks crashed, I looked like a genius. Neither was true.

    – Walt Mossberg

    So, if Yahoo makes a smarter move than Google, or if I agree with Microsoft’s position on some issue, rather than Google’s, you’ll read it here whether Megan (her spouse) agrees with it or not. If Ask.com buys a small, smart company that Google was also pursuing or declined to buy, I will report it and praise such a deal, even if Megan was involved on the Google side. This may result in some arguments at home, but it won’t affect the coverage here.

    – Kara Swisher

    I should disclose right at the start that seven years ago, at my request, a former employee of Digiscents procured for me an “iSmell” t-shirt which I wore to the gym for a number of years.

    – John Paczkowski

    As far as I can tell, the whole thing is running on WordPress. Great job folks! Subscribed!

  • The Value of Editorial

    In this world of automated aggregation engines we can really appreciate the value of someone taking the time to pick through a selection of material, dust off what’s forgotten, and otherwise hold up to the light something to be celebrated.

    I listen to Salon.com’s Weekly Download podcasts and while I enjoy the selections, the adverb and simile-rich descriptions by Thomas Bartlett are just as entertaining. Here’s his intro to Brittle Britches by Quien es, BOOM!

    Austin band Quien es, BOOM! (the name references Billy the Kid’s purported last words before being shot, “Quien es?”) makes music centered around lovely interlocking guitar parts and intricate — sometimes too intricate — drumming. They clearly put so much thought into the instrumental lines, the discreet but delicious bits of electronic ear candy and the way they interact that it’s a surprise when, two minutes into this song, they bother adding a vocalist (although the vocals are, in fact, quite nice, and in a fittingly fastidiously phrased style).

    Brittle Britches by Quien es, BOOM!

     

  • Sun CEO thinks the internet provides broader distribution than traditional media

    The reaction to this will be interesting.

    This (sun.com) website is a tremendous vehicle for the broad delivery of timely and robust information about our company. It is our view that proprietary news outlets are insufficiently accessible to the broad majority of Internet users and individual shareholders. It is certainly the case that the Internet represents a broader user base than those able to afford subscriptions to traditional forms of media and thus usage of this or any other freely available company blog or web site should be considered sufficient in satisfying the objectives of Regulation Fair Disclosure.

    Sun CEO Johnathan Schwartz describes the benefits of using his blog to disclose financial information in a fax to the SEC

  • digg vs.nytimes

    The share of page impressions for the NY Times was 19 times greater than for Digg. . . While Digg is certainly growing in popularity, particularly with the blogosphere set, and its move into more news categories is a good one, it is still an early-adopter site and will take some time to gain traction with mainstream internet users.

    – Hitwise on digg & nytimes.com

  • When the world zigs, Gawker zags. Parsing Nick Denton

    Nick Denton announced that Gawker will be selling two sites from it’s fifteen site blog network. Sploid and Screenhead are both out having not made the cut. In Nick’s words, there are a number of reasons for this sudden change;

    Nick Denton by Matt Haughey

    1. advertising is a fickle thing. . . Better to sober up now, before the end of the party. Better to switch to water now, there’s money to be made while everyone gets silly.

    2. operational costs are increasing. For editorial talent, we now pay within the range of mainstream media. They’re onto me, people no longer thank me for hiring them to work for slave wages.

    3. it’s easy enough to start a site; increasingly tough to attract attention. One way to boost circulation is to write about how hard it is to boost circulation.

    4. it’s hard to turn around a site. They’re either hits or flops, As much as some think it’s a brand new world, blogs still abide by the business laws of old school media.

    5. even successful sites can settle into comfortable habits. . .We want always to be open to new editorial talent. Nothing like a reorg to put the fear of God back into your staff and a cap on those pesky expenses.

    This could have been a more private re-shuffling of the deck but instead, it’s been played out all over the blogosphere. Ever in love with the contrarian, the reorg story has been picked up smartly by mainstream media so they can play it out over the long (eg. slow news) weekend. Nick is a really smart player. He has simultaneously told the market that it’s time to take some chips off the table while also tipping his hand to show how much he’s still worth. All the while, he’ll be putting his house in order for the long run.

  • WSJ 3.0

    Advertising Age checks in with Gordon Crovitz, three months into his role as publisher of a unified online & print editions of Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal franchise and describes Gordon’s thinking around how the paper edition will evolve.

    Given the digital era’s barrage of news from all sides and sources, the paper probably will devote more space to “what it means” articles and less to simple “what happened” pieces.

    As an earlier adopter of online news (and a previous employee of Dow Jones where I had open access to Dow Jones’ newswire content), I’ve always turned to the newspaper version of the Wall Street Jounal as a supplement to the what I read online rather than my primary view into what’s going on.

    Breaking news is clearly better suited to delivery via the internet where the story can be updated as the story develops and for years we’ve seen papers drop scheduling, listings, and stock quote tables from their expensive newsprint inventory.

    Due out early next year, the new version of the paper which is known internally as “3.0” will feature a smaller format and is clearly being positioned as an adjunct to wsj.com, something that helps, as Mr. Crovitz says, “help us overcome information overload by helping us, once a day, put the content in context.” I’ve always viewed the paper more akin to a daily business magazine and read it for its excellent feature articles which typically spill over 2,000 words, not something you would care to read on a computer screen.

    My father, a longtime New York Times subscriber who, reading from Japan, has been forced into pushing the envelope on new delivery mechanisms for the paper. He used to live in a self-imposed time warp where his world view consistently 6 weeks behind which is how long it took for a slow boat to Asia to delivery the city editions to his door in Yokohama. He described reading the paper at nytimes.com as if he were reading a ticker tape, “scrolling up the side of building,” hardly the best way to scan the news of the day.

    Lately, he has been delighted with a company called NewspaperDirect which sends a pdf file of the paper to Tower Records in Shibuya who prints out a high resolution copy of the paper sheets of B4 paper to fill his standing order.

    The trend with many industries that touch the internet is to explode the centralization of capital and infrastructure to the edges. In order to optimize the value of the distribution capabilities of the internet, newspapers must transform what leaves their offices from a physical artifact to an electronic representation. At the other end, the point of purchase, this electronic copy can then be consumed online via a web browser or transformed into a high-quality printed facsimile such as that used by my father in Tokyo.

    A third format is also possible. Companies such as eInk in Boston are experimenting with technology that combines the best of paper and electronic delivery. Imagine a thin piece of flexible “paper” that can be refreshed with the latest information. WSJ 3.0 is ahead of the curve because it conditions subscribers to begin to think of the print and online versions as two important pieces that work together instead of a dual format world. The wsj brand follows the reader as from the online world into the print world and back again, weaving an experience that crosses between the two mediums. This preps readers for a world where the two formats eventually meld together combining an editorial and personalized view of the world just as it does with a hybrid piece of self-updating “electronic paper” that combines the best of newsprint and electronic display.

  • Containers as Commerce Packets

    Shiptracker

    The first newspapers came about back in the 1700’s to fulfill a need for importers and others with an interest in trade with the New World to keep track of the shipping schedules and see who was due into port that day. Tucked away in the business section of some papers you still see announcements of the day’s arrivals but it’s just a vestige of what I’m sure it used to be and I’m sure no one subscribes for this sole purpose.

    Today, Jason Kottke points to Shiptracker which uses voluntary weather reports from ships around the world to track the location of ships in realtime. Imagine each of these dots pilied high with containers and then you get an idea of what kind of logistical problem faces an agency that wants to examine everything before clearing it for commerce. According to one document I found, US Customs cleared 5.7 million containers in 2001 but only checked the contents of 2% of them. There’s also later news reporting a much higher rate to the contrary.

    In the old days, sending CDs via FedEx used to offer better throughput for businesses that needed to send large files back and forth to each other. I wonder what the true throughput of today’s shipping network is and how it’s changed since September 11th?

  • Kill the Paperboy

    Sometimes and idea gets floated that is so out of whack with current trends that you wonder if the author is just trolling for pageviews. Predicting the death of Google seems to be the latest parlor game and BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine has the latest with his post, Putting the Screws to Google.

    What if 2006 is the year big media players take aim at Google’s kneecaps? No, not with more lawsuits; the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers — on behalf, in part, of BusinessWeek’s parent company, The McGraw-Hill Companies — and Agence France-Presse have already sued the search behemoth. Rather, picture this: Walt Disney, News Corp., NBC Universal, and The New York Times, in an odd tableau of unity, join together and say: “We are the founding members of the Content Consortium. Next month we launch our free, searchable Web site, which no outside search engines can access.” (A simple bit of code is all it takes to bar all or some major search engines from accessing a site.) “From now on we’ll make our stuff available and sell ads around it and the searches for it, but only on our terms. Who else wants to join us? Membership’s free.”

    This is just nuts. Of course media companies are jealous of Google’s $450 share price. I’m sure many a publisher thinks that the site was built on the back of their content and feel they should get some of the advertising revenues sold next to the search results. But to try and build your own search engine and ask your readers to come seek you out just seems as shortsighted as previous efforts to wall off information in pursuit of higher margins.

    The overwhelming trend and momentum of the information economy is towards universal access. Powerful tools such as the search engines which indexes the information and social networks such as blogs and RSS feeds which act as filters to point to and annotate the good stuff only get better with greater access and distribution. With greater access everyone gets a piece of the growing pie. The more content from a site that gets indexed and added to the ecosystem the greater the share of the attention and traffic that clicks through to read the referred to articles and the greater the chance for the publisher to engage the reader and draw them in with more related material. The more good stuff is out there, the more folks will use the ecosystem as a source of information making the pie even larger.

    The newspaper sites should be focused on how to convert a casual reader that might come across their site by way of search engine hit or blog post refer to an engaged reader that will click through to more information and benefit from highly relevant advertising related to what they’re reading. Trying to choke off a search engines access to their information and force readers to come to their own search engine is like laying off all your paperboys because you can make better margins by asking your readers to drive to your downtown offices and pick up the paper themselves. “Come on by, your copy will be waiting for you!” Not likely.

    The other aspect of the Content Consortium that I just don’t see working is the bickering over shared costs of the infrastructure, how to effectively cooperate on ad sales, sharing profits, coming to agreement on technology, and index update times.

    Would you base profit-sharing based on the number of articles you upload into the index? That would really tick off the news weeklies that have far fewer stories than the daily papers. Would the wire services get credit for one liner “flash” headlines?

    Yahoo spends lots of time continually thinking how to improve our search engine. We have an entire research team dedicated to thinking about this. I don’t think a search engine is a commodity. Who’s technology will they use? How will they agree upon relevance? I can see the publishers debating this one for decades.

    I could riff on and on about this but at it’s core, pulling all the news off the search engine goes against what everyone wants, except the publishers. Putting up walls or creating scarcity by killing distribution of your product is the wrong way to build a buisness but a great way to kill one.