Last week I met one of the editors of Yahoo Sports and he gently reminded me that Kevin Sites and Richard Bangs are not the first instances of original reporting coming from Yahoo. Yahoo Sports has had it’s own exclusive analysts providing original coverage for several years and have blazed many of the trails faced by new media companies such as securing credentials for events and getting access for interviews.
Tag: media
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Remix as a Business Model
My friend Alex has the coolest job. His company, Rock River Music (throw on the ‘phones, cool streaming music on their site), puts together compilations of music for retail stores. You know that CD you saw by the register at The Gap? That’s a collection of tracks selected, licensed, and packaged by Rock River.
The LA Times has a piece on them which gave you a peek
at their business. Rock River charges the store about $4 per CD and the store sell the CD for about $15. They can also use the CDs as a promotional giveaway to their best customers. Talk about cheap advertising, this stuff not only pays for itself, it turns a profit.I loved making mix tapes when I was in college, everything from the song selection & sequence to the tape covers. In the digital age when it only takes a few minutes to rip a disk, it’s a lost art. Alex has found a way to do this for a living. Nice work if you can get it.
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TimesSelect Annual Revenues Nearly $5M
The New York Times announced that it has over 270,000 subscribers to it’s premium TimesSelect service. PaidContent does some back of the envelope calculations and calculates that they are pulling in $4,954,000 in annual revenue from this venture only 52 days after launch.
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Infoworld on Blogs as lightweight content management
InfoWorld surveys the corporate blogging landscape and sees them as a right-sized solution to basic content management. If you’re publishing a website, you’re managing content. Yet, if you go shopping around for a traditional content management solution, the enterprise software vendors will give you a six figure estimate with a healthy “services” chunk thrown in.
Deploying a full-blown ECM (enterprise content management) system to address basic corporate content publishing and
workflow needs has been likened to trying to kill a fly with a rocket launcher. A more suitable solution may lie in souped-up blogging tools, which by design simplify content publishing.I couldn’t have said it better myself. From Blog tools tackle content management.
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KRON TV blogger meetup
On Saturday, I headed over to check out the KRON4 Blogger Meetup. I was not sure what to expect but who could turn down the offer of free food and interesting conversation? I think all of us there would agree that we would have liked to have more structure to the afternoon but KRON achieved its objective to introduce themselves as the first local TV station to "get it" and break down the wall between Big Media and the grassroots movement that local bloggers represent. Terry Heaton, the televsion consultant who launched the collaboration between bloggers and Nashville television station WKRN, is working with sister station KRON4 here in San Francisco to blend the hyper-local snippets of local bloggers into their news. Terry’s efforts in Nashville have resulted in the very well received, Nashville is Talking aggregator site,
I think Terry summed up their motives best when he said, (I paraphrase) "We don’t want to dictate from above but support from underneath." KRON has already committed to building their own aggregator of local blogs and Terry said that KRON will be inviting selected bloggers on television to share their views of local events. If KRON follows the WKRN lead, we’ll see KRON supporting selected local bloggers with ads and sponsorship and more get togethers & conferences.
My favortite comment of the afternoon? Being introduced by Terry to the General Manager of KRON, Mark Antonitis, "Hey Mark, here’s Six Apart, these guys are like the NTSC of the blogging world."
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Laying Newspapers down to rest
More from AlacraBlog, Steve Goldstein has a roundup of some of the latest stories pointing to the demise of the newspaper as we now know it. It may take longer than we think but the signs are all there to the eventual end of a business model that has worked for over 200 years. Craig Newmark calls it a “tipping point” but is the first to admit that he’s not a news guy and doesn’t know how the model will evolve.
I realize I’m no newsguy, not an activist; just like everyone else, tired of news that I can’t trust. My favorite irony is that Jon Stewart produces fake news that’s honest; and the White House produces allegedly honest news that’s really fake.
My guess is that either me, personally, or my craigslist team, will promote work which merges professional and citizen journalism, along with more fact checking and more investigative journalism. We’re relying on people who really know this stuff to advise, and can’t predict what me or craigslist will do. However, it’s really important to us that we help newspeople and newspapers survive the big transition, and thrive.
One thing is certain, there will be changes and those that embrace this new frontier will be in a position to capitalize upon it while those that chose to ignore it do so at their peril.
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NYT puts their best behind a gate
TimesSelect, a new package being launched by nytimes.com in September, will restrict access to some of the best known columnists to only those with a subscription key. For either $49.95/year or free with a home-delivery subscription to the print newspaper, readers will get an account to TimesSelect which will give them unfettered access to the likes of Krugman, Friedman, and Dowd.
It’ll be interesting to see if keeping these writers behind the subscription wall will lead to a drop off of references to their material on blogs and, as some claim, a drop off in their ability to set the agenda for the day.
Perhaps. In an interview on paidcontent.org, Martin Niesenholtz says their looking to also launch an affiliate network of sorts to drive people to nytimes.com and hopefully sign up for a subscription of their own.
We also hope to roll out an affiliate program so the long tail can create a revenue stream for itself. If you’re a blogger who uses a lot of Times Op-Ed content in your blog you can continue to (by subscribing to TimesSelect)… and, through an affiliate network, extend that to their base and they can make money on the backend off that. We think the blogosphere needs more revenue streams.”
It’ll be a delicate balance but if they do it right, they might be able to recreate that economic model that works so well for them in print. One reason to get a paper such as the New York Times is to get their editorial perspective on the events of the day and share them as a point of reference If you’re a blogger that enjoys amplifying these perspectives to your readers and drive your readers to also sign up for the online edition or home-delivery, then you should be able to subsidize your own subscription.
It remains to be seen if the demographics of their readership is still right for this balance to play out online. Is a Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd enough of a draw or has the curve shifted to the point where people are already drawn away towards some of the newer writers of the day that are not going to be drawing a paycheck from an established brand.
This September the wall will go up and we’ll see if the Times’ magnetic pull can draw others inside and make it a sustainable business for the Times and its affiliates.
Opinion pieces have their most value immediately after they’re published (when the piece is fresh and original) for about a day or two and then once again, several months later, when they serve as a a useful reference point for historical perspective. These same pieces have their least value in the in the time between, say after they’re a few days old until 3 months out.
Restricting access during the period when these pieces are the most valuable will drive subscriptions to TimesSelect. It makes less sense to keep these pieces under lock and key throughout the time when people are mildly curious to see what all the fuss is about and have the time to sample a frequently referenced article without having to commit to an annual subscription. I would prefer to see the program re-jigged so that TimesSelect members get first dibs on grokking the perspective of the day but after 48 hours the doors are open for any and all up until the 3 month mark when they drop back to a view which restricts non-subscribers to only the first few paragraphs.
This new system would allow nytimes.com to extract maximum value from the work of their best authors (in order to keep their far-flung bureaus open for business) while also providing grist for the bloggers and general public to amplify and discuss stories in the public realm for a good three months. Open access to popular pieces for a three month period would help move low cost advertising inventory and allow for the fence-sitters to properly experience the quality of the Times’ news stream should they later decide they want to get access to this stuff prior the 48 hour embargo for non-subscribers.
Call it Kennedy’s Rolling Window of news & perspective. The cheap seats only let you see what’s directly in front of the window while subscribers get to see not only what’s coming down the pike but also dig back and review what’s gone by. Each time you see a story fly by that you wish you could have read sooner or wanted to read later, you’ll be fingering your credit card and thinking about the value of that $49.95 subscription.
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NY Times recommends blogs to build trust
I find it interesting that the New York Times is recommending that blogs are one way to rebuild reader trust. See recommendation 1. III on the Siegal Committee report.
Nytimes.com should conduct frequent Q&A forums with department heads and other senior editors and should set up mechanisms to give readers greater access to key source documents, interview transcripts and databases used in stories and graphics. The Web should also explore the possibility of creating a Times blog that promotes a give-and-take with readers while satisfying the standards of our journalism.
I think they mean “Web site” and not the collective internet in the paragraph above but regardless, this is great news and I think everyone will benefit from the pointers to source materials that this report recommends.
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nytimes.com surveys readers on $50/year subscription fee
The Wall Street Journal Online reports and BusinessWeek blogs that the New York Times is surveying its readers on two subscription plans that would move them away from their current $2.95/article pricing structure. One plan would offer unlimited access to the past year’s articles for $49.99 and the second would limit access to 100 articles/month but from their complete archive back to 1851.
Access to articles less than a week old will continue to be available at no charge.
In the article, Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review is quoted:
a move by the Times to offer annual subscriptions to its online archives would “radically” change the pricing structure for newspaper archives on the Web. “They may be hoping that they’ll be getting a much larger market for this lower-priced, all-you-can-eat archival content,” Mr. Niles said. Such a strategy also could help the Times build its brand online. “You want to be the newspaper of record for the United States, and by aggressively pricing your archives … that can help you do that,”
I always wondered where the $2.95/article benchmark used throughout the online media industry came from. It seemed so arbitrary and is now almost ten years old.