everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: media

  • Yahoo cuts to the chase

    We’ve seen it played out over and over again. The internet has enabled consumers to go directly to the production plant for disintermediated product. Covered in detail in Michael Lewis’ book, Next, the internet has upset age old business models, putting raw materials within reach of the everyman and providing a platform for a thousand new business models to bloom. 2004 was another banner year for online vendors as more go with a source that, because of its virtuality, can offer better inventory and price that a brick & mortar counterpart. Amazon vs. the Mall; it’s like watching mountains crumble into the sea.

    Today’s announcement by Yahoo that it will source quotes directly from the stock exchanges is another notch towards the reinvention of the information industry. Reuters, the traditional source of market data, built its business on charging a premium for market data which it sourced from the markets, both in bulk from the exchanges, but also aggregated, from the banks that wanted to list their prices on the Reuters network. It is rare when you have a business model that allows you to charge not only for subscriptions but also for contributions. As any CEO of a public company will tell you, it is hard to fix something until it’s broke.

    “This significantly increases our ability to extend our brand outside of our network,” said Craig Forman, vice president of information and finance at Yahoo. “We will have more control of financial information that we can then distribute.”

    Depending upon the deal they cut with the exchanges, Yahoo may become the preferred provider of market data on the internet. Superior price and integration options are something that I’m sure they will aspire to and advertising can help offset their costs, an option that’s not part of Reuters’ corporate DNA. Abstracted to our earlier example, is Yahoo going to become the Amazon of Financial Data while Reuters continues to charge a premium for access to a relatively closed network of proprietary information? We certainly do live in interesting times.

  • Bloggers vs. Journalists, it’s Over says Jay Rosen

    NYU’s Jay Rosen declares the “war” between New and Old Media over in a long keynote at the recent Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference at Harvard. Pulling together quotes from key posts over the past few years he says that we really need to stop staring each other in the eyes waiting for the other to blink and realize that the opinionated bloggers and objective journalists need each other. One is not better than the other, they are both different sides of the story and both necessary to paint a complete picture. To a certain extent, the popularity of blogs is a result of the audience (and the working journalist) wanting to pull back some of the powers they’ve ceded to mainstream media.

    The price of professionalizing journalism was the de-voicing of the
    journalist. The price for having mass media was the atomization of the
    audience, who in the broadcasting model were connected “up” to the
    center but not “across” to each other. Well, blogging is a re-voicing
    tool in journalism, and the Net’s strengths in horizontal communication
    mean that audience atomization is being overcome.

  • Bring Down the Wall says Gilmor

    Dan Gillmor argues for the newspapers to unlock their archives from behind the pay wall and provide them to the reading (and blogging) public as a community resource, collective history, and public record. With advances in contextual advertising such as Google’s Adsense (now available as an API by the way), there must be a way for newspapers to make more money off their archives than they currently do from the occasional $2.95 they get from individual readers and the collective royalties they get from the commercial databases such as Lexis-Nexis and Factiva.

    If I was a publisher with a pay-per-view archive, here’s what I’d do:

    1) Re-publish every article in the archives with a unique URL,
    outside the pay-wall. It would be helpful if the articles published
    since the newspaper went online could have the same URLs, but don’t
    worry if that’s too expensive; if the stories are important enough,
    they’ll be found and pointed to. It’ll just take a little longer.

    2) Leave every new article on the Web at the URL it had upon publication. That’s easier.

    3) Encourage the readers to use the archives, with house
    advertisements, website notices e-mail to local librarians and other
    ways to get out the word.

    4) Let local bloggers know that you welcome their links, and that you’ve made the change in part because they need it, too.

    5) If a local blogger points to your article, use Trackback or other such technology to point back.

    I think most of the pay-per-view media sites are all looking at each other to see who will make the first move. Large sites such as the New York Times have the most to gain from such a move because of the attraction of their brand will generate the most traffic. But if a mid-tier player makes the first move (especially someone in a wired part of the world such as the San Jose Mercury News), they could gain first mover advantage and keep momentum up from the subsequent blogger pile-on effect that would use this source as their default research and linking resource.

    If no one jumps, the pending citizen journalism efforts will take their place so someone will make the move sooner or later.

  • James Lileks on Old Media

    The Daily Peg pulls together some choice zingers from Star Tribune columnist and prolific blogger and ephemera archivist, James Lileks, on the impending implosion of the old media.

    Blogs haven’t toppled old media. The foundations of Old Media were rotten already. The new media came along at the right time. Put it this way: you’ve see films of old buildings detonated by precision demolitionists. First you see the puffs of smoke – then the building just hangs there for a second, even though every column that held it up has been severed. We’ve been living in that second for years, waiting for the next frame. Well, here it is. Roll tape. Down she goes. And when the dust settles we will be right back where we were 100 years ago, with dozens of fiercely competitive media outlets throwing elbows to earn your pennies.

  • OhmyNews interviews Dan Gillmor

    OhmyNews, one of the very first citizen journalist sites, interviews Dan Gillmor on his thinking behind why he’s leaving the San Jose Mercury News to start his own venture. In response to how he feels about the decision:

    I’m both excited and terrified (laughter) and a little bit sad, because I’m leaving a wonderful, wonderful job, working with terrific people whom I trust and admire and respect.

    And I’m stepping out of a business that I love. I love newspapers. But I hope that whatever we do is something that at some level newspapers can use, once newspapers decide to take the step that I think is necessary — which is to be part of this new world.

    I’m hoping we will have created something that they can say "Well, we can do stuff like that too." That’s my goal, to do something that is useful not just for old media but for all of us.

  • Dan Gillmor moving on

    Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News writes in his blog that he is moving on to work full time on a "citizen-journalism project." All bets are that blogs will be the enabler and that many of the ideas outlined in his book will be part of it. We’re seeing more and more "hyper-local" news projects where the writers are leveraging weblog technology to break out of the costly infrastructure of big media companies to take back editorial control and experiment with new business models.

    "Practice what you preach." says Joi Ito.

    There are several sites out there including Pegasus News, and Metroblogging.com. There are many more on the way, I’m sure.

  • The end of media as we know it

    The end of media as we know it

    The creepy tone of the background music sets the stage for this look back at the demise of traditional media as we know it from the perspective of 2014. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Friendster and the trend towards personalized and automated filters to help manage information flow pull down the Fourth Estate.

    “The New York Times becomes a print-only newsletter for the elderly and elite.”

    The ending leaves me cold. Watch the developments over at Pegasus News as they build an alternative to this algorithmic nightmare.

  • Le Monde invites readers to the conversation

    Going one step further than The Guardian newsblog which is open to reader comments, Le Monde has a relationship with Six Apart to host readers’ blogs and invite them to participate in the conversation (full disclosure, I work for Six Apart).

    Covered by the site editorsweblog.org, the Editor & Publisher of Le Monde, Stéphane Mazzorato, recently spoke at a conference in Lisbon on the launch of blogs on lemonde.fr saying, “The reader is a partner, not a passive audience.” He went on to talk about the success of blogs for the site mentioning in particular, the success of their NY-based correspondent who posted on the recent US elections,

    For example, Corinne Lesne in New York ran a blog during the American election which allowed readers to have additional insights into the process, and to comment on the issues. Ms Lesne posted 62 items in one month of blogging, generating 774 comments from readers and 90,000 visits.

    In this new world, the traditional Letters to the Editor are no longer on the second to last page of the first section on the day following. If a reader has a comment on something written, they can post their comments right there and then for all to see. Comments are something to be read in real-time, in context, right under the original post.

  • Tivo Sells Out?

    The LA Times reports that Tivo will now insert advertiser logos onto the screen when you fast forward through commercials. PVRBlog says:

    Now, I haven’t seen any actual demos of it in action, and this comment from earlier today claims to be from a TiVo employee and says it’ll be tasteful and unobtrusive, but I have a feeling this is a bad precedent and it’ll get uglier as companies pay more for the primo space.

    Debate rages as to whether these new ads will remain tasteful and unobtrusive as the other things Tivo has done or if this is the first step towards selling out screen real estate until we get the mish-mash of banners that is the Comcast’s Digital Cable interface of today. Then again, it looks like Comcast and Microsoft are up to something that will change their whole TV viewing experience as well and it looks to be for the better.

    Tivo or Comcast – which would you choose?