Archive for December, 2006
What to do with quality writing on the web? What, for instance, will The New Yorker web relaunch (due before Feb) look like? How should the London Review of Books do with their site to embrace new readers, those young-un’s by now used to a web that has the potential to be as authoritative as it is trivial? What about Granta (who soon will get a new editor to go with its new owner), a giant in the literary world sees its influence and cache leak out its backside?
So-called serious magazines have a long tradition of contrariness in practical matters–distribution, design, etc–but a burgeoning online intellectual community points to an opportunity: now is the time to link up with all those smarts 19 year olds who are discovering high-quality serious-minded writing for the first time (you don’t think they only IM about girls and lipstick do you?). It is a simple equation, of course, just paying some attention to the web can yield surprising results, and it doesn’t have to be hip, or even incredibly 2.0-ish either–look at Harper’s Weekly Review which is incredibly useful and entertaining–even better than Slate’s daily version–in exactly the way you would expect from one of the best magazines in the world).
Of course, intelligent writing on the web is not unknown. Slate is the highest profile web-only project, but there are many others, The Morning News in Brooklyn, Arts & Letters Daily and many more. The big question though: why haven’t we seen the The Atlantic Monthly YouTube or The Spectator Digg? All we need is one group to expose the web for its potential utility to intellectuals all over the world. Natural Science practitioners, etc, have long enjoyed the web as a tool and community builder, its time for the preists of humanities to open up a little.
Side note: look at “smartest kid in the world” Chris Ware’s series of 4 covers (for the same issue) for The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago, they tell a story.
December 11th, 2006
Its been a slow day today, no media companies brought to their knees, no foul-mouthed bloggers, not even any newspaper death knells. ABC is changing the way they measure traffic for UK newspapers and, while it is clearly big news and will change these sites do business, it is also something less than a surprise. The debate about the best way to measure popularity and traffic on the web is far from over and has been brewing since I made my first website in 1995 (a genius school project on Aung San Suu Kyi since you asked [even though no one but me and the geeky system administrator who helped me make it would ever know it existed, I still wanted detailed analytics–if you had seen the amazing moving javascript portrait you would understood my pride]).
Its a crucial debate. I think we are all a little tired of hearing arguments about who gets what audience from where. There needs to be a standard that spreads across distribution mechanisms so people who access sites via RSS readers or iTunes, etc, can easily accounted for. Its not going to get easier, more and more people are accessing information away from their main browser, especially as mobile internet options start to really catch on. So bravo to ABC for making the first step towards transparency and standards.
December 6th, 2006
Scott Kirsner, who runs the CinemaTech blog, says in a Sunday op-ed piece in the San Jose Mercury-News that amateur video is on the verge of being pushed off the playing field by big bad professionals. Kirsner is a got-my-head-on-straight realist, and his point is well heard. Of course it is foolish to say that the awakening of the huge corporations to the power of video on the web will have no effect on the amateurs already in the space. But Kirsner still underestimates the ease of entering the fray and the power of networks to pick and choose content regardless of brand identity. Its a good piece though, read away.
December 5th, 2006
Three weeks ago, Google brought the digital advertising revolution, will all its fancy bells and whistles, to print, partnering with 50 US newspapers on a 3-month trial basis. At the annual UBS media conference in New York, James Conaghan, vice president for business analysis and research at the Newspaper Association of America offered some news:
In a test recently started by Google to sell advertisements that appear in the print versions of 50 major newspapers, “the ad volume placed in the newspapers in the first three weeks has exceeded Google’s expectation for the entire three months of the test,”
No real surprise there, eh? Newspapers are gagging to fill their empty slots and looking a bit embarassed when a young digital company comes and out innovates you in your own sphere is a small price to pay for more advertising pages.
December 5th, 2006
“The audience is dead. Long live the participant.” At least that is what Sarah Fay, president of Isobar (a conglomerate that includes Carat among many others) thinks. We formulated it slightly differently in our recent presentation–”Mass markets are dead, long live the network” but the basic point is very similiar: passive groups are out, participatory masses are in. Participation doesn’t just mean voting in digg, bookmarking in del.icio.us or commenting on a random story–statistics still say only 1% of people interact like this–it means choice and connection, the building blocks of the network. We are now intimately involved in the way we receive and process our information. We have the freedom to annoint the The Hindu newspaper king one day, boing boing the next and best friend Bob the next. Choice in many ways is the ultimate participation.
December 5th, 2006
First time I’ve ever heard this (unless we are talking fashion–just look at a US edition of Cosmo and you will see what I mean):
“The U.S. is so behind,” said Terry S. Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, in a recent speech in London. “It’s certainly lagging the U.K. by at least a year or two.”
After all that talk about the US being sooo very far ahead, so webified etc, and then The New York Times goes and drops the truth on us. (Its an article about relative ad markets and includes the infamous statistic: UK digital advertising is growing at a startling rate of 40% year on year).
December 4th, 2006
The Washington Post adds to the local media feed frenzy with a typically well written story on Gannett’s attempt to remake itself into a set of federated, hyperlocal papers. Its a great story for ideas (I love the ‘mojos’ or mobile journalists, sent out into the world with but a computer and camera to protect him/her) but I was particularly struck by one bullet point
Next spring, the paper plans to run a large story on a topic it would not identify. It did, however, say that the reporter on the article will accompany News-Press ad salespeople on trips to advertisers as the paper seeks a sponsor for the article. The logic: The reporter understands the project and can explain it best to potential advertisers. Though the reporter will be in sales meetings, he or she will not be part of the sales pitch. Nevertheless, the practice violates one of journalism’s fundamentals — maintaining a leakproof wall between the news and business sides of a newspaper.
Now I know it breaks rules and it could be a bit dubious (consistent, direct and authorized access to the reporter for advertisers could breed some dangerous bedfellows) but it can work–these days advertising is just as much about sponsoring people and their passions as it is about a ‘brand’ or ‘media company’.
December 4th, 2006
Ask.com, a local company for me (they are right downstairs) is getting local for everyone with their Google Local clone. GigaOm has a nice interview with CEO Jim Lanzone.
Zdnet had more Google local coverage (Careful, the incessant self-linking makes its almost unreadable).
December 4th, 2006
Emily Bell writes persuasively in her column today about the inbred complacency of big media to the so-called Web 2.0 movement.
It is said on an alarmingly frequent basis that although Web 2.0 has so far belonged exclusively to the smartest web developers, there is a very large opportunity for any of the traditional media companies who can really nail the elements of true webbyness and community into their offerings. It is surprising in some ways that it hasn’t happened already. Perhaps it is because the default position for many broadcasters or publishers is that this inspiration will come from the core of its current activity, when in fact it will be a case of developing the margins or what shiny MBA students might describe as edge competencies.
And for all the executives who thought that this would not be their problem, that seems rather optimistic, unless of course they are retiring tomorrow.
Of course she is right on. Two weeks ago, I would have said this is a bit naive, like totally last year. Look at the US, I would have nicely pointed out, look at CBS late embrace of YouTube, look at Conde Nast’s purchase of Reddit, look at Diller’s IAC growth and so on and so on. I dont know for sure, I would have said in alternate universe world, but it seems to me that the biggest names in traditional media, the ones with the most to lose, are right there on the edge with the rest of us, experimenting and massaging and remixing their vaunted brands into new media players. But history me was totally wrong and present Emily is totally right.
And here is how I know:
Last week, Richard and I gave a little presentation (very inadequately taking the place of mega-super-duper-blogger and Yahoo man Tom Coates) at a seminar for LSE’s new Polis thinktank about what we thought were the 10 guiding lights of new media journalism (you can see what we did here, nothing amazing but I think it is pretty right on and even slightly amusing; Lloyd Shepherd, formerly of the Guardian, currently Director of News, Finance and Sport at Yahoo Europe and all around nice guy, also summarised it pretty well). I imagined snores and rolled eyes. But it turned out we were the most radical people in the room, and that has me even more scared.
We gave our little talk and then discussion began. It was clear right from the beginning that the things that Richard and I see as the gospel–things like the burgeoning power of groups and individuals outside of traditional brands to make significant and important contributions to the media world, or the growth of personalization, or that networks are powerful in ways we hadn’t realized–are actually very much up for debate. It was very surprising to hear these people, people who presumably live this stuff, talk like we were in the mid-90’s.
Of course, these people were very bright and articulate, etc, and when speaking about certain topics, utterly persuasive. In the end it was clear the gorilla in the room wasn’t “The New Media Landscape” but rather the BBC. Indeed, all of the most cogent conversation was about the competitive advantage of the behemoth broadcasting company. Ironically, and rather predictably, the BBC representative in the room was one of the most fluent in new media concepts. Its a shame that sometimes we can’t see past the license-fee and look at the pretty amazing forward-thinking work they are actually doing.
Polis, and director Charlie Beckett, has something here–listening to the real practitioners of big media talk about theory and the future in an unguarded way is an invaluable experience. They are funny and earnest (one TV news director, “We lose £10m a year and I am proud of that”), quick and articulate (”News has never been a money-maker, why do we suddenly think it will fill all our pockets?”) and just generally good company. Now if we could just convince them that this whole web thing is really happening…
December 4th, 2006
