To Eric Brazil who told me of the beauty of the desert bloom
(I’m still at Joshua Tree National Park pondering the future of the Fourth Estate and my role in it. This prior posting is suggestive of my line of thought.)
* * *
The great hope of hard-pressed newspapers has been that their online traffic and revenues would rise soon enough and fast enough to replace their evaporating print advertising. But there is some evidence (as I’ve blogged once or twice before) that traffic flows to most online news sites have flattened. While a few national and brand name online dailies continue to grow, the rest of the online dailies stagnate.
That’s the gist of a Harvard study at the heart of this concern. Paid Content editor Rafat Ali has raised a red flag about the study’s traffic-counting methodology. So don’t take it as gospel. But the concern about a traffic slowdown rings true to me because it fits the way the web has evolved. Local newspapers had a natural advantage when they went online a decade ago because they could repurpose print content for Web 1.0. Their competitors had to create content.
But Web 2.0 is not about content. For one thing search has commodotized content. It has unwrapped and aggregated content in an efficient way that feeds people all the news they could possibly want by grazing the web. This invites nomadic behavior at odds with the old habit of newspaper subscribership, and helps create what Steve Yelvington recently called a promiscuous news audience – a term he took from the “nut graf” of research from the management-consulting firm McKinsey & Company:
“The research — an online survey of 2,100 consumers in the United States — found that the respondents divide their time among as many as 16 news brands a week. ‘Brand promiscuity,’ it appears, is the norm.”
So content is not the king of Web 2.0. In fact it may be closer to the harlot. Content is a good way to draw a click. But in a promiscuous world the quality content is unlikely to make the visitor stick. Media compete in an Attention Economy. Media thrive or fail depending upon how much time people spend with them. That’s why Web 2.0 sites emphasize community, conversation, connections, voting – anything to create involvement and buy-in.
None of this — not this thought process of involvement, not the inclusive technologies of Web 2.0 — are native to the newspaper newsroom. Newspaper sites could do well, at least traffic-wise, in the first wave of the web because it was just like printing only without the paper. But a lot has changed in this new web. So much so that I wonder how much of this ethos of participation and involvement has filtered into the American newsroom?
(Special thanks to Der Cuz, who saw Steve Yelvington’s remark picked up in a post by Mike Masnick of Techdirt.)
3 users commented in " Newsroom culture, beyond dysfunctional? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackPerhaps it is just no longer a matter of making good content, maybe you have to write well, but you also have to write for the web. Think about search engines, and also write in a way that really connects with the community of voices that are out there.
Tom, lots of new media sources have popped up in recent years, and appear to be making money. I am thinking of the professional bloggers that sell advertising on their blogs. Why are they doing well? What is different about them compared to the traditional publications that are on the web?
What are your thoughts?
I was wondering if it might be that bloggers are better at spreading their content around the web, but because they demonstrate that their blog is willing to discuss and debate, those people who want to discuss are attracted to their sites.
So maybe it is not just the quality of the content, but the quality of the discussion?
John nice to hear from you and I hope to see you at the SNCR fest (where I expect to be a day tripper).
To your point first off I think there are maybe dozens out of millions of bloggers making a go of it on their own. If you know differently, please share.
To the issue of quality I find that an elusive concept but targetability and precision are terms that sort of add up to quality in my mind. If you have a niche and stay focused on it (and the niche is renumerative — social causes are screwed) you can do well.
The case in point is Rafat Ali who started Paid Content after getting laid off in the dot.com bust. He recently announced a plan to scale his operation. He wrote today: “we’re trying to keep our heads down and will keep building. It goes back to the original vision I defined in 2004, when the blog I started in 2002 turned into a professional company: ‘Our belief is that in the near future, all media will be digital media, and we are helping define sustainable business models and innovation within this sector.’
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-the-next-phase-of-our-company-scaling-from-the-inside-out/
Huffington post, autoblog, adrants, these are all examples of blogs that sell advertising based on their blogging content. Autoblog is part of a larger blogging empire. I don’t know the size of the professional blogging community, but it does appear to be quite large in 2008. Maybe not thousands of sites, but probably hundreds.
You might have a point about quality. Maybe it is more about the depth of connection within a particular niche community. If bloggers are better connected than journalists this gives them an advantage in drawing in readers, and other bloggers who will reference their work.
I don’t disagree with Rafat Ali about digital media’s importance, I just suggest that the company that published on the web on a topic and also engages their community will do better than the company that publishes digitally but does not engage.
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