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When crowdsourcing meets broadcasting

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Crowdsourcing is the term coined to describe using an audience to generate some form of content, from simple feedback to fully fledged stories or artistic creations.

CNN is now poised to put its broadcast — and online — muscle behind an experiment in crowdsourcing as MediaWeek reports:

“Time Warner’s CNN this week will enter YouTube territory with the launch of iReport.com, a new Web site built entirely on user-produced news. And unlike CNN’s own properties—where only iReport submissions that have been handpicked by editors and checked for accuracy ever make it online or on air—the new site will be wide open, allowing users to post whatever content they choose, CNN said.”

Susan Grant, executive vp of CNN News Services told MediaWeek the site would not rush to look for advertising opportunities in part perhaps because advertisers may be leery of putting their brands into this content mosh pit.

This is not an isolated development. It is my sense that broadcasters have embraced user-participation far more aggressively than print media perhaps because the new-found ease of video production and uploading strikes that industry as a novelty. It used to be difficult to freelance as a videographer. It’s getting less so.

As another example along these lines MTV got a grant from the Knight Foundation to create an election-site drawing on citizen contributors. (details).

I’ve blogged in the past (but can’t find the reference now) about how local broadcasters have been beefing up their web sites and gaining traffic at the expense of local newspaper sites. Print had an early advantage in getting web traffic because it was easier to repost words and photos than it was to either contribute or distribute video. That is changing. And fast. (Get a whiff of this in a post titled “TV & Radio facing news revolution“ from Ken Kaplan.

As communication migrates from the literal to the audiovisual broadcast websites could easily leapfrog print websites as magnets for attention. Broadcasters have a great medium for pushing people to their web sites. And once viewers get to the web it’s easier to downland and watch a video than to wrap one’s mind around words.

So here CNN throws open its doors. ““This is an opportunity to create a relationship with a global audience,” said the CNN exec behind the project.

It’s an interesting experiment. I’m not aware of anything of a similar scale being conducted by a newspaper.

Posted in Attention Economy, Citizen Journalism, Media trends | 1 Comment »

Where o where is that niche o mine?

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

Do you have something cushier?

I collect items about niche media businesses for ideas or inspiration. Here are a few.

Columbia Journalism Review published two articles last fall aimed at daily newspaper reporters who wanted more depth than their jobs allowed. Elisabeth Sifton suggests that books rule and newspapers drool in an article titled, “The Second Draft of History.” And in the companion piece former Washington Post staffer Linda Perlsterin explains why she became “Unshackled.”
Heidi Benson of the San Francisco Chronicle (where I also work) wrote about the Frontline/World newsmagazine; hardly a niche, I suppose, but an example of how video journalists are trying to cover the stories that fall through the vast cracks of what airs on network news.
LA Times reporter Alana Semuels writes about e-mail services that keep La-La landers abreast of whatever is hippest and hottest in “E-mail newsletters seek to mine riches from niches.” I read the piece and saw a lot more niche than rich but see for yourself. (Click to read article)
Finally, Associated Press writer Josh Funk says the demise of cassette tapes has been predicted for 20 years and now only niche uses keep this medium alive. In an article about the last audio cassette tape maker in North America, Funk writes that: “Sales of music tapes plummeted from 442 million in 1990 to about 700,000 last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America . . . Officials at the last cassette maker in North America, Lenco-PMC Inc., saythe plastic cases — invented in 1964 to hold two miniature reels for magnetic tape — remain popular in at least three uses: Audio books for the blind, court recordings and religious messages.”

Posted in Attention Economy, Citizen Journalism, ecosystemics | No Comments »

Where eyeballs went on the Internet in 2007

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Web tracking firm comScore released its 2007 Internet Year in Review report showing that the “biggest winners . . . featured some of the top Internet brands inclduing Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and Craiglist.”No surprise there. The Internet, which is “democratic” in terms of access to downloads, is a ruthless centralizer of attention and advertising — and thus opportunity to create sites with meaningful traffic and reach. I started to notice this in a 2005 posting (Niche Rule) that summarized elements of a 61-page report from the American Press Institute’s Media Center. Here is one excerpt from the chapter titled “Economics and Investment”:

“If a business plan is based on an advertising model, the recent hype over Internet advertising growth must be tempered by the realization that only a few large Web sites generate a majority of the advertising and that the growth is limited to only a few formats, such as keyword searched . . . The top 50 websites generate 96 percent of all Internet advertising spending, leaving little room for the remaining hundreds of online companies.”

These littler Internet players, it seems, will have to create value in new ways such as those hinted at the the recent posting by cyber seer Kevin Kelly (see Better than Free) in which he advises Web-based businesses to get a patron, for instance.

Any takers?

Posted in Advertising, Attention Economy | No Comments »

‘Generative values’ key to Net Age profits

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Kelly suggests what could be Better than Free

Cyber seer Kevin Kelly has written a guide for the writer/artist/professional/corporation baffled about how to make a living when it’s oh so easy to make knock-offs.

His advice in Better than Free is forget what used to make you valuable and cultivate eight new ways to create experiences, relationships or artifacts that can’t be easily duplicated. These are generalizations rather than tailor-made prescriptions, and the transformation won’t be easy even for those who accept his logic. Kelly writes:

“Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution . . . Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model . . .money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits. ”

Thanks to Tim Bishop for pointing me to Kelly’s essay.

Posted in Attention Economy, money-making media | 1 Comment »

What killed newsrooms? The Web? Management? Labor?

Monday, February 4th, 2008

There is a palbable gloom in newsrooms today. Newspaper circulation continues its decades-long decline. Layoffs for the rank & file, and job insecurity for their editors, are the order of the day. How did we get here? That’s a darn good question considering that back in 1994, newspaper publisher Frank Daniels III at the Raleigh News & Observer, were bankrolling technical visionaries like George Schlukbier to create what amounted to the first Internet portals, Nando.net. I was a minor participant in a similar experiment pushed by then San Francisco Examiner publisher Will Hearst who worked through WELL-head John Coate to give a Northern California feel to SFGate.com. These are two early and reasonably successful Web sites that nevertheless failed to put newspaper at the vanguard of the Web revolution. What went wrong?

A recent posting on Nando.net drew this response from Howard Owens , director of digital publishing the suburban chain GateHouse Media. Owens suggested that newspapers had an online lead and blew it due to a:

“Critical strategic blunder: Scaling back online efforts circa 2001 after the Bubble burst. Pretty much every newspaper company stopped investing in online and went into a holding pattern. We fell behind and have yet to catch up. And maybe never will.”

That’s interesting. As a rank & file reporter I don’t get to see the annual internal budget at my own paper much less the industry trend so it may be that newspapers were current up through the dot.com era. But I don’t think underinvestment in new media accounts for anything but a tiny part of the current malaise of the newspaper industry. Rather I suspect that there was no way for newspaper leaders to justify the lower revuene-per-visitor they get from online. I think the online viewer is worth about 10 percent of the newspaper reader. I don’t know how any business, no matter how visionary, can willingly substitute a new-fangled, 10-cent-a-head advertising strategy for the tried-and-true 50-cents-per-eyeball sale.

Of course that’s what newspaper management must now do, and in what may be a recession. Oh, well. Capital always survives. When the dust has settled the Big Money will buy whatever works and continue to be the big money. It knows this and therefore has no reason to listen to the likes of me.

Labor on the other hand, is screwed, and not entirely by a lack of vision from above. Newspaper reporters have become a breed of over-specialized and over-bred dog. We think the job is about scoops. Right? Those rare but delightful days when we walk into the newsroom on a cushion of air because our story is not only being read shamelessly on radio and television — our sources tell us they are getting calls from other, competing dailies which will feel obliged to run a story the next day. That is the acme of daily newspapering — to have a scoop that other papers must follow the next day.

But every aspect of that scenario is obsolete. There are fewer competing paper. Most of the stories any of us read or write come from press releases and the rare few tips that pan out into stories are generally self-serving. And in the network age there is no fact worth knowing that isn’t widely available to the whole damn planet not long after it is known by a few. So if you did score an old-fashioned, paper-down-the-road-gotta-run-it-tomorrow scoop, it’s a non-event when it comes to the survival of your paper or papers in general. Because real news, the stuff that you gotta hafta know — the score of the Giants upset over the Patriots in the 2008 Super Bowl, for instance – you learn within minutes by osmosis and there is no psychic nor renumerative credit to being the disseminator of that information. Google, for instance, which hires no journalists but merely aggregates their product by skimming the Web and presenting a list of headlines in a newsreader, is now felt to be one of the most trusted news brands in the world (see the citation on that in this posting).

So I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be doing as newsies to live long and prosper. And perhaps that’s the problem.

Posted in Advertising, Attention Economy, ecosystemics, Media trends | 3 Comments »

Anecdotal ‘poll’ guesses at blog influence on reporters

Monday, January 21st, 2008

The bullet points in the telephone survey by the marketing firm Brodeur were impressive but the fine print undermined their authority. A press release about the survey said:

Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere: One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page.
About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.

Then I read to the last paragraph, in which readers are usually told how the information was gleaned:

“the online survey was conducted among a random sample of North American reporters and editors between December 18, 2007 and January 3, 2008. Some 4,000 reporters were invited via email to participate; a total of 178 completed responses.” (italics added)

If by random Brodeur meant “we don’t know who responded, why and how they differed from the vast majority of non-responders,” I would understand. But random in this case does not mean the sample has a scientific or statistical validity and so whatever its findings they should be taken as strong anecdotalism — there are 178 responses — but I would suspect they self-selected themself for inclusion in ways that greatly make this survey not easy to extrapolate. I am a reporter like the 3,822 (add that to 178 to get to the 4000) people who were invited but declined to participate* and what peaked my interest in this headline was astonishment that anybody had actually taken an accurate reading of this group.

As it turns out, no one has, which makes the survey more useful as a suggestion than as a statistic.

* * *

* (I don’t answer PR polls because they are generally intended to ascertain my views toward news-makers; reporters are not supposed to have views or they are expected to stifle any feelings they might have; I have occasionally been offered small sums, from $25 to $100, to answer questions but have always declined. I’m not suggesting the size of the bribe be higher; that would only make it more annoying to feel obliged to refuse.)

Posted in Attention Economy, Citizen Journalism, ecosystemics, It's Just Journalism | 2 Comments »

The continuing nichification of knowledge

Friday, January 11th, 2008

Trapazoidal niche at Incan site in Ollantaytambo, Peru (source)

Media are mutating from mass to niche. OK. We get that. But this image plucked off the Web this captures not only the tinyness of the word but also the characterteristic that is its primary definition, “an ornamental recess in a wall.”

That recess is a subtraction from the wall and that subtractive quality is what struck me this morning when I read a blurb in Paid Content announcing that a former Boston Globe political columnist will become managing editor of Politicker.com, a soon-to-be network of state-specific political news websites that appear poised to sprout from the New York Observer, the political weekly based in Manhattan.

By all means read the press release for details, but the web site isn’t live and its plans or prospects are not my point. Rather this announcement is a case is exemplary of the subtraction that has started and will continue to hit the journalism side of media just as it has already rocked the business side of media. We’re all familiar with this latter concept. Craig’s List started to subtract classified ad revenues; Monster.com et all started to poach on the job-wanted ads; Yahoo and its cohort have siphoned off display advertising, and so on.

Politicker.com shows how the subtractive process will unfold on the content-producing side. A mass media firm, especially the daily newspapers that I know best, is an organization of generalists. This may generate some objections because there are indeed specializations, between writers and photographers, for instance; and copy editors differ from assigning editors and so on. But a mainstream media organization demands generalization of its content producers because today the mass audience may be focused on the earthquake, tomorrow the coup, the day after that the grisly murder and so on. This is fresh in my mind because this week, I returned to work after a two-week vacation to do an obituary, two different stories on storm damage and one on my beat, which is technology. That’s not a bad thing so far as I am concerned because it breaks the monotony and in some cases is pure fun, such as when I got to slide down a muddy hillside with a storm damage repair crew. With that story occurred another novelty in my work life — I had my first photo published in the paper using the multimedia camera I was carrying. I am a reporter in a union shop that went on strike in 1994, in part over an issue that was framed as “no cameras for photographers.” I walked the picket line back then even though I have always felt that, on that issue, the union was wrong. Anyhow, I guess that’s settled.

But the shakeup in who creates what parts of content, where and how is only going to accelerate as the Politicker.com thing demonstrates. Every mass media outlet of consequence has a statehouse staff. Will Politicker.com now suck the political reporting function out of the paper and centralize it somewhere? I don’t know if that particular business will succeed but I am convinced the answer is YES! because the inexorable power of nichification is driven by the impulse toward efficiency. Thats what economics is all about. The drive for efficiency. And in so many walks of life specialization is efficient. Boring, maybe, but efficient. God forbid you ever need coronary artery bypass surgery for instance make sure you pick the place that has the drive-thru CABG window because you do not want Dr. Marcus Welby cutting open your chest, you want the sonofabitch who splices arteries for a living.

How well does that analogy transfer to content and how does all this play out? How the hell would I know. But I am certain that every force in the world of media is prying loose the mortar in that wall I depicted above, and popping out stones at an accelerating pace. What I lay awake some nights wondering is: how many stones have to pop out before the godamn wall breaks?

Posted in Attention Economy, ecosystemics, Media trends | 2 Comments »

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