I just spent a mind-expanding week at the Knight Center for Digital Media in Berkeley and was exposed to five programs — Photoshop, FinalCut Pro, GarageBand, Soundslides and Flash — along with 19 other journalists. I am not quick on the uptake. I grasped only a small amount of what was thrown at me by a patient training crew. But I did produce a Soundslide story and observed or assisted in a slew of other tasks. I got over my fear of video editing and realized that basic Flash was within my grasp. I have the confidence to get  the refreshers and advanced training that I would need to become a proficient multimedia journalist. I understand how to let the story choose its media, and have at least some sense of how to get the story done.

It was the longest six long days of training I’ve had in a good long while. And great fund. Only one point I heard caused me to disagree.  I think journalists have to invent (ethical) new ways to make money. A remark to the contrary at the end of the session is what prompted me to disagree. Professional journalists used to look down money-making. Someone else did that; ad sales or classifieds or circulation. But the old systems are eroding. If journalists don’t invent ways to get paid for their services they are doomed to extinction. Or so it seems to me.

“One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.”

Kelly allows that the number will vary: “Maybe it is 500 True Fans for a painter and 5,000 True Fans for a videomaker.” And he provides examples for encouragement and ideas for sites or services that would assist in this bootstrapping approach:

“Digital technology enables this fan support to take many shapes. Fundable is a web-based enterprise which allows anyone to raise a fixed amount of money for a project, while reassuring the backers the project will happen. Fundable withholds the money until the full amount is collected. They return the money if the mininum is not reached.”

I spent 10 years running a small business in the pre-Web world and Kelly’s prescription for building a small business out a fan following resonates with my experience. I got into business by accident in a sense at age 26, with no formal training and no role model — my dad was wage-earner as I am now. But what struck me way back then was how a core group of clients made our business (a mom & pop typesetting and publishing shop). It was never easy. It was always feast or famine. So much work we were setting type until our eyes bugged out or else were worried by the lack of a backlog and trying to hustle up some work. But we ran that shop for 10 years and sold it as a going concern (though it died not long thereafter; to use Kelly’s metaphor, new owner did not bond to our fan-base).

All in 1000 True Fans is an idea that is actionable, pragmatic and inspiring. Thanks to Tim (BerkeleyBlog) Bishop for pointing me to it.

Romulus & Remus are suckled by a wolf

Small websites have similar trouble finding nourishment

Advertising is the mother’s milk of media but so far momma has played favorites online. A 2005 report said 96 percent of advertising revenues went to the top 50 online destinations (details). That doesn’t leave much for the millions of other sites that would like to suckle.

In this vein Diane Mermigas writes for Online Media Daily about OpenX — as in exchange – which she paints as the plucky competitor to Google when it comes to offering “small and mid-sized publishers” search and mobile advertising. Mermigas — I believe she used to write for the Hollywood Reporter – goes on to say that:

“OpenX generally receives singe to low double digit percentage commissions, compared to the booming number of ad networks that command 20% to 80% of the advertising buys.”

For more check out the OpenX blog.

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Lost on me completely is the comparison or contrast between OpenX and ADSDAQ which sounds to me to be a similar type of operation. Perhaps there are so many of these ad exchanges sprouting that online media have trouble telling them apart. Here’s a press release about ADSDAQ.

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Newspaper publishers recently formed a national sales outlet called quadrantONE. Though it was created by newspapers, presumably to serve their interests, I would expect it to reach out to other web sites so I mention it in this context. Here is an article about the new initiative.

 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.

So says the CMO Council in a press release summarizing the results of main-in surveys from about 800 of the group’s roughly 3,000 members. I consider the results of such surveys more useful in spotting trends rather than getting reassurances about spending so I focused on the following list of priorities displayed by MarketingCharts.com:

“The 12 leading areas of marketing dollar allocation in 2008 are expected to be the following:

1. Strategy and branding

2. Events and trade shows

3. Operations

4. Direct marketing (including telemarketing, mailings, email)

5. Sales support

6. Online marketing (website, SEO, SEM, viral, podcasts/blogs, communities)

7. Advertising

8. Market research

9. Systems

10. Merchandising and promotions

11. Public and analyst relations

12. Customer data integration and analytics”

Look how far down the list falls advertising, the mother’s milk of the beleaguered print industry. Look how high are events and shows. Where does your media business get its revenues?

“identified television and the internet as the primary engines of global ad growth with 50 percent and 30 percent, respectively, of additional new investment in 2008 . . . (and) . . .  said spending on marketing services such as sponsorship and public relations is growing at a faster rate than it is for traditional advertising.” (editor’s note: this eMarketer article also suggests that ad buyers are looking for new campaigns and not just the same-old, same-old.)

In other highlights the GroupM report (original version here) also predicted that global Internet ad spending will exceed 10 percent of total expenditures for the first time in 2008 and said that in Sweden, net ads are likely to exceed TV ad spending for the first time — with the U.K. and Denmark poised to follow.

In a separate but related report, a J.P. Morgan analyst suggests price increases for Internet display, or graphical, advertising — a boon for big web publishers like Yahoo.

Is Dilbert creator Scott Adams under evil influence of office cat?

Last week I wrote about two prominent online publishers (twins separated at birth) who had throttled back their new media their activities because they were money-losers.  One of these was Dilbert cartoon strip creator Scott Adams* who had written in own blog posting titled, “Going Forward:”

“It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.”

After writing that post, however, I found a newspaper article in which reporter Susan Young reveals that Adams has his hands full running two restaurants. She writes:

“A decade ago . . . Adams was flush with Dilbert dough and looking to invest. A waitress at his favorite eatery had a dream of opening her own restaurant, and Stacey’s in Pleasanton was born . . . in July. His restaurant partner Stacey Belkin was overwhelmed with running two restaurants so she handed over management of the Waterford location to Adams.”

Finally the truth! Adams sacrificed the free amusement that thousands derived from his blog not to feed suburbanites who probably need to miss a meal or two.

This newspaper article reveals Scott Adams as a man who would rather spend time with his new family (if you click on the link in the above photo, it will lead to a slide show of him and his brood) or overseeing his restaurant empire than continue the uncompensated humor on which his blog readers had come to depend. (Here’s a thought: is there an equivalent concept in intellectual property law to “adverse possession” in real property law; adverse possession is squatters law; if you squat long enough on a property owned by someome else, you can lay legal claim to it; is there a legal theory under which browsers who have become accustomed to free entertainment through Adams’ blog might compel him to continue being funny on the Web?)

While legal minds wrestle with that I look for some rational explanation for Adams’ abandonment of his blog fans and in the photo above I see it. Note the black cat. Now think about what we know of his comic strip. It has human characters. It has dog characters. It has rat characters. But it has no cat characters!

Put it all together and it’s obvious: the cat in control! Scott Adams is in thrall to a black cat who has long directed both his cartoonist’s pen and now his blogger’s keypad. Now this feline intellect has ordered Adams to focus on his restaurant. Why? It probably has something to do with dust, as will no doubt become clear to millions of Americans later this week with the opening of the movie, Golden Compass.

 But never you mind. As one of the last free bloggers I plan to remain alert — because, as we all know, the blogosphere needs more lerts.

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* The other publisher, Steve Outing, who had shut down several outdoor sports Enthusiast sites, thought it “odd” that I considered his entrepreneurial undertaking comparable to Adams’ blog – which is the kindest possible way to have characterized such a remark.

“Not too long ago, small time content sites would have been happy for just brief attention from major portals. But now, the drive to deliver more varied content has led to syndication and ad-sharing deals that rarely demand exclusivity on the part of largely unknown providers.”

Kaplan summarizes a Nov. 12 article by WSJ reporter Emily Steel titled, “Portals think small for latest news. (Here is a link; the article was in the clear when I read it this morning but I’m not sure it stays visible.)

Here are a few thoughts from the WSJ article: the “poster child” for the niche site with portal deals is ” Minyanville.com . . . an obscure provider of financial news.” The Journal said other content providers with similar deals includes, “financial sites such as Seeking Alpha and the Simple Dollar, real-estate site Zillow and celebrity photo site X17online.”

The Journal says:

“Big Internet companies such as MSN and Yahoo have small teams whose job it is to “discover” these smaller sites before their competition does. They scan the Web, attend industry conferences and hobnob with start-ups to get names of talented but obscure content providers.”

The Journal names some of these content-buyers: Marty Moe, vice president and general manager for AOL Money & Finance and Mark Interrante, general manager of Yahoo Finance. One other encouraging note for niche publishers looking for a syndication deal. The Journal says:

“In the past, the big Internet companies traditionally demanded some window of exclusivity with smaller content providers. Today, the big sites will often not only give the smaller sites a portion of the ad revenue but also allow them to work with other companies. “The notion of exclusivity is gone,” says David Liu, a senior vice president at Time Warner’s AOL unit.”

Internet analyst Henry Blodgett wrote an op-ed piece that was courageously printed by the New York Times in August. In that article, Blodgett assumed that the Times converted entirely to digital distribution, losing most of the 90 percent of revenues it currrently earns from print. He reduced expenses to a lesser extent, then boosted online income but not by much because content on the Net is plentifully cheap. His conclusion was summed up in his title, “Running the Numbers: Why Newspapers Are Screwed.”

More recently, Henry Copeland, founder of the Blogads network, made two utterances that were noted by reporter David Kaplan in an article published by the industry e-zine Paid Content:

 ”only “dozens” of the 1,500 sites he (Copeland) works with can can sustain their sites solely with ad revenues. Then, he said that the only blogs that attract significant brand advertising are those that can keep the ads separate from comments, which tend to make marketers uneasy with their unpredictability.” (emphasis added)

So big content and little content are both screwed by the Web. It is so easy to publish and aggregate content that few brands, not even those as powerful as the New York Times, can command a premium on the Web as evidenced by the Times’ decision to quit charging for access.

Last May the BBC summarized a global study of attitudes about news sources that said in part:

“The most trusted media outlets around the world were large global news organisations such as the BBC or CNN.  Internationally, 48% said they trusted the BBC, while 44% backed CNN. Younger web brands were also shown to have won significant public trust: Google (30%), Yahoo! (28%) and Microsoft/MSN (27%). “

Google, which employs no journalists, has become in a little over a decade the world’s third most trusted brand for news! McLuhan said the medium is the message and when it comes to content the message of the Web is clear: you can find it all here; it’s all the same and it’s all worth about what you paid for it,  which is nothing, so feel free to heed or disdain this item before you click to whatever strikes your fancy next.

So not only are newspapers screwed but content in general is screwed. This is remarkable considering that most of the time people spend online revolves around content. Or so says Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association, in summarizing the most recent in a series of surveys conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings of the time-per-month spent on the Web’s four key activities, Content, Communications, Commerce and Search.  In a MediaPost article Horan writes:

“In the last four years, the share of time devoted to viewing Content online has experienced the greatest growth, increasing from 34% to 47% of time spent, outpacing all other activities. ”

So why doesn’t content feel the love?

There’s nothing like a deadline to focus the mind and as I sit down this Saturday morning to put in my bid for a piece of this pie, let me pass on one last reminder from  Knight Foundation communications director Marc Fest:

“The Knight News Challenge contest awards $5 million for innovative media ideas, however the October 15 application deadline is quickly approaching. The streamlined application takes less than 20 minutes. Anybody worldwide has a chance to win. For more information and to apply visit www.newschallenge.org.”

Be sure to read the rules. This opportunuty is wide open to individuals, non-profits and even startups that one day hope to make profit. The catch: when these guys say they want to fund local media innovations they mean it. So think locally, act digitally.

Good luck to us all!