Playing a little defense in the pages of Murdoch’s empire, Eric Schmidt dropped a good-sized Op-Ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. The full piece (subscription required, I’m sure) is available over on WSJ’s Web site, but it is likely little surprise that I will agree with the following:
With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.
Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free.
On Monday, the World Newspaper Congress kicked off its 62nd round in India. Among the notable speakers from the first two days was the Dow Jones & Co. CEO, Les Hinton, laying the law down about the need for an era of paid content in the digital reality of news.
The more I read into his soundbite worthy comments (come on, who doesn’t love, “Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts”), I start to notice the core of his solutions have little to do with adaptation.
“Like an over-eager middle-aged dad, desperate to look cool, we ended up dancing obediently to other people’s tunes. For a while. You can almost hear the music – an algorithm and blues soundtrack – accompanying the harbingers of the new economy with the new rules of the new age.”
In this moment, Hinton, along with many others, still are convinced that the solution is to realign information seeking models developed by the developed behaviors of Internet use. Whether it’s continuing the argument of failing to charge for content a decade ago (Paul Jansen, CEO, SPH search, Singapore Press Holdings: “[In 1996], thought we really shouldn’t be given this away for free…We just followed everybody else like a sheep in a herd and did not charge so now we have to make up for our mistakes.”) or the grander arguments about search, the root of the problem is still history to these executives.
I did a pretty big rant last week on the search audience and why its a supplemental gain beyond revenues. However, even Jansen is pointing out the solution more so than what he refers to as a challenge:
“The problem with search is it understanding our customers better than we do.”
There is a solution somewhere between a pay wall and abandoning search, I just know it. A lot of it is going to be teamwork and actual engagement with the audience you already own. If you build loyalists to local content, that’s what you can charge for – not the high-level wires, but the unique, community content. The argument shouldn’t be coming from the top; it should be from the bottom.
I’m not an economics guy, never have been, but there’s a trickle-up method to developing successful online models. Online pubs have (mostly) grown out of the ground, not as offshoots of hierarchical media. Those sites started somewhere, and a lot of where the big online players moved to is based from the support of inbound links and search engine discovery.
These executives (especially Hinton directly) are making the metaphor for me, so I’m just driving it through the ground. They are at this point where they are basically saying they don’t like our rock and roll music and word-of-mouth/worth-of-link credibility. The old school newspaperman is walking into the club and saying, “what about the good old days of Lawrence Welk and when you used to pay for the newspaper for the ads.”
For my closing argument, I’m going to go equally vintage here and respond with an Allan Sherman parody:
The future, which is not a bad deal if you ignore all the collateral gore. Young men and women are still coming here to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent. For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.
David Carr, writer, New York Times, in his 11/30 must-read column, “The Fall and Rise of Media.”
I’ll admit it – on July 4th, I’m hypercritical of parades. But not today, not when I have a glimpse of Manhattan as it cracks the shell on the holiday season. I love the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and in about 20 minutes from now, I’ll be tuning right to it.
Then I started overthinking things, as I am apt to do, and I realized the impressive media design behind an event like this. De-constructing the tradition created by the department store early in the last century, here is what we have:
- A manufactured event that becomes a news story on the holiday because the pages are thin
- A spotlight on the commerce and civic style of the most vibrant city in our country
- Opportunities for additional stories that range from special interest through business by way of marching bands, American Idol level celebrities, media personalities, and more
- High-profile sponsorship and advertising real estate (seriously, Macy’s would be to its last dollar and spend it on this promotion)
And, most importantly…
- Rick-rolling:
They’ve been doing this since 1924 for a reason: it’s ability, as both a media event and business decision, to take the center stage. Macy’s could have bought an ad in the circular-driven Thanksgiving Day edition. Instead, they invested a little more and now are nearly synonymous with the holiday morning itself.
I’ll end with the fact that it’s amazing what a big idea can do and become. There is a little bit of risk in trying to create new traditions – media business models or parades – but the reward is potentially grand.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to enjoy a parade today with my friends, and thinking of my family across the country. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.
Photo: (cc) Flickr user ananawa
Over the last 10 days, I’ve been thinking a lot about Rupert Murdoch’s discussions regarding Google and the content available throughout News Corp media outlets.
The first I started thinking about it was back early last week when it was noted that News Corp’s decision to pull itself from the search engine could cost them somewhere around $3m a year.
A friend of mine commented back when I posted the article to Twitter, and I didn’t think of it much at the time. Bill asserted that an exclusive deal for news content could hurt Google’s market share more so than the wallets of News Corp. The argument and ultimate result is that the revenue that Murdoch gives up via GOOG would be made up for by the exclusivity package.
I disagreed and left it with a pretty matter-of-fact response to me former classmate (“No one’s going to search for news and then go, ‘You know? There’s no WSJ here, I’m done.’”), but as this story has not died in the media critic world, I’ve been continuing to think about my stance. My argument stays strong: this move hurts the potential universe of News Corp’s audience, and it has to do with how we search for content.
From a search habit standpoint – without getting too theoretical – the utility of engines is to uncover what is most appropriate based on the topic for which a user is looking. Whether determined by algorithms or, in the old days, keywords, we have come to trust that the information a search turns up is in fact the most relevant. That’s why so many users click the first few results on a page – because we’ve been cognitively trained to accept those as the most reliable.
Why is this relevant? Because as users most adapted to the nature of search results, we’re pretty satisfied with the information served up. That’s why sponsored ads on Google search results became such a killer source of revenue: marketers aren’t paying for the link alone; they’re paying for the placement that included them in the attention span of information seeking.
As searchers, we don’t think about what isn’t there. We often don’t even look at everything that is there, and most of us stay on the first page of results of any time we search (I’m looking for more recent numbers to emphasize this, but research from a year or two back puts it close to a user clicks on a result on the first page approximately 7 out of 10 times).
With that habit, search is generally a suppplemental audience for content developers. Whether me or Murdoch, the incoming traffic from search is not radically different. Sure, I understand that my idea of getting noticed in search engines to drive people to my content has different goals than Mr. Murdoch’s, but it’s generally going to develop the same results. If I have more traffic, I can hope to push my ramblings out to more people (my reason for publishing); if he has more traffic, he can charge more for ads and make more money (his reason for publishing).
If you take away an avenue people get to your site, traffic will go down. Simple as that.
Search is an opportunity, not a cost. Work with it and you can increase your audience; ignore it or, worse, actively avoid it, and you are really helping speed up the process of being unnoticed.
We need to stop wasting time talking about the Internet and all the sexy new technology that does this and that with news content. We need to be blunt.
~Richard L. Connor, Editor and Publisher of the Times Leader and president of Wilkes-Barre Publishing Company, in his Sunday morning editorial on the change the newspaper industry faces.
Note: I posted a lengthy response as a comment, but have to wait for it to get moderated and accepted. The gist of my response was “Look, Mr. Newspaper Man, time for the tough talk, I won’t mature my way out of screens and ‘modern day version of Morse code on my PDA’ just because that’s what has happened before. Tradition is not change, sir.”
Update (3:59 p.m.): The moderators at hand over at the Times Leader spared my comment, here it is:
Dave Levy said…
So, just to clarify, the future of the newspaper is the fact that people like me (a 25-year-old who stares at a screen most of the day) will get sick of it and mature to the Newspaper? But how could I leave a comment to the editor of the paper when I grow up and get over this screen? Sir, I absolutely respect your opinion, but you are relying on tradition, in fact the furthest possible thing from change, as a justification for the future of your industry. When the day comes that I cross the bridge into life events announcing engagements, marriages, children, and professional success, I will certainly buy that hard copy. But I will also be able to e-mail a copy to my family nationwide wherever they may be – instantaneously. And in terms of discovery: I found this article, didn’t I? Google, to be honest, and then I’ll link to it on Twitter and more people will find it. Serendipity is a fun way to read a newspaper, but it certainly isn’t the only avenue for discovery.
Name a major college; now, quickly, if you’re a journalism type, name its paper.
Student Weekly/Daily geekery aside, I do owe a lot of my interest in media to my history of writing and tracking my campus papers. I did my first writing as a high school student in Phoenix for Brophy Prep’s Roundup, where, in 2000, I wrote a 1,200 word feature on Napster and the rise of social sharing of media. Maybe I’ll get that up on Scribd over the holidays when I’m home.
For four years at my alma mater, I also contributed on occasion to Boston College’s Heights (congratulations to the weekly on celebrating it’s 90th anniversary this month). As noted in past posts, the infamous journalist cousin of mine is also a veteran of the college paper world, a former editor-in-chief of Arizona State’s State Press. Without further examples, I hope you get the point, I’m a fan of the campus press, so an article on Media Shift about its future is certainly worth noting.
Here’s what got me thinking: the campus newspaper is an interesting intersection of non-profit journalism. Whether independent and non-affiliated or University supported organizations, the labor is free, local ads support printing and distribution, and that’s about it. The value for the young, aspiring journalist is a place to write; the value for the good paper on a campus is the opportunity to set conversation (under the watch of a good friend, I saw the BC Heights rise to this level of relevancy).
Let’s get back to that Media Shift piece, because something stood out to me, likely since it involved another portion of my interests: copyright:
The other option would be for college media outlets to do something that might seem radical: use Creative Commons to license their content for non-commercial use, and thereby let other college news outlets have access to their work. At this point, I’m not aware of any college media outlet that has taken the Creative Commons route, although I’ve had listserv discussions with fellow advisers about the concept. The usual argument against a CC license is one that’s been heard before: The content is too valuable for this approach.
Now, it seems to me that Media Shift is actually marginally skeptical about the CC approach, (the next line is “the ‘value’ of articles in a college newspaper is a topic for another day,” so take that context for what its worth). I think this is a nothing-to-lose case study and I’d be in full support of any college newspaper who pushed hard to get their work into the public marketplace that extends beyond their own gates and ivies.
Photo credit: (cc) Flickr user numstead
I’ve never been one to shy away from the crutch of my own life that is pop culture. Monday nights are no different, yet, today I get to let it all collide. The winner of broadcast media today is the production crew of How I Met Your Mother. No fewer than five separate social media properties were created – including a fake Wikipedia page – to promote a small bit on the show in the name of a fake character, Lorenzo von Matterhorn.
You don’t mess with Wikipedia, though. Within an hour of the show’s conclusion, the fake page has been replaced with the more factual stub, but history’s don’t lie (click to enlarge):
I have to give them credit – the crew of this show is constantly thinking up new ideas to drive it out there and going with every possible channel. Whether it’s the mysterious slapcountdown.com or the many other sites that have long been registered or planned that work their way into the broadcast, kudos. According to the now accurate page, this article had gone wholly unnoticed since it was created a month ago.
New media isn’t a threat, it’s an opportunity. If Lorenzo can develop the voices of rescued strayed puppies and turn them into the most successful animal musical act since the Beatles, than (wait for the pun) I think the old dog of the media world could learn a few new tricks from him.
I turn back to a point I came across a few months ago: when it comes to understanding online media, tradition is not a business model. Which is why I was more than delighted this morning to read a piece (not shockingly from the Knight Foundation) that at least broke the mold of square peg/round hole suggestions for pay walls.
I said I wasn’t surprised it was from Knight for two reasons. 1) I usually hold them in high regard because of my own work with my Syracuse’s Knight Chair while a graduate assistant a few years back; 2) they are usually on the leading edge of driving innovation in Media. As noted in the article, “its report says journalism does not need saving so much as it needs creating.” It’s even helping CUNY’s Grad School of Journalism promote the very cool NewsInnovation.com.
There have been a bunch of very cool developments when it comes to pushing the envelope. One of my favorite’s this week was Spot.us, who is driving the idea of community-sponsored journalism. Why not, right? Newspapers are for driving ads, not necessarily the best journalism for the community. The community should decide what’s best for all at hand by more than just subscriptions, right? Just one innovation out of the many listed in the Knight article that turns the current perception of success on its head.
My own joke from a few months ago was the media needs to stop acting like an institution and start imagining itself as an aggressive startup. Get in the weeds with grassroots or community groups who stand to build and provide content, while gaining a mutually beneficial relationship that leads to mass exposure.
Either way, to save journalism (read: investigative reporting, not the pieces of dead tree that prints it), it’s clear that new thinking is mandatory. Let’s keep the ideas coming, because taking news out of Google just seems like an awful one to me.
From Thomas Paine to Dan Rather, we've been trying to figure out where media - as an important institution - fits in as the essential element of democracy. But how does it survive in the new economy and age of digital information? That's what this blog aims to find out.
