New York television consultant Shelly Palmer attended NAPTE, where he sat in on the presentation by Chris Anderson about The Long Tail. In his blog, Media 3.0 (really), he proceeded to disrespect the whole concept and promised more of the same.

“The Long Tail is a brilliantly written, very compelling description of a power law. It is not an economic reality and it has almost no relevance to the economics of the television business. Although I personally think Chris is brilliant, the conclusions he drew from the historical television data points he presented during his keynote are incorrect. The deck illustrated a profound lack of understanding about television production, distribution and the advertising and subscription revenue that drive the business. (Author’s note: We will be publishing a paper that deconstructs the Long Tail for the online video business in a few weeks.)”

In the same entry, Palmer makes an incredible statement about youTube. “It is not a place,” he notes. “it is an application.” He argues that it’s an application that allows people to post videos on MySpace and suggests that without MySpace, youTube has little value.

Ground control to Shelly: Please return to planet Earth.

Like Chris, I’m eagerly awaiting his “deconstruction” paper, for if this is any indication of its contents, it ought to be a hoot.

First of all, television died when Sony quit making tube-based television sets in 2003. We don’t call them TV sets anymore; they’re now monitors. So Shelly is right when he says the LT has almost no relevance to the economics of the television business. The problem with that statement, however, is the assumption that the television “business” is unaffected by the LT. But there’s more. He also apparently believes it has no bearing on the online video business either, else why “deconstruct” it.

There is a considerable LT play in the online video world, because “television” has always and will always live in the world of instant obsolescence. There is money to be made through archived videos, and that is very much the Long Tail. WKRN-TV, which hosts a news video archive of over 7,000 videos, still gets plenty of views of (ad-supported) videos from stories that aired many months ago. This is the LT in action for a television station.

Shelly looks at youTube and decides that it is an application, not a place. Huh? A broadcaster’s view of youTube sees only two things: pirated video and the youTube blockbusters, like funtwo’s guitar masterpiece or OkGo’s treadmill fun. They point to these, because they have reached mass, and mass is all broadcasters understand.

But the real value of youTube is the Long Tail it produces and the thousands and thousands of channels that exist where postmodern tribes gather, share their work with each other and give and receive feedback from fellow tribe members. Some of these channels are big and some are small, and in the aggregate, they’re enormous. This is why Google bought youTube, not because the occasional video reaches mass.

Shelly also uses the old business school story about the railroads blowing it when flight came along, because they insisted they were in the railroad business, not the transportation business. Applied to television, many observers — Shelly included — say that we’re in the content business, or at least that we need to be. But content creation and distribution are the expensive end of the economics of the Long Tail; aggregation is where it’s at for media companies downstream. This is certainly not the television business, nor is it the content business. We’re in the communications business, which includes content aggregation along with content creation.

I didn’t see Chris’s presentation at NAPTE, but this kind of reaction to it is over-the-top. Broadcasters may find that Shelly’s message tickles their ears, but it does nothing to clarify the realities of media circa 2007. The sad thing is that I really like Shelly, and I’ve referenced his work in mine. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood, which is another reason I’m looking forward to his deconstruction paper.

(Anderson’s response)

Many more years ago than I care to remember, I was close friends with an inner city high school basketball coach. At practice one day, I kept hearing players say “I’m known” when making a basket. The deal was that if a guy scored in a game, his name would appear in the paper along with the points he scored. Hence, they would be “known.”

My friend Debora Wenger wrote about my work and some of my opinions for the Society of Professional Journalists.

I’m known!

I took the 9am flight from Dallas to Atlanta on American Airlines Monday. It’s apparently a popular flight for business travelers. When they began boarding the flight and made the announcement that it was time for “Executive Platinum” and “Platinum” travelers to board (note to self: you WANT to be one of these), over half the people in the boarding area stood up and boarded the plane.

So much for the logic of “group” boarding. It took forever to load the plane, because over half the seats were taken by the time they called “Group One.”

For the record, I’ve reached “Gold” level since joining AR&D, and that allows me to board with Group One. With the volume of travel I’m doing, Platinum is in my sights.

But regardless of your boarding status, you have no control over who sits next to you. I always book aisle seats on the chance that the center seat won’t be occupied. Not so on this flight. A woman weighing over 300 pounds claimed the center seat, and when the arm rests went down, several inches of her flopped out onto my seat. I felt sorry for her, sorry for me (try a 90-minute flight with your hip butt tucked up against another), and mostly I felt sorry for the poor guy in the window seat. He couldn’t very well lean away, so he was really crushed.

Such is travel. Sometimes you’re the windshield; sometimes you’re the bug.

I arrived in Atlanta and checked in at the Sheraton Hotel near the Airport to discover this note in my 10th floor room:

We would like to inform you that starting Monday, January 29, we will begin work on all of our exterior windows. Please do not be alarmed if you notice workers outside your windows. For your privacy please keep the curtain closed during the daytime hours.

It gave me a nice chuckle upon arrival in Atlanta and helped me turn the page on a difficult flight.

“Thank God for all these people walking around with cellphones and ear pieces, because now when I talk to myself nobody thinks I’m crazy.”

Oh oh! Better pay attention to this: FOX on demand has a MySpace page and it’s pretty darned cool. Who needs a TV anymore?

Think about this for a minute. Fox has been able to integrate its on-demand products into the biggest gathering place of young people in the world. This is why aggregation (MySpace IS an aggregator of individual websites) is so important in the Media 2.0 space.

Gee, ya think Rupert may have thought of this before he signed the check?

Is your station’s player portable enough for you to embed it on your station’s MySpace page? What? Don’t have one?

Rebecca Lieb, executive editor of ClickZ, told a funny story during a panel discussion yesterday at which I was a participant. She told of disciplining her daughter by taking away television privileges only to discover the girl watching the very program in her bedroom on her computer that she would’ve been watching in the living room.

On the same panel, Giovanni Gallucci said that he had replaced the television set in his home with a Mac.

UPI is reporting that U.S. media job cuts went up 88% last year, and the trend is expected to continue. 17,809 media jobs disappeared in 2006, the largest since the collapse of the internet bubble in 2001, according to a report from outplacement consultancy firm Challenger Gray & Christmas. “A sea change in the way people get and read news,” the report said, “not to mention the way they search for jobs, used cars and consumer products, was the primary contributor.”

Media companies, including the New York Times Co. and Time Inc., have already laid off 2,000 employees in 2007, Challenger noted, saying the cuts suggested the downsizing trend would continue.

“These organizations will continue to make adjustments as their focus shifts from print to electronic,” Chief Executive John Challenger said. “Until they can figure out a way to make as much money from their online services as they are losing from the print side, it is going to be an uphill battle.”

This is grim news for anybody working in the media industry, but it’s necessary knowledge for people who would rather hold onto the past than seize opportunities for tomorrow. That job you hold so dear — the one that gives you status in the community and puts food on your family’s table — is not the provider it used to be. Now, you can fight this and anybody who tries to help you, or you can open your friggin’ eyes and accept that your boss is just as afraid as you are, and that the only way out of this hole is together.

I gave up reading the industry discussion boards a couple of years ago, because I couldn’t stand the moaning and complaining from misguided, misinformed, angry and fearful people. I think we’re all trying to do the best we can with what we have, so I’m willing to give anybody the benefit of the doubt. But I will never understand how people can be so deceived as to think the disruptive forces that are attacking mass marketing business models are anything less than historic and cultural. To blame “management” for a fragmenting and shrinking universe is like blaming the captain for a storm at sea.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda. Yeah, right.

Now is the time to grow a spine and face reality. The money in media is moving. What are you doing to avail yourself of the opportunities that the move offers?

From my friend Tish Grier this morning comes an e-mail with news that GMA-7, the Philippines’ number one television network, has launched a network of blogs via their Website, gmanews.tv. Editor-in-Chief Malou Mangahas has a blog and, while her English is a little jumbled, writes of the company’s decision to get into “professional” blogging. Her thoughts are not only eloquent but spot on.

We will, on the Web, on television, on radio, on print, according to journalism’s time-honored standards of accuracy (get it right), fairness and balance (get all sides). We will, with all due respect to, and admiration for, probloggers.

Yes, in the beginning, blogs were conceived to be personal sites. Vanity sites sometimes. Blogs challenged a few tenets of journalism that in the beginning, the biggest and best media agencies of the world took the path of caution.

In time, however, these media agencies and the most creditable journalism institutes realized that the blogosphere is a platform too important for media to ignore. In time, their blog sites rolled in a series, and we are all the better informed for this.

There are bloggers and there are journalists and… ne’er the twain shall meet? On the Web, the twain have met, crossed, and now run on parallel tracks many times over.

The written word unites us, and write we must all, for our readers.

I’m not sure that traditional mainstreamers in the U.S. have closed the gap quite as completely as Ms. Mangahas appears to have, but it sure is refreshing to find this kind of thinking anywhere it appears. Here, it’s very much a case-by-case deal, but more and more newspapers, television and radio stations do appear to be getting into the world of the blog.

“The written word unites us, and write we must all…” How terribly satisfying it is for an old blogger like myself to read such a line from a leader in mainstream journalism — and now blogger — such as Ms. Mangahas.

(thanks, Tish)

Here is the latest in my on-going series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. This paper examines two important assumptions about doing local business on the web — that the evolution of the local web is very much about the evolution of local advertising, and that the local web functions, in some important ways, very differently than the global web. Opportunities within the local web depend on our ability to define and nurture it, and that is wide open at this point.

If the real growth in online advertising is trending towards local (it is), then local media companies should be at the forefront in actively pursuing and enabling this, instead of sitting back and waiting for it to come to us.

I promise you, this is the goal of the internet pure plays who are pursuing local advertising with vigor.

The Local Web

Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism has released its Winter Report with the provocative title “Goodbye Gutenberg.” It’s an in-depth analysis of the end of the newspaper era of journalism, and it contains some really good stuff.

From Jon Palfreman’s section, “Caught in the Web,” is a look at how IQ scores of young people are rising in the area of spatial reasoning, and this, he argues, has serious ramifications for the future of journalism.

…the love fest between the MySpace generation and the Web may signal a profound moment in human culture. With the Web, we could be witnessing the most important development in expressive media since the advent of writing. One exciting if disruptive possibility is that under the influence of the young, the Internet will usher in a new era of interactive, audiovisual literacy. Though written words will remain critical to human communication, it’s likely they will no longer dominate in the exchange of news and information.

Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame adds a piece about citizen journalism from his perspective as the founder of a web empire built on trust.

…a strength of good citizen journalism is when the correspondent has the courage to speak truthfully even in the face of powerful opposition. In some respects, these 21st century Web correspondents (like some of the best journalists) are following in the footsteps of Martin Luther, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, whose words led to large scale, effective change.

From where I sit, the highest priority right now seems to be finding ways to encourage the convergence of what’s now being done by journalists with what can be done when citizens add their voices to the mix. And this includes journalism’s essential role of being a watchdog on government and other important social and economic institutions.

Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman share their Global Voices Manifesto, and Judy Muller’s chilling “Plagiarism Goes by a Different Name on the Web looks at a case from her own experience in which the word “repurposing” actually means “plagiarism.”

There is some excellent material here, all built around the theme of a farewell to the creator of the printing press.

Newsrooms are being hollowed out, and editors who resist such cutbacks are losing their jobs. Digital video cameras and tape recorders replace reporters’ notebooks as newspapers—and other news organizations—train staff in multimedia storytelling. In this issue, words about journalists’ experiences in the digital era transport our vision forward, while our eye takes us on a visual voyage back to a time when newspapers wove communities together.

R.I.P. Gutenberg

I’ve just spent the past hour studying a document that describes Nielsen’s “Zero Cell” ratings model, the latest gimmick from a company whose statistical analysis has determined broadcast revenue for decades. A friend told me, “You need to be a Navaho Windtalker to decipher this stuff,” and I think that’s fairly accurate. I’m going to try, however, because it’s yet another big problem for local broadcasters.

This has been in place for a couple of ratings periods, but the results are really just beginning to be felt now as local sales professionals hit the streets with numbers that, in some cases, are very different than they were before.

A little history, and please remember that this is MY interpretation: As cable brought about audience fragmentation, this created an enormous problem for Nielsen, because the whole game is based on sample size. Television advertising isn’t sold by household numbers; it’s sold by demographics within those households, so fragmentation is a big deal for statistical analysts, who need big sample sizes to be confident about the numbers.

Nielsen measures audiences three ways today: meters, diaries and local people meters. Despite technology, most demographic measurements (ages, gender, etc.) are determined by the oldest method, the diaries. While meters do a good job of capturing household viewing, very often there’s no quarter-hourly match in the diaries, and that’s a problem when it comes to demographics. Here’s the way the Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) puts it:

In any single quarter hour when there is meter tuning to a source (indicating HH tuning occurred), but no corresponding entry in a diary (to indicate which demographic was viewing), a zero cell occurs. This is also referred to as “tuning without viewing.”

This has been around since meters were first introduced, but the exploding cable universe led to more and more audience fragmentation, and that led to more and more “zero cells.”

Since the lion’s share of these “zero cells” came from cable viewing, the cable industry bitched and moaned that they were getting screwed. Nielsen apparently didn’t move fast enough, so the industry created its own measurement for demos and called it “Fusion.” The methodology apparently didn’t meet Nielsen or the TVB’s “standards,” but the cable industry didn’t give a crap. This is about money, folks, enormous sums of money.

Sensing on which side their future bread was going to be buttered, Nielsen last year announced this “Zero Cell Ratings Model,” which populates some of those “tuning without viewing” quarter hours with demos from what it calls “donor quarter hours,” or the demographic skew of quarter hours with similar tuning/viewing patterns.

Following me?

The end result is that the latest official Nielsen ratings show that while the homes using television (HUT) level stays the same, the persons using television (PUT) levels have gone way up. This has negatively impacted demographics for broadcast sales but positively impacted the same for the cable industry. Some would argue that the new Nielsen strategy more accurately reflects real viewing, but that’s not the point.

Not only is the universe into which broadcasting casts its net shrinking, but the company that measures that universe has adopted a new method that cuts the pie slices even thinner.

In football parlance, this would be called “piling on,” and it’s just another challenge for the beleaguered television broadcasting industry.

Is there a more evident reality in the Media 2.0 disruption than the fact that we’re tired of all the marketing in our lives? One-third of prime-time television is ads. You can’t go (and PAY) to see a movie without 20 minutes of commercial messages for those who want good seats. Billboards, signs, radio, the web (does anyone NOT have a pop-up blocker?) and even air sickness bags (thanks, Steve) ring a constant refrain of “sell, sell, sell!”

This has not gone unnoticed by the inimitable George Simpson (one of my favorite writers), who takes on the issue in his Over The Line commentary. Here’s a sample:

Like everyone else, I have online ad blockers and I fast-forward through TV shows I have recorded. I either change channels during live TV commercials–or hit the mute and read a magazine for the duration of the break. (Given the length of most newsmagazine stories now, I can nearly complete an entire issue in two pods). I never listen to commercial radio anymore, since their ads are THE MOST obnoxious of all media. I am happy to pay for XM, which I listen to in the car and almost all day online. I only look at newspaper ads that have SALE in big letters plastered across them. ANYTHING related to advertising that comes in the mail (no matter how cleverly or deceptively designed to get me to open it) is dumped unread into the trash. In other words, I am a pretty typical consumer.

Do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing. It’s wonderful.

I love this “What the Duck” cartoon:

Truth #1: There will always be a need for professional video/photographs for traditional media.

Truth #2: What viewers/readers deem important is often far different than what we judge important (see below).

Readers here won’t be surprised by this, but Frank Barnako at Marketwatch is reporting that the blogging strategy of top newspapers is having a pretty significant impact on overall web traffic.

The number of visitors to the blog pages of the top 10 online newspapers grew 210% in the past year, far outpacing growth to the parent sites. Nielsen/NetRatings found that while the unique audience to online newspapers grew 9% from December 2005 to December 2006, the number of visitors to blog pages at the top newspapers skyrocketed and accounted for 13% of the parent sites’ total traffic.

At WKRN-TV, there are weeks when the 23 blogs outperform the mother site in all metrics, and I just wonder why it has taken these other folks so long to figure out that this is smart business.

But beyond all that, there are significant reasons why these types of “publications” are having an impact:

• They’re written in conversational English.
• They contain argument — the element missing in contemporary journalism thanks to the “cleansing” of that bogus standard known as objectivity.
• They offer transparency about the writer, which leads to trust.

But the greatest benefit of all about this kind of strategy is that it moves the creation of web content into the hands of the people who are paid to create content and away from a staff of re-writers, regardless of how talented they may be. That, more than anything else, makes this strategy one of enormous value.

The Long Tail guru has an interesting way of stating a reality that those of us in the news business have known for a long time, that up close and personal “news” has value far beyond what journalists tag as important. This discussion is important as everybody scrambles for the “hyperlocal” market.

For instance, the news that my daughter got a scraped knee on the playground today means more to me than a car bombing in Kandahar.

Am I proud of this? No. But it’s true. And it explains why I’ve stopped listening to NPR (I can’t think of a worse way to wake up than to a news report that begins with the words “Another bombing in Baghdad…” when I know that one of the main reasons for the attack was to get covered by the international media in the first place. Plus it no longer counts as news to me.)

I call this the Vanishing Point theory of news.

There’s nothing new about this (it’s a truism of the American newsroom that Paris, Texas counts for more than Paris, France), but it bears repeating. The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn’t relate to our lives. I’ll start reading my “local” newspaper again when it covers my block.

This is why the “news” on mySpace is more compelling to young people than the news from 30-Rock, and it’s a cornerstone of Media 2.0. The disruption is all about people, folks, informed, empowered and enabled people who are taking matters into their own hands, not just because they can, but because they reject the manipulation that so often passes as “real” news. This is not to say that we are culturally irrelevant, but we need to find ways to relate what we know to the people at home and not just in our marketing.

To be the purveyor of hyperlocal news is a good thing, but our mission is more than simply providing information to smaller masses based on geography. Type of information that goes there is important, but our job is also about relating broader picture matters to the smaller groups as well.

The folks at Pew have released a study of the internet’s impact on last year’s political campaigns, and the numbers raise a troubling question for 2008.

Twice as many Americans used the internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002.

Some 15% of all American adults say the internet was the place where they got most of their campaign news during the election, up from 7% in the mid-term election of 2002.

So if it doubled last year, will it double again in 2008? I think that’s probably conservative, and what it means is that political ad money will shift as well. The question is what happens to the formula for revenue growth for local television stations, if a big chunk of political money goes to the web? If you’re a station owner or manager, what are you planning to get your share of that money?

The study also found that younger people view the web as a more important source of political news than newspapers.

While television and newspapers still dominate political communication for the majority of Americans, there is now a group of citizens who use the internet more than newspapers. They are relatively young — under 36 years old — and they have broadband connections at home. Some 35% of those in that cohort say the internet was their main source of political news during the 2006 campaign, compared with 18% who cite newspapers. For older broadband users, the internet still seems to be a supplemental source of political information and activity.

As I’ve often reported, we’ve fallen into a pattern over the last decade of broadcast revenue being off during odd years and up during years with elections and the Olympics. Given these numbers from Pew, it may well be that we can’t count on political campaigns to pull us through difficult times much longer.

Mike Orren, founder of Pegasus News in Dallas, offers terrific advice in an article in Online Journalism Review for those planning hyperlocal plays. I like this graph:

On the local level at least, data is what drives visitors. Stories bring additional pageviews, but more than 75% of our traffic is data — interactive calendar listings, band profiles, restaurant listings, political campaign contributions, drink specials and the like. Most of our listings aren’t found on the other local city guides — something for both traditional media and upstarts alike to think about. We’re always gratified when people dig deep into stories or blogs, but we know that the reason most people come in the door is to find out where to go and what to do. It’s our job to compel them to stay longer with good narrative content.

We’re in the database business these days if we’re in local media, and I find this is something most companies don’t realize. Local database creation and management is where it’s at for the reasonable future. Like Mike suggests, our act may be spectacular, but data is what gets people in the tent.

I’m off to Huntsville, Alabama, and the big, stupendous, spectacular 16th birthday bash for my youngest daughter, Larissa. Woo hoo!!

Look out, Huntsville drivers.

Then it’s off to points east and client visits and presentations. I’ll be making entries from the road and should be back in the saddle next Thursday. I’m flying USAirways (Oh no!), so at least I’m assured it’ll be an adventure.

TTFN

I am really not a “told you so” kind of person, but the news that Backfence is having difficulty comes as no surprise. For the unenlightened, Backfence is a series of 13 “citizen journalism” sites in three metropolitan areas: Washington, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area. Funded by VC money, the model was touted by some observers as the way of the future.

Its downfall — if that’s what’s happening — should not be an indictment of hyperlocal citizens media, because there are plenty of other sites that are doing well (Baristanet, SunValleyOnline, Buffalo Rising, H2Otown, and one of my favorites, PegasusNews here in Dallas). It’s a tricky proposition, to say the least, but I think efforts that don’t do well have difficulty, because they’re trying too hard to build something that’s already there. Aggregation is the key, not content creation.

This is why we built Nashville is Talking for WRKN-TV. It is an aggregator of the existing blogosphere and doesn’t try to be anything other than that. The community that has built up around it is pretty amazing, a little society that runs itself quite nicely and brings loads of benefits to the TV station along-the-way. WKRN’s plans go beyond what currently exists, and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when all is said and done.

The existing blogosphere in any community has energy and life that can’t be duplicated by efforts from without. Bloggers write, because they have something to say. And people who have something to say will find a way to say it. What I don’t like about some citizen media sites is how hard they try to create a forum for people via their own model, reasoning that once the forum is in place, talented people will flock to it. People who have something to say already have their own forums, so efforts to duplicate this, I believe, come off as dry and lifeless.

Fred Wilson has a good summary of the “placeblogging” (this is the new term) phenomenon in his blog this week.

Like other observers, I’ve supported Backfence and the people who were trying to make it work. Nobody has a lock on where all this is going, and we’ve got to accept that some things will work and others won’t. Part of that, I think, is deciding what we mean by “works” and then building accordingly.

Media 2.0 is not Media 1.0, and the more we try to make it so, the quicker we’ll go down in flames.

A lot.

One announcement from Steve Jobs in his history-making unveiling of the iPhone today was that he is changing the name of the mother company by dropping the word “computers” from Apple Computers. (Ed note: See comments) This seem so innocent, but it is enormous and a reflection of the way our world is rapidly evolving.

Apple isn’t “just” a computer company anymore.

I had a great chat this morning with an old friend who works at a major U.S. university. She told me the board is considering dropping “mass” from the Mass Communications Department. Other schools have already done this, and it, too, is reflective of our changing world.

There is a great lesson here for local television stations, because the quickest path to the tarpits is to cling to the notion that we are TV stations. I rarely use that term in presentations these days, because I’m addressing local multi-media companies who happen to have a TV station.

This is Media 2.0 101.

What’s in a name? A lot.