AR&D Reinventing Local Media

When I first wrote about OhmyNews in South Korea three years ago, the organization had just played a pivotal role in overthrowing the conservative government in the country by using web and wireless tools to organize young people. I wrote a few weeks later that, “Some day soon, somebody is going to run a successful political campaign outside institutional politics.”

That day may be closer than you think, and I strongly recommend you keep an eye on the campaign of Congressman Ron Paul. His message resonates with a lot of people, and he’s wisely using the web to by-pass the information hegemony run by the mainstream press. I’m sure political insiders and observers consider the guy an extremist and a nut case, but one of the beauties of the web is that it’s not run by political insiders and observers.

This recommendation shouldn’t be construed to be an endorsement, but it’s hard not to like a guy who takes this approach to campaigning. His message is also uniquely appealing. Duncan Riley has an excellent piece over at TechCrunch that includes an embedded youTube video of Paul at Google. This kind of distributed media is exactly what’s taking place in the overall disruption of Media 2.0, and TechCrunch has a huge reader base. By my writing about Paul here, I’m passing the message, so to speak, and so it goes.

The Houston Chronicle reports today that Paul has “surprised” observers by raising nearly $2.4 million between April and June and ending the quarter with a similar amount in the bank.

The total is a remarkable showing for Paul, putting him in a better financial position — with less cash on hand but no debt — than Arizona Sen. John McCain. Paul still barely registers in public opinion polls and raised far less than McCain or the other leading Republicans. But his libertarian views and opposition to the war in Iraq have ignited a fire among nontraditional contributors, particularly on the Internet.

Don’t underestimate the guy.

In that essay on OhmyNews, I also wrote that real influence in a democracy lies with the people. With every day that goes by, the power of the people increases, thanks to the empowerment of knowledge and information made available via the web. I wouldn’t bet on the coming presidential race being like those of the past, and that includes where people put their dollars for advertising.

The Los Angeles Times’ consideration of page one ads is raising distinguished eyebrows and birthing harrumphs of disapproval in the meeting places of Big J journalism (formerly the “smoke-filled rooms”). Lines have been crossed and backs are being stabbed, it seems. Damn the moguls who just want their money! What about “the news?”

At the LATimes, second quarter revenue was down 10% and cash flow down 27%. In his call for front page ads, Publisher David Hiller noted it was one of the worst “ever experienced” by the paper.

Jeff Jarvis neatly sums up what I’m thinking, that page one ads really aren’t the issue:

It’s not that the paper doesn’t matter but with this rate of decline, what everyone should be concentrating on is what come after the paper: not a reinvented print product, not new companions to a print product, but a new conception of local news.

In his memo, Hiller praised the development going on, both in print and online: the launch of a new section, the redesign of another two, and two new online entertainment products. And he talks about one of those corporate initiatives that yield meetings and banners — “Times Change,” this one is called. That’s all well and good.

But what is the LA Times as a local brand and service — note: service vs. product — going to look like in five years and how is it going to get there? How can it get far more local than it is today? How can it build broader networks of people and content and advertising? How can it pay for all that development and experimentation? And how can it survive long enough to get there?

I’ll add that the hand-wringing from the pedestals of “professional” journalism about not only the purity of page one but also the relentless defense of the anachronistic mainstream are out-of-order, inappropriate, misguided and irrelevant in the face of the Media 2.0 distruption. Nostalgic moanings about how wonderful it used to be do nothing to move the rock forward. The news isn’t “the news;” it’s a business. It’s all about profit and growth, and we long ago passed crisis stage. I’m with Jeff on this. Putting ads on the front page is like putting racing stripes on the Titanic.

Oh, and broadcasters need to be paying attention here, too.

When the “Second Life” hypefest was underway last year (and this), I decided to get an account and see what all the fuss was about. Not much, I concluded. I haven’t been back, but I’m still considered one of the 8 million “Total Residents” cited on the home page.

Moreover, in an age when time is the new currency, the appeal of plays like this is extremely limited. Really, folks, who has the time to live a second life when there isn’t even enough time to live the first?

Time and again, I was asked if I thought people should build a store, buy an island or otherwise get involved. You can guess the advice I offered.

Now, the site is the subject of scrutiny by the mainstream press and that has raised the ire of some online observers.

A Forbes article called “Sex, Pranks, and Reality” is described as “spectacularly incorrect” by Wagner James Au of GigaOM and an avid Second Lifer (”As someone who worked for Linden Lab, consults on and is writing a book about Second Life, I have an obvious personal and professional interest in the topic.”). He also wrote that the Forbes article was “the latest example of a larger trend: if 2006 was the year of inaccurate, over-hyped Second Life coverage, 2007 is the year of equally inaccurate counter-spin.”

The latest hit for Second Life is an article from the LATimes, where Alana Semuels writes what many believe — that the only real business value Second Life offers is the publicity that comes with launching something.

Four years after Second Life debuted, some marketers are second-guessing the money and time they’ve put into it.

“There’s not a compelling reason to stay,” said Brian McGuinness, vice president of Aloft, a brand of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. that is closing its Second Life shop and donating its virtual land to the nonprofit social-networking group TakingITGlobal.

…sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.’s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.

The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.

Second Life is a unique fantasy community inhabited by all sorts of people — kind of like the First Life world. The “sex and weirdos” label probably isn’t fair, although being “approached” by sexy avatars is apparently a common occurrence. It is what it is, and I’m sticking to my original gut feel — that Second Life and other fantasy role playing sites are just that. They’re not the “next big thing,” and I think media companies should give a lot of thought about it before getting involved.

In an age of limited resources, those dollars would be better spent building databases of local knowledge and information to serve the local First Life community.

I’ve been on the road with clients, so I haven’t been able to do much writing. However, Steve and I did get the newsletter out today, so here’s the link. This week, we talk about Time Spent, Advertising is Content, and What’s Wrong with Political Cartoonists? I also get in a rant against the FCC’s so-called “open access” decision this week. Grrrr.

There’s movement in the world of web “audience” measuring that bears reporting only to make a point about trying to turn the web into something it really isn’t.

Firstly, Nielsen has formally dropped the page view as a top line measurement. This has been coming for a long time, so it’s no surprise. Staci Kramer over at PaidContent provides notes that this will shift some sites’ status considerably. AOL, for example, ranked sixth in total page views for May but first in total minutes: 25 billion.

I’ve always had a problem with page views as a top metric given the way various sites have been able to inflate page views, both by poor design and intentional effort. This shift could help provide a more realistic view although you can still game time spent by making it hard to find things. Now how are Nielsen, comScore-and IAB-going to solve the autoplay issue where sites jack up streaming numbers by delivering video whether or not a user wants it?

And while this is taking place, the Interactive Advertising Bureau is working to establish a single standard for measuring web video. David Kaplan, again at PaidContent, writes that sites are doing their own thing to better position themselves with advertisers.

Many TV nets divide their webisodes into four to five streams for a drama and two to three streams for a sitcom. The point is to make it simplify the delivery of the shows and also to insert ads in each break. But that also allows networks to count based on the stream, as opposed to the number of individuals watching what ought to be considered a single webisode. The IAB hopes to nail down a single standard within the next 12 months.

A single standard would seem doable, given the ability to precisely measure the web. However, the IAB will have to nail down many facets in order to arrive at a single standard. That’s evident in a recent report by TubeMogul.com on an experiment they conducted with eight websites.

The company found that the top online video websites differ greatly in how they record video views. Here’s an image from the report:

TubeMogul writes that “this lack of standardization presents complexity to content producers and advertisers in understanding the relative popularity of videos across video sites. To fully realize the potential of advertising models in the online video medium, increased standardization and transparency is required.”

If you can step back far enough and combine these elements, you can clearly see the media business community moving in unison to turn the web into a form of measurable cable TV. This effort benefits the status quo and includes the Telecom industry, headed by our old friend AT&T. The paradigm is an old one. “Content” travels through pipes to destinations, and everybody makes money along the way. I should add that this paradigm necessarily requires that the “packages” flow from their point of origin outward. In this model, the haves continue to have, and isn’t that nice?

“Standards” is a modernist term that’s essential for a modernist culture. The same is true with “measurements,” because the whole culture is based on the rule of logic and science, something I’ve written about many, many times in this space. The problem is that we’ve entered the postmodern era, one that views authority and hierarchy — and their tools — as self-serving.

In all of the above, who is least affected by these organizational efforts? Google, that’s who, because the bulk of its revenue doesn’t come via the measurement paradigm.

This is, again, why I continue to emphasize that the real disruption for media companies isn’t multi-platform distribution systems or new ways of delivering “content.” The problem is the personal media revolution, which is driven by the internet pureplay companies enabling it (led by Google, eBay, and a host of others).

In the weeks and months to come, we’ll hear a ton of publicity about how the telecoms need to “build out the pipes” and how Madison Avenue and media companies are coming to agreement on the money-making process.

What you won’t hear are the giggles coming from the secret chambers of Media 2.0.

Beginning a week from today, the big three internet giants — Google, Yahoo and Microsoft — will each report quarterly earnings. Anders Bylund at The Motley Fool suggests it’ll be “another blowout quarter from Google, a Microsoft that’s all Vista and no Web, and a Yahoo! struggling to make ends meet.” It’s important that we all remember this as we make our assessments of what’s “working” and what isn’t in terms of local media web strategies.

In the past two years, Google has grown revenues from $3.2 billion in 2004 to $10.6 billion in 2006. Operating profit more than quintupled in that time frame, from $640 million to $3.6 billion.

Yahoo! snags a solid second place, kicking sales up from $3.6 billion in 2004 to $6.4 billion, and increasing its operating income 37% to $941 million.

You see, Google and Google’s model is what’s generating the heat in terms of real online revenue, and that’s not the way most people in the traditional media world see things. The mantra of traditional media is if we can just get enough page views, we can make some real money, but the dirty secret is that, given current rates that advertisers are willing to pay, it would take billions of monthly page views to generate serious money, and that’s just not going to happen.

Yahoo ranks ahead of Google in terms of page views, yet Google does almost twice the revenue. Think about that and try to compute the numbers necessary for Yahoo’s portal model to “catch” Google. And let’s not forget that Nielsen NetRatings is dropping the page view as an ad metric anyway.

The Baltimore Sun carried an interesting story yesterday by their television critic, David Zurawik, titled “TV news attempts an online comeback.” The piece is an optimistic look at the money that is rolling in for some companies with successful brand extension strategies. It suggests that success in this year’s upfront came, because “Madison Avenue has agreed to pay the networks for some new media audiences when buying advertising time on fall schedules. As a result, the major TV networks for the first time in four years will show an increase in upfront sales revenue - instead of a projected take of $8.5 billion, the five networks have already passed $9 billion.”

The story also cites significant gains in traffic on the CNN site along with the amount of time users are spending there, known as “stickiness” during the bubble days (and Nielsen’s new/old metric). Zurawik uses year-over-year numbers but doesn’t take into consideration CNN’s major decision to switch from a paid video model to one that’s advertiser supported during that period. Obviously, their metrics would go up after that.

I say this not to be picky, but for all the good news stated in the story — and let’s face it, there really is some good news for these companies online — nobody seems willing to talk about the reality of comparing this revenue to that which is being lost from traditional sources. Because if you can combine web and traditional, why are layoffs the norm and takeovers by private companies the flavor of the day?

The truth is that brand extension, reach/frequency strategies and tactics are only going to go so far. I’m happy to occasionally point to such success stories, but I won’t really rejoice until I see evidence that mainstream media companies are moving INTO the Media 2.0 disruption in addition to just using its tools for extending their brands.

According to Broadcasting & Cable, the alphabet network has decided to renew National Bingo Night thanks to a very real metric provided by ABC.com. By Nielsen standards, “Bingo” should not be getting a second life, because the ratings were very poor for the interactive show.

But the online numbers tell a different tale, and that’s going to spawn a whole new series of shows with interactive elements that can be accurately measured. It’s also a significant chink in the armor of the Nielsen paradigm and one that will be exploited in many ways downstream.

“Nielsen claimed the numbers were what they were, but there was definitely a disconnect,” (ABC Entertainment President Steve) McPherson says of the show’s audience. “We have concrete online numbers that don’t lie.”

The show gave viewers the ability to go online and download their own Bingo cards and play along, with home viewers winning more than $550,000 throughout the show’s run.

More than 3 million Bingo cards were downloaded before the series even debuted on May 18, and weekly numbers grew online more than 10% a week. All that spelled profit for ABC.com, which saw traffic skyrocket.

ABC racked up more than 22 million Bingo card downloads overall. The Bingo cards helped ABC.com more than double its unique users in May from the same month a year earlier, to more than 14.6 million. The site finished the month of May as the top entertainment TV site, according to MediaMetrix and Nielsen NetRatings.

Show creator Andrew Glassman said, “We don’t need focus groups to tell us what’s working and not working. We have a team of people reading e-mails and answering questions and dealing with technical issues, so we hear it directly. And all the broadcasters are looking very carefully for this interactive component and not just voting or texting in to win.”

It will be interesting to see what ABC does with advertising for the new run of “Bingo” in December. Will sales be based on Nielsens or some hybrid? The times they are a-changing.

The announced closing of Backfence has brought about some refreshing and much-needed discussion on the subject of hyperlocal news and the web. This is an important discussion, because a lot of companies are looking to hyperlocal as the salvation of their business model. But the concept is misunderstood and, as a result, carries a false promise for mainstream media.

Backfence, with 13 sites and $3 million in financing couldn’t build the audience or the revenue streams necessary to generate a return on the investment. Judging by the reaction from the web community, Backfence suffered from poor design, insufficient feet on the street, poor choices for locations, or it was simply ahead of its time. When web businesses shutter, there is no lack of analysis from the web community.

But in this feedback, there are some real gems for those who are pursuing hyperlocal as a strategy for their company.

Let’s begin with Jeff Jarvis and comments to his entry at Buzzmachine:

The biggest challenge facing local news organizations today is figuring out how they can gather more and produce less. That is, how can they help other people produce, so the news organizations have something worth gathering?

After trying one of everything in hyperlocal, I’ve come to believe that this will happen only by combining those various models — so people can join in however they want to — and by answering the questions: How much news will members of the community create and share? What do they need to do that? What motivates them? How can local news organizations enable and encourage them?

Hyperlocal will not, I firmly believe, happen at one site. It will work only via networks: content, commercial, social. It will work by gathering, not producing.

But I still don’t know whether it will work. We need to do a lot of development and experimentation.

In the comments to this post, Mike Orren of Pegasus News proves once again that he’s one of the smartest people around when it comes to hyperlocal efforts. I would advise anyone considering such a venture to pay attention to what Mike says. One of his “truths” is that data is what brings people to hyperlocal sites, and many traditional news people are hung up on other types of content. And building databases is a lot of work.

Our site has neighborhood maps of no more than a few miles radius with stories, events and garage sales plotted. Part of the way we do that is by mining city and school district sites for news in areas where there are no content partners or bloggers to work with.

It ain’ glamorous, but if there’s a temporary road closing near you, it’s news. And you can’t wait/depend on someone in that community to blog it.

Where it gets cool though is that these trivial, government-supplied neighborhood stories, mixed with a little search engine mojo, become breadcrumbs for folks who come in the door, comment on what you got right/wrong, and then start contributing regularly with real narrative reporting.

I won’t kid you — that’s a slow process. And it takes a real farmer to cultivate that kind of participation. The seeding with “release” type news has to continue, because without a flow of content, there’s no frequency and without frequency, today’s item written by a member of the community won’t be read or responded to–Meaning they won’t be repeat contributors and you won’t have a business.

There is also some wonderful discussion over at TechCrunch, only from a slightly different perspective. Here’s an example from the comments:

To some extent, you have to wonder just how interested people are in reading about the town’s little league championship, what happened at the church BBQ on Saturday went and what was decided at the last City Hall meeting. I would argue that the future of news and information distribution is more likely to be hyper-targeted than hyper-local. That is, most people, faced with increasingly little free time, have very specific interests and would probably be most receptive to services that enable them to efficiently and accurately aggregate news and information about those interests. Obviously, there are services like this out there and I think they’re more likely to have long-term success than services which are focused on very narrow local topics.

Both of these threads are well worth the time to read. Follow the links, too, and you’ll have a pretty good understanding of where people stand on the topic.

One problem in analyzing such efforts is the natural tendency to view success or failure in absolute terms. Backfence was only a failure in its pre-defined business goals, but that doesn’t make the effort itself right or wrong. It could just as easily be that the business goals were off-the-mark. Investors want a return, after all.

Hyperlocal is a currently popular theme among mainstream media companies with visions of increasing their reach/frequency numbers by pulling in suburban or outlying users. Advertisers in those communities, the thinking goes, will want their goods and services positioned within such a framework. The trick, of course, is to create “content” without spending a lot of (or any) money by building an attractive user interface that enables citizens in those communities to make the content themselves.

There are two big problems with most hyperlocal efforts.

One, we get hung up on content when content isn’t the problem. The question is how do you make money in a disintermediated, distributed media paradigm? Experiments in hyperlocal media don’t fail because of content; they fail, because they can’t deliver the promise of sustainable revenue. It is the advertising paradigm that’s the real problem, not how to make more or “hyperlocal” content that such advertising will support.

I’ve seen sales people salivate over the idea of creating a “page” or “section” or “channel” that will deliver an audience that traditional ad models can serve. While it’s true that some advertisers is suburb A will want to put ads in a web platform that serves suburb A, the numbers just aren’t big enough to justify the expense, because the ad model requires a BIG audience in order to deliver ROI. I know there are exceptions and that I’m making a generalization, but we simply have to start thinking differently about this.

This is why I keep harping on organizing the local web and building databases of knowledge at the local level rather than trying to make another content play. Google (the hyperlocal winner) has proven that advertisers will pay a premium for actual business leads, but that has never been a part of mass marketing. How we put advertisers together with users is the key, and “news content” isn’t the only way to do that.

Jeff Jarvis is absolutely correct when he states that network dynamics provide the revenue key for tomorrow, but that key will be more about direct marketing or micro marketing than anything resembling the old reach/frequency model. And Mike Orren is spot-on when he states that “little crumbs” of data ARE news at the hyperlocal level.

Two, in terms of building sites that appeal to “local” people, we simply cannot begin with revenue assumptions. In fact, I would argue that this guarantees business failure right out of the box, because the whole business of local advertising is evolving. How on earth can we create a business plan based on revenue when we don’t know what that revenue play will be? We simply must have the courage to move forward to build audience before we tackle monetizing that audience. If we do this, we’ll build things differently, because we’ll approach the process differently.

This is the flaw of the Newspaper Next recommendations, which begin the brainstorming process with revenue goals. This is entirely backwards, and it’ll produce the same kinds of “return” that the Backfence effort produced. Again, it’s the mass marketing paradigm that’s being disrupted by the personal media revolution, not the distribution of “content.”

I believe strongly that niches are where it’s at downstream and that the long tail is the economic model for tomorrow’s media, so I very much like the “idea” of hyperlocal. But really, folks, Google is the hyperlocal model and their global mission ought to be our local mission — to organize our community’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

We owe Mark Potts and Susan DeFife, founders of Backfence, kudos and thanks for the vision and effort that went into the project. Now let’s learn and move forward.

According to data provided to me by Hitwise, Viacom’s Comedy Central and MTV websites have lost market share since the company ordered YouTube to pull copyrighted videos from the popular online video aggregator in February. This despite clear statements by Viacom that YouTube was standing in the way of its ability to make money from its content on its own sites.

Viacom assumed the traditional model of scarcity would reward their strong arm tactics against YouTube, but it hasn’t, and it won’t, because Viacom — like so many other mainstream media companies — can’t see beyond the traditional economic walls that surround its empire. Abundant micro-media is killing (or already has killed) the old model, and it shows no signs of letting up. You only need to consider that while traffic to comedycentral.com has gone down 11% since February, and MTV.com has seen a 14% traffic loss, traffic to YouTube has gone up an amazing 39% during the same period.

In March, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman told shareholders, “Our content was a substantial part of the traffic on (YouTube). We are very pleased to have more traffic on our sites since we took down our video from YouTube because we are able to monetize that as opposed to someone else doing so.” Apparently not.

Moreover — and this is truly amazing — during the same period, YouTube has been providing a steadily increasing amount of traffic to those two sites. That’s right. Upstream traffic from YouTube to comedycentral.com has increased 17% since February. Traffic from YouTube to MTV.com has gone up a whopping 38%.

So let’s accurately understand the picture. Viacom sued Google to remove copyrighted videos from YouTube, because YouTube was in the position of making money off Viacom’s content. In so doing, they assumed that people who wanted to see the various Jon Stewart (and other) clips would make their way to comedycentral.com, where they could have the same experience offered on YouTube, except with Viacom’s ads attached. From a traditional media perspective, this makes perfect sense.

However, the opposite has happened. Not only have people not gone to comedycentral.com to see the clips in numbers anywhere near YouTube’s, the site and MTV.com have lost market share since Viacom pulled the clips from YouTube. YouTube, meanwhile, continues to show explosive growth and is actually feeding Viacom’s properties with an increasing amount of traffic — all without compensation, I should add. (Where’s the quid pro quo love, Mr. Dauman?)

And without all those people swapping and emailing the Stewart clips or the Colbert clips, their influence will begin to decay as well. Out of sight, out of mind. And soon the audience for these shows will be limited to hard-core fans and nothing more.

I know this drives people nuts, but we simply cannot ignore the power of the personal media revolution in what’s taking place across the media landscape today. The Media 2.0 disruption isn’t about online brand-extension, multi-platform delivery schemes, deals with Joost, or anything else that tries to protect the Media 1.0 paradigm. And it’s not (just) about technology either.

It’s all about people — informed, empowered, enabled, involved, and connected people — people who are fleeing the relentless assault of mass marketing and building new value chains and a new media economy in the process. Involving ourselves in all of this is more than just the right thing to do; it’s an absolute necessity of doing business in the world to come.

(Edited 7/9 to reflect market share versus “traffic”)

Here’s the link to this week’s newsletter. Topics this week include NBBC bows, Building a Link Machine, Yahoo’s SmartAds and Einstein on news ideas.

I almost spit my coffee across my laptop this morning when I read the latest from my all-time favorite spin doctor, Alan Wurtzel of NBC. Let me start with his conclusion. Alan wired up a bunch of people to study their “engagement” with TV and is announcing that people are just as engaged when watching a fast-forwarded commercial as they are when they’re watching an actual program.

In a former life, I really would’ve liked some of what the guy smokes.

The New York Times has the story:

When it comes to fast-forward advertisements, “the assumption has always been that they have no economic value, that they have no communication value,” said Alan Wurtzel, president for research at NBC Universal. “But the fact of the matter is we’re learning that they are valuable.”

No. They’re. Not.

I mean, this is pathetic, folks. It’s like saying a picture of the Grand Canyon is as good as being there. What kind of fools does this guy think we are?

The Times does its best to present that this “thesis flies in the face of the assumption among advertisers that their ads have no effect when played at a high speed on a DVR.” And yet, they offer this remarkable statement of support for Wurtzel’s slight of hand.

“Whether people watch or not is not a useful measure of anything,” said Joe Plummer, chief research officer for the Advertising Research Foundation. “Exposure has very, very weak correlation with purchase intent and actual sales, whereas an engagement measure has high correlation and are closer to what really matters, which is brand growth and creating brand demand.”

“Whether people watch or not is not a useful measure of anything?” What exactly is it, then, that the industry has been selling for all these years if it’s not that somebody’s watching?

Wurtzel is doing a second study of this to determine what “works” during fast-forwarding, so that NBC can “offer tips” on how to optimize ads for fast-forwarding. I kid you not.

“We can then go through our advertisers and help them optimize a commercial for fast-forwarding, while also not denigrating the quality while watched live,” Mr. Wurtzel said.

If anybody in the ad industry really buys this flimflammery, they’re dumber than I thought.

It’s like researchers for the whale oil industry announcing that electric light bulbs enhance the quality of the light given off by oil lamps. Yeah, right.

Alan Wurtzel’s personal life mission, it seems, is to prove some how, some way that DVR’s are the opposite of what they really are and that the 30-second ad paradigm is just as powerful as it has always been. Fortunately, Madison Avenue is leery. And as I’ve said many times, the real problem with this effort is that it detracts from actually doing something useful in the face of disruptive innovations attacking the paradigm itself.

In the world of big-time unbundled, distributed media, the new middleman is the aggregator. Anybody who’s a regular reader here knows why that’s the case.

This is why today’s news about Universal Music Group’s decision not to renew a long-term contract with Apple’s iTunes is so important. As I wrote last week about the iPhone, Apple is making a play to position iTunes as THE aggregator of all professional content, a distribution point for everybody’s unbundled content. This includes both television and music.

Universal’s decision doesn’t mean they won’t keep distributing content there. Moving to a month-to-month position, however, opens the door for agreements with other distributor/aggregators — a world that is both fluid and evolving.

In the end, I think, you’ll see fewer and fewer exclusive deals, so that customer service and choice will be the proper end game for the makers of unbundled content.

iTunes is a fabulous application, and perhaps there’s a sense that it’s getting too big and too powerful. In the iPhone story, I wrote that Apple is predisposed to avoid direct downloads of music via cellphones, which is why you can’t do it (yet) with an iPhone. The market will decide whether that’s a smart position for Apple (it isn’t), a company that’s accustomed to providing people with what they want.

The ultimate winner in the aggregator game is going to be the one that allows media companies to monetize their own distributed content instead of trying to take that role for themselves. The aggregator will make money by providing ads either around the distributed content instead of the content itself or in the search process itself.

We’ll see who gets there first.

Here is a link to the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. This one is called “Niche Media is the Future,” and it examines the drift to specialization in news coverage that’s a big part of what J.D. Lasica calls the personal media revolution. I use coverage of Paris Hilton to make a point that I think is vital for us to understand in the midst of sea changes in media and in journalism.

The era of the all-things-to-everybody news organization is drawing to a close, because specialty coverage can do a better job of delivering depth. Aggregators bring this to us in every size and shape imaginable, and so the challenge to local media companies is which niches in your market do you want to own? Move now, because eventually, forces within your own community will seize those niches, if you don’t.