I had barely pushed “publish” on my last entry when Apple decided it wouldn’t wait until the NBCU contract expired in December and announced that NBC’s fall line-up wouldn’t be available via iTunes. According to Marketwatch, Apple will also drop other NBCU programming.

According to a statement from the company, NBC refused to renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple balked at paying fees that it said would more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode.

Apple said NBC’s demands would have raised the price of NBC shows to $4.99 an episode from the current $1.99 price tag.

“We would not agree to their dramatic price increase,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes, in a statement. “We hope they will change their minds.”

A spokesman for NBCU denied that they had asked for double the wholesale price, adding, “Our negotiations were centered on our request for flexibility in wholesale pricing, including the ability to package shows together in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers.”

Sorry, I don’t buy that. Nobody from Hollywood does ANYTHING that makes things “more attractive for consumers.” It’s all about money, and Apple — the folks who invented this source of revenue for everybody in the first place — is trying to help you and I by keeping prices low.

I find most interesting in this article from Marketwatch the comments of James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.

“What they’re going to have to realize,” McQuivey said, “is that out of all the dozens of shows available out there, most people only want the four or five most popular shows. And if those aren’t there, those consumers are just going to walk away.”

This is conventional thinking, but it’s also the kind of stuff that got traditional media in trouble in the first place. Let me repeat what I said in my previous entry. Losing this content hurts NBCU much more than it will hurt Apple. Let’s watch and see what happens.

Here’s one that bears watching. NBC Universal has told Apple that it’s not going to renew its contract with them to provide programs via iTunes. According to the New York Times, NBCU wants to do things with its programs — such as bundling — in order to increase revenue. Apple’s model is one of simple, straightforward pricing, $1.99 per episode, $9.99 per movie. Rafat Ali at PaidContent summarizes:

NBC was in early on iTunes’ video offering, and now accounts for about 40 percent of downloads…The current two-year deal extends through December, so the 1,500 hours of NBCU programs will remain available on iTunes at least until then.

…This also comes as NBCU-Fox video joint venture Hulu is about to get off the ground, where NBC will be putting most of its shows for free streaming and distribution.

This could be just rhetoric in negotiations (after all, the NYT story is based on “a source close to the negotiations,” which is mediaspeak for someone who stands to benefit from releasing the information), but I think there’s an important element to note.

If NBCU’s content accounts for 40% of downloads, they are making the assumption that it is their content that drives those downloads. They no doubt use that number amongst themselves for high-fives and encouragement that content is still scalable via the Web. Why else even think of playing chicken with iTunes? The assumption is that “the people” so love our content that they’ll come where WE want them to come in order to get it. It’s the same logic that drove Viacom’s decision to sue rather than work with YouTube.

Apple, on the other hand, would argue that it is the presence of the content on iTunes that drives the downloads, that people download their products, because, as an aggregator, iTunes makes it easy for people to find them and download them.

So who is right? On this question rests much, and it’s the stickiest of all wickets for traditional media, because the business model of Media 1.0 doesn’t play well in an age of distributed media.

The gamble NBCU is making is that they can still make business decisions with their content that don’t include their customers. While I do believe that serious “Office” fans will go where they have to go to get their downloads, forcing everybody to do this is ultimately a fool’s folly, for most people will opt for the path of least resistance.

“Let’s see, Office isn’t here anymore, so what else do they have?” It is a critical mistake to assume that iTunes downloads will go down by 40% simply because NBCU decides not to play. Every other content creator that does business with iTunes is hoping NBC will go away, and this is the essential problem. NBCU may be able to increase its revenue, but eyeballs that go away are eyeballs that aren’t coming back.

If NBC were to leave, it would also hurt iTunes, because its ability to aggregate and present everybody’s content is its value proposition. So it’s not an easy matter for Apple either.

In the end, though — and as has been evidenced so many times in recent years — it is foolish to mess with empowered consumers. Who negotiates for them?

Reaction to the name of NBCU and News Corp’s new video portal has been almost entirely negative, and I’m afraid I have to agree. I mean, “hulu?” For the uneducated, the two media giants announced the partnership before they’d hired anybody or had a name for it, so media bloggers and observers dubbed it “ClownCo,” which would’ve been a better name than hulu, for crying out loud.

This portal has been so hyped as God’s gift to online video that any name they came up with would likely have bombed, especially with the tech community — which includes the people who’ve written the book on online video without the “help” of the networks or studios. Old media just doesn’t get that new media isn’t created in a board room with fancy consultants (oh shit, I’m a consultant!), because the results are usually just varnished horse crap. Hulu? The first thing people did was research the word in various languages, and the meanings are almost too funny to believe. In Indonesian, it means “butt.” In Swahili, “cease and desist.”

The problem is that the fuss over the stupid name casts a pall on what is really a smart move by NBC and Fox, namely creating a single portal for video instead of asking people to come to each branded site. Of course, it would be better if all networks were a part of this, and I think announcing the project without a name or a more complete partner list was a huge tactical error.

I had the great pleasure of attending a local blogger meet-up last night in Portland at the studios of KATU-TV. I’m not sure of the headcount, but 50-60 is probably about right.

As I travel around the country and do these gatherings, I find that the blogosphere of each community generally reflects the personality of the community itself. Bloggers are fun people to hang with — bright, witty, passionate, curious, and often quite comedic. Portland’s is a fun-loving bunch, moreso, I think, than their neighbors to the north in Seattle, where the humor is a bit more restrained (exceptions noted). It reminded me more of a meet-up with bloggers in Nashville than, say, San Francisco or Seattle.

Like other smart local media outlets, KATU-TV has taken a position of embracing the personal media revolution in its community. This isn’t easy for TV stations, but it’s an important first step in participating in the conversation — the buzz — that is the cyberspace community. I don’t see how media companies will be relevant in the years to come without taking this step.

And at every blogger meet-up, there’s always one blogger that really makes me smile. In Portland, that award goes to Athena, shown below holding court with (from left to right) Rob Dunlop of Fisher Communications, owners of KATU-TV, Don Pratt, KATU-TV news director, and Matt Davis, a reporter for the Portland Mercury and an active participant in the alternative paper’s Blogtown, PDX blog.

Athena tickled me. She’s the author of a book about ghosts in Seattle, so she begged Don for a tour of the KATU basement. Her blog is called TheBlissQuest, where her slogan is “Eat my bliss…” I asked her how the quest was going, and she said she’s experienced bliss only in bits and pieces so far, but “I’m still waiting for the big chunks.”

But Athena was just one of many Portland bloggers that I met, and everyone had something unique about them and a story to tell. Bloggers are like that, which is why I enjoy being in their company so much.

Here is the latest in my on-going series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World.

I know I sound like a broken record sometimes (only people my age use that saying), but the foremost assumption of a networked media world is that the highest value goes to the people running the network, not its individual nodes. This is why we strongly recommend that clients get into the business of network building in addition to distributing their content through networks run by others. This is possible at the local level, because, well, everybody’s a sort of media company these days.

This is just one of the reasons I question the value of the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium, an enormous blending of Yahoo!’s reach and technology with the content and sales efforts of 19 major newspaper companies in the U.S. I’ve had several discussions with people involved in the deal, including a guy I really respect who felt I wasn’t considering all the factors. This essay is my attempt to put the details of the deal into language we can all understand, because I think there is an important lesson here for all of us, whether newspaper or television.

Understanding the Yahoo! Consortium

TechCrunch provided a link this weekend to Vision 20/20, a nice mash-up site that provides users with a free map showing where sex offenders live in their neighborhoods. Just click on POM Offender Locator in the top navigation and enter your address. It’s pretty freaky, a nice public service, and an excellent demonstration of what you can do with databases and maps to create meaningful content.

Which got me to thinking…

NBC is continuing with its controversial “To Catch A Predator” series despite advertisers pulling out of the “show.” My heart bleeds for NBC, so why don’t they visit the Vision 20/20 website, find offenders living in the hood, and have pretend youngsters knock on the door with Girl Scout cookies? The cookie box cam video alone would be priceless. They could call it “To Catch a Repeat Predator,” and with his brow appropriately furrowed, Chris Hansen could ask them, “Don’t you know you can’t do this?.”

Noble, huh?

Yesterday, we had a report from Nielsen that the drop in television usage by consumers was real and not some statistical anomaly. In an admirable bit of fancy footwork, Nielsen said that DVRs “in and of themselves” weren’t a contributing factor, but that the presence of a DVR in the home reduced viewing. Huh?

The biggest losses in tuning appear to be coming from the homes that tuned the most last year…Some homes are tuning relatively more this year, these are generally the lowest tuning homes in the panel; the heavy tuners who acquire DVRs tend to tune less, more than offsetting these increases, resulting in overall declines.”

Gotta love that spin.

Today, we hear of new research from IBM that also shows TV viewing in decline. This is damning stuff:

Saul Berman, IBM Media & Entertainment Strategy and Change practice leader, said, “The Internet is becoming consumers’ primary entertainment source. The TV is increasingly taking a back seat to the cell phone and the personal computer among consumers age 18 to 34. Just as the ‘Kool Kids’ and ‘Gadgetiers’(1) have replaced traditional land-lines with mobile communications, cable and satellite TV subscriptions risk a similar fate of being replaced as the primary source of content access.”

The data is part of IBM’s upcoming “the end of advertising as we know it” study, something we’re eagerly anticipating.

To effectively respond to this power shift, IBM sees advertising agencies going beyond traditional creative roles to become brokers of consumer insights; cable companies evolving to home media portals; and broadcasters and publishers racing toward new media formats. Marketers in turn are being forced to experiment and make advertising more compelling, or risk being ignored.

There are well-informed eyeballs studying all of this on behalf of the advertising community, but the behavior of advertisers themselves is contrary to the data. This troubles me with regards to broadcasters, because it effectively shields them from the truth.

For example, there’s this headline from a Wayne Friedman piece in MediaDailyNews: “Scatter Market Sizzles, Network Ad Rates Rise Double-Digits Over Upfront.” Rich Goldfarb, senior vice president of media sales for the National Geographic Channel told Friedman, “Things are very strong; business is excellent.” The article references cable networks, the niche markets of television, but you have to wonder how all of this is occurring in a time of decreased viewing.

Of course, I also wondered why people would pay for bottled water.

The juiciest announcements always come on a Friday afternoon. Media giant Hearst Corporation has made an offer to acquire the publicly-held shares in Hearst-Argyle television and bring the company under its private control. According to the press release:

Hearst Corporation currently owns approximately 52% of the outstanding Series A Common Stock and 100% of the Series B Common Stock, representing in the aggregate approximately 73% of both the outstanding equity and general voting power of Hearst-Argyle Television.

That means 27% of Hearst-Argyle is outstanding, and the company is offering $23.50 per share in CASH as part of the deal.

This is the latest — and biggest — of the public-to-private moves that I’ve been predicting for the past couple of years, and it’s incredibly smart on the part of Hearst. First, our times call for investment and entrepreneurship, something that is very hard for a publicly-traded company to do. Investors want their quarterly dividends, not have them spent on making the company stronger. Secondly, and not insignificantly, they move out from under the absurd regulations of Sarbanes-Oxley, the well-intentioned mess created by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal. This act so handcuffs industry that it has become a net liability in the world of business development.

Hearst-Argyle is already a VERY good company, and this will make them even stronger and, I predict, even more competitive in their ability to attack the real disruptions impacting broadcasting’s business model.

(Hat tip to Cory)

Here’s the link to this week’s AR&D Media 2.0 Newsletter.

Enjoy.

Michael Arrington has a solid update on what’s taking place in the copyright lawsuits involving video upload sites. He does such a good job of laying out what’s happening, that I won’t try to reproduce it here. The basic thrust is that Viacom and NBC are now filing “friend of the court” briefs in other litigation.

The cases being litigated now are crucial in determining what level of freedom video sites have in letting their users upload and distribute content. Content owners are not happy with the protections provided under the DMCA - they want video sites to be far more proactive in stopping uploads in the first place. The outcome of these cases will guide how much freedom these video sites have to continue current practices, and ultimately determine the value of these companies down the road.

I want to add that these efforts by content owners are designed to preserve a business model that can’t be preserved. It isn’t about the value of their content or even the wish to get more from what they own. It’s about the customers of this content, those who are fleeing the grip of mass media — and the relentless pounding of unwanted marketing — on their lives. Even if the whole world agreed that this content should only be available at the content owner’s “site(s),” the model still wouldn’t work. People would simply find other ways to entertain themselves, because the personal media revolution makes that possible.

These companies would do well to find new ways to monetize their content in a truly distributed marketplace. Go with the flow, instead of against it. They might do well to band together and create one, giant portal for all professionally created stuff and charge people to view it or serve ad after ad to make their money. Wait a minute. Isn’t that what NBC and Fox are trying to do? Will people use such a site?

And what will happen to YouTube? Nothing. It’ll continue to prosper, because YouTube is an enabler, and people want to be enabled.

Another fascinating side of this traditional versus new battle is reported by Amy Gahran at Poynter. The issue here is RSS feeds, more specifically, full text feeds versus partial feeds. Go read the whole thing, because she makes an important (and similar) argument that media companies need to find ways to play in a truly distributed world.

Partial RSS feeds are popular and common with traditional media sources, because they think they drive traffic to their sites and, hence, their advertising. This is yet another “we don’t give a crap what people want” argument, and it is actually counterproductive. Here’s Amy.

Seems to me that, as media organizations learn to adapt their operations and business models to online media, they’d do well to learn how to make money from feeds (yes, you can put ads in feeds) as well as educating advertisers to make ad content more inherently valuable and engaging. Also, properly distributed full-text feeds make your content much more findable via all kinds of search engines and aggregators, potentially leading to increased page views well after initial publication.

As long as we keep trying to lure people to sites where they’re forced (or at least, more likely) to view ads that they’d rather avoid altogether, we’re fighting a losing battle. As the blog Techdirt put it recently, “Taking value away from users to try to force a specific action is almost always going to be less desirable than providing people what they want.”

Of the changes taking place with media these days, the most difficult are those that involve the generation of mass that can be monetized. What many companies don’t understand (or refuse to see) is that the herding of people into masses is exactly what people are rebelling against, and I honestly believe the people will win this one.

In a quote on another topic entirely, I read this from a marketing guru: “that’s part of what I think is driving penetration.” He’s referring to newspaper circulation, but think about that phrase, “driving penetration.” Used in another context, it’s not a very pleasant thought, and we would all do well to understand that our mediated world has produced an offspring that feels, well, quite penetrated.

And nobody ever says, “Thank you.”

Long ago and far away in a galaxy called Broadcasting 101, the ability to grow revenue was based on ratings. Apparently, that’s not the case in our contemporary world, because this most basic assumption of mass marketing for television doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

While summer ratings for the networks are off by double digits this year, what’s known as the “scatter market” — ads that are purchased close to the time they’re supposed to appear — is up double digits.

Um, go figure.

So apparently, television is still the best bang for the buck, even though the cost-per-viewer keeps going up, up, up. Broadcasters are still making tons of money and that helps buffer overall media company losses.

Some day, somebody’s going to take a real close look at this cost-per-viewer thing, and it will not be pretty. But Madison Avenue loves the 30-second ad paradigm; hell, it’s a $70 billion industry! So don’t expect the research to begin there.

One of the beauties of moving into a house is you’re fair game for telemarketers of every stripe. In the last two weeks, I’ve had calls from insurance companies, security systems, plumbers, maintenance people and lawn care services. I can understand these types of people searching government databases of new home owners, but the most insidious calls have come from magazine “sweepstakes” telemarketers.

I got a call from a nice woman representing “Family Readers” who offered me free, 60-month subscriptions to three magazines such as Gentleman’s Quarterly, if I would buy a subscription for another magazine. Plus, I was automatically entered in a sweepstakes for trips, cars and other luxury items. Yippee! I decided to play along, so I selected TV Guide as the purchase subscription,

The subscription fee was $3.31 a week, a little high for TV Guide, but I accepted the deal. After all, I’d be getting all those free magazines, right?

She then handed me over to a supervisor to “verify the transaction.” This gal went through everything. She also asked for friends that I would recommend for such a deal. I said, “No, thank you.” She then asked about family members. I said, “No, thank you.” When we got through everything on her list, she then got to the fine print.

I would pay this $3.31 a week over the first 20 months of the deal. That’s $43.03 a month, or $860.60 over 20 months. Then she actually said to me, “And here’s the fun part. After that, you continue receiving your magazines ABSOLUTELY FREE!” The fun part? Yeah, right.

I scolded her, and she hung up.

I immediately went to the “Do Not Call” website and registered my new number.

Now if I could just find a good electrician…

A lot of people think I’m nuts when I say that advertising is content in Media 2.0. I usually point to examples like FlushTV, but I’m going to start directing them to my latest wonderful discovery, NXTube.com.

It’s Titleist’s hilarious “blog” by Ian MacCallister, the character played by John Cleese in the commercials. Ian is an old time golf advocate who hates the fact that Titleist NXT balls go so far, and he’s a one-man anti-distance campaigner. The site carries that theme forward, and it’s well done, including great use of our favorite, User-Generated “Content.”

Read the blog comments and watch the “live” web cam. Smart, smart, smart.

Oh and note that the time you spend there is actually all about being served advertising.

I’ve written often about this subject, because while media companies are slugging it out in attempts to carve up the web market in their favor, outside pureplay companies are sneaking in the back door to take money out of the market. Writing in Bloomberg.com, Ari Levy notes that Yahoo is launching a weekend section to help users in cities from San Francisco to New York find movies and events. The goal? Local advertising:

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp. are battling for sales in the local advertising market, where companies will almost triple their spending to $2.61 billion by 2011, according to market research firm Kelsey Group Inc. in Princeton, New Jersey. As part of the upgrade, Yahoo added new search software to make sponsored links on local pages more relevant to the queries made by users.

“It’s focusing on the people and the community and is geared to generate more active engagement from those users,” said Brian Gil, a senior product manager at Yahoo, in an interview.

Isn’t this exactly the kind of stuff that local media companies need to be doing?

Mark my words. This is the most serious threat to local media. The more we obsess over our precious content, the easier it is for outsiders to come in and steal our revenue base (while we sit by and do nothing).

PaidContent.org is the premier aggregator of news about where the money’s going in media. If media is your business, you really need to be reading PaidContent.org, because more than any other observer of trends in media, this site follows the money. The subscriber list of its newsletter is likely a who’s who of all media.

PaidContent is flagship of the ContentNext network, founded by journalist Rafat Ali in 2002. ContentNext’s news sites chronicle the economic evolution of digital content that is shaping the future of the media, information and entertainment industries. It is based in Santa Monica, California.

Prior to developing his company, Rafat was managing editor of Manhattan-based Silicon Alley Reporter,” where he covered the Internet and tech sectors.

In 2003, Editor & Publisher referred to Ali as, “journalism’s poster boy for career independence from news companies,” and CBS MarketWatch called him “a pioneer in using the Web for an almost real-time business news feed.”

I’ve known Rafat for several years. We’ve both sort of evolved together as the disruptive innovations spawned by the personal media revolution and the internet have relentlessly hammered at the business model of contemporary media. He’s one very smart cookie, and I’m proud to call him a friend. He graciously agreed to answer 10 questions via email, and I think you’ll find his answers insightful and provocative.

TERRY: How has the mission of PaidContent.org changed since you first began the site?

RAFAT: Well, there wasn’t a mission. I started the site in 2002, in the middle of the recession, as a way to raise my own profile as a journalist, an interactive resume of sorts to get a job. I wasn’t out of a job, but the Internet news media company I was at was about to close down. And now, we’re a trade media company with about 20 people…so the mission, if there was one to start with, has completely changed. Thats on a personal level.

On a coverage/focus level, the site started covering the (then) trend of online sites charging for content (hence the name “paidContent”)…at that time WSJ, Salon, TheStreet.com, NYT (for crosswords) and others started a trend. It didn’t last as the economy and online advertising made a comeback. So since then, our coverage/focus is now reporting and analyzing all the ways in which content gets paid for, whether premium or ad-supported, or any other hybrid. That’s how we’ve kept ourselves relevant.

TERRY: The very name of your company seems to suggest that content and money are forever linked. Have you ever had second thoughts about that given the commoditization of news and information that’s taken place in the last few years?

RAFAT: No, as commoditization happens, companies need to try more and different ways of monetizing their content. In all this fear and confusion, we become even more pertinent, as the premier chronicler of all the efforts happening out there, the ones working, and the ones not working. Also, the definition of what’s content, news and information has broadened, and media and news companies are taking note and trying everything. Commoditization begets innovation, or at least begs innovation.

TERRY: You’ve been following the money for a long time, Rafat. Where was it headed when you first started PaidContent.org, and where is it headed today?

RAFAT: I think the first answer touches on this…when I started, it was about getting money directly from consumers…now it more advertising driven, and in pockets where it is not yet, it will. For instance, on mobile content sites, the first wave until recently was about consumers paying for everything. Now, ads are beginning to creep in, some good and some bad, but at least moving the debate forward. The other thing that’s happening is that money is heading online, and then online, trickling down the tail. The top portals still command a huge majority, but newer and smaller sites or blogs are also getting ad revenues. The money spend will continue to get diffused, and that creates all kinds of opportunities, both for media companies to start new efforts, and also for aggregators and filters to come in and sort all this diffusion out.

TERRY: You do a very good job of keeping your opinions to a minimum, but for the next few questions, please feel free to express. You’ve been a professional observer of media trends from a unique perch. First, do you think mainstream media companies can maintain growth without diversifying?

RAFAT: No. The cost of diversifying is dropping, so the excuses for not doing anything because of prohibitive costs are gone now. Some companies consider M&A as their diversification strategy, but once you “buy” diversification and innovation, then what? If that isn’t bringing in a thread that goes across the whole company, and instead is in a “new media” ghetto on its own, that doesn’t serve the purpose. Synergy, an oft-beaten word, doesn’t just have to be a business jargon…it can be innovation and ideas as well.

TERRY: Who’s the prototypical new “media company” and why?

RAFAT: I am answering the “what”, not the “who”. Where it comes from the top. Really. A CEO who believes and understands the fundamental shift in media consumption patterns is the one who then brings in the new media ethos to the rest of the company. New media isn’t about the medium, it is about the people taking advantage and building on top of that new medium…that is why we obsess over people and executive movement within companies.

Now to the who: Five years ago you would have said CNET Networks. Now, there isn’t any definitive one…Facebook, maybe, but is too early to judge. Reuters, maybe, but with Thomson-Reuters merger, it would be a very tough integration of cultures after the merger gets approved. Some could argue some Murdoch has it all in his head, but it could all unravel if the Dow Jones buyout doesn’t go well.

TERRY: What’s the smartest move by a mainstream media company that you’ve witnessed in the last few years?

RAFAT: News Corp buying MySpace….not for that move itself, but for what it meant for the rest of the media industry, as everyone else woke up from the slumber and kick-started their own “social media” efforts. Irrespective of whether any of this will create long term business value on a company level, it will certainly raise level of efforts and debate.

TERRY: Media company investors, who want a return NOW, are different from tech company investors, who seem more willing to ride with a longer runway. What’s your view of this, and do you ever see a time when the two become one?

RAFAT: The two already are converging…media companies are opening up new media R&D labs or divisions. NYT & Co has one, Dow Jones has one, NBCU just opened one. Then the strategic venture arms of media companies are ramping up again, though one would have thought tighter integration with the main companies.

These new efforts are lower cost than anytime previously in history, but even then, they need a longer time frame. Media companies that are private have a longer leash…for public companies the scrutiny becomes too bottomline driven.

TERRY: Follow the money shifts and paint your vision for 2012 for media companies.

RAFAT: A media company is increasingly user and data driven. On one hand, consumers want more customization and data (for say a business media company). On the other hand, advertisers want more data in return for their money spend. The money will shift to the point of consumption, as it becomes more diffused. If companies can reach users where they are, manage the diffused chaos, and balance these tricky divergent issues, they will survive.

By 2012, we will see some of the news services companies survive…newspapers may not. You’ll see a lot more entrepreneurial journalism coming out from individual journalists. Smart media companies will work with them, or buy them out. There wouldn’t be separate sections for text, audio and video on websites…it would all be one stream, with multiple elements in each story.

TERRY: You write a lot about major media companies, but what about the television station in Abilene? What do you see for them?

RAFAT: If they can rise above the sweeps-journalism, maybe. Would any of the TV stations ever be able to cover the issues like say the way HBO show “The Wire” portrays urban decay and life on the street? For the local stations, it is and will always be about the issues, and driven by editorial focus. This is me as a journalist and community member speaking. On a business level, I don’t have an answer. Really, I don’t. It is tough as hell.

TERRY: What segment of the whole media industry is in for the roughest ride in the years ahead?

RAFAT: News media, and the journalists producing that news. No doubt.

The telephone has become useless for interacting with businesses. Actually, it happened a long time ago, when companies (and governments) decided they could save money (rather than serve customers) by installing ridiculous answering technologies, including those where you have to actually speak with a machine! And who programs these things anyway? Who decides what should be on what menu and that pressing zero gets you no where?

It’s especially “fun” with utility companies, who route you through an endless array of choices, each time requiring that you enter some numbers, “so I can access your account.” This would be fine, if that information was then passed from menu to menu, but it isn’t. When you (finally) get to the point where the machine actually lets you talk to a human being (term used loosely), you have to repeat the same damned information.

Then, after bouncing around for 15 minutes, you’re placed in the queue “to speak with a customer service agent,” only to be told that your wait will be 10 minutes, during which time you’re forced to listen to marketing messages (unwanted, but is there any other kind?) and the most God awful music ever licensed for public use.

And here’s what really galls me. Once you’ve successfully navigated the mine field, the guy at the other end doesn’t speak English! Well, in HIS country, they may call it English, but to me, it’s just gobbledygook.

Verizon now has immediate online chat, which I’m convinced is the way we’ll all be dealing with businesses in the future. The telephone is terribly convenient, but only if both sides think it’s so. Because if the one end of the line considers it a nuisance, it’s that way for everybody.

Online chat’s also better, because it’s easier to understand misspelled words than those mispronounced.

So put a fork in telephones; they’re done! One day, our museums will show phones to be an archaic way that consumers and businesses used to speak with each other. The sign will say, “The Telephone: A 20th Century communications mechanism designed to connect people with each other and the institutions that served them. Rendered irrelevant as a business tool in the early 21st Century, because the cost of speaking with customers outweighed the need.”

I really like what Gannett is doing with its online properties in the launch of 100 mobile sites. I especially like the identifier “m” used in front of the domain name as a way of finding the sites. It’s such a good idea that I hope others pick it up.

Basically, they’re creating subdomains using the letter “m” as a way of linking into content that’s been streamlined for mobile use. For example, USATODAY’s mobile URL is http://m.usatoday.com. How simple is that? I tried it, and it delivers as advertised.

The mobile web needs some form of standardization, and I think this is a good first step. Kudos to Gannett.

Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. This piece examines the aspects of commoditization impacting all forms of media in the current marketplace. This is especially significant as it relates to news, for the economics of the market are quickly reducing its value to near zero. If you want to know why you’re having trouble growing your market share, it might be because news is being commodified.

The web is having this effect, and it’s a straight line from here-to-there on the road to news as a commodity.

This, of course, has pretty significant ramifications for those of us in the old media — that is to say the Media 1.0 — world. Media 1.0 isn’t going away any time soon, but it’s already gone as a vehicle for growth, and the sooner we accept that, the better. Mature businesses, especially those with shrinking profit margins, need to look elsewhere, and that’s why we’re so adamant about diversifying along a dual path strategy.

News as a Commodity.

Personal note: It’s been over a month since I last published one of these, and I’m sorry about that. I have so much to write these days that it’s getting harder and harder to keep this series going. We do plan to publish the series in a book soon.

The job market for graduating journalism and communications graduates has stalled, according to the latest Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates conducted by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

Graduates of U.S. journalism and mass communication programs confronted a weakened job market in 2006 and early 2007, as the recovery that began only two years earlier stalled. Graduates were no more likely to have a job offer when they finished their studies than graduates a year earlier and no more likely to have landed a full-time job by the end of October–approximately five months after leaving the university. Salaries for graduates with full-time jobs did increase and even managed to outpace inflation just slightly. Benefits, however, showed a marked decline.

Benefits are down, because half of those who got jobs are working less than 40-hours a week, a reflection of, among other things, the need of media companies to keep costs down. Another portion of the study is worth noting here:

Graduates find themselves in jobs where work involving the web is a quite prominent part of the routine. Graduates use the web to obtain materials for the various types of reports they produce. And they use the web to distribute the materials they produce. The field has become more web centered in recent years, and it will almost certainly become even more so in the future.

This is in sharp contrast to a report in Inside Higher Ed stating that “journalism education is lagging behind industry in embracing the new media technologies that students will need to be competitive in the work place.”

My advice to college students always is to “go forth and make media.” Get in the game and see what happens. Don’t give up on that “real” job (I hate that concept), but use your time to build your portfolio by participating in the net revolution.

Somebody has decided that we need to stop referring to media forms as radio, television and newspapers. They are now audio, video and text. I feel like I did when my daughter informed me that “cool” wasn’t “cool” anymore and that the proper term was “fly.” Fly?

Joe Mandese at Media Daily News writes today that one media shop is now officially calling radio “audio.”

MediaVest has adopted the position that terrestrial broadcast radio should no longer be looked at as a discrete medium in communications plans, but as part of a greater array of audio media–including satellite, online, mobile and a variety of personal media device technologies, such as iPods, other MP3 players, and even television, which increasingly is being used as an audio-only medium.

But there’s more. Joe goes on to tell us about a growing industry shift away from defining media based on their distribution platforms and toward understanding how consumers interact with the essential nature of their content and formats.

That argument is at the heart of “StrADegy: Advertising In The Digital Age,” authored by TNS Media Intelligence President-CEO Steven Fredericks. In it, he argues that in the future, “Content is defined not by its old media name, but by its core property: text, video and audio. All content, clarified and freed, can be distributed via any converged technology.”

The web is what’s doing this, folks, and this notion ought to send a collective chill down the spine of anybody in an incumbent media business. Video bloggers, for example, don’t do “television,” but they sure as heck do “video.” Same “nature of content.” Same level in the this new-speak language.

This doesn’t change the professional/amateur distinction, but it further blurs the line. Yikes!