Every time I read an article in one of the trades that refers to the need for a “sustainable ecosystem” for advertising online, I shake my head and say, “Who says there will ever be one?”

What the phrase really means is “when will the Web sit still long enough for us to create a lasting system that we can exploit?”

At what point do these folks begin to realize that the people formerly known as the audience really ARE in charge?

No ecosystem is going to save anybody; it’s all about hard work.

The group of hackers known as Anonymous may have been behind a series of whirling and blinking applications inserted into a popular discussion board run by the non-profit Epilepsy Foundation last weekend, which caused multiple seizures and other uncomfortable symptoms for users. Wired spoke with victims:

RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.

Fultz says she “locked up.”

“I don’t fall over and convulse, but it hurts,” says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d’Alene, Ohio. “I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn’t move and couldn’t speak.”

The Wired article points a circumstantial finger at Anonymous, whose most recent claim to fame has been an attack against the Church of Scientology. As much as I detest what’s happened here, this just doesn’t seem to carry the mark of Anonymous, and if it turns out that the group truly is responsible, we may see the Feds step in. I mean, why deliberately hurt epileptics?

There may be a fine line between pranks and terrorism, but this one isn’t even close. What’s wrong with us anyway?

In a move that frankly surprises me, Amazon is slowly pulling the plug on the Print On Demand (POD) publishing world by forcing such publishers to have their books printed exclusively by BookSurge, its own printing division. Amazon is informing POD publishers that their “buy” buttons — that which enables people to buy books through Amazon — are being turned off, and reports are flooding behind-the-scenes blogs that this is exactly what’s happening.

I know this, because I’ve just published a POD book through Lightning Source, the same company I used to publish my three Palmer’s Meadow novels. It’s unclear if people will be able to buy the book via Amazon, if we don’t switch our printing from Lightning Source to BookSurge. Lightning Source has had a long relationship with Amazon, even shipping books in Amazon boxes with Amazon’s return address on them.

Many of the people leaving comments on various blogs are shocked by this and question whether top management at Amazon even is aware of what’s happening, because it is so contrary to past business practices of the company.

This is nothing less than extortion, it seems to me, and in addition to the coming public relations backlash, Amazon may be in for legal troubles on this as well. Thousands of small, independent publishers make a living off technology that allows books to be printed one-at-a-time, and Lightning Source has long been considered the leader. A division of Ingram, one of the largest book printers in the world, Lightning Source has a reputation for competitive pricing and extremely high quality. According to what I’m reading in these blogs, the same cannot be said for BookSurge.

There has been no official word from Amazon so far, fueling speculation and raising eyebrows throughout the POD industry.

Stay tuned.

Wall St. Journal report
Writers Weekly
Writers Beware

As we drift farther downstream into the postmodern era, the battle between the elite institutions of modernism and the culture will intensify. The culture is on the offensive, forcing the establishment to defend itself, and that is already underway. On the modernist side, the war will be fought by the keepers of the status quo — the lawyers of the land. On the culture’s side will be technology and the participatory nature that it brings with it.

The defenders know this and will do everything they can to prevent it, trying to use the courts and the legal system in attempts to rope the wild stallion and return it to their barn.

In the last few days, a plan that can only be described as sinister from our friends in the recording industry is being exposed. The idea is right out of the Sopranos — use the threat of lawsuits to force ISPs into “taxing” every user $5 to download music via the Internet. TechCrunch is on top of the story.

The tax will not, in fact, be mandatory. But that is misleading - it won’t be mandatory for ISPs who provide Internet access to actual users. But if ISPs join the scheme, it will apply to all of their customers and be added to their bill as a surcharge.

Why will ISP’s agree to this? Mainly to avoid liability. The core of the plan is a covenant not to sue anyone who pays the fee. (industry insider Jim) Griffin touched on this in the article, saying ISPs will want to “discharge their risk” around file sharing that occurs over their networks.

The rollout plan will hit colleges and universities first, who will simply add the fee to tuition bills so they won’t have to worry about getting dragged into lawsuits. Then Griffin will approach consumer ISPs. If an ISP joins, their users will not have the option of not paying, even if they don’t download music from the Internet. So, basically, the tax is only voluntary if you define avoiding it as not going to college, or using the Internet.

TechCrunch calls it “government endorsed extortion, nothing more and nothing less,” and I couldn’t agree more. While the record companies would find relief from such a plan, imagine what it would do to stifle innovation and creativity.

Meanwhile, the RIAA is lobbying Congress hard to explore the idea of universities “filtering” their networks to stop allegedly illegal downloading. What would you do, if you ran a big school, install filtering applications or simply pass along the $5 “tax” to students. No brainer.

But other battles waging — in the form of lawsuits — in the fight by institutional modernism to reclaim territory it feels belongs to them. To see these suits for what they are, we must examine one of the core philosophies of the modern culture — that everything is cause and effect and, therefore, there’s always somebody to blame (usually the one with the deepest pockets) when something goes wrong. We will never have tort reform in this country as long as the people creating the laws (read: Congress) is made up of trial lawyers, who exploit this blame game to serve themselves, but I digress. As long as “the law” is god in the culture (as it is with the modernist belief), there will always be lawyers ready to take on any cause in the name of blame.

The reason this is on my mind is the strange case in Jacksonville, Oregon, involving Robert Salisbury and Craigslist. Somebody — either maliciously or on a lark — posted ads on Craigslist saying that Salisbury had to leave town suddenly and that everything at his home was free for the taking, even his horse.

As Salisbury was driving home, he noticed truck after truck going the other direction carrying his stuff. All his possessions were gone, and while authorities were able to get some things back, the question remains as to who did this to him.

The case is identical to one earlier from Tacoma, and it’s got people asking questions about, you guessed it, liability. After all, these people were wronged, and victims in our culture are entitled to compensation for their losses, right? So speculation is aimed at Craigslist. They ran the ad. This wouldn’t have happened without them. Hence, it’s their fault.

Along comes Michael Arrington from TechCrunch to make a remarkable statement: Craigslist Is Our Mirror, Nothing Better (Or Worse).

Could a litigiously minded individual find a winning argument to get Craigslist to pay for the damages? Perhaps…And there are certainly plenty to lawyers who’d consider taking the case on contingency, hoping for a quick settlement/shake down to keep PR exposure over this to a minimum.

But what I really think is that Craigslist is just a mirror, and we have to take the good with the bad. Countless connections and transactions are made on the site, and the vast majority are of benefit to everyone involved.

Sure, mainstream press feasts on the occasional accident scene, making it seem like the site is a den of predators waiting to strike at anyone who drops by. Craigslist has it all - Sex, drugs, humiliation and more.

But for the most part Craigslist is just a really good place to find a job, or a boyfriend, or buy cheap furniture for your dorm room. The situation today is simply an exception that proves what an important place Craigslist has taken in our culture. I feel bad for Mr. Salisbury and I hope he gets all his stuff back (especially his horse). But pointing the finger of accusation at Craigslist for what happened is not what should happen next.

Arrington is making a postmodern argument that is foreign to the concept of blame assessment, and I fully support it. Others have come to Craigslist’s defense in this matter, saying that if the company was a profit-hungry corporation, they might deserve a lawsuit, but that Craigslist is more public service than profit-motivated, and thus, shouldn’t be touched.

I don’t like this argument, because I think we’ve gone way overboard in the culture and that any company functioning as a conduit for the actions of people — profit-driven or not — ought to be protected from the shenanigans of the few. We’re a society that supposedly believes in personal responsibility, but every day, I see evidence that this is not so. This is why we have section 230 of the CDA, which classifies such web applications as “common carriers,” similar to telephone companies. You can’t sue the phone company if somebody plans a terrorist attack over the phone, and you shouldn’t be able to sue Craigslist — or anybody else — if bad people do bad things online either.

But somebody will sue Craigslist; I’m convinced of that, and then we’ll see how strongly we feel about such protection.

And there’s one other matter here that must not be overlooked. Media companies who cover this issue must tread very, very carefully, especially the newspaper business, for Craigslist gets the blame (there’s that word again) for the financial woes of the industry.

I’m just sayin’…

Cabel Sasser is a world class tech whiz who co-founded Panic (a software company specializing in shareware applications for Macs) and travels frequently between the states and their offices in Japan. On his last trip, Cabel noticed something new on the advertising placards on board the various trains in the country. He took pictures of the signs and posted them on his blog.

Instead of company URLs, the ads all show search boxes with recommended search terms.

It makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone. Getting people to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who’s going to write down anything after the first slash?). And, most tellingly, I see increasingly more users already inadvertently put complete domain names like “gmail” and “netflix” into the Search box of their browsers out of habit — and it doesn’t even register that Google pops up and they have to click to get to their destination.

I always advise media companies to use keywords to drive people to various sections within their sites. It’s just easier on-the-air, for example, to say “enter keyword ‘cows’” than to give people the path to the page or, worse yet, tell them to go to a “as seen on 2″ page. AOL and CompuServe created the keyword frenzy, and basically everybody knows what they are.

Clearly, advertisers in Japan see the value of using them to bring people in through the search engines, and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t begin to happen here. I recall seeing Pontiac ads that encouraged people to Google the word “Pontiac,” but that has been the exception.

Market share should drive local television station online revenue efforts, not budget goals or growth. That’s one of the key findings in a new television benchmarking study from Borrell Associates released this week at the annual Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) conference in New York. While local stations have gained market share in the past year, that share still pales in comparison to local newspapers, which have been at the game longer and more seriously than TV stations.

Local online ad spending is projected to increase by 40-50% in the next year, so even a station that grows its local revenue by 35% will be losing ground in terms of market share. Of course, the big gainers in local online revenue are the outside-the-market internet pureplay companies like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL.

This strategic approach to attacking the existing ad marketplace is foreign to television stations who are used to competing only with each other over the airwaves. That sense of competition is carried into the online world, and it is one of the things that is keeping stations from reaching their online potential. Online, it’s not about WWWW-TV versus KKKK-TV, for that “market” is an illusion. The real market is vastly bigger and includes many, many other players, so when station managers compare their revenue only against what the other stations in the market are doing (and even the newspaper), they commit a form of self-delusional business suicide.

Total online ad revenues for local TV stations this year are projected to be $1.1 billion, according to Borrell Associates CEO Gordon Borrell. That’s a 45% increase over the $770 million last year.

Another key recommendation for broadcasters is to adopt a niche mentality for the Web.

Some 90 percent of the respondents to our survey say that at least two-thirds of their TV Web inventory remains unsold. That’s likely because the “mass” appeal of news, weather and sports pages aren’t as attractive to advertisers as pages that contain content specific to their business (think health care, real estate, and automotive content), or to their customer base (think young adults, women, or suburban communities).

One of the most striking differences between this benchmarking study and the one Borrell has done for newspapers is the complete lack of stations who perform in what Borrell calls “the green zone,” those local media companies who have a market share of 28% or higher. This demonstrates how far behind local stations are in their competition with their print counterparts for local online revenues. All broadcasters need to study this green zone approach, for these companies approach selling the Web very differently than traditional media account executives.

Green zone performers have dedicated online sales people, work with non-traditional clients, have an amazing thirst for data, use a consultative sales strategy, can’t get enough training and set much higher rates.

The salespeople at these sites seem to understand that this is an early-stage medium, so you can’t just go out and plop a proposal down on someone’s desk and expect them to understand what they’re getting. They look for data — loads of it, on traffic, Internet usage, the rate of online ad spending by the type of advertiser they’re approaching — anything that will help the advertiser understand what’s happening with the Internet and how they might take advantage of it. And of course the consultation — they ask the advertiser questions before blurting out what they have to sell him or assuming they want a massive broadcast and online reach. They do not.

Television stations with at least one online-only salesperson achieve an average of 26 percent more online revenue than their counterparts who rely solely on broadcast salespeople to sell the Internet.

Every day we’re reading stories of company after company laying off people and tightening belts, because business for local media companies is going south. The remarkable thing about this, to me, is that this is an Olympics and election year, the kind that normally produces significant revenue growth for stations. Unless local stations do something with the only market that’s actually growing (online), it’s hard to rationalize how they will survive 2009.

Gordon Borrell understands this like few others, and we need to pay attention to what he says.

I know this isn’t really new, but it’s the kind of local media killer that keeps me up at night. Follow the money, folks.

Speaking of local search, have you noticed the Yellow Pages ad campaign? “We wrote the book on local search” is a clever tag line, and one that follows basic Reis & Trout marketing. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, because while they may have written the book, Google owns online. The difference is that the Yellow Pages folks have feet-on-the-street.

Stay tuned.

A noteworthy piece in the New York Times by Brian Stelter outlines beautifully a postmodern perspective on “the news” and brings a little clarity to the matter of how young people stay informed. It will give modernist, top-down professional news people heartburn.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

“There are lots of times where I’ll read an interesting story online and send the U.R.L. to 10 friends,” said Lauren Wolfe, 25, the president of College Democrats of America. “I’d rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story.”

While Stelter’s article deals with political information, I would argue that this is taking place across all information niches, because in a postmodern, postcolonial culture, trust is with one’s tribe, not institutional expertise. So why shouldn’t we expect Bill to email his friends when he finds something of interest? It’s word-of-mouth gone-to-seed.

Young people also identify online discussions with friends and videos as important sources of election information. The habits suggest that younger readers find themselves going straight to the source, bypassing the context and analysis that seasoned journalists provide.

Stelter quotes Jane Buckingham of the market research company Intelligence Group recalling a student in a focus group who said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

This is a great mantra for the traditional news industry to adopt, because it flips the news mission from putting the word out via “distribution” channels to the active pursuit of “finding” people like the student referenced above. You can’t “find” anybody by insisting them come to you. Old meet new.

(Thanks, Jeff)

The amount of money advertisers are spending on their own web applications has skyrocketed in the past year, offering a chilling clue as to where the disruptive nature of the Internet is taking media companies next. According to new data obtained from Borrell Associates, advertiser spending in the “online marketing and promotions” category jumped 130% between 2006 and 2007 to an estimated $8 billion nationwide. That’s money that advertisers would likely have spent on conventional advertising before the Web.

“The meteoric rise of promotional spending on the Internet is changing the face of advertising ’sales’ as we know it,” Borrell Associates CEO Gordon Borrell told me in an email. “Media companies are having to become far more creative and consultative, acting a lot like agencies, to help local businesses attain their marketing and sales goals. They can’t get away with just taking orders anymore.”

Some of the specific categories within the whole show growth that can only be described as incredible. Every category in the medical profession, for example, is far above the average. Doctors, up 160%. Other medical professionals, up 236%. Pharmacies, up 245%. Hospitals, up 150%. Other medical facilities, up 225%.

Political organizations have increased spending in this category a remarkable 1,021%. I’m sure television will still reap a windfall in political ad dollars, but this is an area that ought to concern everybody.

It’s important, again, to understand that this is brand new in our world. Never before have businesses been able to, in essence, become their own media companies, and that’s clearly what’s happening.

“The Internet,” said Borrell, “is far more utilitarian than, say, newspaper advertising or TV advertising. And it’s phenomenally measurable. So when Oil of Olay wants to spread the word about a new wrinkle lotion, instead of a mass-mailing of free samples and coupons, it can place an Internet campaign that collects names and addresses of people who actually want the free sample — and continue marketing to them.”

Promotional opportunities for (former) advertisers are something media companies have been slow to understand. In today’s world, it’s often far more important to help businesses with their web strategies than it is to simply provide brand message opportunities. Advertisers are willing to spend money without actually running ads, as long as the opportunity to obtain data is there. It’s why Borrell’s “green zone” performers (those who get 28%+ market share of online ad revenue) all use a consultative sales strategy in working with clients. This whole game is increasingly about their needs, not ours.

If you follow the money in this strange new world, it’ll lead you down paths you don’t expect, and if you pay attention along the way, it’ll also open doors to new opportunities. The ad-supported content revenue model is slipping slowly into the past, but if we’re smart, we’ll see that all of these new websites and web applications that the people formerly known as the advertisers are making offer a significant revenue growth opportunity for the company that can tie them all together.

This is why one of our top recommendations is the creation of a local ad network for media companies, regardless of where local advertisers are in their level of web sophistication. The trend noted in the Borrell data is unmistakable and will impact every business downstream. In my book, the smart local media company will do whatever it can to accelerate the trend in its market.

(Originally published in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel)

(UPDATE: This report in yesterday’s Online Media Daily about American Airlines’ Facebook widget is a textbook example of the above.)

They said it couldn’t be done, but I’ve gone and done it, LOL — written the ultimate New Media book: Reinventing Local Media, Ideas for Thriving in a Postmodern World, thus joining the world of published non-fiction authors. AR&D is publishing the first go-round of the book, although we’ll be seeking a contract with a major publisher in the weeks ahead.

This book is a compilation of the essays I’ve written over the past five years, a time of epochal change in the world of communications. It’s over 500 pages long and fully indexed, and it’s my hope that it will be used as course material in colleges and universities everywhere.

The book will be available via Amazon and other online distributors within a month, and we’re going to try and make copies available at NAB next month in Vegas. The price is $24.95.

I’ll have copies next week that I’d be happy to autograph and sell to readers of my blog. It’ll take a couple of weeks to process everything, but feel free to drop me a note with a check to AR&D for $30 (to cover shipping and handling), and I’ll personally take care of the rest. Send it to:

Terry Heaton
Audience Research & Development
1913 Redwood Trail
Grapevine, TX 76051

Of course, anybody’s work in this field is really an aggregation of the thinking of many. I’ve written before about The Unbroken Web, and I certainly feel I’ve been touching it throughout the process of writing this ongoing series of essays. The Unbroken Web is a place where many thoughts mingle, and it would be arrogant to assume that the ideas expressed there belong to any one individual, self included.

So I am honored to be a part of something so big, and to make this book available to you.

Eric Alterman has written an excellent piece for The New Yorker that gives me a chance to remind people of the core of my philosophy: that the real disruption that’s taking place in our world today is the empowerment of people through technology. This is so profound that it will impact every institution of “modern” humankind, and first up is how we communicate with each other, a.k.a. “the media.”

Called “Out of Print, The death and life of the American newspaper,” Alterman brilliantly goes back to the source of “professional” journalism and the social engineering of my old pal, Walter Lippmann. Here’s a sample:

Lippmann likened the average American—or “outsider,” as he tellingly named him—to a “deaf spectator in the back row” at a sporting event: “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen,” and “he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.”

…Lippmann’s preferred solution was, in essence, to junk democracy entirely. He justified this by arguing that the results were what mattered. Even “if there were a prospect” that people could become sufficiently well-informed to govern themselves wisely, he wrote, “it is extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered.”

…in one of the oddest formulations of his long career, Lippmann proposed the creation of “intelligence bureaus,” which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge the government’s actions without concerning themselves much with democratic preferences or public debate. Just what, if any, role the public would play in this process Lippmann never explained.

Alterman brings into play John Dewey, who made it his calling to “debate” Lippmann’s positions. Dewey would love today’s blogosphere.

Dewey did not dispute Lippmann’s contention regarding journalism’s flaws or the public’s vulnerability to manipulation. But Dewey thought that Lippmann’s cure was worse than the disease. While Lippmann viewed public opinion as little more than the sum of the views of each individual, much like a poll, Dewey saw it more like a focus group. The foundation of democracy to Dewey was less information than conversation.

…Dewey also criticized Lippmann’s trust in knowledge-based élites. “A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge,” he argued. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”

As I have been writing for years, Lippmann is the “father of professional journalism,” and the apple never falls very far from the tree. And so we’ve had decades of an elitist press getting all comfy with the power brokers of the culture — in fact, becoming the NEW power brokers — and it is against this that the people of the culture are objecting.

I mean who wants to be treated like a herd of dumb cattle, a la Lippmann? And worse, Lippmann’s elite gets its status, in part, from money earned by the relentless carpet bombing of the herd with unwanted ad messages. Does anybody really have a problem understanding the revolt? This is the energy that drives J. D. Lasica’s “personal media revolution.”

Contemporary journalism MUST honestly deal with this issue or face certain extinction.

So Dow Jones is leaving the Associated Press. This is a very big deal, folks, and I think it’s fair to examine the assumption of the “co-op’s” value proposition in light of disruptive technologies. While the AP began as a cooperative, it has evolved over the years to that of a monopoly, and one that can exercise complete control over pricing. You want the “service,” you pay for it, whether you can afford it or not. This is reflected in AP Chief Revenue Officer Tom Brettingen’s reaction to the Dow Jones decision.

“We did not believe we were being adequately compensated for the use of our content on DJ Newswires,” Brettingen said in a statement. “We weren’t able to resolve that with DJ, so we’re going our separate ways.”

I love it. “Our” content. If the AP paid members for that content, it would be easier to justify such a statement. That’s not the case, however. AP members contribute the content and then pay stiff fees to get in on the aggregation of everybody else’s. Regardless of the shade of your rose-colored glasses, the reality is that it is very much a one-way street.

So the question for media companies is whether the service is really necessary anymore. DJ has decided to go with the French news service Agence France-Presse, but the bigger issue remains — what will the AP do when “members” begin searching out a less-expensive, less dictatorial system?

A wire service is a middle man in the news business, assembling items from members and passing various feeds back to those members. This is the spirit of a cooperative, but there are two problems with this for the group. One, the Internet makes assembling items into a feed ridiculously easy, so the cooperative simply can’t make the case that costs keep escalating. Two, newspapers are especially well-position to go their own way, because they’ve been working together with the Yahoo! consortium and other cooperatives for many months in an attempt to shift their business model to one that’s more web-centric.

The AP has recognized that shift, but rather than use its resources to help the industry, it’s used the occasion to charge more for “different” uses of the same material.

Believe me, it isn’t cheap to be an AP “member,” and at a time of industry-wide expense reduction, one wonders how long that money can be justified. And anytime the AP decides to create a new feed from its content pool — niches, for example — the price goes way up, period. The AP argues that it’s cheaper to pay them than to organize such content for yourself, but that value proposition is, frankly, on-the-table.

Meanwhile, the AP continues to go where the dollars are. They just hired 21 new staffers to bolster their entertainment news offerings, knowing that media companies covet this content. That feed, I promise you, will cost plenty. The problem in this niche, for the AP, is that the existing sources of entertainment news don’t give a rip about being a part of the cooperative, so the AP has to have its own staff to keep up.

And that reflects the real problem for the AP overall: sources of news content aren’t scarce anymore, and machines — like Google News — are taking the place of editors required to assemble all that content and spit it out.

Like everything else in the world of media, the nature of the wire service is being disrupted by technology. Just because the world of journalism once required wire services to organize and distribute news from faraway lands doesn’t necessarily mean that it does today.

Moreover, the real battle that media companies face is local, and with consumers able to tap other sources for regional, national and global news, the value of that content to local media companies is declining rapidly.

These are tough times that call for asking hard questions.

Dow Jones is just the beginning.

Wayne Friedman writes for MediaPost that NBC’s Jeff Zucker is thinking that the number of hours produced by the network for the network might be going down. NBC hands affiliates 22 hours of prime time, while Fox offers only 15 (guess which network is tops?). Zucker thinks that fewer hours may give Fox an advantage.

But Friedman finds a fly in the ointment.

If NBC gives up any program time, it won’t exactly be good news for TV stations. Sure they’ll get to program what they want and keep all the advertising time. But the increasing downside is that programming will be even more expensive to produce and market.

Perhaps stations and syndicators should try and resurrect the 1990s one-hour weekly drama business of a few years ago, with a slew of new “Baywatch”s, “Star Trek”s, and “Xenia: Warrior Princess”s.

Many stations might also convince themselves that an extra-early evening hour — attached to their already lucrative 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. time slot (6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Central Time) — could be built for all-family TV shows. TV pressure groups have complained the networks have abandoned the early evening, so-called family hour. Still, convincing advertisers is another story.

I actually think such a move could be a windfall for local stations, depending on how they approached it. Local stations must continue to develop local programming, ‘lest they find themselves out in the cold when digital distribution makes them irrelevant for network-level scripted programs. An hour a day could help begin moving us in that direction.

Sarah Perez has a great post over at Read Write Web that is a must-read for the serious student of New Media. Called “The Conversation Has Left The Blogosphere,” it takes a serious look at how new applications are making it possible for people to discuss issues, ideas and memes taken up by bloggers away from the blogs themselves. Oh no! You mean the original conversation lifters are having their conversations lifted? What’s the world coming to?

The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself.

It is ironic, to say the least, that the blogosphere — the place where stories were lifted from the mainstream press for “discussion” — is now faced with the same issue that mainstreamers have been fighting for years.

Sarah’s post offers tips on how to keep up with all the dismantling, but it doesn’t offer solutions for ways to prevent it from happening. That’s because bloggers can’t stop it any more than the mainstream press could or can. We live in a world of unbundled media. Deal with it.

This will be interesting to watch.

So I got home last night and my cable wasn’t working. Not to worry; there’s always hulu.com.

I watched a couple of episodes of House and then searched for an episode of Law & Order, SVU that my daughter had recommended.

Imagine my surprise to discover that only “clips” are available from the Law & Order franchise — no full episodes.

So now I know that hulu isn’t what it could or perhaps “should” be, and I’m altering my view of its potential for success. If Fox can satisfy me with House, why can’t NBC do likewise with L&O? I’m sure they have their reasons — perhaps even legal — but it undermines the value proposition of the site and casts doubt on how serious NBCU is about it. You can’t pretend to provide a portal for professionally-produced information and entertainment programming and then withhold the best that you’ve got.

It would be like Disney deciding they wouldn’t provide any coverage of football on ESPN.

Sorry, folks, but in this case, it’s all or nothing.

Although late to the game, many anchors at television stations are beginning to blog. While each has its own flavor, most are of the “behind-the-scenes” genre. Some anchors “get it” more than others and use the Web to build a personal brand in the market.

I try to encourage anchors to just be themselves, and nobody I’ve encountered does that better than Sherri Talley of our client in Shreveport, KTBS-TV.

Sherri is loved and respected in the market; there’s no doubt about that. But the “real” Sherri is something far beyond what people see on TV, and her blog reflects that. Not only is Sherri involved in life to a degree beyond most, but she’s one of the funniest, wittiest people on the planet, and that’s front-and-center in her blog.

“I like this on so many levels,” she told me. “First, it’s a creative extension of myself. As much as there is still out there for me to learn about blogging, there’s also room for me to invent/create along the way.”

She says there’s a real similarity to anchoring and blogging, because they’re both very intimate. “I talk on the air as if I’m speaking to one person and do the same when I’m blogging,” she said. “That way I’m not announcing to an audience nor blogging for masses, but just having a conversation…ha…one where I hope someone responds.”

A while back, she found an old oil painting from the mid 20th Century of two babies. The thing is pretty ugly, because back then, painters would “touch up” photographs to make the babies look more adult. She bought the picture and made a cut-out copy of the two babies. She’s named them “Hazel and Jimmy” and they play a role in her blog, often showing up in the background of photos. She makes no reference to them other than in the cut line of her blog: “sherritalley.com, it’s good enough for Hazel & Jimmy.” Readers are in on the joke, and it gives the blog an automatic edge, for people are always waiting for the next reference to the two babies.

Sherri is unique in that she has an inherent self-effacing ability to see the humor in what she does and to take people behind-the-scenes in colorful and compelling ways. Readers are fully engaged, and most entries include a regular group of commenters, which gives the site a community feel. Sherri’s not trying to “be” anybody other than herself.

“I actually almost resigned several months ago to take a marketing job,” she told me “because I didn’t see much of a future in the direction of television anchoring and reporting in the traditional sense. When I realized our station had such a progressive approach to internet development, I asked to get involved. Now, I’m more passionate about my work. I feel more engaged than ever with viewers.”

Sherri’s blogging and her insatiable thirst for knowledge have elevated her status with the web team at the station, and she now plays a leadership role in newsroom online efforts.

Her advice to other bloggers, especially anchors? Be positive, invest yourself and have fun. “Some bloggers get frustrated because they can’t think of a topic. Just like everyone and every situation has a story, there’s always a topic.”

So do yourself a favor and drop by her site. Read the entries and the comments, and I think you’ll agree that if it’s good enough for Hazel & Jimmy, it might just be good enough for you.

Here is the latest essay in my ongoing series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World. “It’s Always About the Money” takes another hard look at how trends in advertising and personal media are working around traditional media offerings to choke the money spigot and threaten the business that is mainstream media in our culture. It’s our own fault, because we cannot bring ourselves to actually compete in an arena with which we are unfamiliar.

Google’s announcement last week of a free ad manager for web publishers is just the latest evidence that the drain of ad revenues from local markets will continue to flow to outside pureplay companies. Data from Borrell Associates clearly demonstrates what’s happening, but local media companies are doing nothing to stop it. The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s fifth annual State of the News Media report is due to be released Monday, and it reportedly shows that despite huge growth in audience for legacy media offerings, advertisers aren’t following yet. This essay will help you understand why.

Young Broadcasting’s WRKN-TV in Nashville has terminated Adam Kleinheider, effectively ending a remarkably successful experiment in blog aggregation, VolunteerVoters.com — lovingly known in Tennessee political circles as v-squared. I’m sure nobody is happy about this, and it should rightly be viewed as a victim of what’s happening to mainstream media companies, and not about the quality of the political aggregator. It is, in my opinion, the type of site that local media companies need to be running for a whole lot of reasons.

As one commenter to Adam’s last post wrote, “If a mainstream news organization can’t sustain an objective political dialogue online, then I fear the horizon holds nothing good.” The site got respectable traffic numbers, but beyond the reach, it served a valuable function in the political journalism firmament in the state of Tennessee. I doubt the vacuum will exist for long.

Broadcasting & Cable reports on the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s fifth annual State of the News Media report due out tomorrow and quotes one of the conclusions:

News consumption has become continual, with news morphing from a “finished” product — a newspaper, a newscast, even a Web site — to a service that helps consumers “find what they are looking for [and] react to it.”

Please refer to News is a Process, Not a Finished Product by yours truly, published last fall.

I’ll bet I don’t get quoted in the report.

The simple model of Continuous News will eventually replace much of what local and national media companies produce online and not just because it makes sense for journalism. We can make more money this way, and it’s been on my mind a lot lately.

As I’ve previously written, it’s the era of “finished product” news that’s drawing to a close, those packaged models of information designed to appeal to a mass audience. Today, the demand is for now, raw and even unedited up to a point.

With Continuous News comes the reality that there is no such thing as a page view online. This is an archaic term that serves no one, especially publishers and advertising wishing to use the Web to do business. Continuous News elevates the scroll bar over the page view, because the cost of interaction is lower, and the scroll bar suits the blog software necessary to do the model justice. And in so doing, it reveals many things about advertising and browsers that ought to get the attention of Madison Avenue downstream.

So I’m going to call it “browser views” as opposed to page views, but a browser view doesn’t encompass everything on a page. That’s because the “page” is very long and can occupy many display ads along the side rail. If they are positioned so that only one appears with content for reading to the left, the advertiser’s wish of being the only ad adjacent to content is fulfilled. That moment, when in the scrolling process, there is content to the left and one ad to the right is what I’m calling a “browser view.”

I also want to state that the value of that ad is determined not by the eyeballs that view it at that moment, although advertisers would love to devalue the experience by looking at it that way. Its value should be determined by the daypart in which the ad is served, with the noon hour going for the highest rates.

We’re way off base in determining online ad values, and this is part our fault and part the fault of the advertising industry, which can’t seem to view anything other than through old eyes.

A television commercial, for example, is viewed in a pod of other ads. Those pods are getting longer, and the individual ads fight for attention with other ads, regardless of their position in the pod. The same is true with display ads in newspapers or magazines. Every ad competes with other ads and marketing clutter. It’s what we do.

But the Web offers a different experience, one that’s clean and simple, if we’d only design our sites according to the scroll bar instead of the clicking on pages. We’re giving away the store otherwise.

While we’re at it, what is the value of a news and information site? How is it determined? Assuming it makes money, why don’t we take the total amount of revenue and divide it by users to determine a price-per-user, or divide it by the minutes of the day to determine price-per-minute? These values become negotiable in terms of setting rates, not locking rates based on individual metrics and hoping to increase them to grow revenue. The goal should be to raise the price-per-minute or the price-per-user, not demand more, more, more content to grow the page view model.

And let’s remember that in a simple Continuous News environment, the likelihood of engagement — that attracting of real attention — is much, much higher than it is with a banner among other blinking and twirling items. If we create value for advertisers and price it accordingly, all this business about trying to find the right metrics becomes moot.

Approaching advertisers this way will be met with resistance, because “that’s not the way we do it.” But we must stick to our guns here, because eventually we’ll win out. It’s not only good for publishers, but it’s good for advertisers as well. Somebody has to break the mold. Who will be first?