If you want to know what I mean by a local media company doing “continuous news” (see: News is a Process, Not a Finished Product), give a lookie-loo to the KTBS-TV website. It helps that a hurricane is bearing down on the coast, but the formula works with or without breaking news.

From a statistics perspective, the can site is measured in terms of simultaneous active sessions (think “ratings”) with ads sold by daypart. I predict you’ll see this in many other places as the months and years go by. The RSS feed is also quite useful and, therefore, valuable.

KTBS is a client of mine, so naturally, I’m proud of them.

If you’re not, you should be.

Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst for Forrester Research and one of the smartest web guys around, has a provocative post on his blog about the honing of one’s personal brand. I’ve been thinking a lot about this myself, because I see the struggle between anchors and reporters who blog and the companies they represent. The media companies want their brands reflected in the work of “their” employees, but it may be smarter for these people to be allowed to develop their own.

Let’s face it; the day is coming when independent journalists will offer their goods and services to media companies, instead of the companies actually employing them. This is already happening on a small scale, but I expect it will increase as fiscal pressures squeeze the life out of media companies. Hard-working independent contractors can make good money, and it will cost media companies less to purchase their work.

And so my advice to journalists is to develop your own brands, and Jeremiah’s entry gives lots of good advice. Here’s just some:

There are so many brands now, in fact with the introduction of websites, and blogs in particular, many are developing personal brands, something not as easy to accomplish (as) in past years. With this profileration of brands, it becomes so much more difficult for brand to stand out from the millions of others. Sure, you’re thinking the long tail solves this, and well yes, in a way. In reality there are leaders and followers being created in each sub-niche, so the rules of getting noticed still apply.

He advises people to:

• Have a goal
• Develop a unique brand
• Get personal
• Attend local events
• Lead events
• Be interesting
• Archive your achievements

There’s also great advice in the comments.

If you work for a local media company, I strongly recommend you start blogging and building your brand. If you’re a local media company, I strongly recommend you let your people blog, although you might want to own the domains that drive their brands.

Editor & Publisher had a couple of articles this week (here, here) about the slow stream of newspapers who are opting out of their deals with the Associated Press. The biggie is the Minneapolis Star Tribune. According to various reports, these AP contracts have a two-year out clause. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune has given its required notice, but in Spokane, the Spokesman-Review is even challenging the clause, insisting that the latest rate increase is actually a new contract, which the paper is refusing to accept. In their minds, the Spokesmen-Review will be free of the AP in January without waiting the two years.

Other papers are also leaving the fold. They include The Post Register of Idaho Falls; The Bakersfield Californian; and The Yakima Herald-Republic and Wenatchee World, both in Washington. Other publishers have sent angry letters to the cooperative, and papers in Ohio have banded together to form their own cooperative, which portends further problems for the AP.

This should surprise no one, for, as I’ve oft-written in the past, the Internet by-passes middlemen, and it is no respecter of companies. The networks even by-pass affiliates in delivering their programs directly to viewers these days. This “by-pass” trait inherent to the Web has been discussed by minds much greater than mine, only they use the term “route around” to describe the idea.

“The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes around it.” John Gilmore, SUN Microsystems.
“The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.” Mark Pesce, Writer, consultant, Sydney, Australia
“The web regards centralization as a failure, and routes around it… by moving to the edge.” Stowe Boyd

My take: “The net regards the middleman as a failure, and routes around it.”

So the handwriting is on the wall for the AP, which has its work cut out for it in redefining itself. As a purveyor of original content, it will always have a place in the media world, but the creation of original content — as all media companies are discovering — is at the wrong end of the value chain in today’s business world. It’s just plain expensive, and if you can’t make enough money to support it through advertising, you’ve got a big problem.’

At the AP, original reporting is supported by the contracts the cooperative has with the hundreds (thousands?) of media outlets around the country and beyond. AP has a history of always raising prices, and I can remember from my days as a news director the pain of the size of the monthly check that went to the AP. I can also remember feeling absolutely choiceless, and therefore powerless, in the relationship.

The clear message from the action of these papers is that life for the AP cannot continue, for there are now ways to “route around” the cooperative and obtain news directly from the source, and I expect a cheap model for this is just around the corner. Such a model could come from the AP, but it won’t, because like any other business caught in the throes of disruption, the AP has to protect its legacy business.

There is no sadder commentary on the conflict between the orderly modern world and the wild west of the Web than the legal moves the owners of the popular game Scrabble to control the game’s brand on Facebook. For those not familiar with the case, two brothers from India, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, created a Facebook application called Scrabulous when Facebook opened its platform to developers earlier this year. The interactive game, which, to be kind, “borrowed heavily” from the Scrabble game, quickly became one of the most popular Facebook add-ons. Hasbro, the owner of North American rights for Scrabble, sent its attorneys into action, and Facebook removed the application in the U.S. and Canada.

Mattel owns the rights beyond North America, and it quickly dispatched its lawyers into the fray. Facebook complied in all places except India, where the issue is being considered in the courts thanks to a lawsuit filed by Mattel. Hasbro has moved to create their own Facebook application for Scrabble through Electronic Arts to fill the void left by the loss of Scrabulous. The Agarwalla brothers are asking former Scrabulous players to move to another application of theirs called Wordscraper. It’s 21st Century drama all the way.

We’ll likely never learn the amount of money Hasbro and Mattel have spent on legal fees to protect their property, but it can’t be insignificant. And one has to wonder if there might have been a better way for them to respond, like perhaps just buying the application.

That’s what online movie social networking site Flixster has done in acquiring Carnegie Mellon University student Jeffrey Grossman’s iPhone application that lets users find show times, watch trailers and get maps to local theaters. It has been downloaded 250,000 times. According to TechCrunch, Grossman is joining Flixster as a consultant, a nice resume bump for a college sophomore.

I know the Flixster example isn’t the same as the Hasbro/Mattel conundrum, but on the Web, institutional businesses face the law of unintended consequences like no other marketplace before. The Facebook community is far more likely to support the Agarwalla brothers than the “big, bad corporations” that own the rights to Scrabble, and the memory of what’s taking place there will not be quickly forgotten. Before it was shut down, Scrabulous was averaging over 500,000 DAILY players, and that audience was growing rapidly. Will Hasbro and Mattel ever reach such a level with their own versions, and if they do, how much will it cost them?

This is the same brush that’s painting the record industry’s decision to sue its customers rather than let them share music they had purchased. Legal rights may protect your property, but it may actually be wiser not to press those rights in some circumstances. Hasbro and Mattel will win the legal battle and lose the war of brand contentment, and this lesson applies to anybody with a legacy business that’s trying to move its brand to the Web.

Oh, and Scrabulous is still available here, at least for now.

(Originally posted on AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

Nicholas Carson at ValleyWag posted an interesting historical view of the decline of newspapers in the digital age (5 ways the newspapers botched the web). It’s worth reading for two reasons: one, it offers a compelling view of mistakes the industry has made over the last couple of decades:

Here’s our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look (no) farther into the future than the next edition.

And, two, the comments are filled with interesting perspectives:

Thanks to the merging of major dailies throughout the 70s and 80s, most cities ended up with newspapers that were monopolies. Without any kind of competition, these old-school newspaper veterans just applied their monopolisitic approaches to their web sites and just expected everyone to use them and all the advertisers to pay for them… no questions asked.

Several of the commenters here nailed what I think is the most overlooked reason newspapers have had difficulty with the Web, and that is that their web efforts have been run by newspaper people, not web people. That may seem silly, but it’s really not.

I’m an old TV guy, but it is not my understanding of TV (or the wants and needs of mass marketing) that drives my view of the Web. It’s the years I spent running a web company upon retiring from TV news, which is why my views seem “different” or “out of step” with traditional media thinking. Those who influence my thinking do not come from a media background, but are pioneers in “web think” and the running of web businesses. This puts me in almost constant conflict with the world I’m actually trying to serve and help and fuels the rolling of eyes I often witness in conference rooms or sense over the phone.

There are a great many really competent newspaper web people who are not driven by the needs and traditions of the industry, but they are often subject to people higher on the food chain who are so driven. This is the greatest challenge the industry faces, and I’m reminded of that great quote from Lisa Williams that “journalism will survive the death of its institutions.”

It was supposed to be a way to let supporters in on a big decision before the mainstream — a way to prove that his candidacy was going to be different. Barack Obama’s hype over a text message announcement has turned out, however, to be nothing more than a way to gather phone numbers and email addresses, and there aren’t a lot of people too happy with it. Word that Obama’s running mate would be Senator Joe Biden came via more traditional news sources, and as a result, the Democratic candidate blew a significant opportunity to prove not only that his candidacy is going to be different but also that he’s tech savvy beyond his opponent.

Three hours after the news broke, the campaign sent this text message (in the middle of the friggin’ night) to supporters who had bought his “I’ll let you know first” bullshit promise.

“Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee.”

How special. Paid Content’s Matt Kapko expressed what most are thinking.

If the leak was authorized—which seems likely since cable news networks and news outlets were confirming the news directly within minutes—did the Obama campaign abandon the first-of-its-kind plan to break the news via SMS and email or did it simply fail on the backend?

Valleywag’s reaction contained an element of snark.

So much for being the first to know, as Barack Obama’s campaign promised Internet users who handed over their email addresses and cell-phone numbers in exchange for early notice of Obama’s VP pick.

This is a blunder of significant proportions, given the number of people who signed up for the service and what they can now expect downstream (can you say “election spam?”). Here’s the thing. If the campaign promised these supporters that they would be first, then they had an obligation to let them know first. Leaks are an unacceptable excuse, for Obama’s character is on-the-line.

Working in television has its highs and lows. In the midst of a successful, kick-ass election night, for example — one of those nights when everything goes right — a kind of euphoria sets in that drug dealers would love to bottle. You say nothing bad about anything or anybody. It’s a feeling of fulfillment that I honestly don’t believe is matched anywhere. We came. We saw. We kicked ass!

However, it’s at these times that hubris rises to the surface, because we actually begin to believe our own hype. I think this is what happened during a mind-boggling, love-fest of an interview that CNBC’s “Squawk Box” did with their boss Jeff Zucker on Friday. Zucker is in Beijing, where he’s getting a decidedly one-sided view of the performance of his network in delivering the Olympics.

In the interview, he made some remarkable statements, including that a “great story” coming out of the Olympics is a demonstration of the power of network television:

IN THE FOUR YEARS SINCE WE LAST HAD THE OLYMPICS IN ATHENS AND EIGHT YEARS AGO SINCE WE WERE IN SYDNEY THE EROSION OF NETWORK TELEVISION HAS BEEN PRONOUNCED AND THERE’S NO WAY OF GETTING AROUND THAT. BUT THE FACT IS THIS EVENT SHOWS THE PIPES WORK AND THAT IF YOU PUT ON GREAT PROGRAMMING THAT PEOPLE WANT TO WATCH, THEN THEY’LL SHOW UP. THAT’S WHAT’S HAPPENED ON NBC. SO THIS REALLY IS A GREAT WATERSHED MOMENT FOR NETWORK TELEVISION. IT’S GREAT FOR NBC BUT IT’S GREAT FOR ALL OF NETWORK TELEVISION. IT DOES SHOW THE PIPES STILL WORK AND IT’S A GREAT MOMENT FOR OUR MULTISCREEN ON AIR, ONLINE, ON THE GO, THE DIGITAL ASPECTS OF THESE GAMES HAS BEEN HUGE.

…ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS TO COME OUT OF THESE OLYMPIC GAMES IS THAT THE TREMENDOUS USE OF OUR DIGITAL PROPERTIES ONLINE AND THE GREAT VIEWERSHIP ONLINE AND THE TREMENDOUS NUMBER OF PAGE VIEWS IS REALLY TEACHING US A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE WANT TO CONSUME GREAT CONTENT. AND SO WE’RE GOING TO COME OUT OF THESE OLYMPICS WITH GREAT DIGITAL KNOWLEDGE AND HOPEFULLY WE’LL BE ABLE TO TURN THOSE DIGITAL PENNIES INTO DIGITAL IF NOT DOLLARS DIGITAL 50 CENT PIECES AT SOME POINT. THAT’S ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS TO COME OUT OF THESE OLYMPICS.

Okay, so let’s set aside that ratings have been good and that NBC Universal is turning a profit. If that’s all that mattered, I’d be the first to jump on Zucker’s bandwagon. But all that really proves is that, given the right combination of compelling and exclusive content, television works. That’s certainly no bulletin. Add to that the fact that the games have been delivered in HD, and you have a recipe for success. Mark Cuban does a great job of pointing that out in a blog entry this weekend.

I think the real question of the Olympics isnt “whats the impact of the Internet”, its “whats the impact on viewing of HDTV ?”. If and when NBC releases numbers regarding ratings in HDTV households, I wouldn’t be shocked if the numbers are 75pct higher. People with big, beautiful TVs that they spent a lot of money on, want a reason to watch them. This could go down as the year the Olympics reinvigorated TV.

I disagree with Mark’s final conclusion, because I think it’s a stretch to make the case for reinvigoration based on a spectacular event staged once every four years. And of course, Mark’s predisposed to tout the virtues of HD, because he owns the cable channel HDNet.

To honestly examine these Olympics as a media event, one has to explore the conflict between an interested audience that is increasingly accustomed to getting what they want when and where they want it and the need by the network to control what’s presented in order to maximize profits. This conflict is at the heart of the collapse of mass marketing, and by the time the 2012 Olympics roll around, NBC is going to be forced to do things differently. The games will be in London, so the problem of time-shifting events will be acute.

I think Zucker would be well advised not to overlook or underestimate the angst over this that’s been demonstrated this year. For example, Rafat Ali penned an angry post for PaidContent.org yesterday over NBC’s online handling of the world record 100 meter dash performance by Jamaica’s Usain Bolt.

In what is probably the greatest moment in this Olympics, Usain Bolt of Jamaica won gold 100m dash in 9.69 seconds, a new world record…and he didn’t even have to try after the first half of the race. But you wouldn’t know it if you were here in U.S…well, if you were not online actively searching for a video clip of it. NBCOlympics.com has a lame text story online, and with a lamer Getty Images-supplied photo slideshow. Not that we were expecting anything different from NBC today, but it does add up to the growing frustration with the “bottled-up” (not my phrase…Jeff Zucker used it in a CNBC interview yesterday) coverage by the network.

Rafat went on to demonstrate how video of the event could be found on foreign sites, but not on NBC’s own special website. The transparency of this doesn’t go unnoticed.

Then there’s the controversy over digital media “spoilers” in the form of text alerts that stepped all over the network’s delayed west coast coverage of Michael Phelps winning his 8th gold medal. NBC could have shown it live on the west coast, but chose not to, because again, profit is the operating fundamental of the network’s coverage.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the coverage I’ve seen, although I’ll admit I haven’t watched all that much. But I do think that Mr. Zucker needs to carefully consider the real world of 21st Century media before he assumes that 2012 will be the same as it is in 2008. Live and uncut is what people want from an event like this, but as we’ve seen, that runs counter to the pink cloud that Zucker is currently riding.

I was paying a bill on Friday when the clerk — a bright young man in his late 20s — began talking about how the news makes him feel depressed (the world and its denizens are, to me, a rolling focus group). He then made this remarkable statement: “The only news I really watch is Jon Stewart. I mean, it’s all the same thing, but at least he’s entertaining.”

So this fellow (and I imagine his friends) avoid the “real” news programs in favor of The Daily Show, where he feels he gets “the news” but in a more palatable form.

If you want to better understand why the show’s audience feels that way, The New York Times has an excellent feature article on Stewart today: “Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?”

For all its eviscerations of the administration, “The Daily Show” is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology. A sane voice in a noisy red-blue echo chamber, Mr. Stewart displays an impatience with the platitudes of both the right and the left and a disdain for commentators who, as he made clear in a famous 2004 appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire,” parrot party-line talking points and engage in knee-jerk shouting matches. He has characterized Democrats as “at best Ewoks,” mocked Mr. Obama for acting as though he were posing for “a coin” and hailed MoveOn.org sardonically for “10 years of making even people who agree with you cringe.”

To me, Jon Stewart has always epitomized the classic postmodern news anchor. Deconstruction is his M.O., transparency is his core value, and participation as one outside the velvet rope is his perspective. Comedy is simply the path he and his writers take to enter the minds of their audience. Night-after-night, he continues to demonstrate that “real” news anchors are, perhaps, just a little too full of themselves, and in so doing, Stewart adds to the general mistrust that the people formerly known as the audience have of the media.

I don’t know if Jon Stewart is the most trusted man in America, but I’d be a fool if I didn’t seriously consider the possibility.

Long ago, I wrote that the online world is almost entirely counterintuitive to traditional media thinking, and nowhere is this reflected more than in the business practices of Google. In a fascinating interview (transcript) this week with CNBC’s Jim Cramer of Mad Money (you either love him or hate him - I love him), Google CEO Eric Schmidt made statements about their fundamental beliefs that must leave media company executives shaking their heads.

He said the company gives up billions in revenue by keeping ads off the home page. Why? Because it would upset users. “We prioritize the end user over the advertiser,” he told Cramer. This simple statement — if truly adopted by media companies — would revolutionize all of online media. We’d have a race to see who could better serve the wants and needs of the people formerly known as the audience, and that would be a refreshing change from words like capture, drive, and my favorite, monetize.

Google doesn’t provide any guidance whatsoever to stock analysts, and Schmidt’s answer, again, is profoundly simple when he says it would “get in the way” of running the business, adding, “If we started giving quarterly guidance, all of a sudden the whole company would start focusing on the quarter rather than trying to change the world.”

On the company’s heretofore unsuccessful attempts to make money from YouTube, Schmidt said it didn’t matter, at least not right now. He said they make plenty of money already, because YouTube places users in the stream of Google’s other businesses, and that cannot be overlooked. “I’d be worried if people weren’t using to YouTube,” he told Cramer. “Since it’s an enormous success globally, we know we will eventually benefit from it.”

Cramer began the interview with a personal story of how his 5th grade daughter was prohibited from Googling the topic of a class project, which evolved into a discussion of whether Google is “dumbing down” people. Schmidt disagreed and compared academia’s complaints about access to knowledge with the complaints about portable calculators in the 70s. I agree with that, which is why you’ll often hear me reference that we’re in the midst of a second Gutenberg moment in Western Civilization.

Do yourself a favor and go watch the interview. Note Schmidt’s sometimes subtle references to Google as an advertising system. The interview is in three parts (part one, part two, part three). CNBC, by the way, could learn a lot from Google, because they don’t provide the embed code that would allow me to present the videos here. Sigh.

By now you’ve heard that the enormously successful Huffington Post has launched a local clone in Chicago. It’s what I call a local information aggregator and something I have recommended to clients for years.

The home page is typical Huffington Post, only this one contains a chilling headline just to the right of the lead:

So Huffpo Chicago rises, while the Tribune sinks, and this has not escaped the attention of the institutional press. In Philadelphia, Will Bunch wonders if his city will be next.

There is one huge problem with the model, however. With all its unfair built-in advantages, Huffington Post Chicago could actually help push one or even both of Chicago’s daily newspapers — both struggling mightily for different reasons — right to the brink of extinction. And if that happened, HPC would ultimately be shooting itself in the foot. If the Chicago Tribune disappeared, so would half of the actual news the Huffington Post now highlights.

In other words, the Huffington Post and the newspapers need each other. I can understand why there’s an initial wait-and-see attitude, and I have no idea what the specifics of cooperation might be. But if HPC does well, I think either Sam Zell or Arianna Huffington needs to pick up the phone and say, “We need to talk.

Or Sam Zell could just launch his own version. Local media companies have such an aversion to even acknowledging their offline competition that the idea of being together online is anathema. Meanwhile, they open the door to entrepreneurs like Ms Huffington, who isn’t bound by such nonsense.

As the Kingston Trio used to sing, “When will they ever learn?”

There is a form of stasis that takes place when you’ve been in the hospital for a week. Life stands still for the patient, while it carries on just fine in the real world. And so it is that I’ve returned to my office to discover an RSS reader way too full for me to skim, much less read, and more voice mails than I’ve ever experienced. I’m marking all the feeds as “read” and turning the page on the past week.

For all I know or care, it didn’t exist. All those newsletters that I got, all those feeds, all that work by so many people, and it’s all just wasted effort for me. The week just didn’t happen.

Of course, I know it did. I’ve been watching TV non-stop and I’m sick of Bret Farve, Michael Phelps, the Cubs, Manny, and anything else served up by ESPN during the past week.

And while I’m here, let me complain about NBC’s restrictions on Olympics video. In today’s world, it’s ridiculous to embargo video and restrict its use the way it has been done in the past. I haven’t watched squat in terms of NBC’s coverage, and I was in a friggin’ hospital! But I do expect to see those highlights on ESPN or even my local news, so here’s the question for the Olympic Committee: is not the restricting of video a net liability for the future of the Olympics? If nobody (relatively speaking) watches real-time (can you say “DVR”), then is it not a net loss in presenting these off-the-mainstream sports to the people of the world? It’s all about the money.

So here I am at my desk pain free for the first time since August 6th. I have a ureteric stent that helps drain my left kidney while my body tries to figure out what to do with the stone pieces. The doctors moved it back into the kidney and blasted it again yesterday afternoon, and we’re hopeful I’ll pass the fragments.

As for the last week, if anything important happened, please drop a note in the comments.

UPDATE: In the comments, old pal tdc says the photo of me in the hat reminds him of a famous chef. Nice.

Well, it’s Thursday and the saga of Terry and his kidneys continues. I’ve been in the hospital since Sunday, while this little bugger of a kidney stone has caused me both excruciating pain and endless frustration. I’m due for another lithotripsy this afternoon, an attempt to blast the S.O.B. It’s tricky, though, because it’s wedged in my ureter, that little tube that runs from the kidney to the bladder. It’s 4mm, which is pretty hefty to begin with, but my doctor says it’s especially hard, which makes the lithotripsy problematic. They’ll likely use a stint this afternoon, and then I’ll get to live with that for a few days while the swelling goes down.

This began as preventative — the removal of two very large stones, one in each kidney. It’s turning out that the prevention is actually causing problems, and it’s friggin’ ruining my summer in the process. Along the way, I’ve learned more about healthcare than in all the previous years of my life. The waste caused by the need to cover one’s ass legally is ridiculous, and I honestly don’t think we’ll ever have true healthcare reform without tort reform. It’s just absurd.

I’ve spent most of my time here at Baylor Regional Medical Center at Grapevine, just up the street from where I live. My insurance will only cover lithotripsy at one hospital, Baylor at Trophy Club. Rather than just transfer, I have to be discharged and readmitted. The IV must be removed and a new one put in place, all in the name of “protecting the patient.” And if this procedure doesn’t work, I’ll likely be discharged from there and readmitted back here. It’s insane.

But you already knew that, right?

Here’s to a successful blasting procedure this afternoon.

A new benchmark study on digital pricing by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Bain & Company reveals that a growing reliance on ad networks by top online publishers is lowering the value of their websites and helping to commoditize online advertising. The report in Online Media Daily today should be a wake-up call to publishers of every stripe, and it validates something Gordon Borrell and I have been preaching for a very long time — that any serious online revenue strategy begins with valuing what you’re selling and ends with hard work. Media companies, however, seem unable to grasp the seriousness of this and choose, instead, the easy path of turning impressions over to ad networks.

Ad networks aren’t evil, and they provide an ideal solution for remnant impressions, but companies that bet the ranch on the networks ultimately sell themselves short. It’s easy money and plays into the order-taker mentality rampant in the world of media companies.

The average CPMs earned through ad networks ranged from 60 cents to $1.10–a fraction of the $10 to $20 paid for display inventory sold directly by the seven unnamed publishers involved in the IAB study. And while networks account for a quarter of display impressions sold, they make up only 2% of revenue.

“This type of understanding may serve as a direct call to publishers to do a better job at optimizing ad sales, which may include partnering with different networks to get more value out of their inventory,” said Sherrill Mane, senior vice president of industry services at the IAB.

Earlier this year, ESPN took the bold step of refusing ads from ad networks and placed the onus for sales directly on its own sales division. They’re getting into the ad network business, and other major publishers, like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Forbes and Conde Nast, are following suit. I expect this trend will continue, as more and more publishers wake up to the reality that they’re giving away the store.

And nowhere is this issue more acute than with local media companies, who long ago turned their web futures over to third-party ad networks and continue to reap small returns for their investments as a result. Local media companies need to get serious about online revenue and acknowledge that the flexibility for making money will always be at the local — not the network — level. All the evidence you need is found in Gordon Borrell’s common practices for what he calls “Green Zone” publishers — those who perform above average in terms of local revenue market share. 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.

What they don’t do is sit back and rely on ad networks to do the work for them.

The graph on the right is from the Gallup organization late last year. It shows two important things: one, trust in the press continues its downward trek in the U.S. and, two, the percentage of people with no trust in the media is clearly above the percentage of those who say they have a great or a fair amount of trust.

Trust has been trending downward for so long that it’s hard to believe the press continues to move forward maintaining a quo that has clearly lost its status.

And now we have the John Edwards affair, a story that was first broken in October by the tabloid The National Enquirer. When it broke, Edwards was able to successfully spin it as the rantings of a tabloid, but now that we know it’s true, it casts another pall over the press as a whole. Political blogs pursued the story, but the press did not. Did they look the other way, because Edwards is a Democrat? I don’t believe that, but many do. The point is there clearly is a “pressosphere” in this country, and the farther downstream we get with blogs and the explosion of other niche publishers, the more clearly that becomes. Jay Rosen calls it “Pressthink,” the name of his blog. In the Edwards case, it was the view of this “pressosphere” that the story had no merit. Turns out that was poor judgment.

As I’ve written in the past, the press operates in this country as the voice of the people and assumes a public trust in that regard. We simply have to take this into consideration as we work to reinvent journalism for the 21st Century, because this “pressosphere” neither speaks for the people nor has the public trust. If the press is to be rescued, it must begin by assuming a degree of independence from this group think, for the group tends to support the group, not the best interests of the public.

The Gallup numbers speak the truth, and the press needs ears to hear.

I should buy a lottery ticket. That was the reaction of my doctor to being admitted to the hospital again with another kidney stone episode, this time it’s my left kidney. I had both kidneys lithotripsied last month to remove large stones. In rare cases, a fragment is left over and causes problems later. I’ve had it happen with both kidneys now, and my doctor says, well, I’m just special.

Anyway, I should be home tomorrow. Meanwhile, I have my laptop and a good Verizon signal, so it’s just another day. Unless, of course, the pain comes back. This is a 4mm stone caught in my left ureter just below the kidney, so I have a nice dilaudid pump.

Better living through chemistry.

Anybody who has spent time with media websites knows the frustration of dealing with advertisers and the variety of methods of counting site traffic. When an advertiser’s metrics don’t jibe with the site’s metrics, there’s tension, to say the least. Much has been written about the issue, but here’s a really good in-depth analysis from Susan Kuchinskas at iMedia Connection.

Despite methodological convergence, there’s no way that everyone’s audience measurements — or even any two services — are going to match. Still, in this numbers game, the big winners will always be the measurement companies, because only they can provide any sense of credibility.

This is a fascinating and controversial topic, and we recommend that our clients at least add Google Analytics to the pages of their sites. GA provides a very good set of free 3rd-party data that publishers can use to present to advertisers. This is especially important locally, for the case can always be made to local advertisers that other sites in town could provide GA data as well.

But if I can put on my cynic’s hat for a moment, the energy behind this quest for the Holy Grail is the creation a paradigm for web advertising that takes a lot of the work out of selling, something for which traditional media companies are famous. We want to get back to the “science” of mass marketing, because that’s what we know. We’re quite happy making money via gross rating points and cost-per-thousand impressions. The problem I’ve always had with this is that the medium isn’t the best for brand advertising, and that’s what mass marketing delivers. The web is dynamite for transactional advertising, but that’s not what the agencies want. In the end, it’s going to come down to what “works” for the advertisers, and that may not be reliable 3rd-party data.

In a guest commentary for MediaPost four years ago, Kathy Sharpe of Sharpe Partners in New York wrote that the whole advertising industry was based on intricate myths, and it wasn’t so much that its foundation was cracking as it was that there never was a “real” foundation in the first place, “just a series of shared beliefs, like a religion or a culture.”

Did Nielsen ever offer more than a gross proxy for the real television audience? No, but that was okay, as long as that stand-in was big and growing (and the one with the most buying power). Were media planners ever blind to the implications of magazines inflating circulation numbers with cheap subscription drives? Even in the days of the two-martini lunch, everyone knew that the value of the impression had to decline. It’s just that nobody much cared to do anything about it. Certainly, nobody from the agencies would; and even advertisers blithely ignored it because there was no alternative to TV other than print.

But the web has changed everything for advertisers, because its value proposition is precise measurement, and this is what’s getting lost in this cry for reliable 3rd-party data. There is so much money (and jobs) at stake in the maintenance of the advertising status quo that agreement on some form of outside measurement is highly likely. But in the end, only advertisers themselves will be able to state whether the dollars they’re spending are returning in the form of business, and on that, the jury is most certainly still out.

From his position as a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University, Michael Wesch is making observations about new media that go far beyond what most people even think, much less talk about. I’ve used his material in presentations, because he’s really onto the truth, and his views help explain the “why” behind what seems to most as chaos. His latest YouTube video is his best work yet, and I strongly recommend you take an hour to watch it. The video makes a strong case that, at least culturally, YouTube is something truly new under the sun.

This blog is dedicated to discussing a practical form of postmodernism, and I believe we have entered the “Age of Participation,” a second Gutenberg moment in history. We’ve just scratched the surface on what it means, and Michael Wesch seems to have a unique understanding of the changes that are evolving. And why wouldn’t he? The guy’s an anthropologist.

(thanks to John Battelle for the video)

About this time yesterday, I began to experience acute pain in my right side and back — the familiar grimacing kind of agony that only stone-makers know. In just a short time, it was so intense that everything I’d eaten for the past 30 days came roaring to the surface. The vomiting enabled the stone to “step aside” and let urine flow into my bladder, thereby relieving the pain. I went to the doctor and made arrangements for a cat scan this morning.

Unfortunately, the little terrorist had other ideas, and by 6:30pm, I was in agony again. So we went off to the emergency room and said hello to dilaudid (better living through chemistry). They did a cat scan, which revealed the bastard was stuck in my ureter just above the bladder. This gave me hope. Hell, I’d already moved it that far, so at least I knew it “could” be shoved along, and I “could” avoid surgery. Between IV fluids and about a quart of orange juice, the thing moved into my bladder around 1 a.m., and I passed it into a strainer a couple of hours later. It was a fragment from the lithotripsy done on July 22nd.

So now I’m home and sore, but at least that gripping pain is gone. Women like to point out that childbirth is like 12 hours of kidney stone pain, but at least they get a child when it’s all said and done. All I got was a lousy night’s sleep and a 30-ounce plastic drinking cup with the logo of Baylor Regional Medical Center at Grapevine.

Nice.

Five years ago, I wrote an essay about MTV and how the case could be made that their news and documentary unit was cranking out a form of news for young people. Everything is done “reality show” style, but the channel really does a great job of offering issues that are quite impactful. Here’s a graph from that paper:

The point is if you are a young person in western culture, these programs meet your information needs about growing up and living life. No lectures. No lessons. No right way or wrong way. They simply express, through the life experiences of others, what life is or can be like for the target demographics of MTV. It’s very postmodern and, frankly, it’s brilliant. Reality works, because it can’t be hyped and manipulated - things these people increasingly see through.

MTV’s program “Juvies” is another great example. It’s no longer in production (although there’s talk that it’s moving to MSNBC), but you can catch them on-demand on the MTV website (here). My hat’s off to the production team and the Indiana Department of Corrections for agreeing to give MTV access involving juvenile offenders. The show is real life, and that’s what makes it so gripping. These aren’t “reports” done like a conventional newsroom would do them; they’re the real life stories of kids in trouble, and viewers get to see the whole mess, including the hearings, the tears, the pain, and the exasperation of the system.

When I see this kind of stuff, I keep asking myself why somebody doesn’t do this at the local level. We chuckle at reality shows and make fun of everything about them, but the truth is the style is effective, and I think the more our culture is exposed to these types of programs, the greater the likelihood people will be willing to participate. When that happens, we’ll see them as part of mainstream news gathering.

Wouldn’t that be something?

The video below is an “ad” currently making the rounds online. It’s Paris Hilton jumping at the opportunity to be herself in response to the dumb move by John McCain’s campaign to use an image of Miss Hilton in a campaign ad comparing Barack Obama to other celebrities. The observations so far have all been political or from the entertainment press, but I think there’s a huge comment to be made about media here.

But first, the video:

In today’s world, everybody is a media company. I’ve been preaching that lesson for almost 10 years now. It’s the essence of J.D. Lasica’s seminal book, Darknet: Hollywood’s War on the Digital Generation, in which he coined the phrase “personal media revolution.” This video by Miss Hilton is a stunning example of that, because she is, among other things, a media company, and, like everybody else, has the resources to put cute little videos out into cyberspace where they can be picked up by others and passed around. In so doing, Paris Hilton has injected herself into the race for President of the United States, or I suppose you could say that McCain did that for her. And here’s the thing: this video is actually more than just cute or funny.

Candidates have to buy time to get their messages out, while everyday people — using back channels — can do the same thing for nothing. I realize this is Paris Hilton and that she carries leverage that others don’t have, but you’d be missing the point to dismiss the bigger picture here. As Gordon Borrell so beautifully put it, “The deer now have guns,” and we need to pay attention to that.

From a postmodern perspective, this incident shows how people are able to participate in the political process in ways never before possible, and it is changing — and will change — things forever.