Wednesday, March 14, 2007
If you read the trades or Mark Cuban, you get one version: Viacom owns copyrighted content. Viacom charges that YouTube is unfairly profiting from its property. YouTube says that it has and will continue to comply with the law. Hence, the lawsuit.
A lot of observers conclude that this is merely the next round in negotiations in what will inevitably be Viacom's ability to monetize its content and that the suit will never go to trial. However, another group of people -- including some in the Venture Capital business -- are hoping for the opposite, because Google has billions of dollars to spend on the case and, they argue, there is no way Viacom can actually win.
The case is just not as cut-and-dried as it might appear, and the precedent it could set seems to have nightmarish consequences for our economy. The copyright industry is, after all, America's largest export.
Time is on Google's side, because the actual business disruption moves forward with or without an agreement with Viacom.
The problem for Viacom, Haque writes, is that one of its key properties, MTV, has been hypercommoditized by YouTube. Music videos (legal) are a big part of YouTube, as are reality shows (legal user-generated creations). So what's left for MTV? Had Viacom been a part of the solution instead of the problem, MTV could easily have been YouTube today. This leads Haque to conclude -- correctly, I think -- that for Viacom "this is really kind of a fight to the death."
Meanwhile, a new user-generated animation site has launched. MyToons.com, and it will pose further problems for the copyright industry, not because people will upload copyrighted material, but because technology is making animation easier for a lot more people.
And Jay Rosen's experiment in open-source journalism -- Assignment Zero -- launched today. Funded by NewAssignment.net, Wired Magazine and others, it's a serious attempt to do investigative journalism from a new direction, and it's yet another example of the people formerly known as the audience getting involved in this thing we call media.
This is the heart of Media 2.0, and it's why we all need to think carefully about how we approach this world. Everything is counterintuitive here, and we really need to adjust our view to see what's really taking place. It really isn't about copyright at all. <Permalink>
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THE WEB IS NOT THE TV MINOR LEAGUES
Most newsrooms have had websites for a few years now. But they're still used to thinking of them as second-class citizens. Accordingly, material gets put on the site without regard for whether it is best serving its audience by being there.
Some stations will dip a toe into original content. But what is it so far? Scraps, mostly. Leftovers that didn't make air. Sometimes, that's useful - there are, indeed, full interviews that should be put on the web. But often, they're put on the web for the sake of saying "we have exclusive web content." You do not. You have leftovers. You have shells and you're hawking them as peanuts. There is an easy way to generate exclusive web content while you're in the field - shoot an interview exclusively for the web audience.
Another trap: stations will put people "on camera" for web-only video when those people are absolutely not ready to be on camera. Sometimes, that's charming. The wonderful thing about the web is that we don't demand perfection. We don't even want it. We like quirky. We like real. But there is a difference between "real and quirky" and "bad delivery." A person is either ready for an audience or they're not. I find that some people who are uncomfortable doing web video are charming people who are smart about the web - but they're trying too much to be like television people. Tell them to be themselves and that may help.
There's a different audience online, to be sure - but your online audience deserves great stuff too, not the stuff that wasn't good enough for the "real" audience in the real stadium downtown.
And then there's the human resources matter: two practices that make me scream are 1. Turfing people to the web who are riding out the string of their employment and 2. Deciding someone is such a good writer that they should be "in the newsroom" and not "just on the web." Really - what are the messages you're sending in both scenarios? The messages are that : TV is the big leagues, veterans who have lost their fastball go to the web, and the up-and-coming kids practice on the web until they're ready for The Show.
Strike Three.
So play ball, everyone. But recognize you're in a much bigger stadium than you used to be and your fans want a whole lot more than fastballs and strikeouts. And, as that great philosopher "Crash" Davis said in Bull Durham, "Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls - it's more democratic." <Permalink>
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This week's orchid for a creative vertical goes to Belo for o8sis.com, WFAA-TV's new women's portal in Dallas. As the Guinness guy would say, "Brilliant!" Is your station doing anything like this? <Permalink>
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STATE OF THE MEDIA 2007: WHY DOES A WEB BUDGET COME ONLY FROM NEWS?
But for me, the report's best insight comes right in its summary of local TV news:
"There are signs that the local TV news industry is at long last beginning to take the Web more seriously. It has been among the last of the traditional media to do so. We have found in past years that some Web sites were more advertorial than news in their content. That, finally, may be changing.
"But the pressures on stations to build Web sites, add content to them, and transform production to high definition, all tax budgets -- and much of that, insiders say, is coming out of news."
Exactly. We've been the last. And when we've done it, we've been the most reluctant. And still, for some reason, the money for the website is coming out of news budgets. But that's absurd. A website isn't just about news. It should be about the local media outlet's identity as a whole in its community. It should be a web presence, not a web site. It should certainly be a heck of a lot more than just the newscast repurposed in HTML.
We're now used to thinking that a station's web presence A. Has to be one website B. Has to be the station's newscast online C. Must be the station's call letters (or brand) and D. Can't cost any money. This is not an especially good plan for building a web business.
News budgets are thin enough. We all know there's no room for more money to "come out of the news budget" for an entirely new business discipline. The real play in this is to think of the web as if you've been handed a new channel. How will you program it? News will be one program, yes. But what else? What will your community programming be? What original shows will you have? What offerings will you have that will be unique?
Once you start thinking web business and online channels and stop thinking web news site, you realize there's huge potential in this business. This is a tree, with many branches. The newsroom isn't the trunk. The television station, which should transform into a local media outlet, is the real trunk. <Permalink>
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CUSTOMIZABLE START PAGES, MEDIA 2.0 101
How easy do you make it for those MyYahoo users to pull your content onto their pages? The company makes one-click available for your feeds. Are you using that? I'd wager not.
The problem we have with this concept is that we're stuck on trying to drive traffic to our own sites (which this will actually do), so we don't pay attention to how much control people really have over their own experience. We want them to make us their home page. How foolish.
These numbers also point to the value of widgets as a brand extension tactic, but there's something else about this that I want everybody to understand: These tools are being created by the same dynamic that's driving the whole YouTube/MySpace business, and this is the real disruption we face.
To quote Gordon Borrell, "The deer now have guns. What do you do when the deer have guns? You get into the ammunition business." <Permalink>
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SPRING CLEANING: GET THE CLUTTER OFF YOUR SITE
NewYorker.com relaunched this week and it's a marvel of design. Simple. Easy. Elegant. Plenty of whitespace. Oddly, this simple site is an act of rebellion.
Some time ago, I judged a few websites for a national contest. As you probably know, when you submit for these kinds of awards, you write a little letter. This letter told me about all the cool things the site was doing. Original content. Weather alerts. Community blogs. I read the letter and thought "We have a winner!" Then I visited the site. Couldn't find a thing. Until I did a Google search.
Sure enough, I found the content they were talking about. One of the items was, as it turns out, even linked on the front page. Did I feel silly that, in retrospect, I missed it? Absolutely not. It's their job to make my life as a news consumer easy. And even though they had great tools and content, how does it make my life any easier if I can't find that stuff?
Note again: they had one of the items linked from front page and I could not find it. Having something on your front page is no guarantee your audience will know it's there. I realize this is counter-intuitive. But come back to my desk for a moment: the business card I need for my 4 p.m. appointment is here, somewhere. I know it's on the desktop.... but maybe I would have been better served with a card file system. Get where I'm going?
You may hear how you need lots of room for lots of tiles to sell for advertising. This is a terribly inefficient way to sell advertising. Google has no ads on its homepage. It has nothing, apart from a search box and a few links to just some of its other products. But it seems to do OK with sales, because it sells smart search results. You can do the same thing. You don't need to be Google to get started with selling targeted local search. It pays a lot better than banner ads. Looks nicer, too. And your audience will be happier, because the ads will be for products they're more likely to have an interest in buying.
Sites get cluttered when everyone in the building thinks their pet project NEEDS to be on the front. It does not. There is no evidence that having a tile promoting some show does anything more than clutter your homepage. It certainly does not drive traffic to your site. It does nothing to help inform your audience. Newsroom websites look like little girls who play dress-up: their first reaction is to put EVERYTHING on. Then, when the girls get a little older, Mom gives them the best advice they'll ever get about how to look terrific: "Less is more."
Have a look at the NewYorker.com redesign and see if you agree. <Permalink>
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One of the most radical new stars in the new media firmament is a London Business School economist named 
The always-informative Project for Excellence in Journalism is out with its annual report on American journalism. "
According to the latest Comscore numbers, MyYahoo is the clear leader in the customizable start page space with over half of all users calling MyYahoo their home. These numbers are staggering and show explosive growth. This is an important Media 2.0 barometer, because these types of pages allow users to drag and drop whatever they want into their own world, and if your company isn't playing the unbundled/RSS game, you're out.
Spring cleaning time, everyone! Have a look at that site of yours and clean it up! I know, we all think that everything on there needs to be on there. It doesn't. I use everything on my desk, but when it's a mess I can't find anything when I need it. Same with your site.