AR&D - Audience Research and Development

When I wrote "The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media" two years ago, I noted that people were the ones doing the unbundling and that our best response would be to help them do it. That essay listed six ways to make money off unbundled media, and most of them are in the process of becoming accepted practice today. But local media companies still need to heed the warning of that report:

This is a tough sell for the industry, because our bread and butter bundled models are still delivering significant revenues and will continue to do so for years to come. Those revenues, however, won't (can't) be enough to sustain real business growth, and so the only choice seems to be to cut costs. We keep missing the point that revenue isn't the problem; audience is the problem, and they're moving to the unbundled world.

And they're not coming back, either. After all, once you've acquired a taste for filet, a steady diet of hamburger doesn't cut it anymore.

<<< >>>

VENTURE CAPITAL NOW FUNDING PROJECTS THAT ARE AFTER YOUR MONEY (Terry)
The biggest story this week is one that's probably not getting a lot of attention in the halls of traditional media powers. It should, though, because it's a direct challenge to the competence of local media to scrape local advertising dollars in their own markets.

The sub-headline of an LATIMES story says it best: "Online players are courting mom-and-pop businesses as consumers turn to the Internet to find services in their neighborhoods." The "online players" referenced in the article aren't local media companies, which begs the question, "Why?"

Locally targeted search engines have replaced thick phone books as the starting point for millions of people seeking plumbers, personal injury lawyers or hair stylists. That trend is creating a big business opportunity for a slew of online players, including advertising start-ups, Internet giants and traditional yellow-pages publishers.

Search engines are investing in initiatives to create virtual neighborhoods where people can find detailed information on local businesses, including consumer reviews and such basics as the hours of operation.

Google Inc., for example, recently launched a pilot program to send contractors into local businesses to collect such information. ReachLocal is using some of the money it raised to take a similar approach, sending salespeople into small businesses across the country to offer to manage their search-engine advertising campaigns.

Those "feet on the street" efforts reflect how hard it is to reach the country's millions of small-business proprietors, who tend to rely on more traditional forms of advertising, and teach them about the benefits of online search, analysts say.

But local search is just the start. While ReachLocal was getting their $55 million, MediaDailyNews was reporting that Brooklyn-based local social network and news aggregator Outside.in had closed a round of financing totaling $1.5 million from investors including Union Square Ventures and Milestone Ventures. Outside.in is a very cool application that recognizes your IP address and defaults to your local community.

Outside.in will use its funding to build out features on the site, expand its outreach to offline partners like local newspapers, and launch a geo-targeted advertising platform. The service collects neighborhood-specific info from blogs, traditional media and crowd-sourced insight to provide members with a comprehensive look at their real-life community. Outside.in covers 55 cities and more than 3,000 neighborhoods in the U.S.

"The development of our partner program and targeted regional and national advertising will be two major initiatives for the coming year," said Outside.in co-founder Steven Berlin Johnson. "We've spent our first year building out a state-of-the-art platform for organizing the Web geographically, and now we've got a fantastic opportunity to build a business on top of that platform."

<<< >>>

STEVE SAFRAN AT THE NETWORKED JOURNALISM CONFERENCE: (by Steve, who else?)

DARING TO CROWDSOURCE
"Networked journalism" is what we're calling "citizen journalism" these days, and I like the new term better. "Citizen journalism" delineated a line between us and them. "Networked journalism" is more accurate and less condescending. Media outlets are connected with the public in new ways as well, thanks to social networks. The tools have changed and the terminology evolves. And there is a term you should get to know: "Crowdsourcing."

I attended the Networked Journalism Summit in New York City this week, which Jeff Jarvis and CUNY masterfully hosted. The key topic that arose: how do we all work together in this messy pot of old media, new media, social media, blogs and more?

Jay Rosen, the NYU professor who started NewAssignment.net, was on hand to discuss what he had learned from the "open source reporting" group's first stab at journalism - a report on the topic of online collaboration itself. This is crowdsourcing. Wired's Jeff Howe, who wrote a seminal article on the topic, moderated a panel at the conference. "Assignment Zero" was conducted in collaboration with Wired Magazine. The online article is here.

Rosen said he learned six lessons from the experiment:

• Division of labor is key in distributed reporting projects
• You have to understand the motivations of the people contributing.
• The more people who contribute, the more it costs to coordinate them. Resolve this as people take you up on your invitation.
• When people seek out data for you and then report on it, they want to see how it fits in to the overall picture. Don't just say "thanks for the data."
• Shared background knowledge is critical. "The simple fact that all the people had been reading along in the U.S. Attorney General's story made it possible for readers to pick out the critical pieces of information," said Rosen.
• Existing communities already know how to control information coordination costs, link up and share information.

Or you can boil that down even more: when you pick a story for a lot of people to work on, find a group that is already interested in it and is networked with each other, then be responsive to their needs.

Just as I was thinking "Man, I'd love to see a local station experiment with some crowdsourcing," along came producer Jim Colgan from WNYC's Brian Lehrer show. (WNYC is New York City's public radio powerhouse.) Colgan was part of a panel I moderated on Broadcast and Multimedia, and he demonstrated his show's foray into crowdsourcing: "How Many SUVs Are on Your Block?" I can't possibly explain it any better than the title. They asked the audience to count the SUVs in their neighborhood and then report back. In turn, WNYC then made a Google Maps mashup of the results. Scientific? No. But fascinating. Of the cars they counted in the New York City area, 30% were SUVs.

What stories can you crowdsource? Maybe there is data you can get your hands on but it's too much for the station to go through. This was the case with a story the Ft. Myers News-Press did in the wake of the hurricanes that poured through their area in 2004. The station sued for information. Kate Marymount, Executive Editor of the News-Press, said the only way they could get through all the information was with the public's help:

"We sued FEMA after the hurricanes of 2004. We wanted to know how FEMA distributed aid and they wouldn't tell us. We fought a long and costly battle, which we could afford to do. We got the documents. Here's how we turned to the public: As soon as we got the database with 2.2 million files we posted it to the database. We turned to the public and said "go in there and search and tell us the stories we need to investigate." In the first 48 hours there were 60,000 searches. People saw that their neighbors' homes got aid but they didn't, or they got aid but their neighbors didn't."

Excellent.

Put ideas out to the public and ask them to raise the red flags. Maybe you want to find the neighborhoods where milk is cheapest (or oddly expensive). Think about a way to empower the community to tell a story in a new way, and you will probably find they have a good idea for a story to begin with. Crowdsource them for a crowdsource idea.

<<< >>>

ALIVE IN BAGHDAD, HARD TO GET NOTICED IN AMERICA
One of the panelists on "Broadcast/Multimedia: A Whole New Grammar" was Brian Conley of "Alive in Baghdad." If you haven't checked him out - do it. Conley has put together a team of reporters in Iraq who file video stories once a week. The reporters are mostly Iraqi. They range from experienced Iraqi TV journalists to a former Iraqi army soldier. The pieces are remarkable and intimate. They will make you uncomfortable. They are, unquestionably, acts of journalism.

So why the hell haven't you heard of this? And why hasn't a mainstream outlet bought it? Why isn't Brian heralded as a visionary of using new media to tell stories?

Michael Rosenblum who was also on the panel, and who evangelizes the videojournalist model used by the Alive in Baghdad team believes he knows why. Rosenblum says the networks don't want to admit that this kind of journalism works, because it will be a tacit admission that their model is dated.

I have to say, I think he's right. Fred Graver, who just recently left VH-1, asked the room a simple question: "How can we help Brian make this into a business?" Well, some yammering went on about how CNN should hire his team or whatever. But, I asked the room, at a new media conference can't we do better than tell him "I know a guy at NBC...?"

Are we so stubbornly fixated on how people are telling stories that we refuse to hear the stories? Will we no longer pay for great video and wonderful pieces because we fear the way in which they were gathered?

Watch these stories and then think: what would happen in my community if the people who were passionate about life here had the tools of the personal media revolution in their hands. No, you don't live in a war zone. But you have crumbling neighborhoods. You have uplifting stories to tell. There is a new dialogue, a new grammar that is being shaped in how we tell stories online. Watch the pieces at Alive in Baghdad (it's a Dot Org, not a Dot Com) and you'll see what I mean.

<<< >>>

TALK RADIO IN A BOX
A quick one here. The most fun I had at the Networked Journalism Summit was doing a "radio" show on the web. I've done my share of radio and online audio shows before, but I've never been as impressed with a setup as I was with BlogTalkRadio. This is a talk radio station in a software box. It works on your laptop, with only a few mics, headsets and a small mixing board on the side. The folks behind this software have thought of everything - right down to an automated call-in feature. Fred Graver and I did about a half hour with them and we took a couple of calls. One call was from a reader of mine, and I can't tell you how amazing that felt.

I don't think I've ever endorsed something after one use. I'm endorsing BlogTalkRadio. Imagine if your station had this - you could have an online talk radio show after the newscast where people would call in and discuss the stories. And if they (heaven forbid!) swear (as Graver did in our segment) - no FCC!

<<< >>>

PHOTOS AND OTHER BLOGS FROM NETWORKED JOURNALISM CONFERENCE:
Jeff Jarvis has asked everyone who took pictures or wrote articles about the event to tag them "netj." Here is the Flickr photo page with the netj tag, and here are the Technorati links.   <Link>

<<< >>>

SOCIAL MEDIA IS A LOCAL PLAY (Terry)
In just this week (so far), we've had stories galore about movement in the social networking space. eBay is launching shopping networks, Google bought social mobile start-up Jaiku, Business Week carried a big story about Google's social networking model, Okrut (very big globally), and CBS bought music social networking site last.fm.

Social networking is all the buzz these days, and it's the kind of buzz that usually pushes me away. However, there's another development coming that makes participation in all the social networking sites much more manageable, and that is a new start-up called FriendFeed. Started by four former Google employees, FriendFeed is an aggregator of information (any format) from social network profiles that enables a user to easily keep track of all his or her social connections over any given number of applications.

Got friends on MySpace AND Facebook but only want certain information from each? FriendFeed is there to help. Now let's assume that in five years, you're participating in 15 social networks. FriendFeed will put information about all of your connections' activities in one place. I think this is huge, for it follows patterns that are built into the structure of the Web, and I think it will spawn other types of social network aggregators.

What this does is take a horizontal slice through any number of social network verticals, which changes the economic rules of participation. You can pull one friend's Flickr feed, another's MySpace bulletins, another's Facebook status and follow them all in one place. Nice. This removes the necessity of "being there" to participate, and that means a whole new way of looking at social networking sites.

I think it also opens up the market, and if you haven't made social networking a part of your company's new media mix, I strongly recommend you rethink the decision. But, Terry, aren't these things expensive to create and maintain?

Glad you asked, because that brings me to the second part of this article, an introduction to Ning, the network of social networks. Ning provides FREE software for creating your own social networking site. You can avoid all of their advertising and create a completely branded site for about $35 a month. The templates are all there and can be customized to your heart's content.

So the cost of building your own — or better yet, adding social networking capabilities to existing sites — is next to nothing. All that's needed is a little knowledge and a sound strategic plan.

Just a few years ago, local media companies needed expensive and complex software to run media websites, but all that has changed, thanks to the personal media revolution. Wordpress and Drupal are open source content management systems and now Ning allows us to do things we couldn't have imagined just 18 months ago.

The point is there's really no excuse for not jumping into this world and building real niche communities. And if your company has some resources to invest, why not get into the business of aggregating content from existing networks? I've long contended that while MySpace, for example, is a global "site," its application is almost entirely local.    <Link>

<<< >>>

CONFERENCES: COME SEE US!
We're hitting the road this fall and going to a number of conferences, and we'd love it if you would stop by and say "hi" if you're at one of the events with us.

Steve Safran will be at:
- The Online News Association Conference in Toronto on October 19, on the panel "Broadcaster Strategies for the Web."