The Web drives traffic to our brands

May 9th, 2009

One of the key strategic mistakes local media companies have made regarding the Web (especially TV stations) is the assumption that driving traffic to a brand-extension portal is smart business. It’s not, and we can see this today, whereas we perhaps couldn’t a few years ago. In the early days of the Web — before we knew what this thing really was — the Web seemed just another distribution channel for our goods and services, and smart third-party ad network companies were there to make sure we had everything we needed.

But these ad networks made money through aggregated ad impressions nationwide, so the driving of traffic to properties containing their ads was smart strategy — for them. Tactics to do just that came with the software, and so was born a consistent practice of using the legacy property to move people to branded corners of the Web.

In so doing, however, we’ve harmed the value of legacy media, for a media company can only “drive” those eyeballs that it already reaches. When NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker proclaimed his fear of turning “analog dollars into digital pennies,” he was really holding up a mirror to himself and all other media moguls, for we have all been participating in a process that does exactly that. If web users in our communities have the idea that they can get everything online that they can offline, then audience convenience becomes the only determining competitive factor, and whose fault is that? Pay walls and micropayments won’t solve what bad strategy has created.

At this point, it’s a case of water under the bridge, but the essential lesson is one we should heed moving forward. We simply won’t survive, if we shift everything we have to the Web. To be sure, some companies have made a lot of money in building and maintaining brand extension websites, but the long-term efficacy of such sites is not a sure thing. Most are tied to banner advertising, which has a questionable future. Most exist to make it efficient for ad networks, such as Centro, to move national and regional ad money to local markets. This symbiotic relationship (and easy money for media) depends on a certain status quo in the world of advertising, a world that is facing disruptive innovations similar to what have been eating away at the foundation of traditional media for the last 20 years. Betting the long-term health of your media company on a strategy that emphasizes only brand extension portals is a dangerous move.

If we are to be truly successful downstream, we must begin to enable a fundamental shift in our strategic thinking:

The Web drives traffic to our brand.
Our brand drives traffic to the Web.

We don’t use the Web to grow legacy media, because we don’t believe in the power of the Web to do so. Moreover, we don’t have legacy products that work “with” the Web to accomplish this end. TMZ.com is a web business that built a television show and brilliantly uses the Web to drive traffic to that show. The Continuous News model that effectively meets the news and information needs of the community during the Web’s “prime time” — Mon-Fri, 8am-5pm — is the perfect vehicle to drive people to early evening newscasts. One of the key purposes of any web business we create ought to be to promote the legacy business we already maintain.

The new value of local television airtime is to promote the web businesses that the station runs as part of its business portfolio. This is the right use of legacy media, for the reach of the traditional property is being used to drive eyeballs to businesses that don’t compete with the products and services of the traditional property itself. This is the key competitive advantage local media has over the internet pureplay companies. This presupposes, of course, that we’re creating such online businesses and not merely parroting our traditional news and information services on the Web.

While industry insiders focus on the content side of what we do and craft clever strategies and tactics to that end, we simply must start looking at advertising as the driver of anything we do tactically. Advertisers are an increasingly empowered lot (just like consumers), and they won’t suffer the rates of ad-supported content forever. Whether it’s online or off, the game today is about enabling commerce. We enable commerce when we use the reach and frequency of our legacy products to help businesses expose their products and services to a mass audience. Online, however, we enable commerce by connecting those who want to buy with those who want to sell through a variety of means, including local search, email, video, contextual targeting and behavioral targeting.

The Web is so much bigger than we think it is.

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

Posted in Media 2.0, Reinventing Local Media | No Comments »

Rupert Murdoch’s fantasy

May 9th, 2009

“That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal’s experience,” Rupert Murdoch told a NewsCorp quarterly conference call this week. The story of Murdoch’s intention desire to move all of his newspaper properties to a paid model got wide distribution, because, well, it’s Rupert Murdoch, and the newspaper industry is looking for a savior.

Murdoch’s problem here is one I’ve written about for years: The Wall Street Journal is a terrible example to use for a paid scenario, because subscriptions to the paper aren’t paid for by individuals. They are a business expense, and any attempt to transfer that model to other newspapers is just foolishness, to be kind. There’s no doubt Rupert Murdoch is a maverick, but in this case he’s just wrong.

He clearly has something up his sleeve, but at this point it’s just posturing for shareholders.

“We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning,” the News Corp. Chairman and CEO said.

“We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximizes revenues in return for our shareholders… The current days of the Internet will soon be over.”

That last line is intriguing and, let’s be real, wishful thinking. Murdoch can throw up pay walls and make legal moves to end the “wild” distribution of his content, but he faces two enormous problems in so doing. One, he gives up journalistic relevancy, for without the organic “spread” of information in the “current days of the Internet,” an institution of journalism cannot expect to be player in the world of cultural power. Two, regardless of what media companies do to increase the “value” of their content, the disruptions in the world of advertising will continue unabated. Madison Avenue itself is in disruption, because there’s increasingly no need for advertisers to pay the kinds of money that Murdoch wants in order to “maximize revenues…for shareholders.” Eyeballs are everywhere these days, or does Rupert have a plan to overcome that?

I like a good fantasy as much as the next guy, but my fantasies all end well. This one won’t.

Posted in Newspapers | 9 Comments »

More on the aporkalypse

May 2nd, 2009

I woke up this morning to this CNN headline in my Blackberry: “Number of confirmed H1N1 cases worldwide soars.” I guess we could argue about what defines the word “soars,” but it’s certainly a sexier, more compelling term than “increases,” although the latter might be more factual.

It’s time to regurgitate a point about cable news. These entities are at their best during news blockbuster events, like hurricanes and other major disasters. We need them during these kinds of times, because they do a great job of satisfying the adrenalin rush that comes with such. The problem for cable news organizations, however, is that they don’t get paid during times of major breaking news events, although they bring them their biggest ratings.

This has brought about the necessity of the artificial blockbuster. Driven by hyperbole, this is the weapon that these news organizations use to create a sense of blockbuster status even though the facts don’t support the hype. When you need blockbusters to make a living, everything begins to look like a blockbuster.

The problem, of course, is what this does to the culture. I called it “The Lizard on America’s Shoulder” many years ago, and I think (and hope) it’ll be just a documented part of American press history some day.

Posted in Uncategorized, Journalism, Culture | 1 Comment »

Debate within the box is not debate

May 2nd, 2009

Tim McGuire wants media criticism to be a bit more civil. “If media criticism is going to be taken seriously,” he writes in his Cronkite School of Journalism (Arizona State) blog, “I think the vitriol needs to be toned down and humility introduced.”

I have found it mighty maddening lately that everybody who talks about newspapers, media and the future of said media is so damned certain about just about everything. I have certainly made as many flat-out declarations as the next guy in my life, but it strikes me that in this intriguing liminal moment we live in there is a demand for more humility, more sense of journey and more open inquiry.

This is all well and good, but one of McGuire’s five rules for media criticism (academics love rules) strikes me as bringing the debate within a traditional box. Rule #3:

There needs to be common starting point. A good one for journalism is the four pillars of truth-telling, minimizing harm, independence and accountability. Those four elements are essential for discourse to be considered journalism. Good criticism should challenge journalists on the exercise of one or more of those elements. (Emphasis mine)

We’ll never find a common starting point for media criticism by forcing the debate into the very box that’s being criticized. It may introduce civility, because everybody in there believes the same thing, but journalism isn’t a practice codified by the traditions of a press more interested in creating a sterile environment for advertising than arguing the issues of the day. Imagine, if you will, the 18th Century pamphleteers working within the constraints imposed by the King’s “real” journalists.

There is no more colonialist institution in the world than the American press. Its need to be separate from (and above) the ignorant and uninformed citizenry it claims to represent is laughable in a culture where those same citizens are now able to publish for themselves. I agree with Professor McGuire that nobody knows the future on all this, but I think the right starting point is the people formerly known as the audience. They have run from the box, and we need to honestly and fearlessly ask ourselves why.

Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment »

The good thing about swine flu

May 1st, 2009

I have been young and now I am old, and I have never witnessed anything like the virtual panic in the streets over a little bug from Mexico. Nothing can make seemingly intelligent people tremble like a warning from the World Health Organization that uses the word “pandemic.” After all, we’ve seen the movies and the TV dramas about such things, right?

“Aporkalypse Now.” OMG, we’re all gonna die!

The good thing, of course, is that it gives Americans something to worry about that isn’t related to the economy. Of course, nobody goes to the mall when they’re afraid of other people (that mask isn’t foolproof, after all), so it could actually end up making matters worse.

People, please. Can we just chill for a minute? And to the health officials who will doubtless be chest-thumping when the fear has passed, remember the story of the boy who cried wolf.

Posted in Culture | 3 Comments »

Is the Mainstream Winning?

April 27th, 2009

Here is the latest in my ongoing essay series about reinventing local media:

Is the Mainstream Winning?

News last week that Yahoo was shuttering GeoCities got a lot of people thinking about what’s happened with the Web’s “top performers” over the last ten years. GeoCities was a top ten performer in 1999. A surface view suggests that mainstream media companies are beginning to win, because these companies now occupy many of the Web’s “top 25″ slots. Other evidence, including new data by Gordon Borrell (due out in the next few days), shows that traditional media companies are winning some of the battles in their competition with internet pureplay companies at the local level.

I look at all of this and concede that we’ve made big gains. I fear, however, that those gains are in the ad-supported content business, and I’m not sure that’s the real issue for traditional media companies. Hence, it may be a case of winning the battle but losing the war.

Posted in Advertising, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment »

This day

April 25th, 2009

Three years ago today. I pause to remember. A life. A love.

<<< >>>

A Patch On My Soul (2006)

I face each morrow with a sense of great sorrow
That cannot be spoken away.
For no hope can I find any place in my mind
That will make this great loss seem okay.

From whence can I hide, or find words to describe
The emptiness that greets me each day.
When only I find a pillow next to mine,
The place where her head used to lay.

She’s gone and it’s perished, this thing that we cherished,
This love that we both knew would last.
For those lips I once kissed are now but a mist
In a place far outside of my grasp.

At the front of my mind, she’s there every time
Whether thinking of that thing or this.
With no wish to escape, I embrace this sad fate
‘Cause at least in my mind she exists.

Like a moth on a screen, there’s something between
What I want and what I may possess.
The light beckons me, but I cannot break free,
No matter how hard that I press.

So when death sings its tune, be it later or soon,
To her arms I will run once again,
That thought I can seize, but explain to me, please,
How I live in this world until then.

They say time will heal this pain that I feel
That one day I’ll find myself whole.
And that may be true, but between me and you
It’ll be with a patch on my soul.

Posted in Allie | 2 Comments »

Local web revenue begins to favor local media

April 24th, 2009

For the first time, there’s evidence that local media companies who are “doing it right” in the online space are actually showing revenue growth exceeding that of the pureplay Web companies in the same markets. These are companies who view the Web as an opportunity for business development, and demonstrate it by dedicating resources and personnel to the task of growing online revenue, instead of placing the responsibility on existing employees.

This remarkable finding comes from new Borrell Associates data and should bolster the hopes of local media companies to seize the moment.

In crunching the preliminary numbers, Borrell looked at 15 legacy media companies and found each generating anywhere from $10m to $311 million in revenue from local online advertising. According to the data, the average growth comes to about 19%, while the pureplay companies are averaging about 9% growth. There’s a caveat, however: “If you add Google and Yahoo’s advertising programs to it, which admittedly aren’t purely ‘local,’” Borrell notes, “it drives the percentages up to about 20%, so they’re even. That’s not exactly a fair comparison, though.”

Perhaps even more importantly, this discovery could also encourage pureplays like Google, Yahoo, Local.com, Reach Local, Yodle and others to reach out and form partnerships with local media companies instead of competing for local dollars.

“The pureplays need feet on the street, which is too costly for them to obtain,” according to Gordon Borrell. “In the end, they’ll probably fall back on being platform and product suppliers, leaving the local media guys as the promoters, content providers, and sales force.”

That would be an extraordinary turn of events, for the pureplay companies have been eating the local media companies’ lunch when it comes to local online revenue. The image below looks at lot like a familiar game from the 1980s.

Borrell also notes that:

• These 15 companies collected a total of $1.03b in online advertising in 2008.
• And these 15 companies lost a whopping $1.9b in legacy media advertising in 2008.

These are the local media companies that are outperforming their contemporaries in the online space. They are executing parallel path strategies, one dedicated to brand extension and the other to business development.

“Doing it right,” according to Borrell, “is seeing the Internet as a SEPARATE entity deserving of considerable resources, not trying to use your existing sales and content staff.” That doesn’t mean

Creating news content for local media companies is the role of the news department, whether that’s for the legacy property, the Web or mobile. This is where many companies get it wrong in viewing the opportunity strategically. Borrell — and those of us at AR&D — strongly feel that business possibilities for local media go way beyond the content created for news, and these types of businesses require separate content and sales people.

Borrell likens what’s happening today to that which has happened before.

“Through time,” he told me, “local media companies were the ones who seized any ‘new medium’ — whether it was newspapers starting radio stations or the radio and newspaper guys starting TV stations, or the newspaper and TV guys getting into cable back in the 1970s.”

“It’s probably a bit early to declare newspaper and TV companies the probable winners in the ‘local online’ space, but I’m seeing a lot of the right moves being made. And history causes me to believe it’s actually going to happen.”

I think that’s a pretty big leap, although I would certainly rejoice if that were to take place. Wherever I go, I run into disbelief about the size of the local online market and also questions about who these “pureplay” companies are. Weddings.com is an excellent example, and Borrell says the local the local Weddings.com site typically has more revenue than the average TV station website.

This data reveals that some media companies are finally understanding the Web. Borrell thinks only 20 to 30 percent will “get it,” and the others will just be newspapers and TV stations with brand extension sites. Which category describes your company?

The new data should be available in report form via the Borrell website next week.

Posted in Advertising | 3 Comments »

To each medium, its own

April 22nd, 2009

Print: Advertising is adjacent to content
Broadcast: Advertising interrupts content
Movies: Advertising is within content
The Web: Advertising IS content

Just thought you’d like to know.

Posted in Advertising | 3 Comments »

It’s all in your perception

April 21st, 2009

A young woman — a college student exploring the RTNDA conference likely for the first time — asked the question of the whole convention yesterday. It came during a session in which Jerry Gumbert, president and CEO of AR&D, was discussing our new book and the details of re-engineering local TV. Grip the arm rests of your chair and get ready. Here it comes:

“Why wouldn’t anybody want to shoot their own video?”

The issue was the roles and expectations of the multimedia journalist. Jerry was talking about how veteran TV news reporters sincerely believe they’ve “earned” the right to “just” report but that the industry simply must move beyond that and embrace the necessity of putting more feet on the street. Readers here have been down this road with me many times. The industry vilification of Michael Rosenblum, the outlier “father of the VJ (video journalist) movement,” has been well-documented here, and it’s common knowledge that the pejorative term “one-man-band” is used with condescension among the rank and file in TV newsrooms.

But the reality is that a whole new generation of multimedia journalist is coming up through our institutions of higher learning, and they feel like this young woman in that room at the RTNDA yesterday. When she made that statement, the other students in the room announced their agreement. Wake up, you intransigent old-timers.

I wish Michael could have been there to hear this young lady make that unsolicited statement. I’m sure he hears it elsewhere, but in this context, in this place, in that room, it was very special.

Posted in Broadcasting, Disruptions, Technology, Video | 1 Comment »

The skewed view from the inside

April 20th, 2009

Science refers to the embracing of one point-of-view in an objective study as “going native,” and it can ruin sincere attempts to observe. This is the risk of any observer at the annual conference of the business of broadcasting and broadcast news. It’s the business of broadcasting talking to itself about things relating to the business, and this produces an odd (for me) perspective on the disruptive innovations about which I write.

This was evident during last night’s opening supersession panel. I had the honor of being a part of the discussion. The show opened with Bob Papper, an old friend and professor at Hofstra University, revealing a new study showing that employment in TV news fell by 4.3 percent (1,200 jobs) last year, while the typical station added one newscast. This is called doing more with less, which is — in the Clayton Christensen view — a textbook response to a business disruption. There was agreement on the panel that we can no longer do things the old way, but I was taken aback that much of the rest of the conversation spoke of exactly that.

The view from inside the business of broadcast news is very different than the view from the outside. Inside, it’s about content, how to get more people producing content for multiple platforms, the tools to create the content, and the presentation of the content. There exists the (nearly) absolute conviction that “quality” content is the key to the future, and that we’ve cut back on investigative reporting, so audiences are turning away. In this view, one only needs to fix the content, make more of it, distribute it everywhere, and in so doing, fix the audience problem.

This is not only naive, but it completely misses the bigger picture of what’s taking place in media — that the “mass” in mass media is being scattered and that the people formerly known as our advertisers are finding better and cheaper ways to find scattered eyeballs. This is the view from the outside, and absent serious and immediate efforts by local media companies to attack this problem, the “quality” of our content output won’t matter one bit.

The view from the inside interprets my position on this as too much doom and gloom, but regular readers here will know that I’m still quite bullish on broadcasting. I think it will be around for a long time, but I don’t believe it will ever sustain the kinds of business growth necessary to satisfy Wall Street through any form of multiple platform delivery of news “content.” People may want their news in a variety of forms, but the belief that we can support that with advertising sufficient to produce growth is not a safe assumption.

Another one of Bob Papper’s findings was that TV is still the dominant media form — and by a wide margin. This led him to say that TV and TV news, while needing to change, won’t face the same kinds of audience drop-off numbers that have crippled the newspaper industry for at least ten years. This is the view from the inside, for the revenue pressures on all media companies aren’t going to stop just because the recession (or whatever we’re calling it) ends.

The panel was a fun gathering. Russ Mitchell of CBS News did an excellent job as moderator, and I was proud to share the stage with Kevin Roach of The AP, Lane Michaelsen of WUSA-TV, Susana Schuler of Raycom Media, and Bob Papper. You can follow Jill Geisler (another dear old friend) and her live blogging via Cover It Live here. I’m told the RTNDA site will also offer a stream of the session via its website later today.

(NOTE, I interviewed both Jill and Bob for our book, “Live. Local. BROKEN News.“

Posted in Broadcasting, Disruptions | 1 Comment »

A Sunday in Vegas

April 19th, 2009

I’m sitting here at the window-view desk of my room on the 23rd floor of the Las Vegas Hilton and pondering the RTNDA and today’s panel. Next year will mark my 40th year in broadcasting, and, oh my, how things have changed.

When I first got in the business, newsrooms were mostly dominated by former radio or newspaper people, and TV news was seen by us as a way to make a difference. We didn’t have to deal with the whole profit-center business, because there weren’t a lot of public corporations running stations. That came much later. Privately-held, locally-owned television stations were an entirely different animal than today’s bean counter, process-driven world. People get into the TV news business today, because it’s cool to be on TV, and that remains one of the biggest problems of the day.

Through it all, the RTNDA has been a steady voice, always relating the industry back to its roots. I have been proud to be associated with this group, and it’s a little disconcerting to see what’s happening to it these days. People don’t join the RTNDA like they used to, because they’re so busy primping for the next newscast. Like the sheep heading for the cliff, they don’t even realize that no shepherd is leading them. The RTNDA’s current ill health is far more a result of news people who haven’t a clue as to why such a group is relevant and necessary, so they spend their money on make-up instead of joining the association. It’s evidence of how the industry has lost its way.

This is not to suggest that the RTNDA has the answers to disruptive innovations in news and advertising that are threatening the business, but it is the right group to bring people together to talk about such things. That’s the purpose of its annual conference, which, to be honest, has spent more time in recent years digging the hole than trying to figure ways out of it. Even now, the panels on technology involve people from broadcasting, and I think we should be listening to those involved in the disruption (been saying that for a long time). It’s like the annual convention of the whale oil industry having panels about electricity, but seating only whalers and processors. They’re more content to see who will be the last harpoon maker than changing business models, and so it goes.

I think that the realities of the job losses and budget cuts have smacked everybody upside the head, and there’s a sense of “how do we stay positive amongst all this?” I haven’t been to the registration desk yet, but everybody’s expecting attendance to be way off. This is, of course, a shame, for at a time when we really need to be pulling together, the bean counters say “we can’t afford it.” Really?

The opening chapter of our new book is a call for leadership. Leaders can set aside process for the sake of the goal, and this is what we so desperately need. The summary for my panel this afternoon, for example, states, “This session will help introduce attendees to what is working in the industry now.” We want to know what’s “working,” because we’re process-driven. We’re outstanding at copying, but lousy at innovating. Leaders need only a goal. We badly need leaders.

Time for breakfast. More later.

Posted in Broadcasting | No Comments »

Pirate Bay lunatic decision is just the beginning

April 18th, 2009

I’ve been watching this business of the guilty verdict against the four founders of The Pirate Bay the past couple of days, and it has been illuminating. The four were sentenced Friday morning in a Swedish court to one year in jail and $3.6 million in damages. The case will be appealed.

A ton has been written about this since the verdict, much of it bullshit. The more illuminating work has come from people like Steven Hodson at The Inquisitr and Mike Masnick of Techdirt. All I can say is thank God for the Web, for the mainstream press doesn’t seem to view this decision the same way.

Hodson rightly points out that The Pirate Bay is nothing more than a search engine, and if they’re guilty of copyright infringement, then so are Google and Microsoft.

The thing is that for all the accusations of Pirate Bay being a file sharer the argument is fundamentally flawed. Pirate Bay as a site does not host any of the files that they are accused of sharing. All they are doing is providing a search engine interface for torrents that point to both legal and illegal content. It’s not like they are twisting anyone’s arm to download anything – they are providing a service not a file depot.

This would be like suggesting that Google or Microsoft Live are file sharers because they provide links to downloadable content. If the grounds that the entertainment industry used against Pirate Bay are valid by even the farthest stretch of the imagination then the same arguments should be used against Google and Microsoft.

But Masnick’s take is even more interesting, for he cites the work of best-selling author Paul coelho, who supports The Pirate Bay. That’s right; a best-selling author supports “piracy.”

The folks this will hurt the most are those content creators who actually do value The Pirate Bay — such as best selling author Paulo Coelho, who found that “pirating” his own book helped him tremendously, and who recently spoke out about what a useful tool The Pirate Bay has been. It’s a shame that because some big lumbering companies are unable to change their business models that they get to use the legal system to disrupt and annoy those who have figured it out.

A Brazilian author Coelho is so convinced that downloaded copies help book sales that he set up his own bogus “pirating” site, Pirate Coelho, to encourage free downloading. He’s posted every translation of his best-seller, The Alchemist, and let’s users assume it’s an “illegal” site. Why? Because it boosts sales, and he can prove it. Watch the video and you’ll learn about that and more.

Coelho has figured this out and he made one statement that is so important. “People share your work because they love

And this message is especially relevant for The Associated Press, whose members are taking an eerily similar path with regards to copyright.

Posted in Copyright, Legal | 1 Comment »

What should I tell the audience at NAB?

April 17th, 2009

It’s been a busy week for me: clients, the new book, staff meetings, school, and an occasional tweet or blog entry. But this weekend, it’s off to Vegas and the annual NAB/RTNDA conference. I’m on the opening Super Session Sunday afternoon, and I’d like to get your input in the comments about how I should handle that responsibility. Here’s the background:

Sunday, April 19 - 4:00 to 5:30 pm: Opening Supersession: Leading News Reinvention
Ballroom A of the Las Vegas Hilton
The gloomiest year ever in some newsrooms leads some to wonder whether there is a viable future for broadcast news. Part of the reason for the slump on the business side is the growing lack of relevance of traditional broadcast models to younger audiences. Traditional TV and radio spot advertising is no longer capable of sustaining the operation, capital, and profit needs of many stations. Those stations have looked to change models to support free broadcasting. News managers may sometimes have trouble helping find and adjust to these models. This session will help introduce attendees to what is working in the industry now. (emphasis mine)

Producer: RTNDF and Stacey Woelfel Sponsor: The McCormick Foundation
Moderator: Russ Mitchell, News Anchor, The Early Show, Anchor, CBS Evening News Sunday Edition, Correspondent, Sunday Morning New York
Panelists: Kevin Roach, VP and Director of U.S. Broadcast News, Associated Press, Washington, Terry Heaton, SVP Media 2.0, Audience Research and Development, Fort Worth, TX, Lane Michaelsen, WUSA-TV, Director of Information Center, WUSA-TV, Washington, Susana Schuler, VP of News, Raycom Media, Bob Papper, Professor, Hofstra University, Department of Journalism, Hempstead, NY

Communications and electronic journalism have changed dramatically and promise to change even more in years to come. The familiar lines that once marked the boundaries between radio, television, print, computers, telephones and other media are blurred. News is a digital broadband mix of audio, video, print, graphics and databases. New technology is completely transforming the news industry and the definition of who is a journalist and what are journalism standards.

So what’s “working?” Anybody want to address that? Put yourself in my shoes. You have an audience (150 in the flesh, but many, many more via streaming, etc.), so what do they need to hear.

Posted in Broadcasting | 5 Comments »

AR&D releases “Live. Local. BROKEN News.”

April 16th, 2009

On the eve of perhaps the most important NAB/RTNDA conference ever, AR&D is publishing a one-of-a-kind guide that details our unique vision for local television in the wake of disruptive innovations to the business. Live. Local. BROKEN News. The Re-engineering of Local TV went on sale yesterday at AR&D’s website and Amazon.com (they got the authors wrong on Amazon. I wrote some chapters, but it was a collaborative effort. Copies will also available at the RTNDA bookstore at the conference in Las Vegas.

The project has been in development for the past year and is the combined thinking of some of the best minds in broadcasting, the senior strategists at AR&D. “We took a real hard look at the realities confronting local TV,” said AR&D president Jerry Gumbert, “and found a lot of worried people and little hope.” “As an industry,” he continued, “we’re very good at copying others, but what happens when there’s no one to copy? Somebody needed to step forward with a real vision, and that’s what we’ve done here.”

The vision is both sweeping in its scope yet practical in its details, touching every facet of our business. Gone is the star anchor, to be replaced by the news department’s “chief journalist.” From the front office to the news director’s chair, the industry needs leaders, not managers, and Live. Local. BROKEN News. defines what that means. The book examines revenue opportunities beyond the broadcast signal and reveals the workflow transformation process for functioning in a new news cycle that we call “unfinished to finished news.” The “Content Center” runs everything and works with multimedia journalists to guide and shape the multi-platform, multi-disciplined output of the shop.

From management to street reporters, we’ve tried to present a clear picture of the new responsibilities and skills necessary to meet the challenges of change with a sense of guidance, passion and purpose. The book also looks at the evolving new tools that technology brings to the newsgathering table and even explores new roles for meteorologists and sportscasters.

Outgoing RTNDA President Barbara Cochran — who has watched the evolution of television and TV news — said that the book comes at a crucial time, when everyone is trying to “figure out” how to reinvent local TV. “The specifics are here,” she commented, “but the overall message is loud and clear. Now is the time for leaders, not managers. It’s not enough to do more with less; we must be bold enough to lead change while preserving the core values of sound journalism.”

Publishing a book of this nature as a collaborative effort is a daunting task. Individual chapters were assigned, and then passed through layers of editors to insure a similar “voice.” It has been my honor and privilege to be a part of the process, because I honestly believe this book can serve as the roadmap that the industry needs to jump start reinvention across-the-board. The book is so rich in terms of ideas and how they’re presented that it will likely become a standard textbook at television and journalism schools everywhere.

Posted in Broadcasting, Reinventing Local Media | No Comments »

Shafer: Don’t cluck your tongue

April 16th, 2009

Jack Shafer’s latest is a must read. An excerpt:

Instead of getting wigged out at the Huffington Post, offended sites would be smarter to glean a lesson from experience. Top journalists aren’t going to like hearing this, but not everybody has time to lounge about with the 2,000-word masterpiece that you and your editor handcrafted. They want to get to the salient point, and they want to get there now. As heretical as it may sound, the Huffington Post is adding value by skinning alive that beautiful baby seal you just birthed and serving its fresh, beating heart to readers in a hurry.

Instead of feeling diminished by the Huff Post’s excerpts, more publications might want to pre-empt the site by serving distilled versions of their own articles. That’s right: Even the Post and the Times and the Journal can learn something about how to serve readers from the Huffington Post.

Don’t cluck your tongue…

Indeed.

Posted in Journalism | No Comments »

The trouble with Twitter

April 16th, 2009

While I am a user of Twitter, I remain only warm on its value in the overall scope of social media, and this business of Aston Kutcher and CNN trying to get to a million followers just emphasizes my point. The news is also filled with stories of Twitter’s dramatic growth — traffic up 131% in March — so it would seem everybody’s jumping on board. Nobody has summed up my feelings about all this better than Steven Hodgson at The Inquisitr:

Robert Scoble once said it isn’t the number of people of following you on Twitter that is important but rather the number of people you are following. Well if we look at those numbers in regards to the two combatants in the PR slugfest of the century we can see they are both losers. Currently CNN while ahead in the follower’s number game is lagging behind Kutcher, which isn’t say much either.

Kutcher is following: 70 people

CNN is following 6 people

Where it can make sense for CNN to have as many followers as it does, because it is a news broadcaster after all, Kutcher’s obsession with reaching that earth shattering milestone of 1 million is pointless and stupid. It also shows how as much as the folks in social media would like everyone to believe that it is all about the conversation the real point of Twitter is to prove how little you value your friendships. After all how could you even come close to being able to give a rational explanation about any value of having a million people following you.

Twitter is being used by media companies as another form of mass media — which is fine — but its real value is as a listening post. I think if all we do is accumulate followers and blast them with tweets, we’ll end up talking to ourselves, because conversational media must be 2-way in order for the conversation to take place. And anybody who thinks all those followers are glued to their every word is fooling themselves.

Twitter is another case of legacy media taking a new technology and bolting it onto its existing model, rather than exploring how it is really used among the geeks who created it. We certainly should be using Twitter, but the smart media companies will recognize and pursue both sides of the conversation.

Posted in Disruptions, Technology | 8 Comments »

It isn’t about the content

April 12th, 2009

Nick Carr (Google in the middle) and Scott Karp (How Google Stole Control Over Content Distribution By Stealing Links) are both on Google’s case this weekend. Their view is essentially that Google is hurting traditional media companies by becoming the dominant middleman in the distribution of content. Both articles are good reads, and Carr and Karp are smart fellows.

The problem is that the distribution of content isn’t the real problem for media companies; it’s the growing ability of advertisers to reach people without media companies. Advertising is the disruption that should trouble media companies, not what’s happening to their content. Ad-supported content is simply not a growth business anymore; it cannot provide sustainable growth, because the disruption isn’t about content.

This is why the “reinvention of journalism” concept is dicier than most think. If the mission is to find a way to better position content for advertising, it isn’t going to work (if “working” means growing revenue). This is why I advise clients to seek ways to make online money detached from the content they create by connecting consumers with advertisers in ways beyond simply serving ads. I think it’s possible we’ll come up with some form of user fee downstream that will help compensate journalists, but casting aspersions at Google is just a waste of effort. Google is an outstanding business and one that has undergirded J.D. Lasica’s famous “personal media revolution” since the beginning. Any media company on the planet could have done the same thing, but they didn’t.

And here’s the thing that’s most irritating to me in bitching about Google. Despite its intelligent algorithms, Google is what I call a “dumb” aggregator, meaning items are gleaned based entirely on software. “Smart” aggregators involve human intelligence calling the shots, and you’d think by now that somebody would have built one for news.

Posted in Newspapers, Journalism, Disruptions, Google | 6 Comments »

I want my iPhone

April 11th, 2009

How long before Apple buys this video for a commercial?

Thanks to Kara Swisher at All Things Digital.

Posted in Just Plain Fun Stuff | 5 Comments »

The AP and its uphill battle

April 11th, 2009

I got an email last night from Paul Colford, Director of Media Relations for the Associated Press. It was the canned response to anyone who has commented on the “misunderstanding” involving the cooperative and a Tennessee radio station over the embedding of YouTube videos from the AP’s YouTube channel.

There was a misunderstanding of YouTube usage when the Tennessee radio station was contacted by the Associated Press regarding the AP’s more extensive online video services. No cease and desist letter was drafted or sent by AP to the station at any time. The AP was trying to offer the station a superior service for their needs — the AP Online Video Network.

OVN is a paid service. YouTube videos are free. ‘Nuff said. (See Paul Colford’s comments below. I misstated OVN’s purpose, which is advertising, including a revshare with the publisher.)

Paul also included a link to “further describe the content initiative announced by the AP this week.” You can read the FAQs yourself, but here are a couple of thoughts.

The AP is well within its rights to defend its copyrights in any way it chooses. It has no reason to defend itself publicly, so these FAQs are an excellent gesture. They’re going to help their members with search engine optimization, which is a smart move. The cooperative says this is about consumers (”to access and engage with news content in more robust ways”), and I say that’s just spin. It’s about money, and the AP’s position here is that it costs a lot of money to produce “authoritative” news and that members should be compensated somehow.

But on a much deeper level, this battle is between the old and the new, traditional media companies who make their money through bundled content and the geeks of Silicon Valley and beyond, who not only built the Web but set in place new methods and rules for participation. The AP and traditional media will lose this fight for two reasons: One, they underestimate the realities of contemporary online advertising, such as advertisers creating their own content and advertisers no longer needing the reach provided by media content in the online world. Two, they’re placing their entire hope on copyright. The RIAA did this, and it didn’t make a dent in the loss of revenue to record companies. And not only will the AP lose, but they’ll expend energy and resources on a side issue instead of reinventing a dying business. As evidence of that, the FAQs refer to the link economy as the “so-called” link economy.

The AP shot itself in the foot years ago when it created XML content and images feeds that its members could have used in developing their brand-extension websites and creating niche verticals. I recall working with a station that badly wanted these feeds, but the prices the cooperative wanted were truly outrageous. It was pretty clear that the AP thought of the Web as a way to reuse and repackage existing content and make money from it, despite the fact that members were already receiving the content in other forms. If the AP truly had the interests of its members in mind back then, a whole series of profitable and automated local niche verticals could have been created. Instead, many just backed away and silently complained, because expressing discontent didn’t do any good.

My heart goes out to friends and colleagues in traditional media businesses, and where I can, I try to make a difference by telling the truth about that which is disrupting their business. There is a way out of this, but it does not involve clinging to the past. Content isn’t king anymore, and businesses sustained only by ad-supported content are in the worst position for tomorrow. The “business” of media is advertising, and that’s the problem.

More: read Peter Kafka’s AP Exec: “To the Untrained Eye It Looks Like We’re Stupid”

Posted in Copyright, Reinventing Local Media, Associated Press | 4 Comments »