IN THIS ISSUE:

THE FUTURE OF PAID CONTENT
"SNOW"MAGEDDON AND THE NEW MEDIA
MEDIA 2.0 101: IT'S ALL ABOUT PEOPLE (NOT "CONSUMERS")
TOOLS OF THE TRADE - A DIFFERENT VIEW OF TODAY
MOBILE DIGITAL TV GETTING CLOSER
QUOTE OF THE WEEK

THE FUTURE OF PAID CONTENT
by Terry Heaton
The hopes of newspapers to shift their Web users from free to paid models suffered a fairly substantial setback this morning with word of a new study from the folks at Nielsen. According to a report in Online Media Daily,

A new Nielsen survey says 79% of users would no longer access a Web site that charges them. The finding also assumes that consumers can find the same information at no cost. The new report from Nielsen surveyed 27,000 consumers from 52 countries.

Looking at new fee-based areas, the survey shows that 71% of global consumers say that if have to pay for online content it must be considerably better than what is currently available for free.

Obviously, media companies need to get paid for their efforts, so this disconnect between users (let's remember that they're real people, see below) and the copyright community needs resolution somehow, and fortunately, there are smart people trying to work on the issues. A lot of them will be on hand this weekend at a new conference in New York on the concept of paid content by the people who report daily on the subject, PaidContent.org. The scope of "Paid Content, Discussing The Economics Of Content" includes:

• Business strategy and models that are working across news, information and entertainment
• The people and companies driving innovation
• The cross-platform approach to developing these diverse revenue streams
• Music, TV and movie downloads
• Subscription streaming
• A la carte payments, micropayments, subscriptions, donation models, subsidy models, and mobile payments

In other words, just about everything involving people paying for content. I caught up with ContentNext Media EVP and co-editor of paidcontent.org, Staci Kramer, with some tough questions about the idea of paid content:

Q - What is the future of paid content? Content that used to be ad-supported is now competing with content that IS advertising, and I've read from many knowledgeable observers that "content" is no longer king. Given that this is the namesake of your company and your conference, what are your thoughts?

KRAMER: Our flagship site, paidContent.org, was founded by Rafat Ali in 2002. As we added sites and other elements to the company, the corporate name became ContentNext Media -- chosen in no small part to reflect a constantly changing area. To me, all content is paid content -- the differences are in who pays for it. With our sites and newsletters, advertisers pay to gain access to our readers. In theory, and often in practice, readers pay for "free" and ad-supported content with attention. Cable, newspaper and magazine subscribers pay for access and delivery, usually subsidized by advertisers; some are willing to pay more to get media and entertainment without ads. You get my drift.

So what is the future of paid content? Nothing that makes money now is going away any time soon. We're in an age of maintenance mixed with experimentation -- keep as much money coming in as you can while you look for solutions. It's also an age of opportunity. That's one reason we're having paidContent 2010 -- to hear about what's working and to explore the possibilities.

Q - Your speaker list is a veritable "Who's Who" of the content world. Do today's "content" people really have a handle on what's disrupting their world, and, more importantly, what to do about it? I'm partly referring to the issue of aggregators, like Google.

KRAMER: A lot of them do -- or at least are trying very hard to get one -- and our speakers reflect that. John Squires, for instance, is heading Next Issue Media, the joint venture of five major magazine publishers looking for a solution together, They want to create an electronic newsstand that gives each publisher control over its own pricing, customer relationships, etc., but solved the technological and marketing issues as a group.

Google News' Josh Cohen is on the news panel so I expect we'll hear a fair amount about why Google doesn't think aggregation or search should be the bogey man. Most publishers want to use search literally as an engine for traffic to their sites so cutting it out completely isn't an option but the "solutions" are all over the map. The FT's Rob Grimshaw will talk about how they're limiting full "first click" access from Google, while the New York Times has already said it won't block in-bound links.

Q - Do you think content people will be able to successfully pull back on "free" content to bring about another revenue stream? This must be a constant source of your attention, so your view is pretty important (I think).

KRAMER: Thanks for thinking my view is important. I've been through this drill before. When I was at Inside.com, the site had an enormous amount of buzz from its free content, which was meant to fuel subscriptions. When we went behind the paywall, the buzz died down. If you can calibrate the launch of a new product with a blend, you have a chance at success.

As for "successfully":-- that may depend on your definition of success. If you're trying to take back something people already get for free -- like Newsday did late last year -- be prepared to pay the consequences in lower traffic and possibly lower relevance. Newsday and parent Cablevision think they can win by creating a higher-value, more targeted local audience.

On the broadcast/cable side, because so much cable video is out there, most people don't realize that more than 80 percent of full-length cable programming hasn't been available free. When Hulu's' investors talk about subscriptions, they're not looking at making everything on Hulu's' pay only. The focus will be on video that isn't out there yet or is made available in different ways That has a better chance of succeeding. Disney's Bob Iger has already said broadcast programming won't be moved to pay only.

Q - Finally, like so many people who've been around this for awhile, I'm proud to know both of you and to have watched your business - and stature - grow. How have things changed for the PaidContent empire?

KRAMER: It's been about 18 months since we were acquired by Guardian News & Media, which is the biggest change for the company. We have the resources of Guardian to draw on and share a CEO, Caroline Little, with Guardian North America and operate independently editorially. But our focus and that of paidContent and ContentNext remains the same: doing our best to keep up with this crazy space so we can help all of you keep up with it. We've come a long way from 2004 when I joined -- with Rafat working from his home in California and me from St. Louis -- to a full company with a nice (but not glam) office in New York and staff in Seattle, LA and London. One of the best parts is so many people like you have been on the journey with us.

We'll be watching the conference closely and hope to report on it next week. Like last week's conference with Gordon Borrell's company, this one is being organized and planned by people who really know the space. And the exciting thing to me is that neither conference existed last year. It should be good.   <Link>

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"SNOW"MAGEDDON AND THE NEW MEDIA
by Ken Elmore
Each week it seems a new snow storm is bearing down on some unfortunate portion of the country, dumping tons of snow and sending news crews scrambling. This season's storms is the first real test of extended coverage for newsrooms that lost staff positions in the 2009 cost reductions. The question of "do we have the staff to cover a major news event" was partially answered in the form of social media.

While some stations simply took the "we will do with what we have" approach, others excelled in coverage with new ideas and help from their viewers.

CBS owned KYW in Philadelphia, CBS3, drew up a game plan that included using Smartphones, Skype, Qik and Facebook, reaching out to viewers who were in the midst of the storms, all who had the ability to report to the station on the record snowfalls. Roads were closed, portions of the state were inaccessible and with the power of consumer technology and social media, the story was covered like never before.

KYW used Skype to talk directly on-air to people from their homes for weather conditions, and unveiled a Skype team of reporters that filed live from the field, and even traveling down snow covered roads offering unprecedented perspective to viewers who were stuck in their homes. It was a masterful plan that allowed KWY to offer the most complete coverage of a major storm.

"We used Skype, USTREAM and content cached on websites. One of our reporters posted some video to their Facebook page and we could take it off there too." KYW system engineer, Rich Paleski told TVNewsWeek, "At one point they had seven live shots up simultaneously and none were interfering with the other ones.

"It was unconventional the way they were seeing the television broadcast so we were explaining, showing reporters using an iPhone or a Flip camera and wireless and laptops," says KYW News Director Susan Schiller.

I know as a former News Director, in the past it was always difficult to convince viewers to share their videos and pictures during these types of events. I believe partly because technology had not reached the masses, and stations were ill equipped receive and post the content in a timely manner.

Now with smartphones viewers have audio, video and pictures at their fingertips and their willingness to become part of the news gathering process is exploding. Kevin Brennan is the News Director at WSAV-TV in Savannah, GA. Over the weekend he experienced just how powerful smartphones and the social site Facebook have become.

"We set up photo galleries on our website at WSAV.com We had 450 or 500 photos sent in by viewers. Most would send in just one photo, but some send three or four. They started in Friday night through mid-day Saturday. We have always had some response on severe weather, but never anything like this. Before we would have flooding around town, you may have 20 - 30 - 40... This effected everyone somehow. We had pictures from people in the majority of the counties that had snow, says Brennan"

WSAV also used its social media sites Facebook and Twitter to generate news leads and citizen coverage. "People also posted their pictures on our Facebook page. One of reporters sent out a tweet looking for historical snowfall information to her followers and within minutes had a photos of a record snowfall in 1989. I made sure we also commented back to viewers and thanked them for their contributions, as part of the ongoing conversation." added Brennan.

The station also used off the shelf technology we've talked about before, Eye.fi cards and the MyFi mobile wireless device. It allowed the WSAV crews to shoot pictures from the field that were immediately transmitted back to a station web server for online. They will use the same device for their upcoming coverage of the huge St. Patricks Day parade. During storm coverage the station increased its online page views 400%, and unique visitors by 250%.

Next up is severe weather season and then hurricane season. If you haven't put in place a social media and mobile coverage strategy, you might want to add it to the 'to do list" today.   <Link>

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MEDIA 2.0 101: IT'S ALL ABOUT PEOPLE (NOT "CONSUMERS")
by Terry Heaton
In my early presentations to groups that wanted to talk about disruptions to media, I always began with a slide that said, "It's not about technology; it's about people." For those who've not read or heard me on the subject, let me give you the basics, because I need to answer a question posed to me by colleague Jim Willi over the weekend on his blog.

While everybody points fingers of blame this way or that over what's been taking place with media companies over the past few years, we would all do well to look in the mirror. The Internet has brought Western culture to a new place, and here's what's important to know: the Web is unlocking deeply-held feelings and awakening new possibilities for everyday people. To begin with, people are able to be better informed about a great many things today. And if information is power, then people are more powerful today. On many fronts, they are enabled to do something about their former helplessness. They're involved in their lives and the lives of their friends, families and communities on levels never known before, largely because they're all connected and can respond on a dime to anything. This is new under the sun, and we cannot look the other way.

This is why I say that technology may be providing the means, but it's what's being released in people that's generating the heat. In my view, we are in the midst of the second Gutenberg moment in history, and it will have profound ramifications for all of culture.

So when Mr. Willi wrote this weekend of the failure of Superbowl advertisers to successfully drive viewers to their websites, the question about why is rather simple.

Apparently Super Bowl advertisers missed the mark in their attempt to extend their ads from the big game by using social media to give life to their brands beyond one multi-million dollar spot within the most-watched event. I leave the diagnosis of why this effort missed the mark to 2.0 guru's like our Terry Heaton - but I find the information fascinating.

Jim wrote of strategies by advertisers to involve social media in their ads, but noted that research after the fact showed that few people actually were moved to do anything. "The advertisers' goal," he noted, "was to drive the viewers to go on line and chat, Tweet and become a Facebook fan."

When marketing people use phrases like "drive the viewers" — and media companies are certainly guilty of this as well — we dismiss any notion that, just perhaps, people don't care to be so driven. In the seminal book of the new revolution, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls wrote extensively about this. Here's a key paragraph:

So the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." Power swung so decisively to the supply side that "market" became a verb: something you do to customers.

If you've never read the book, I strongly recommend you make it your weekend project. It's free as a PDF online.

The point is that people are tired of the relentless carpet bombing of unwanted messages, and so they've turned them off and tuned them out (think TiVo). The marketing world's response is to try and jam more into every conceivable sight, sound, touch, taste or smell. If it can get into your brain, marketing will try to get in there with it, or at least that's the way it used to be.

Newscasts and news departments, for example, that radiate a "watch or you might die" persona are challenged, because people know it's just not true. Hubris is our big enemy, along with the presumption that we can say or do anything — no matter how it challenges the integrity or intelligence of the audience — and they'll respond the way we want them to respond.

This is why Jay Rosen refers to them as "the people formerly known as the audience."

So why didn't people respond to those ads? Well, it certainly could be lots of things, but the place I'd begin is the presumption in the first place that they would. Social media isn't a place where we can butt in and take over. Just because you're a big brand doesn't mean you have a license to treat people as pawns on your self-serving board game. Until mass marketing accepts the new realities of life in an empowered culture, they will continue to find failure with old thinking. People simply need to be treated differently.

Here's Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, and formerly Starcom's chief innovation officer:

(We've entered) an empowered era in which humans are God, because technology allows them to be godlike. How will you engage God?

Douglas Rushkoff in his book, Get Back In The Box:

The internet is not a technological or even a media phenomenon; it is a social phenomenon. And in this sense, interactivity has changed everything.

Chris Anderson in his book, The Long Tail:

As the tools of production and distribution are democratized, institutions lose power and individuals gain it. As the Web becomes the greatest word-of-mouth amplifier in history, consumers learn to trust peers more and companies less.

So I'm not surprised when marketing fails today, and the lessons for all of us are pretty clear. Old assumptions about people, especially those that involve fun verbs like drive, move, shift, and my favorite "reposition" must be carefully reconsidered in our dealings with our audiences. New words like participate, involve, transparency, and friend are strong but only if we deliver what we promise.

I can still remember sitting in an office at Nielsen in Dunedin, Florida and reading comments in diary after diary from viewers in the Northwest begging for the TV stations to stop insulting them with teases. I asked myself, "Do station managers ever read this stuff?" Because if they did, they might have a different view of how we interact with viewers.

(Now that's not to say we shouldn't do "teases," only that we might want to try less insulting approaches than "15 dead in an accident on highway 101. The story at 11." And it turns out to be pigs. You get my drift.)

In the old world, people couldn't escape that nonsense. Today, not only can they escape, they are — and in big numbers.

"Spam" is a nasty word for unwanted messages via email — or any other delivery system. Think about that before you create some clever way to "drive" people from here to there.   <Link>

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TOOLS OF THE TRADE - A DIFFERENT VIEW OF TODAY
by Ken Elmore
Viewers for the NBC Today Show are in for a treat this week. The ability to catch a live, 360 degree, view of the Today Show set at the Olympic Games in Vancouver. By logging into the Today Show website you can control a 360 live view of the set, the guests, the gathered gallery and NBC technical crew.

The technology is one of kind and the brain child of Immersive Media, a Canadian based technology company. The company supplies 360 degree, full motion, interactive videos. Similar to what you see on Google maps, but with live and pre-recorded video.

The Today Show set is equipped with a high resolution , 11 lens camera. Online users can pan and tilt throughout the NBC morning show set. The unprecedented access was available during today's broadcast and will be back online Thursday morning at 7AM Eastern.

The camera was also used for the red carpet arrival of stars at the recent Grammy Awards. Are there other uses for this emerging technology? Certainly NBC will see substantial increases in traffic to its morning show website.

For local television stations and media companies, there may be opportunities for 360 degree commercials for advertisers, interactive videos of large events and festivals.

According to a company press release, Immersive Media is also making available a high-res 360 online video of the Haiti earthquake devastation for use by local media companies and non-profits for ongoing relief efforts. Powerful images that can help drive home the message. Pretty cool stuff!   <Link>

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MOBILE DIGITAL TV GETTING CLOSER
by Terry Heaton
As we get closer to the reality of mobile digital television (MDTV), articles about it are beginning to appear in the mainstream press, and not just the tech press. The New York Times, for example, carried a piece this weekend, Local TV for Devices on the Move, that fairly well sums up the current situation.

Beginning in April, eight television stations in Washington, D.C., will broadcast a signal for a new class of devices that can show programming, even in a car at high speed. In all, 30 stations in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington have installed the necessary equipment, at a cost of $75,000 to $150,000.

"Younger generations want programming on the go," said Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters. "To access TV on a cellphone, on a laptop or in the car is a game changer for local broadcasters. It will provide a renaissance for over-the-air broadcast TV."

The first devices will become available in April, according to the report. "They include a $249 TV-DVD player from LG; a $120 device the size of a cigarette box from Valups, a Korean set-top box maker, that retransmits a mobile signal to an iPhone, iPod or BlackBerry over Wi-Fi; PC dongles and set-top boxes for automobiles from iMovee; and a $149 iPhone/iPod mobile TV cradle from Cydle."

Of course, the issue remains about exactly what will be transmitted for these devices, and this is where I want to say again that local programming and the network programming that local broadcasters transmit every night and throughout the day won't be sufficient to really make this the game-changer that everybody is hoping for. Until the affiliates strike deals with their networks to strip (perhaps delayed) programming from the cable channels they each own, this won't be much different than the old days of taking a portable TV to the ballpark.

The competitors here are the Telcos, who want subscribers to pay $15 a month for a service that will bring this kind of programming to them, and I'm sure the cable channels would prefer that model. Free versus paid? Didn't we just discuss that issue above?

I've long been a huge fan of MDTV, and if broadcasters can play their cards right, this could breathe new life into a business model that's limping along right now. Mobile television is a HUGE opportunity for advertisers, and I'm of the camp that this should drive the bus, not subscriber fees.

We'll see.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic!" he (Rupert Murdoch) recently said. But as our Kevin Kelleher essentially summed up in discussing Murdoch and News Corp's business strategy in this post over the weekend, "Murdoch is right that those devices are lifeless without content, but he neglects to mention that it's a symbiotic relationship." Om Malik, from MySpace R.I.P.