When I blogged last week about successful online business models, Working Reporter left this wonderful comment:
I’d like to see newspapers try your ideas, but I’d also like them to try the enormously unpopular idea of actually selling what they make, either directly through online subscriptions or indirectly, perhaps by partnering up with a cable company and becoming a “premium channel” like HBO.
It seems to me like the main problem with offering free content, even alongside ads, is that it makes it much harder for the author (or artist) to eat.
But it also prompted me to scribble this in the margins (yes, I printed it out):
The AP is flipping the news model!! Newspapers beware…
What I meant is that the AP is positioning itself to steal news distribution from its member papers while they’re all looking the other way.
If you read between the lines in that report, you can see how the AP is learning where and how young people are reading the news, building the infrastructure to reach that new audience, mining the member papers for content, and creating the ad network that will support it.
Fred Wilson’s tumblog post today led me to an extremely important article in the New York Times about how NBC is handling the Olympics in an age where the consumers are in charge more than the executives.
It turns out that although NBC tried their damnedest to keep the stunningly gorgeous opening ceremony under wraps for twelve hours while they prepped it for the “live” US prime time debut, they failed miserably.
More importantly, their utter failure to keep the scenes off You Tube did nothing to hurt their prime time viewership. In fact it might have helped—the Times article reports that a whopping 34.2 million viewers, an audience larger than that of any non-US opening in history.
What gives? Why did all these people, who already saw it for free, turn up in droves for the real broadcast?
The Wall Street Journal has an article today chronicling the difficulty that newspapers are experiencing as they try to capture the local ad market for their web pages.
The problem is twofold:
Local advertisers don’t think of newspapers as a place for cheap, online ads
Newspapers are trying to sell these ads with ad sales teams
The chart from the article, which I’ve shamelessly ganked and placed here in this post, tells the tale: over the past two years, literally everyone has become familiar with AdSense and abandoned the newspaper. After all, AdSense is the self-serve ad platform for the little guy.
Google only has ad sales teams for the big clients, the ones dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars (or making hundreds of thousands of dollars), and lets everyone else take care of themselves.
I really like the way that the New York Times has a “comments of the moment” section high up in the sidebar on their blogs. It looks like this:
Lending high-profile exposure to good comments is one great “carrot” method of hosting a good comment section. Leading by example and rewarding good behavior are powerful, Pavlovian methods, and it proves that you’re taking community input seriously.
I know, I know, you “don’t have the resources.” Remember, you’re in startup mode. Time to invest.
It’s easier than ever to read news online. Most newspapers have a good portion of their content online. But are they engaging with their readers? Have they explored the many opportunities of interacting with the readers & the benefits of doing so?
My husband has been reading the regional newspaper online for almost 10 years. There has been no reason to have the paper copy delivered. The online version opened up the option for readers to comment on certain articles.
My husband enjoyed adding his thoughts to articles & reading the comments. This was allowed for three months before it was discontinued for unknown reasons.
Patrick Thornton of BeatBlogging.org has a good interview up with Mónica Guzmán, one of the three speakers that will be kick-starting The Pitch this September.
The main issue? Comments:
For Monica Guzman, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s first online reporter, empowering people is a major way to cultivate comments and build a community. She runs The Big Blog, a blog dedicated to keeping tabs on what’s happening in Seattle and the Seattle blogosphere.
“I’m convinced that newspapers need to rise up and take responsibility not just for the quality of the news, but for the quality of the conversation,” Guzman said.
This week’s On The Media programming includes three segments on reader comments, a topic that Gawker seems to have successfully brought to the front of everyone’s mind.
As usual, there are some good ideas and some bad ideas mixed into the whole. I’ve embedded the audio from each segment here (on NPR’s part, allowing this is a good idea) and left my thoughts below.
Comments on comments
The good part of this interview comes in at the very last question, so once the segment has loaded you should skip in to 5:26.
Ira Glass (host of This American Life) takes this opportunity to defend the idea of comments in particular, and a two-way conversation system in particular.
It’s called The Pitch because it is designed to start a discussion around one particular statement (or pitch) about current changes in the publishing industry.
For this event, that statement is:
There is no business model that will support a print daily product.
Last week Eric Schmidt spoke with the LA Times (found via editorsweblog) about the recent deal that Google has made with Lionsgate, and also about how newspapers were going to have more trouble adapting to the internet than video.
There are three things about this interview that I want to highlight:
1. The reason that Schmidt thinks video is OK and print is not is not just the split between entertainment and news (as he implies). The reason is that there’s currently no good way to track print content to its original source the way video can be tracked.
YouTube can pay Lionsgate because it knows which videos are Lionsgate property, regardless of where they’re being played.
2. One of the major shifts that I think might have to happen for newspapers to start seeing real online revenue is tied directly to Google’s self-admitted “moral obligation” to help print publisher’s out: it needs to help publishers protect copyright in the only way that matters — revenue.
When I blogged last week about successful online business models, Working Reporter left this wonderful comment:
Some of you may have noticed the new tab that appeared in the top corner of this blog a week or so ago. It says “
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry.