|
Posted 1:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Net Gets Even More Global
If you're not already considering a global audience for your online content, you'd better get started! By 2005, three-quarters of all Internet users will reside outside the US, with one third residing in Asia, according to a new study by Jupiter Research. Translators, multilingual editors, and others involved in localizing content will probably be doing a swift business in the near future. Also, we'll probably start seeing innovations in online media that probably couldn't have sprung from North American minds. See "Global Internet Population Moves Away from US," CyberAtlas, Jan. 11. —Amy
Posted 12:49 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
More on Those CNN Interactive Layoffs
Earlier, Steve Outing mentioned that CNN is expected to lay off about 750 employees in the near future, mainly from its online division. According to a Jan. 11 article in The Standard ("CNN to Ax About 750 Amid $1.2 Billion Expansion," by Kenneth Li), this appears to be part of a larger trend. This article notes:
"For months, major media companies – including Viacom (VIA) and News Corp. – with separate Internet and traditional media units, have moved to consolidate their operations. Late last year, Viacom slashed the staff of its Internet unit MTVi and rolled the individual sites back to their respective broadcast counterparts. Likewise, Viacom-owned CBS.com now also answers to CBS broadcast divisions instead of a separate Internet chief. And last week, News Corp. practically eliminated its dot-com unit, News Digitial Media, and plans to marry its many sites, among them FoxNews.com and FoxSports.com, closer to their broadcast counterparts. Breaking out the dot-com unit made more sense during a booming economy as media companies looked to fund growth with money from an initial public offering."
I think this author has a point. The news business is a hard business, and maintaining separate divisions requires tremendous overhead. True, I am sorry to see these separate news units get scaled down and folded back inside, since often they have become the main source of true innovation within major news organizations. I fear that these organizations may forget many of the valuable things they learned about new media. However, the possible bright side is that this fold-back-in trend could lead to a more integrated approach to traditional/online news in the long run. We'll see. —Amy
Posted 1:16 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
From an Early Adopter
After reading my item here yesterday about e-books, I got the following note from Dave Traynor of the Canadian Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors: "You're right about the convenience of e-books. I carry a Palm IIIx with me wherever I go. It always has two or three books and six or seven magazines loaded into it, which I can peruse whenever. I ride a train to and from work every day for two or three hours. While I often work on my laptop on the train, the ability to pull out a book any time on my Palm is a huge convenience. I find the screen very easy to read, convenient to carry and almost as useful as a real book. In fact, when I really get into a story, I don't even know its a small electronic device that I have to turn the page on all the time. It works." ... Not everyone is so enthusiastic, of course. Printed books have a special place in most people's hearts. E-books almost seem like a threat to many. —Steve
Posted 7:31 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Down Side of Blogger
Blogger (the service used to produce this weblog) is great. I say that and so do a lot of other people — even those at Netslaves. But as this article on Netslaves points out, there's a big down side to Blogger's success: It makes it so easy to publish on the Web that everyone and their dogs are publishing weblogs — and the majority of them contain useful, pointless crap that no one really wants to read! The article is largely tongue-in-cheek, but it does point out how technologies like Blogger are contributing to our already serious information overload. —Steve
Posted 3:36 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
TV Doesn't Get It About the Internet
Local TV station Web sites suck. That about sums up the message of this story by Terry Anzur for the Online Journalism Review. Television executives can't seem to bring themselves to build Web sites that people actually want to visit, Anzur reports. They're more likely to repurpose newscast material instead of creating original online content. This confirms what I've noticed for years. With all that promotional power, TV stations could dominate local online audiences. Instead, many TV executives still don't understand the Web well enough to do a decent job with it. (Note: I am not saying that there are no good local TV Web sites! Indeed, there are, but most in the local-TV industry are behind the curve.) —Steve
Posted 3:10 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Web Syndicates to Small Publishers: 'Bye!'
Web syndicates Screaming Media and Yellowbrix are no longer working with smaller publishers, according to a report in ContentBiz.com. Screaming Media recently changed its policies and no longer handles content from small publishers that don't produce at least 10 articles a day. A Yellowbrix spokesperson said the company won't work with some small publishers.
iSyndicate hasn't followed this trend yet. In fact, on a Web syndication panel that I moderated at a conference in Switzerland in November, iSyndicate executive Allison Hartsoe made it clear that her company will not give up on small publishers and content creators. She was critical of comments made by a Screaming Media executive who also was on the panel and talked about dropping small publishers.
The Web is becoming less friendly for small and independent publishers and content creators. Not only are the Web syndicates pushing them away, but so are companies like MightyWords, which recently stopped selling content from small and unknown authors. No one, it seems, can figure out how to make money by helping small content providers. —Steve
Posted 2:46 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Forrester: E-books Will Flop
The latest Forrester Research report suggests that eBooks Will Flop, But Print-On-Demand And Digital Textbooks Will Thrive. They've certainly got it right that digital textbooks will become a big, big business. It will be super-convenient in the future for college students to purchase and download books (including individual chapters, if that's all a professor requires) and other course materials onto a single, handy portable tablet device (what I call an "e-reader").
But I vehemently disagree with Forrester's prediction about trade e-books. "The drawbacks of reading onscreen will discourage all but the most motivated readers," say the authors in a press release about the report. Sure, that's true with today's technology. But with e-book readers or e-readers, we're at the equivalent of 1994 on the wired Internet, with slow dial-up connections and not much content yet available. When the e-reader devices mature, they'll be a compelling product for media consumption. What would you rather lug with you on a plane trip: 2 hardback books, 5 magazines, and 2 newsletters; or all that content packed into a single 8- by 10-inch digital tablet the size of a single printed magazine? —Steve
Posted 2:33 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Will the Press Play 'The Sky Is Falling' Game?
Expect to see a new wave of stories in the press about layoffs and the gloom and doom of the online news/content sector. Just this morning I was contacted for comment by reporters from Business Week and UPI. Yeah, things don't look rosy right now. But a dip in the market is not going to kill off online news as an industry. I subscribe to the theory of Dan Finnigan in the item below. We'll pass through this trough in time, and the online news companies that survive will be strong ones. Don't mistake the current and coming wave of press reports for the death of this still-new industry.
Meanwhile, another dynamic that's at play here is that interactive spin-offs of traditional media companies will continue to be brought back into the folds of their parent entities. Without the promise of fat IPOs for new media spin-offs, it will make sense for some media companies to integrate new and old to 1) create efficiences of publishing, and 2) construct operations that best serve the need to publish to multiple media formats — where the Web is but one channel, and there are many others (PDAs, mobile phones, Internet radio, e-readers or portable digital tablets, MP3 players, print, cable, and broadcast). —Steve
Posted 1:54 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Finnigan's Silver Lining
KnightRidder.com CEO Dan Finnigan, who late last year joined the dot-com layoff craze and axed 68 jobs (but then hired 34 sales people), quoted by San Francisco Chronicle media writer Dan Fost: "We're seeing in the Internet industry what a lot of reasoned people have expected for a long time. After a phase one of innovation and experimentation, we're in a phase two of consolidation and seeing that some business models work and some don't. That is leading to a third phase, in which those who survive the second phase reap the considerable benefits of the Internet's growth. For us in the Internet industry, this is a very good phase, and we wish it had happened sooner."
Yeah, it's "good" in an uncomfortable way, assuming you're still employed. —Steve
Posted 1:47 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Major CNN Layoffs Coming
The Wall Street Journal reports today that CNN is about to announce significant layoffs throughout the news company — with the bulk of them coming in the interactive unit that operates CNN.com. According to the Journal's report, cuts are expected to be in the 500 to 1,000 range, out of a total workforce of 4,000. The deepest cuts are expected at the interactive operation, which now has 750 employees. Some positions will be eliminated by attrition and reorganization. —Steve
Posted 11:53 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Smoking Gun Purchased by Court TV
Court TV has purchased Web sites The Smoking Gun and Crime Library, according to this report in Silicon Alley Daily. Gun is an adventurous and popular site that publishes controversial and often humorous documents (from Robert Downey Jr.'s police arrest to Britney Spears' contractual dressing room demands). Crime Library publishes details of famous crimes, such as the Jonbenet Ramsey murder.
The two sites will remain independent, but their content will be integrated into CourtTV.com. Gun staff will move into Court TV's offices, and probably start featuring more video. —Steve
Posted 11:39 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'Church and State' Online Media Study
The Online News Association has named Martha Stone and Howard Finberg to conduct a Knight Foundation-funded, year-long research project to look at the weighty issue of blurred boundaries between advertising and editorial at online news operations. Stone is a journalism instructor and new media consultant/writer. Finberg until recently was a new media division executive with Central Newspapers and the Arizona Republic. The duo will spend the next year interviewing news and online industry leaders and workers, and compiling existing information about "church and state" integration challenges. They will publish a report by the end of the year. —Steve
Posted 1:23 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Gasp! You Can Charge for Content on the Web
My Editor & Publisher Online column this week looks at how online publishers can charge money for content. No, this isn't a repeat of models tried several years ago, when some online news sites charged for access and offered limited free content — a model that quickly failed. I offer ideas about how to charge for extra-special content while still holding onto the free-content model. With the online ad marketing tanking, and online content sites laying off employees left and right, it's time to focus on that time-worn model of getting people to pay money for what they consume. —Steve
Posted 12:50 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Reports of Salon.com's Death Premature
Yesterday I noted a Boston Globe writer's "Salon.com Death Watch," and due to technical problems with the site yesterday, some folks thought perhaps the plug had been pulled. According to this report in Wired News, the site had technical problems that meant some site users couldn't access Salon.com for about 12 hours yesterday. The problems were due to technical difficulties with a remote server at Salon's hosting facility, Global Center, in San Jose, California. Salon.com is still kicking. —Steve
Posted 12:34 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Express Web Staff Suing Over Site Closure
Employees of the Web sites of the Express newspaper (London) are suing the paper's new owner and the entity that purchased the Web sites. It's an odd scenario. The Express was sold to Northern & Shell, but the paper's new media operation (which has a staff of 46) instead went to investment group Seymour Pierce. Web employees believe the sale is actually a ploy to avoid paying "redundancies" (in other words, unemployment compensation) to the workers should the new media operation be shut down — which appears likely. N&S's sale of the Express sites did not include the hardware that ran the four sites. N&S has said it will fight the lawsuit. Read all about it in The Guardian. —Steve
Posted 10:53 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Corante: A Human-powered Moreover
Clickz columnist Susan Solomon's column today is about a new Web site called Corante, which aggregates news from around the Web into various topic categories. The concept is somewhat akin to Moreover.com, except that while Moreover runs on machine intelligence, Corante relies on human editors to select the best and most relevant articles. Of course, Corante doesn't cover nearly as many categories; its editors daily scan Internet sources for news stories, magazine articles, resources, and related items about e-commerce, biotechnology, law and policy, venture capital, and telecom wireless. The site's editors find the best, most timely news, then write a brief introductory paragraph for each story. (Corante's editors were nice enough to pick up my Content Spotlight story this week about wireless content trends.) The site plans to syndicate the content it produces to other publishers, and accept advertising. —Steve
Posted 7:44 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Salon.com: The Deathwatch?
Alex Beam of the Boston Globe thinks Salon.com will die within the year, and says so in his latest column. I disagree. Salon.com puts out a fantastic editorial product, and is arguably the best zine on the Web. While many content sites on the Web will fail during this Internet downturn, I don't think it will be so terrible that the most visible and respected content site on the Web will fail completely. More layoffs? Other cutbacks? I won't be surprised. But outright fail? No. —Steve
Posted 6:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
That Crazy E-book Publishing Business
M.J. Rose looks at the new e-book publishing venture of Barnes & Noble in her latest Wired News column. B&N e-books will all be priced at or under $8, which is a step in the right direction. (Whereas outfits like Gemstar have announced plans to offer e-books at prices matching or close to printed-book prices.) As Rose points out, things are really getting interesting in the book publishing world. B&N, a retailer, is now getting into the publishing business — cutting out the publisher and working directly with e-book authors. Meanwhile, publishers will soon start selling e-books directly to consumers, bypassing retailers like B&N. Interesting times we live in! —Steve
Posted 6:22 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Return to the Mother Ship
Writing for eWeek, Grant DuBois has an astute analysis of the current malaise among online news sites. What's happening, he notes, is that spin-off new media divisions of news companies are being brought back into the fold of the parent companies (as News Corp. did last week). Now that the IPO market for Internet companies has cooled (to say the least), this makes sense. It also makes sense because of the larger trend of media convergence, where a news company will in the near future be publishing its content to many media formats (including print). It simply makes sense now for "new media" operations to be integrated into the entire news operation. With the carrot of a hot IPO now withdrawn, there's less reason to maintain a separate online/new media division.
Here's a profound quote from the article by International Data Corp. analyst Malcolm Maclachlan: "Media is like retail, where people looked at the Internet and mistook a channel for a standalone business." —Steve
Posted 11:35 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Multi-Tasking, Multi-Media Kids!
If you think your kids are way beyond you when it comes to today's media environment – you're right! In a new survey by Nickelodeon Online and Harris Interactive, more than half of the kids age 8-12 polled engage in other forms of media consumption while they're watching TV. Some of the simultaneous media activities reported include talking on the phone, playing a video game, and surfing the Net. But nearly a third of the admitted multi-taskers were doing something "entirely different" while watching TV. This wasn't defined specifically, but let's hope it includes reading or talking to other people. (See: "Awash in Media: Online Kids Show Broad Use of TV, Phone, Radio," CyberAtlas, Jan. 4)
IMHO, I think this survey may say as much about the generally dismal and over-commercialized quality of kids' TV programming as it does about the media-utilization skills of kids. —Amy
Posted 5:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Era of Wireless Content Is Upon Us ...
... Well, it's not exactly in full bloom, but it's getting closer. In my article for this week's Content Spotlight newsletter, I look at potential opportunities in wireless content in an attempt to get publishers thinking about the possibilities and opportunities ahead. Today for wireless content is like the Web in 1994. Is there money to be made in wireless content? For most, not in the immediate future — but you should be planning to make money longer term. Get those thinking caps on now. —Steve
Posted 5:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Date Your Web Content (Dammit!)
In a Tidbits item last week, I mentioned a pet peeve: Web news sites that don't put "published on" dates on their stories. This Is True's Randy Cassingham, who reads newspapers and news Web sites for a living (to find funny news items to comment on in his weekly True e-newsletter), wrote in to says that it's even worse than I stated. He says, "Now and then a reader will suggest a story for True. I'll click through and think, 'I've seen this before.' Sometimes — after taking a LONG look — I'll realize the story is YEARS old. Really. I especially hate it when there IS a date on top, and I figure out that shows TODAY's date, and has NOTHING to do with when it was posted. Grrrr!" —Steve
Posted 4:51 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
mediabistro.com, Content Exchange Debut Online Content Jobs Service
Content Exchange has partnered with mediabistro.com to provide a job listings service focusing on employment in the online/new media field, which debuted today. Users visiting the main page for the service will see job openings only in the online/new media area — for writers, editors, content producers, content executives, etc. (Using the search feature of the site, online users can expand their searches to include traditional-media jobs, as well.) As of today, there were 44 job openings in the online/new media area, plus more than 100 additional job listings from non-new-media companies. —Steve
Posted 3:21 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
NY Times Sells Off TheStreet.com Shares
The New York Times Co. is distancing itself further from TheStreet.com. As Reuters reports today, the Times Co. is selling off more than a million of its shares in TheStreet — which follows the dissolution of a joint venture newsroom project between the two companies. —Steve
Posted 3:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
NY Times Digital Laying Off 70
Here's yet more of the same bad news. New York Times Digital, the new media unit of the newspaper company, has announced that it is slimming down by 70 employees. In an article by Times reporter Felicity Barringer, she writes that the unit will be reduced in staff from the current 400 employees — who operate the Web sites NYTimes.com, NYToday.com, Boston.com, and Abuzz.com. The cuts are expected to save about $6 million in the division.
The NYT Digital move, resulting from the downturn in Internet advertising, follows layoffs announced last week by News Corp.'s new media division, and significant layoffs at KnightRidder.com a month ago. Even being under the umbrella of an established news media company isn't enough to provide protection for new media workers in the current environment. —Steve
|