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Posted 7:49 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
No Tidbits on Monday
Steve Outing
The E-Media Tidbits writers will be taking a break on Monday, which is President's Day in the U.S. This weblog will resume publication on Tuesday.
Posted 7:43 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
RoboJournalists?
Andrew Nachison on media convergence
Dirck Halstead writes in Digital Journalist that CNN plans to equip its news staff with compact video cameras and laptops, and that reporters have been urged to learn how to shoot video, and photographers how to write. Everybody in the news business should take note. Corporate consolidation, competition, and advances in digital delivery are pushing print, broadcast, and online news operations closer together. This is what broadcast, newspaper, and online news executives will be studying March 26 - 29 in Florida during Convergence: The Tour (I'm moderating). We'll visit the Tampa Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, and Sarasota Herald-Tribune, all of which have pushed the envelope in merging print, broadcast, and online news production. Clearly, CNN and parent AOL Time Warner are planning now for a multiplatform future so that they can reach audiences however audiences decide they want to be reached.
Posted 7:40 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Gutenberg Napster
Vin Crosbie on copyright
Few people today realize how black was Johannes Gutenberg's reputation when his invention of the printing press enraged the content providers of his time. Their livelihoods were based upon controlling the production and reproduction of information and entertainment content. Their revenues were proportionate to the numbers of copies made of content. They were the guilds of scribes without whose involvement no content could be produced or reproduced. Gutenberg's creation shattered their sinecure.The difference between them then and the Recording Industry Association of America now is that the later guild lives in an era of copyright laws and frequent litigation. Amid this era, the most perceptive American critic of popular music is Jon Pareles of the New York Times. You might expect him to rejoice at the RIAA's February 10 Appeals Court victory over Napster. However, Pareles wisely sees the RIAA's legal success as the pyrrhic victory it is. I encourage you to read his essay about it. When you do, forget for the moment the issue of whether or not consumers should pay for content, for the Napster case has more dimensions than just that.
Posted 12:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Etown Implodes
Steve Outing on content failures
I know it's depressing, but nevertheless it's worthwhile to track the rash of online content sinking ships. The latest is Etown.com, a site that provides news and information about consumer products to aid people in making buying decisions. The business model is to help a consumer find the best product, then steer him/her to point of purchase, then take a commission from the merchant for the referred sale. (CNET follows a similar model with its tech-related product reviews.) Etown.com ran out of money and has fired all its staff (about 100 people), according to a report on News.com. Assets of the company were transferred to retailer Best Buy, which was one of Etown.com's investors, and there may still be hope that the service will be resurrected in the future.I can't help but think that lots of these dying content-related companies represent good ideas that don't deserve to die. What will almost certainly happen is that the concepts will be resurrected — in some cases by other entrepreneurs — when market conditions improve. But many companies with good ideas of course won't be able to hang on until good times return.
Posted 11:45 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
E-Media Tidbits for Your PDA: How To
Steve Outing on weblogs
This morning I received an e-mail from a E-Media Tidbits reader who gets this weblog on his Palm Pilot every day, via AvantGo. It seems that since I changed the format of Tidbits recently, AvantGo readers get a "page too big" error when they try to call up the page.Here's a solution for those experiencing this problem (and instructions for those who might want to start reading this weblog on a PDA): Use the "Create a New Channel Wizard" to set up a custom Web page AvantGo channel. Use this URL:
http://www.content-exchange.com/weblog/weblog.inc. (This URL is different from the one that your Web browser is pointing at to view this page.)
Posted 11:30 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
List Technology Marches On (This Is Cool)
Steve Outing on e-mail list software
I've used Lyris for my various e-newsletter and discussion lists for some time. (Lyris sends out the HTML daily version of this weblog.) It's slick software and I'm happy with it. Lyris just released a new add-on, and it's very cool. The Clickthrough Tracking Module enables you (as a list owner) to monitor responses to e-mail you send using Lyris. Using this add-on, you can see how well your e-mail is working in generating clickthroughs to Web pages by including tracking URLs within your messages. You'll be able to see: e-mail address of user who clicks through, date/time of click, a message number, name of list from which message was sent, tracking URL number and destination page, and optional data stored in two blank fields.That's quite a bit of power to supercharge your e-mailings. Of course, this technology could easily be used improperly by spammers. But used ethically, it promises to be a useful technology for e-mail publishers.
Posted 11:24 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'We Have Freedom of Speech ...
Norbert Specker on online censorship
... but no freedom after speech," said Steven Gan, editor-in-chief of Malaysiakini.com when he and his team received the Press Freedom Award of the International Press Institute in New Dehli recently. The award for the first time in its 50-year history went beyond paper. The "online newspaper" gets an average of 120,000 daily visitors. And there is no paper version of Malaysiakini ("Malaysia Now"). The reason is that Malaysia employs very strict censorship on its printed press. Gan spent more than four years in prison for violating those censorship rules. The online paper successfully tries to dodge the censorship.The success of Malaysiakini so far has gone unnoticed with the government. Or so it seemed. Only a week after Gan received the prestigious award, the online newspaper was refused access to all government activities. Gan feels far from heroic. "All we want to do is normal journalistic work," he says. By the way, Malaysiakini is looking for an online publication system at minimal cost. If you can offer any help or want to follow up the story, Gan can be reached at steven@malaysiakini.com.
Posted 4:38 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Online Job Classifieds Flourishing
Paul Grabowicz on classified advertising
Online recruiting firms are being spared in the dot-com shakeout, according to a story in the Industry Standard, and that may be bad news for newspapers. The Standard says that sites like Monster.com and HotJobs.com are growing and beating stock analysts' expectations. "And as companies are increasingly watching every penny they spend, they are more likely to shift from costlier traditional recruiting services such as newspaper classifieds to less expensive online recruiting services like HotJobs," the Standard predicts.
Posted 2:40 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Inkspot: There's Little Hope
Steve Outing on content failures
To follow up on Jade Walker's item below about the demise of Inkspot, the well-respected and popular online writing resource, founder Debbie Ohi Ridpath has posted an explanation on her site, along with an FAQ. In a nutshell, it looks like there's no hope of a resurrected Inkspot run by Ridpath or anyone else. As you might expect, Ridpath told me she's pretty depressed over the situation, but also somewhat relieved at ending a life of 12-hour workdays and working weekends to keep her "baby" going. This truly does represent a significant loss to the writing community.
Posted 2:22 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Don't Blow It With Wireless News, Publishers
Kerry Northrup on wireless content
The Newspaper Association of America has announced a project to investigate the best ways to use new wireless technologies to provide the mobile masses with news and information. (See this Editor & Publisher story.) That is an extremely worthwhile undertaking — as long as it does, indeed, focus on helping the news consumer and not just the advertiser trying to sell things to the news consumer. I've nothing against the business underpinnings of American publishing, please understand. But if publishers are not careful, they could make some of the same mistakes with wireless that they did in the early days of the Internet. Too many of the early (and even current) Internet initiatives ignored how people really used the medium, concentrating instead on over-exploiting its marketing uses. The result was that news organizations hurt their own credibility by association. Hopefully we won't similarly waste wireless, which has the potential to define the Information Society even more than has the Internet.
Posted 12:24 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Newspapers: Don't Box Yourself In
Kerry Northrup on jargon
What the heck is a pure-play newspaper company? "Pure play" is the latest buzz word in conversations about how to make money in the Information Economy, and now — inevitably — the phrase is starting to appear in the same sentence with the word publisher (see http://www.twst.com/notes/articles/lar609.html). "Pure play" means that a company is focusing on its core expertise. That is an excellent thing for news publishers to do, after these past years of branching into every i-thing and e-thing from offering telephone service to marketing software. But in the process, news publishers must be careful about letting themselves be fenced back into a text-only market by a buzz word. The world has changed. People increasingly jump back and forth from one medium of news and information to another before they consider that they have gotten enough of a story to satisfy them.New technologies and expanding skill sets are allowing news publishers to evolve an integrated cross-media service business to provide that satisfaction. It would be a mistake now to define the local newspaper too narrowly, ruling out linkages to broadcast, cable, mobile, and other parts of the public's news environment. That's not a pure play. That's a niche play.
Posted 12:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Napster Decision: Good for E-publishers Who Want to Charge
Steve Outing on charging for content
This week's Napster decision is actually good for the online content industry, because it takes a step toward improving the climate for publishers to charge for online content. So says Christopher Price in his Financial Times piece, "Internet Media Feed the Money Machine." He suggests that the Internet is evolving, and that it will take time for people to feel comfortable with the idea of paying for online content. As point of comparison, 40 years ago it would have seemed absurd to charge viewers for TV programming; now it's commonplace with cable, though there remains some free TV available from the broadcast networks and local affiliates. This is an insightful article. I encourage you to read it.
Posted 11:46 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Inkspot: Another Loss of Greatness
Jade Walker on content failures
The pink slips continue to fly. The grandmother of all online writing-related magazines/sites, Inkspot, may soon be just a memory. Last year, the site was purchased by print-on-demand publisher Xlibris, and on Tuesday, Inside.com reported that the company is regrouping to concentrate on its core business of publishing writers.Writer's Digest magazine just selected Inkspot as one of the best sites for writers this year. Write Magazine ranked it the No. 1 site for writers in their 2001 Yearbook. And Inscriptions (my Web writers magazine) has it listed as one of the top five writing sites on the Internet. Unless additional funding can be found, the Wednesday issue of Inkspot's e-zine, Inklings, likely will be its last and everyone on staff will be out of work. An announcement about the situation is expected later today or on Thursday, according to Inkspot insiders.
Posted 11:24 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
College Sports Fans Say the Darnedest Things
Steve Klein on message boards
For out-and-out, downright faceless nastiness, nothing compares with the anonymous posts that show up on college-sports message boards. Just ask former University of Arizona football coach Dick Toomey, who resigned after 14 seasons, writes the Wall Street Journal's David Sweet in his latest Nothing But Net column. Toomey cited Web message boards as one of the reasons for his resignation following a 5-6 season. "They were ugly at times," Toomey said. Adds Steve Patterson, publisher of UGASports.com, a Rivals.com site that covers University of Georgia athletics and which hosts the dawgvent.com message board: "It's just gotten out of control. People say things on message boards they would never say face to face. So many posts are just garbage."Most of the boards are either not moderated or lightly edited and produce the kind of interaction only the XFL could love.
Posted 10:52 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
On This Job, the Paychecks Will Arrive
Steve Outing on content people
I noticed that Hoag Levins has a new job, as editor of Ad Age Online. That's got to have more security than his last job, as executive editor of the troubled crime-news site APBNews.com. At APB, Levins stuck it out longer than most as the company teetered back and forth on the edge of bankruptcy then finally went under, later to be saved (sort of) by a buyer who picked up the enterprise at the bankruptcy auction. Levins (and other APB die-hards) endured many a missed paycheck, but remained devoted to seeing the site survive. He did finally get fed up and quit when the site was being operated by new owners and again paychecks were slow to arrive.
Posted 7:09 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Why Flash Matters
Rich Gordon on Flash for content authoring
As the Web evolves beyond "pages" and turns into more of a multimedia-driven place, new kinds of storytelling tools will become critical. For better or worse, I think Macromedia's Flash is the best tool around right now for telling multimedia, time-based stories. It's being used now mostly for dancing letters, animated shorts and games, but we're starting to see storytellers get to work with Flash. A couple of good examples: The Philadelphia Inquirer's "Beyond the Flames" (click on "In their Own Words") and the New York Times' "Two Tours of Magnolia Plantation" (registration required; click on "Launch Complete Flash Tour").Yes, I know that there are a lot of people out there who say "Flash is evil" or "No one looks at that stuff." For these skeptics, the O'Reilly Network site (publishers of technology books) has just published an excellent Q&A that explains "Why Flash is Significant."
Posted 6:01 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The New Yorker Finds Its Way to the Web
Steve Outing on Web sites
At looooooong last, The New Yorker magazine has a Web site that's more than an advertisement for the print edition. NewYorker.com debuted yesterday, and it's worth a look if nothing else than because the magazine is such a significant media entity. Frankly, I've just taken a quick look at the site, but the first word that formed in my mind was "shovelware." The site operates with a minimal staff and is not expected to make money — but rather to promote print sales. Articles are a single, solid mass of type that's set too small. Interactivity seems to be at a minimum. My first impression is that this is a Web site produced and designed under constraints of old-line publishers who fought every new-media innovation suggested to them, but relented just enough to allow a shovelware site that has scant potential of being significant in its own right. Hey, maybe they'll prove me wrong. I hope so, but I doubt it.
Posted 3:17 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The i-mode Diaries
Katja Riefler on wireless content
Can we learn from Japan how to make a real business out of this fascinating, fancy mobile wireless thing? MforMobile is offering a new monthly newsletter called "The i-mode Diaries." It is written by Julian Lai-Hung, CEO of GoCapital. Its intent is to provide a comprehensive look at services, business and revenue models, content, and partnerships implemented by Japan's NTT DoCoMo. In the first issue, Lai-Hung takes a look at the various misconceptions in regard to the i-mode success story.
Posted 11:05 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Help Is On the Way!
Andrew Nachison on ad standards
Ignore the banners while you can. Coming soon to a screen near you will be ads that pop, sizzle, and, if advertisers have their way, suck you in like the best (and worst) that TV has ever offered. Resistance will be futile. While the content industry has been beating itself up over its failure as a business, the ad industry has been busy figuring out how to save the day. Maybe.The Internet Advertising Bureau helped the young online media industry in 1996 when it adopted voluntary ad dimension standards that were quickly adopted around the world, but today the ubiquitous 468 x 60 banner is a dinosaur in search of a meteor. Tom Hespos wrote last week in ClickZ that the IAB is rumored to be working on new standards, which are long overdue. Meanwhile, Emerging Interest reports on efforts to roll out Flash-powered interactive ads, and that Red Herring is about to test a system that enables advertisers to create their own ads online. Change is on the way.
Posted 10:54 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What Do We Call Them?
Kerry Northrup on new media semantics
As news organizations expand from their traditional isolated formats of print, broadcast, or online into a multiplicity of distribution services, journalists run into a problem of what to call our public. For newspaper folks, it used to be clean and polite to call them readers — although the more business-minded would use terms such as customers or subscribers. Today, however, we work for not just readers but also listeners, viewers, callers, surfers ... and of course the ubiquitous users. A leading newspaper in India, MID-DAY, published in Mumbai (Bombay), considers this confusion more than just a matter of semantics. There is newsroom mindset involved, making sure that editors and reporters in fact realize that they are working for a wider public than they did back in the 20th Century. So MID-DAY has started to refer to its public as "newsers" — consumers and users of news.
Posted 11:11 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Lost Your Content Job? Don't Fret, Move On
Steve Outing on content employment
Lost your Internet content job? Not to worry, you're not alone — and you won't be long without work, says new InternetContent.net editor Andrew Stroehlein in "Skill or Be Skilled." "It is difficult to understand how the overall market is supposedly so weak but the job market remains so strong," he writes. As bad as the Internet economy is, online content workers seem to be taking their skills elsewhere with relative ease.
Posted 11:52 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
On Organization
Katja Riefler on management
We have all heard a lot about "integrated newsrooms" for online and offline publishing during the last year. The Tampa Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, and the Financial Times are well known examples. Those experiments are seen with new interest here in Europe in regard to the the cost-cutting pressure and the possibly needed new skills for online journalists. Now I read that Clark Gilbert, doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School, has discovered that separate online operations tend to be a lot more creative and therefore more successfull than integrated ones. (See preview of the study at the NAA's "Digital Edge" site). Any comments?
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