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Posted 11:48 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Contract Only Tony Soprano Would Love
Steve Outing on the Tasini case
Debra Cash, founder of the Boston Globe Freelancers Association, has an interesting commentary about the Tasini v. New York Times Co. case recently argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. It's available on TomPaine.com in text or audio. (For non-U.S. readers, the headline for this item is a reference to the mob boss in the hit American cable TV series, The Sopranos.)
Posted 11:22 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
High Quality Doesn't Help ...
Katja Riefler on Nua Ltd going into receivership
Steve (two items below) just urged us to inspire the psychology of the markets — but that is hard to do if you see interesting and valuable enterprises struggle and lose. Nua Ltd from Ireland just announced that it is going into receivership for not being able to find new investors. The consultant company had develeoped Web content management software and earned a high reputation in online research. It is well respected. Daily updated Nua Internet Surveys will continue to be published for the next days. You still can access the Nua knowledge base.
Posted 11:17 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
IM the Editor (or Not)
Andrew Stroehlein on instant messaging
Last week, in internetcontent.net, I wrote an editorial, trying to get readers to contact me via instant messaging. It was a bit of an experiment: we've had quite a lot of reader e-mails lately, and I wanted to see if people would prefer to get in touch with the editor in a real-time conversation. Well, uh, to be honest, it didn't work. I still received a pile of reader comments via e-mail, but only one person logged on to IM to contact me. We've now got a reader survey, but it may turn out that people simply find e-mailing strikes the right balance of speed and intimacy for a letter to the editor.
Posted 2:37 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Have We Hit Bottom, or Still Going Down?
Steve Outing on content layoffs
I spotted several articles yesterday suggesting that we've hit the bottom of the dot-com slide, and that now is the time that the industry will start to inch back upward again. If enough journalists write that story, then the psychology of the markets might just make it so. But in the content world, layoffs continue apace. iWantMedia documents a bunch of layoffs announced or rumored just this week. The rate of content-related layoffs remains scary. One of the biggest layoffs is at WinStar, which among many other things operates Office.com. Office.com was already rumored to be in trouble; there's no word from the company yet, but I won't be surprised to see that high-profile business news site go under. (WinStar's stock is down 99% from its high.)
Posted 11:35 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Read The Item Below This!
Steve Outing
As editor of E-Media Tidbits, I encourage our talented writers to keep their items short. The item below this, by Rich Gordon, is a bit longer than usual, but it's well worth reading. Rich offers a provocative point of view. Read on ...
Posted 11:23 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Going Against the Grain
Rich Gordon on MIT's plans to publish course materials for free
At a time when many sites are rushing to put up "paid subscription" curtains in front of their content, it is very interesting to note the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's announcement that it will post all the materials for its courses online — and free of charge. While newspaper, magazine, and online publishers are willing to limit the size of their audience in order to collect a few bucks from those willing to pay, MIT plans to publish content for which it normally charges more than $30,000 a year. The great press (from the New York Times and Business 2.0, among others) is testimony to the power of the idea.I certainly understand the financial pressures facing online publishers. But there is a really strong argument that in a digital age, with the accompanying explosion of information, the value of intellectual property is inevitably going to slide toward zero. What MIT seems to recognize is that by making its content available as widely as possible, the university will derive enormous benefits. Imagine the high school teacher who uses some of the MIT course materials in his class and, as a result, urges her best student to go to MIT. Some MIT administrators must be afraid this will lead to fewer people wanting to enroll as students. But in fact, spreading MIT's "brand" as widely as possible will, I predict, increase the value of the MIT classroom experience.
In an important article in Wired magazine a few years back, Esther Dyson argued that in the information economy, "Content providers should manage their businesses as if [content] were free, and then figure out how to set up relationships or develop ancillary products and services. ... The way to become a leading content provider may be to start by giving your content away." That's why MIT's strategy could be successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams. It's why a magazine like Business 2.0 might make more money from conferences and trade shows than from its magazine. And it's why content providers should think more than twice about the subscription model.
Posted 10:36 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Coverage of E-Books Canceled
Jade Walker on dead media
eBooknet.com, a Web site dedicated to promoting the electronic book industry and its place in the future of publishing, has been killed by Gemstar-TV Guide International. Before it was replaced by a splash page announcing its cancelation, eBooknet offered many useful items to its readers. The Undiscovered Gem section highlighted new or little-known e-books with best-seller potential. Columnists shared their opinions on e-publishing, and news was frequently updated and posted at the bottom of the site. Gemstar acquired the site in January 2000, and announced its demise this week by saying it had "decided to step out of the e-book journalism space at this time."
Posted 8:10 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
TheStreet.com Staffers Hit the Street
Steve Outing on content layoffs
TheStreet.com is on the skids yet again. This time it trimmed 20% of its staff, or about 40 people, in an effort to stem losses. Lots of media outlets are covering this news; here's a report from Inside.com.
Posted 8:01 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
New Site for Cyberjournalists
Steve Outing on online journalism resources
CyberJournalist.net is a new Web resource for online writers and editors, and other journalists who use the Internet in their work. The site, which is run by MSNBC.com technology editor Jonathan Dube, features links to online media-relevant articles and research, and highlights examples of outstanding online journalism.
Posted 7:50 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Data Mining Across the Water
Norbert Specker on business-relevant culture gaps
Are you delivering content or audiences? Your sales people should be as clear on this question as your advertisers. However, delivering the right audiences is becoming an ever more refined process. Understanding, aggregating, evaluating, and employing the data gathered from the user will give a media company the edge. Or so it might happen in the U.S. In Europe, ownership and control of private data is ever clearer handed back to the individual — with far-reaching consequences for business models depending on data collection. This cultural gap is only accentuated by the Bush administration, which acts with little understanding of a historically grown consensus on data protection within Europe. Here's a recent update on the next Internet trade war frontier.
Posted 7:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
More on the Baseball Credentials Standoff
Steve Klein on online sports content
The U.S. and China aren't the only ones at a big-issue impasse these days. Newspapers like the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, and Detroit Free Press are insisting that they would leave Major League Baseball games uncovered rather than accept new restrictions to control the transmission and use of photographs and play-by-play coverage of games. Under its new credentials agreement, MLB is trying to limit how often journalists can transmit information and how many photographs they can send out while a game is in progress.Says Times assistant general counsel George Freeman: "The underlying issue is that they view a baseball game as a private performance whose information they totally control, rather than a public news event which ought to be in the public domain." The Tribune's Ed Sherman reports that MLB is issuing day passes to reporters covering games until the issue is resolved. "Major League Baseball is aggressively trying to protect what it believes to be its intellectual property," says John Cherwa, associate managing editor for sports at the Tribune. Despite the differences, an agreement is expected.
Posted 9:59 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
When Giants Meet...
Katja Riefler on media concentration tendencies
The merger of Daimler/Chrysler didn't work out too well. But in Germany we nevertheless see some strange concentration in the online content market. Just two or three weeks ago the ZDF, one of the national TV stations, announced a deal with the dominant portal T-Online. ZDF will exclusivly present its excellent news content that it now offers at ZDF.MSNBC at T-Online — free of advertising. Just today the big German newspaper group Axel Springer Verlag announced the foundation of the "Bild.de/T-Online.de AG." So the most successful German online newspaper BILD (about 30 million pageviews/month) and the most successful German portal combine strenghts. Now consider that T-Online some days ago also just started the new portal T-Info — a cooperation with the German yellow pages publisher, which operates the most successful German online telephone book — and that those publishers shall also get a share in a common business — then you could see the architects of those mergers envision Germany on its way to the "Brazilian model": One ISP serves the needs of the whole Internet community.
Posted 9:51 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Play Ball!
Steve Klein on online sports content
Now this is fun! MSNBC gives you a pop-up window applet on its baseball site that both explains and allows users to interact with Major League Baseball's new higher, tighter strike zone. "A Look at the New Strike Zone" runs you through the reasons for the change; superimposes the new strike zone over the old one and "throws" a few pitches to a batter using both strike zones; and finally, it let's you throw simulated pitches to different plate location and call the balls and strikes. You can even hit one out of the park — which is just what this little interactive tool does itself. So, play ball!
Posted 1:10 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Dead Media
Norbert Specker on dusting out the bookmarks
While most are discussing the merits of new media forms like PDAs, tablets, setup boxes, iTV, etc., one hears little about the "almost made it" or "never entered the limelight" media. Spring cleaning provided Bruce Sterling's ultimate list of dead media. (Read the "Notes.")
Posted 2:28 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Ah, Grasshopper
Amy Gahran on content
Today's issue of ClickZ features an interview with me by Susan Solomon. She calls me a "content guru" — which was very kind. However, somehow I always feel like I have more questions than answers! See "Little Grasshopper Meets Content Guru."
Posted 12:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Office.com Troubles?
Steve Outing on online content sites
According to this report last week from LocalBusiness.com, writers working for LS2 have been told to stop projects for Office.com. LS2 has been a contract supplier of content for the business news portal site, but LS2 executives have expressed concern about Office.com's ability to pay its bills. Office.com has given lots of work to freelancers, so this could be a loss to many writers. Its executives say there is industry-norm belt-tightening going on at Office.com, but nothing more. The site is owned by Winstar.
Posted 11:38 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Dot Hybrid
Andrew Nachison on media org charts
More on the "integrate or separate" debate: Tribune Co. and Cox Communications still have separate interactive divisions that once had IPO fantasies. The IPO bubble burst a year ago, and both companies are now trying to integrate their interactive content operations back into their offline homes. In Orlando, Florida, where I recently led a seminar focused on media convergence (we'll be repeating the program this fall), the Web content producers who once were part of the Orlando Sentinel, then moved across the street as part of Tribune Interactive, are in the midst of moving back into the newspaper's newsroom. The Web producers and editors are, once again, reporting directly to the newspaper's editor. Something similar is happening at Cox newspapers, which for a while ceded all control over their Web sites to Cox Interactive Media.The org charts may not be entirely comprehensible, and org charts alone won't make or break any digital news company, but it seems to me that any digital operation with brand and product ties to an offline media brand needs a direct relationship with the offline management.
Posted 11:45 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Another Web Writing Marketplace Bites the Dust
Steve Outing on content failures
CreativeWrites is gone. Sunday apparently was the last day for the site, which was a marketplace that helped match writers looking for work with editors seeking talent. According to a notice from the company that landed in my mailbox, CreativeWrites will not sell or lease the information it gathered from its users. The notice also leaves open the possibility that the service might resume in the future — should its proprietors come up with funding.
Posted 6:41 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Haven't We Seen This Revenue Model Before?
Steve Outing on newspaper Web sites
The Rochester Post-Bulletin (Minnesota) next month will begin limiting access to its Web site to paying print newspaper subscribers. The site is now being viewed as a value-add to the newspaper, with Web-original content plus print content, and 11 years of archived newspaper articles, being available online. As of April 30, non-print subscribers will only be able to view headlines and classified ads on the Web. This is a model that was tried several years ago by some newspapers; it failed and the concept was dropped. Now that conditions have changed and online publishing business models based on free content are faltering, we're seeing some old ideas re-introduced. Will this work? It will possibly boost print subscriptions somewhat, but for a newspaper to adopt such a Web strategy is to doom the online division to modest revenues and profitability.
Posted 3:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
CMS Resource
Norbert Specker on content management systems
The industry is looking for content managment systems in a big way. Good resources are hard to come by. A rather technical-oriented list with interesting links and vivid discussions is on camorld. It is maintained by Cameron Barrett and offers in addition a cross table with pointers to about 30 systems. The missing item is a search field, increasingly important as the archive is growing. So, if your CMS person is not on it yet, send him/her the link. (Top o' the hat to Bob Wardrop, Inland Empire Online.)
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