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Posted 8:17 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
We'll Be Back Next Wednesday
Steve Outing on this weblog
The holidays have of course disrupted our publishing schedule with E-Media Tidbits, and many of the writers in this group weblog are on vacation. There will be no new items published until Wednesday, Jan. 2. Have a happy and safe new year!
Posted 8:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Sports' Monster Presence
Steve Klein on online advertising
If you enjoy major sports programming, then get ready for a monster presence by careers site Monster.com. Starting with Bowl Championship Series games on Jan. 1-3, Monster.com will launch a new marketing campaign appropriately titled "Never Settle." The campaign will continue with Super Bowl XXXVI on Feb. 3 and conclude during NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympic Games, Feb. 8-24 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Monster.com provides career-related content for the Nos. 1 and 2 Internet portals, AOL and MSN, and also has a co-branded career site on the No. 1 sports site, ESPN.com.
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Posted 8:08 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Art Online
Norbert Specker on watching the trends
The history of media is hugging the history of art for many good reasons. What is most daring and allows a glimpse into possible media futures usually does happen in the vibrant art field. The round-up in the New York Times on online art developments is rather lacking in passion and focused on the economical perspective. However, the pointers to various art projects are very helpful and for a mind shifting afternoon start with Martin Wattenberg's Idea Line, an attempt to chronicle online art projects while providing access to the various sites. You will also love Jim Andrew's Vispo site (try "Nio") if you think interactivity is more than a "mailto:" option.
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Posted 8:02 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Is Spam a Threat to E-mail News Delivery?
Paul Grabowicz on online media
Some online news companies are using e-mail to deliver news alerts and HTML versions of their front pages — a possible answer to anemic pageview counts and banner ad performance at websites. But these efforts could be buried by a growing avalanche of junk e-mail that is turning off Internet users. The New York Times reports that the amount of spam e-mail has increased significantly and is expected to more than double in the next five years. Advertisers say the response rate to even targeted e-mail marketing campaigns is plunging as a result.
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Posted 1:57 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
E-mail News' Boring Subject Lines
Steve Outing on e-mail alerts
I subscribe to a bunch of e-mail breaking-news alert services. (One would do for most people, but I track how the various news providers handle major stories.) Most of them, I've noticed, make the same mistake: They have mundane, non-descriptive subject lines such as "Breaking News" and "America Fights Back: The Latest." This means that recipients of the e-mail alerts must open the messages to see what they're about. This is a common e-mail publishing mistake, yet news organizations (that should know better) like CNN.com, ABCNews.com, and Yahoo! News continue to make it. Getting it right — by including a very short headline in the subject line — are CBS Marketwatch, WSJ.com, and MSNBC.com.Why is this important? Because many e-mail inboxes are overflowing, and harried e-mail users review subject lines before opening a message. Having the same wording ("Breaking news") on every message doesn't encourage the recipient to open the mail as much as does something more descriptive. (You could even argue that a subject line is all a subscriber needs to see, especially on an important story — say, "Bin Laden found dead" — where there are yet no further details available.)
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Posted 1:55 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
In the End, drkoop.com Outlived Predictions
Steve Klein on Internet contraction in 2001
Ever since the dot-com bubble burst in April 2000, the downturn's constant cover boy was drkoop.com, the health website of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. But in the 19 months since the downturn began, more than 750 Internet companies filed for bankruptcy, according to WebMergers Inc. of California, before drkoop.com finally followed suit earlier this month. So what do the numbers mean? "It's clear that the worst is well over," says Tim Miller, president of WebMergers. "The weakest players have shaken out. What we are going to see in 2002 is what everyone has been waiting for all along — sane growth of a promising, if not revolutionary, new sector."Miller is quoted in an excellent year-end industry assessment by Leslie Walker of the Washington Post. Walker notes that access and content "fell badly out of sync this year." She adds: "Companies trying to create new business models out of access, content, or both have been doing a delicate dance since the mid-1990s, hoping the two would create a virtuous circle but fearful that one might get ahead of the other. ... Today, barely 1 in 10 American homes has high-speed access, a far cry from the nearly 7 in 10 that are paying for slower dial-up access." In 2001, waiting for broadband was more like a death-watch than a rebirth of the Internet.
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Posted 5:12 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Media's New Role: 'Guide and Direct'
Steve Outing on media trends
Thanks to Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota's Institute for New Media Studies for pointing out a recent Forrester Report, "Guides Redefine Mass Media," which Paul says is a "must-read" for news executives. She was struck by this statement from the report: "New technology, by empowering consumers, will end media companies' control over distribution. Consumers will use guides to assemble media experiences, forcing media companies to refocus on content and audiences." Says Paul, "This 'guide and direct' role is one that news organizations are clearly abdicating to independents and this report suggests it is at their peril." (Hint: Get on the weblog bandwagon if you want to stay ahead of this trend.) You can read the Forrester report, but you'll have to register for "guest access."
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Posted 12:45 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
I (Foolishly) Predict ...
Barb Palser on the new (online media) year
It's perhaps more foolish than brave to forecast the fate of online news in 2002, but I'm willing to take that chance. The following events may or may not happen in the coming year:
1) The first generation of truly convergent newsrooms will reach maturity. This will involve cross-platform publishing technology and a new group of journalists who are conversant in print, broadcast, and the Web. By 2003, these people will all be schizophrenic and/or replaced by robots.
2) To better describe the concept of "newsroom convergence," we shall henceforth speak of "omnijournalists" who create "flexicontent."
3) We will continue to debate the viability of pay-for-content models for another year.
4) The mad scientists who unveiled Author in 2001 will release a complementary program called Reader in 2002. Reader will simulate lifelike user sessions and generate maniacal, poorly spelled feedback e-mail.
5) The release of the Associated Press Guide to Internet Research and Reporting in early 2002 will inspire hysteria among online copy editors when it is ordained that the proper spellings are web-site and emale.
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Posted 12:36 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Micropayments: Still the Answer?
Steve Outing on Jakob Nielsen's revenue model of favor
Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen in his year-end Alertbox column repeats his call for a Web content revenue model that relies on micropayments — instead of advertising or subscriptions (both of which he thinks will fail to sustain online media operations). I agree with him that pure ad-supported sites won't prosper anytime soon; I agree that for all but a select few, Web subscriptions for individual sites will fail. Nielsen thinks that a micropayments scheme that sells Web content for tiny amounts (on the order of pennies) is the best hope for the online media industry. It must be transparent and work in the same way as making long-distance phone calls: You make the call and the amount gets tacked on to your bill; there's no need to pre-approve the cost of each call. The price for online content must be low enough that an accumulated monthly bill for a subscriber might be $20, even though the user might have looked at a couple thousand articles. Nielsen says this won't happen in 2002, but he still hopes for such a system in the long run.I'm not convinced of Nielsen's vision, because I still don't believe that Internet users will want to worry about how high their monthly "content bill" might be; this scheme discourages heavy use of content. What's better, in my view, is a scheme I outlined in a recent column for Editor & Publisher Online: A Web-wide content subscription that for a set price gets the user into "premium content" areas of media sites. That's a variation of Nielsen's idea. Isn't it time to take one of these ideas seriously?
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Posted 12:32 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Year in Review for Year-In-Review Lists
Barb Palser on lists of lists
The award for the best list of 2001 lists goes to ... weblog fimoculous.com, which offers a robust compilation of more than 150 year-in-review lists posted by various media organizations and websites. Some are related to online news, business, and technology; most are not. My favorites include the hottest queries on Google and Lycos, and The Smoking Gun's Document of the Year awards.
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Posted 12:30 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Year in Review, Web Style
Steve Outing on MSNBC's multimedia view
Every media will be pumping out "The News Year in Review" features this week. On the Web it's possible to create these features using the core strength of the online medium: multimedia. A great example is MSNBC.com's The Year in Pictures 2001, which packages together: still images, auto-running slide shows of still images with audio voiceovers, video clips, user-selectable photo packages by week, and user voting for the best news photograph of the year. As long as you have a broadband Internet connection, MSNBC's editors have provided an excellent user experience. For narrowband users (that is, those with pokey dial-up connections), I wouldn't bother (though to its credit, MSNBC.com does provide a low-bandwidth alternative featuring smaller photos; still, audio and video will be slow loading and choppy). Even broadband users won't be impressed with the grainy video, alas. With that caveat, I do recommend this feature; it demonstrates the accumulation of knowledge and technology we've acquired over the last few years to tell a story with the Web.
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Posted 12:27 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Note to Tidbits E-mail Subscribers
We apologize to our e-mail subscribers who received a delivery of E-Media Tidbits on Monday or Wednesday that contained last week's content. Due to technical problems, we were not able to post new material until early Thursday morning, but the automated e-mail went out nevertheless. We apologize for the inconvenience.
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