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Posted 8:37 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Classifieds Sell Better Online
Steve Outing on online advertising
Newspapers that wish to increase classifieds revenues — that would include all of them — will be interested to know that customers spend more money when they design and pay for their own ads online (as opposed to through traditional methods like talking to a classifieds phone operator). Online-placed ads get more upsells, are longer, and are more expensive than phoned-in ads. Not only that, the cost of handling the ad is lower, and customer service improves. So says consultancy Classified Intelligence, which just completed a study of more than 75 newspapers' classifieds activity and trends. (The research was sponsored by AdStar, and is available free online.) Classified Intelligence, by the way, is one of the enterprises of fellow E-Media Tidbits contributor Peter M. Zollman.
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Posted 10:54 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Online Media: How to Think Like an E-tailer
Jeppe Kruse on online media revenue streams
Recency, frequency, monetary. It's all about mathematics and very interesting. ClickZ is currently running a series by Mark Sakalosky on optimizing online sales by using the RFM model to segment your customer base. Basically, this is all about figuring out which customers are more likely to generate revenue. The first part of the series is about how e-tailers can monitor customers' most recent buy, their frequency of buying, and the average amount of money they've spent. But exchange the word "customer" with "reader" and online media can benefit as well. In the second part of the series, Sakalosky argues that the model also can be used by media websites making revenues from banner ads. Follow the how-to and you'll know your readers better, he says.
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Posted 10:52 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Cannibalization Myth
Peter M. Zollman on executive fears
One of the many reasons newspapers have been reluctant to be aggressive (or effective) online is the fear of cannibalization: "We'll take our content, put it on the Web, and people will stop buying the paper." Of course, it hasn't happened. In fact, just the opposite.First, online studies from Belden Associates have shown that non-subscribers who use a newspaper's website buy the print edition more often than before they started using the website. Now a French study by the circulation audit group Diffusion Controle shows even more conclusively that a newspaper website improves circulation, rather than diminishes it. A report on the study is available.
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Posted 10:48 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Geeks In Love
Jade Walker on real cyberromance
Who says the Internet isn't a realm for romance? On Valentines Day, Rob Malda (a.k.a. CmdrTaco), the founder of Slashdot.com, used his site's home page to formally propose to his girlfriend, Kathleen. "I wanted to do this in this most potentially embarrassing way possible, and I figured doing it here and now, in front of a quarter of a million strangers was as good a way as any." Within 30 seconds, Malda received an e-mail reply — she said yes!
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Posted 12:26 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'i lv u' or 'I Love You'?
Steve Outing on changing communications behavior
I guess I'm old-fashioned at heart, despite being immersed in digital media as a career. I gave my wife a paper Valentines card yesterday. Somehow it didn't occur to me to send an I-love-you text message to her mobile phone. But lots of people sent their sentiments over the airwaves. According to this Guardian article, estimates made before the big day were that 67 million SMS messages would be sent on Valentines — about double the normal rate. (The article is not clear on the geographic scope of that figure, and neither is the site of the research company that made the estimate.) Age of most of the digital cupids: 10 to 29. No wonder it didn't seem obvious to me. Now in my 40s, I'm of the wrong generation.
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Posted 6:37 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Pre-Olympic Online Medal Winners
Steve Klein on online sports content
What are the most popular Winter Olympic sports? Figure skating — on ice and off — right? Sorry to disappoint all you Michelle Kwan fans, but the gold medal for online popularity goes to snowboarding, according to the Lycos Top 50 and Aaron Schatz. Of course, Olympics or not, snowboarding does well almost every week when it comes to Web searches. The silver goes to curling, that "sport" in which participants toss a stone down the ice and then use brooms to smooth the way. Asks Schatz: "Does this mean NBC will show America what it really wants — more curling? We have our doubts." Rounding out the top 10 most-searched-for sports of the Winter Olympics: hockey, skiing, figure skating, skeleton, luge, bobsled, speed skating, and biathlon.As for the top 10 Winter Olympians entering the Winter Games (we'll update the post-Olympics winners): Michelle Kwan, Picabo Street, Sasha Cohen, Apolo Ohno, Mario Lemieux, Bode Miller, Sarah Hughes, Alexei Yagudin, Jonny Moseley, and Eric Lindros. That's four figure skaters, three skiers, two hockey players, and one speed skater.
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Posted 6:30 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
On a Lighter Note
Norbert Specker on bad hyperlinks
With all those links ending up in the Knight Ridder Nirvana after the reshuffling of the various sites, maybe 404 Lounge Net might offer a template to tone down the angry voices.
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Posted 3:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Broadband Gaps Slowly Narrowing
Steve Klein on Internet access trends
Christopher Stern of the Washington Post reports on a recent Federal Communications Commission study that shows that the digital divide in the U.S. between those with high-speed Internet access and those without is slowly narrowing. About 96% of the nation's most wealthy ZIP codes have high-speed Internet access compared to only 59% in the poorest ZIP codes. The contrast between rural and urban areas was even greater: 98% of the most densely populated ZIP codes have at least one high-speed Internet customer; in contrast, under 40% of rural ZIP codes have even a single high-speed subscriber.The report raises concerns that the U.S. trails Korea, Canada, and Sweden in the deployment of high-speed Internet access.
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Posted 12:56 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
New Search Interface
Steve Outing on Web usability
Search engine Lycos has a new feature that's really nifty. Search for something, then on the results click on the "Fast Forward" link that's on each result. You'll get a left-side-of-screen window that lists all of the results as links. Click on them to more quickly look through the results than the traditional technique of clicking to a site then clicking "Back" to get to the results page. Nice — and applicable to other websites that feature searches. (Chris Sherman's SearchDay offered this tip today.)
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Posted 11:55 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Endangered: The Print Trade Pub Covering Tech
Steve Outing on industry journalism
CMP Media is ending publication (in March) of its monthly glossy magazine, M-Business, which covers the wireless industry. (Wired News reports.) But CMP will continue to support the M-Business Daily website. It's not that the wireless sector doesn't show promise — it's hugely promising — but that the economics right now don't support publishing new print magazines. M-Business Daily operating purely as an online publication will have some serious competition, however; other publishers covering the same space produce e-newsletters, which reach wireless-industry leaders daily and offer cheaper ad options than a monthly magazine.The larger trend this represents is the eventual and likely demise of print trade publications that cover technology sectors where the audience is solidly connected to the Internet as an industry-news source.
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Posted 11:18 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
D'uh! What'd They Expect to Happen?
Steve Outing on paid-content risks
An item in Frank Barnako's Internet Daily newsletter today notes that American Greetings saw a significant drop in usage of its e-greeting card sites in December — after instituting a fee for sending e-cards. Meanwhile, still-free competitors Hallmark.com and Yahoo! Greetings saw traffic rise about 70%. That's totally predictable, of course. What's curious is that American Greetings would take such a chance — unless it's certain that its competition will follow suit. The cardinal rule in online content is that you can't charge if you have serious free competitors who offer a similar product/service. With so many e-greeting card services on the Web, American Greetings' gamble looks to me like a losing hand.What should the company do instead? My opinion: Offer free e-cards but make money off virtual/physical card services — such as allowing consumers to order a physical card online, but mailing it on behalf of the online customer. (Hallmark.com already offers this.) There are lessons here for all manner of Internet sites (including media).
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Posted 8:51 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Bye-Bye, 20-Somethings
Steve Outing on newspaper readership
People in their 20s and their habits of using the Internet for news consumption are a huge problem for newspapers — even more so than persistent loss of classified advertising revenue — according to a Forrester Research report released recently. It suggests that a new wave of young people — introduced to the Web at an early age — will likely never cotton to print. (Here's a report on the report from Media Life.) The Forrester analyst responsible for this report has this sage advice: figure out ways to make off-line and online work together, if you expect to attract young people to your newspaper brand. We've heard that many times before. It's long past time for all newspaper publishers to take such advice to heart.
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Posted 8:35 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Virtual World Gets No Special Treatment
Juan C. Camus on Internet law
At least for legal purposes, the virtual world is like the real world. That's the conclusion of the Secretary of Science and Technology of Spain, Anna Birulés, as she expressed during her presentation on a new bill about the Society of Information and Electronic Commerce (LSSI after its Spanish name), as the El Mundo website cites her. The most polemic part of the bill was the authorization for the political authority to close a website, if it is breaking the law in some way. Now, in the final redaction, it says that only a judge can do that — just as in the real world.
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Posted 5:43 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
South Korea: Making Internet Media 'Official'
Steve Outing on online news access issues
Credentialing for Internet journalism continues to be an issue — around the globe. In South Korea, a group of lawmakers is seeking to change the law that stipulates what is an official media company. The proposal would allow Internet sites to be credentialed alongside traditional news media. This effort stemmed from recent action of the National Election Commission, which blocked presidential contenders from participating in an Internet video panel discussion. The NEC's reasoning was that only official press companies are allowed to hold such events — and only newspapers, TV and radio stations are so classified.
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Posted 2:44 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Is He/She Dead/Alive?
Steve Outing on reporting resources
SearchDay today includes a list of the best Web sources for finding biographical information. Skip the search engines and instead use specialized biographical databases. SearchDay offers a list of 13 of them. My favorite: the Dead People Server, which will tell you if any celebrity is alive or dead. Very useful for cocktail party chatter, as well as a journalistic tool.
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Posted 12:20 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Argentina's Pans: The Sound of Virtual Fury
Juan C. Camus on innovative uses of the Internet
The Internet has become an important tool for protesters in Argentina, because through different websites they have been publishing news that is not appearing in the press, and also they have been helping people to talk about their problems with the national economy. A symbol of the situation in Argentina is people using pans (cacerolas in Spanish) to make noise against the authorities in government. And there are websites like Cacerolazo that reunite protesters. These sites offer chats, forums, and other features, such as the five types of sounds of a smashed pan in MP3 format, to play online or download. There is a Flash program from Xaga, with which you can use a virtual pan and spoon, to hit each time you feel the need.
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Posted 7:12 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What's Good for KR Isn't Good for Web Users
Steve Outing on rocky transitions
You've probably heard that Knight Ridder has moved its various Web properties to a new digital publishing system, which gives the newspaper chain more uniformity among its websites, and various site-management benefits. How good this is for users is debatable, but there's one particularly bad aspect of the transition: if you try to go to any old stories on affected KR websites, you won't get the content. Instead, you get a default page that explains that the URL for the site the requested content once resided on has changed. There's no way to then find the old content. For example, try going to this page, which originally was an article from the Miami Herald about former President Clinton's dog getting hit by a car. I found the link to that story on Google.Now, I realize that transitioning to a new publishing system is hell, and it's difficult to impossible to keep all the old links to many thousands of articles working. But, frankly, this sucks — for KR websites, and for their users. Of the thousands and thousands of links to content on KR sites that exist all over the Web — which used to link directly to the content — now they all return an "Error 404" and a boilerplate explanation of why you're not getting the content you requested. I'm sympathetic to the challenges of implementing a new publishing system, but the results here are embarrassing to Knight Ridder websites, and mean the loss of much traffic from sites that linked to KR content in the past.
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Posted 12:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Now for Something Completely Different
Nora Paul on digital storytelling
A fellow afficionado of new story forms sent me this one the other day. Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is a different sort of collaborative online journal. The "table of contents" is a satellite photograph of New York City. Pick one of the areas highlighted as you scroll over the photo and get a bird's eye view image of the area. You'll see red and green dots placed around — the green dots identify landmarks in the area, the red dots open up a text box with a story that happened in that area. This is an interesting way to connect content geographically. On the news side, the most similar thing I've seen is the Tampa Bay Online Crime Tracker, which also uses a map interface to get you to specific crime reports (represented by dots). It is good to see this kind of experimentation with non-linear compilations of stories and data.
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Posted 10:46 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
No Chance for Another Good Idea
Katja Riefler on technology vendor risks
The Online Journalism Review recently started an interesting series about the state of online news operations. Martha L. Stone's first piece is about the Sacramento Bee website. Reading the piece, I had expected to learn something about the site's "SacClubCams" — an initiative for young people I endorsed when I heard about it first (see my item from August 2001). Unfortunately, I waited in vain. "SacClubCams" is shut down and probably will not return. According to the website, this is due to the loss of the technology partner.I really feel sorry that another good idea had no chance to develop. I fear that this failure will stimulate again the discussion among online publishers about whether it is safe to rely on technology partners, or whether you have to do everything in-house.
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Posted 1:52 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Photojournalism History Is Made
Steve Outing on an unusual award
Each year the White House Press Photographers' Association hands out annual print and video awards. And this year, the video award is a shocker: it goes to Travis Fox of WashingtonPost.com. Yep, a website photographer has won an award that's always gone to TV news photographers in the past. Fox won both "The Eyes of History Cameraman of the Year" and "The Eyes of History Editor of the Year" honors for his work for WashingtonPost.com. The awards recognize America's leading still and video photojournalists who capture a news event at the White House, Capitol Hill, and around the world. (Thanks to Al Tompkins for alerting me to this development, which was announced last week, but with little fanfare.)
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Posted 1:38 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Don't Click Here
Andrew Stroehlein on the madness of the hyperlink patent
From the "I wish it were a joke" department, British Telecom (BT) went to court this week in an effort to get royalties out of early American ISP leader Prodigy. BT claims it invented the hyperlink in 1980 and now deserves financial compensation for Prodigy's use of it. If BT wins, some say, it could mean all clicks will cost you — as if the industry wasn't suffering enough already. This whole thing started when some overzealous lawyers at BT dusted off an old stack of patents last year, and came to the conclusion that they'd uncovered a gold mine. Few thought BT foolish enough to actually pursue the case, but BT has plunged headfirst into this PR disaster waiting to happen. The BBC Online report on this case quotes one lawyer as saying, "It could blow up in BT's face." Let's all hope so.
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Posted 8:51 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Designing for Whom?
Vin Crosbie on online publishing
For whom are newspaper websites designed? Last Thursday morning, San Francisco Chronicle vice president of digital media Bob Cauthorn told Editor & Publisher magazine's 13th annual Interactive Newspapers conference, "Focus on what the consumers want." An hour later, a panel of presidents of newspaper new media divisions took the conference stage, and an audience member asked CanWest Interactive president Bruce MacCormack why CanWest redesigned all its newspaper websites to look alike, having no individually distinct graphical identities. MacCormack, and also Knight Ridder Digital president Dan Finnigan (whose company announced a new companywide site layout design that same day), replied that they had homogenized the graphical layouts of all their newspapers' sites because it was inconvenient for their companies to operate different layouts at different newspaper sites.Is design homogenization focusing on consumers' needs or on companies' needs? Do all online consumers have the same needs regardless of regional differences? A sage reply was offered by Tribune Interactive president David Hiller, who politely differed with MacCormack and Finnigan: "We (Tribune Interactive) think that each site should decide its own content and layout."
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Posted 5:14 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
How Many People Have Visited You Today?
Juan C. Camus on website features
Clarin.com, the website of the leading newspaper in Argentina, has a very interesting feature on its home page. Every day it shows, live and online, the number of visitors to the site. Below the logo on the site's home page, there is the phrase "Until now" and the constantly refreshing number, with the latest value. This is not the only numeric feature of the site. Clarin.com also offers its users an estimate of the average time it would take to read a story (with an algoritm based on the number of words of each story), and a list of the most read stories.
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Posted 4:08 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Welcome Back, Wacky World News
Peter M. Zollman on a website publicity stunt
So the Wacky World News — I mean, the Weekly World News — has reopened its website, shut down as a stunt to sell more papers. (See Katja Reifler's Tidbits item of last week.) When you visit now, as you leave the site a pop-under appears saying, "We'd like to thank everyone who went out and bought this week's issue. ..." "Ed Anger" — the "columnist" who posted a notice on the "shut down" pages telling people to buy more copies of the paper — "was so happy, he took a case of scotch, a blonde, and a can of tuna fish (don't ask) and left on a 5-day road trip."In reality, not only was this a great stunt, but it illustrated something that's missing at most newspaper websites (and many other sites, as well) — personality. And a sense of humor: "We'd also like to say the following to everyone who went ballistic when we temporarily closed the site, including many members of the mainstream press who take this stuff a bit too seriously. ... LIGHTEN UP."
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Posted 12:58 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Quickie: Turning TV Copy Into Web Copy
Steve Outing on convergence advice
Cory Bergman of Lost Remote offers some good advice on how to convert TV scripts to the Web. Says he, "It's no easy task hiding the (near) illiteracy of TV news with stuff like verbs and punctuation. For Web producers, it's a nightmare." Bergman has produced a 9-point checklist of steps to turning TV news copy into compelling copy appropriate to the online medium. Excellent advice. ... But isn't it sad that he has to implore TV news people on something so basic as "Form complete sentences"? As my Poynter colleague Al Tompkins (group leader of the broadcast/online group) points out, it's a trend in TV news to not speak in complete sentences. Listen closely next you watch TV news.
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Posted 1:06 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Peer-to-Peer Photo Service
Steve Outing on a new application
The exhibit hall at the Interactive Newspapers conference last week was much smaller than in years past. (No surprise.) One vendor that did make an appearance I found to be interesting and innovative: Picsmart. (Its website currently offers no more than a logo and e-mail info address.) Picsmart's software product is a peer-to-peer application that a newspaper chain (for example) could use so that newsrooms around the country/world could take a look-see at what sister newsrooms have in their computers — to facilitate easy sharing of photo resources. Think Napster applied to a corporate intranet. This could be very useful to news organizations with far-flung properties.There are other interesting applications possible if you look beyond the first pass of sharing newsroom photos. (There's no reason a commerce-based content-sharing P2P service couldn't be created.) This is interesting because Picsmart represents the coming wave of P2P services. P2P will be a big deal in the media world.
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