Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Media Talk USA: Will Hyperlocal Save Journalism?
Is hyperlocal the magic bullet when it comes to fixing all that’s wrong with the news business? That’s the issue up for debate in this month’s Media Talk USA.
Is hyperlocal the magic bullet when it comes to fixing all that’s wrong with the news business? That’s the issue up for debate in this month’s Media Talk USA.
In newspapers’ game of revenue roulette, there’s a lot of talk lately about their trying to create membership plans.
The newspaper industry should be sobered by Martin Langeveld’s calculations, based on the Newspaper Association of America’s misplaced bragging about Nielsen internet data, that only about a half one one percent of time spent online is spent on newspaper sites.
Arnon Mishkin says he has found the fallacy of the link economy but I think his argument is itself built on some fallacies, among them:
In bringing together their search traffic, Microsoft and Yahoo are fighting an unwinnable war. Worse, they are still fighting the last war.
The Associated Press is becoming the enemy of the internet because it is fighting the link and the link is the basis of the internet.
How can and should news organizations and others add value to the new news ecosystem that is being used in the Iran story?
Or to put the question another way: The New York Times keeps talking about how expensive its Baghdad bureau is and what a fix we’d be in without it.
Three apparently unrelated items on the shift from valuing the product to valuing the process as the product:
An alarm went off on some desk at The New York Times business section: Oh-oh, time to slam blogs again.
The Observer’s John Koblin reports that the NY Times is considering putting a meter on usage of its site and charging once you’ve read too much.
Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight–that is, more efficient–times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?
The Newspaper Association of America is meeting in San Diego this week and they’re preaching up at their own choir loft with angry, self-righteous fire and brimstone about their plight.
For more than a century, the public face of companies has been their advertising, slogans, brands, and logos. How much better it would be if a company’s public face were that of its public, its satisfied customers who are willing to share their satisfaction, and its employees who have direct relationships with customers. Brands are people.
When I saw Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph, on my last trip to London, he said over breakfast that he’d been thinking about my book title’s question — What Would Google Do? — in relation to newspapers and he came up with a radical notion:
One problem I’ve had with much discussion about the future of news lately is that it’s too press-centric. It focuses on the press as if it were at the center of the world, as if it owned news, as if news depended on it, as if solving the press’s problems solves news. That’s not the ecosystem of news now. There’s a fundamentally new structure to media, and there are many different ways to look at it. And until we realize that, I don’t think we’ll begin to create successful new models for news. So pardon my simplistic drawings, but here’s an attempt to begin to illustrate that new ecosystem of news and media.
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