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To make money from social media, a newspaper plays consultant

Mark — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:36:10 +0000

Most of America’s newsrooms have been aboard the Twitter bandwagon for at least a year, though few of them have found a way to directly make money off of social media. But one small daily newspaper in Nebraska has brought in a small but steadily growing stream of revenue this summer by creating and consulting for its own social media network for local advertisers.

The paper is the 20,000-circulation Grand Island Independent (disclosure: I worked as a reporter there until April, just before this project was formally launched), and the service is called the giNetwork. Here’s how it works: Companies pay for The Independent’s web editor to set up their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, with synchronized posts between the two. Their posts are then aggregated and displayed with a Twitter lists widget on The Independent’s homepage (about midway down) and on a dedicated giNetwork page. The deal includes on-demand social media consulting during business hours and a regular email newsletter with tips and success stories.

The giNetwork was added on top of an existing local search service developed by the newspaper that boosts local advertisers’ search results on Google and other search engines, as well as the paper’s own local business listings. The search service, FindNEthing.com, had been offered to businesses for $79 per month, and the giNetwork is now included in the FindNEthing package for a total of $99 per month. (Businesses are required to sign on for at least 12 months in order to prevent them from quickly parlaying the paper’s network support and free social media setup into their own independent social media campaign.)

The two services together give advertisers a strong presence on Google, Facebook and The Independent, the area’s most-visited website. “You get the two most popular sites in the world and the most popular site here — it’s what I call the holy trinity of ‘onlineliness,’” said The Independent’s new media director, Jack Sheard. “You can’t get it anywhere else. There’s no other product that’s going to give you all three of those things.”

Advertisers seem to be buying into Sheard’s pitch: The network launched this spring with about a half-dozen businesses and now includes 37 in the rural town of about 50,000 — this after FindNEthing had struggled and flatlined, Sheard said. Here are the project’s main selling points, and how they’ve worked in practice.

— It makes social media simple for businesses. When Sheard, web editor Stephanie Romanski and The Independent’s sales reps talked to local advertisers, they found that few of them knew how to set up Facebook fan page for their business, and even fewer understood Twitter. “A lot of them, when we talk to them, say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know I need to be a part of that, I just don’t have the time. I know the way things are going; I just don’t understand it,’” Sheard said. So the giNetwork makes it simple: The paper sets their account up, gives them a single place to put in messages (usually Facebook; sometimes Twitter for the smartphone-attached) and provides help and advice along the way.

Sheard said the network’s been much more popular among older business owners than younger ones, largely because older ones tend to be unfamiliar with the technology while their younger colleagues are skeptical of paying someone for something they’re capable of doing themselves. Romanski’s expertise — she runs The Independent’s creative social media efforts and has done consulting for others in the newspaper business — is a major draw for advertisers and an important part of the program. “If [the businesses] are not successful with this, then we just have a dead product, and we’re just spending money on something that doesn’t work,” Sheard said.

— It gives targeted access to devoted local audiences. The key to this selling point is the aggregation of the Twitter lists widget on the homepage and the giNetwork landing page. That widget expands the business’s audience beyond the business’s few hundred Facebook fans or few dozen Twitter followers to potentially include the paper’s thousands of unique visitors per week. And, of course, a streaming list of constantly updating local deals draws a much more interested audience than a banner ad. To that end, the paper is hoping to make the giNetwork the hub of local-deals-of-the-moment — a sort of shaggier Groupon — as the network grows, attracting a devoted following of bargain-hunters. Joining the network is the only way to gain access to that following.

— Other local businesses have used it to attract new customers. The paper has plenty of small success stories. The local franchise of the Mexican fast-food chain Qdoba reached nearly 500 Facebook fans in its first two weeks with a giveaway offer; it now uses its page to spread word of its regular promotions, like kids-eat-free Mondays. A local florist started with a special deal for customers who came in and said “I love my dog,” and was getting new customers from the promotion months afterward. A tire shop has drawn new customers with its regular oil change deals.

The most successful local social-media user is a grocery store that actually launched its Facebook page independently, as the giNetwork was in the planning stages. It quickly gained thousands of followers with deep daily discounts, though it limited the deal to Facebook fans, necessitating a messy system in which customers printed out proof of their Facebook fandom, then exchanged it for a voucher at the customer service desk.

When the store joined the giNetwork, Sheard eliminated the Facebook fan requirement over the initial objections of the store’s manager. The Facebook fan page was merely a means to an end — increased business, Sheard said. ”We’re not in the business to sell Facebook fans,” he said. “We will help you build them, and that’s great, but we are in the business of getting people in your door. That’s what the giNetwork does that Facebook, maybe, is limited on.”

In the newsroom

So what has this meant for The Independent? Despite the relatively meager revenue, it’s come out a plus in the paper’s cost-benefit analysis; the initial setup is simple, and the project requires even lower maintenance after that point. The paper had initially discussed a much more intensive program in which Romanski would actually run the social-media efforts for local businesses, but that idea was scrapped because of ethical (the newspaper’s web editor also being the online voice of numerous advertisers) and time issues. This project has struck a much happier balance, Sheard and Romanski said.

The network won an award this year for best new revenue idea in the online group of The Omaha World-Herald Co., The Independent’s owners, and The Hays Daily News in Kansas has picked up the idea after talking with Romanski.

But don’t expect the giNetwork to look the same a few months from now; the paper plans to keep incorporating new technologies and services into it, such as Foursquare and Shoutback, a Groupon competitor. In a late-adopting social media city like Grand Island, that means the paper itself plays a role in pioneering those new products — a refreshingly unfamiliar role for the local paper. And while the numbers are small, Sheard and The Independent’s executives are excited about the fact that they’re making real money directly from their social media efforts. “We’ve started, and that’s the key,” Sheard said.

This week in media musings: The Demand Media invasion, and ‘objectivity’ trumps transparency

Mark — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:36:30 +0000

I started this post thinking it had been a slow week, but by the time I was done, I had the longest week in review yet. Enjoy it over a nice, tall glass of egg nog. (Want to know what I’m doing? It’s here.)

— The discussion about Demand Media has been simmering since NYU’s Jay Rosen made it (or, more specifically, calling attention to how “demonic” it is) his cause du jour following the publication of this Wired profile of the online content factory. Early this week it reached a boil after both TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb sounded the alarm about the coming onslaught of cheap, superficial “content farms” or “fast food content” like Demand Media. Here are the highlights, the miscellaneous commentary and my take.

The highlights: Pioneering tech thinker Doc Searls tells TechCrunch to stop hyperventilating, arguing that “Nothing with real real value is dead, so long as it can be found on the Web and there are links to it.” Rosen interviews Demand’s founder and CEO, Richard Rosenblatt, and while Rosenblatt makes things sounds a lot less scary than Rosen does, his statements are so filled with corporate platitudes and empty CEO-speak that they’re tough to take at face value. Two people with experience working for Demand Media weigh in: Andria Krewson says the work is low-paying but well done, and in a thoughtful post, John Zhu says companies like Demand Media might be the inevitable outgrowth of all media’s marginalization of quality.

The other commentary: And common (and very salient) point among much of the commentary was best put by Fred Wilson, who wrote that our friends and other trusted sources will play a big role in helping us separate the good stuff from the crap. Cody Brown and others noted that it’s tougher to “game” social networks like Twitter than search algorithms. In a related point, a few others noted that Google seems to be losing its battle against SEO-gaming spammers. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis says news orgs might have something to learn from Demand.

My (very quick) take: I’m with Doc Searls on this one. The best way to keep crappy content from choking out good content? Keep creating and linking to good content. Google’s search dominance depends (at least in part) on its ability to lead users to the good stuff; makes sense to just produce quality stuff, link to it and pass it around, and let Google’s engineers do their jobs. As Scott Rosenberg points out, it’s not like people actually want to read empty, cynically produced search-bot fodder, anyway.

— We’ve talked about this “transparency is the new objectivity” idea a bit here before, and this week Paul Bradshaw at Poynter provided us with us an intriguing example of the clash between the old and new philosophies in this area. After an email interview with a reporter for a story, Bradshaw asked for permission to publish the exchange on his blog after the story ran. The reporter said no and eventually allowed Bradshaw to post only his side of the email conversation, not hers.

Bradshaw uses the case to ask the question, “Who owns the interview?” Steve Buttry says the reporter loses control over the interview as soon she hits the “send” guys and warns journalists not to put anything into writing that they’re not willing to see published. I largely agree with Buttry on this, though I don’t go as far as he does: The journalist was within her rights to ask Bradshaw not to publish her side of the conversation (and he obviously complied). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an arrogant, controlling thing to do, though.

What I find most interesting about the case is the complete subjugation of transparency in the name of objectivity. In this case, the reporter is willing to go so far to avoid transparency that not only does she choose not to reveal to her readers anything about her news-gathering itself (nothing wrong with not doing that, don’t get me wrong), but she actually refuses to allow a source — who has no obligation to her in this manner at all — to disclose anything about her, either.

And why does she do this? Bradshaw gives us a pretty strong hint when he notes in passing that in her email “she gives her position on the issue.” Aha! This wasn’t about suppressing transparency for the sake of privacy or the final product or anything like that; this was about preserving the appearance of objectivity at all costs. What better way to illustrate the idea of transparency being the new objectivity than by this, its precise opposite?

— This being mid-December, we’re starting to see the inevitable end-of-year, end-of-decade, and preview-of-next-year lists. (I’ll admit it: I’m supposed to hate these kinds of lists, but I can’t stop reading them.) Here’s this week’s review of those lists:

End of year: Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp has the top 10 newspaper stories (40,000 jobs lost is appropriately #1); Lifehacker has a rather overwhelming list of all of Google’s developments in 2009; and though I mentioned it last week, C.W. Anderson still has the best year-end snapshot of media so far.

End of decade: The Austin (Texas) Statesman’s Robert Quigley has an insightful piece at Mediaite looking at how the Gawker media empire defined this decade; and About.com, not usually known as a font of quality media criticism, has a surprisingly solid roundup of the major developments in journalism this decade.

2010: Martin Langeveld, Adam Westbrook and Sean Blanda all have predictions for 2010 — Langeveld’s are more newspaper-centric, and Westbrook’s more optimistic and presented in spiffy video format; Save the News has 10 New Year’s resolutions for journalism organizations; and newspaper publishers think advertising will magically flatten next year after collapsing this year, prompting Alan Mutter to wonder, “What the heck are they thinking?”

— In tech-oriented news, Twitter’s API (the interface that allows it to interact with other programs) was added to Wordpress last week and Tumblr this week. Combined with its integration with Facebook’s status API and tons of other programs over the past year or so, that effectively means that, as tech thinker Anil Dash puts it, Twitter’s API is complete. I don’t understand the implications of this quite well enough to summarize it, but fortunately, we have the renowned Dave Winer to explain it to us. So read what he has to say about Twitter’s API becoming a new Internet standard here and here and listen to him here.

— In the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten makes an interesting point regarding the ratings rise of MSNBC and Fox News and decline of CNN. He says that it’s not a sign that most Americans now want their news provided through an ideological lens, but that cable news instead attracts a relatively small niche of news junkies who follow news throughout the day. When evening rolls around, Rutten says, “they’re hungry for analysis rather than recycled reportage, and like most Americans today, they prefer interpretation that reinforces their own opinions.” I think the truth lies somewhere in between conventional wisdom and Rutten’s point of view, but it’s still a valuable corrective.

— I missed this one last week, but Jim Barnett of the Nieman Journalism Lab has a helpful quasi-scientific study of the finances of several significant local and national nonprofit news organizations. He finds a pattern, then looks at why Mother Jones might be an exception.

— Three social media-related links before I send you off for the holidays: 1) The Bivings Group’s study of newspapers’ use of Twitter (would like to see someone look at smaller newspapers, too, but I’m sure that’s coming from someone sometime), 2) A fun look at some reeeaaally early predecessors to modern social networking sites, and 3) Dan Schultz’s nifty survey and map of the participatory web, focusing on scope and individual vs. group focus. Enjoy.

This week in media musings: RIP E&P, and Google’s and Rosen’s story ideas

Mark — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:09:05 +0000

Big, big week last week. Let’s get into it. (As always, an explanation of what I’m doing is here.)

— There’s no doubt about the biggest journalism-related news this week: It’s the impending death of Editor & Publisher, the magazine that’s been covering the newspaper industry since 1884. E&P’s owner, Nielsen Business Media, announced on Thursday that it had sold the magazine’s sister publications and would be shutting down E&P. (Editor Greg Mitchell offers some more details.) Yup, it was pretty easy to see this as symbolic of the death of the entire newspaper industry itself, and that’s where many left it.

A few went deeper, though, on what E&P stood for and what killed it. Longtime E&P columnist Steve Outing reflected on the newspaper industry’s resistance to change, adding that “I let the newspaper industry down, as did E&P.” The Philadelphia Daily News’ Will Bunch praised E&P and Mitchell in particular for their criticism of the media’s coverage of the runup to the Iraq war. The two main explanations for E&P’s demise being passed around are 1) the drying up of advertising dollars, especially classifieds; and, 2) as articulated by former Rocky Mountain News publisher John Temple and agreed with by Outing, the rise of online media-news aggregators like Romenesko. Steve Yelvington gave us a little of both in his explanation.

I think Yelvington’s analysis probably hits closest to the bullseye. E&P was a publication largely operating in a traditional, dying medium (magazines) covering another traditional, dying medium (newspapers). In other words, we probably shouldn’t be all that surprised at its death. I suspect that what killed E&P was not so much Romenesko as it was sites like JournalismJobs.com, as the Internet eroded the magazine’s classified base.

That said, E&P did solid work covering both the everyday and big-picture issues in the newspaper industry right up until the end. Judging from his byline counts and takeout pieces, Joe Strupp was a force of nature there. But news media coverage is still in fairly good hands; sites like the Nieman Journalism Lab and PBS’ MediaShift have taken on the task of providing regular reporting on journalism in transition, and I’ve been fairly impressed with the work they’ve done (particularly the Nieman Lab). E&P will be missed, but it isn’t a mortal wound for journalism.

— Google made big media news twice this week: First, it announced that it’s adding real-time search from sites like Twitter and Facebook to its traditional search results. This is the beginning of the implementation of all the deals we heard about in October, and it’s big news. Google assured us its real-time search won’t kill journalism (duh) and will find a way to make sure the cream rises to the top. Daniel Honigman gives a quick look at how the change will affect the PR world.

— Second, Google introduced a new partnership with The New York Times and Washington Post called Living Stories, a smart, personalized version of the Wikipedia-style explainers that Matt Thompson has advocated. (The New York Times has more of the nitty-gritty details.) The announcement created a lot of buzz early in the week, with Online Journalism Blog’s Paul Bradshaw calling it a “jaw-dropping online journalism form” and others wondering if it would “give newspapers new life.” Elsewhere, Thompson and Danny Sullivan are less enthusiastic: Thompson likes that news orgs are trying to tie stories together for readers, but says Living Stories is more of a starting point than a finished product. Sullivan has some qualms with its usability.

I’m with Thompson on this one: Living Stories may be getting a lot of hype because Google’s behind it, but this type of re-envisioning of the way a news story should look is not new, and Google’s manifestation of it is not exactly the pinnacle of the form. But, most importantly, it’s a good start, and it’s miles ahead of the Post’s and Times’ concept of topic pages. Like Thompson, I sense that the pinnacle of this “explainer” form is a long way off, but it’s encouraging to see news orgs and the brilliant minds at Google diving into the pool.

— Some Google miscellany: Google also expanded its search personalization to include everyone. Danny Sullivan tells you how it works and what it means. Also, Rupert Murdoch responded to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Wall Street Journal op-ed with his own. His two main points: Media companies need to give people the news they want, and quality content is not free. Oh, and his third: The FCC needs to let me own everything.

— NYU professor Jay Rosen’s been talking for a while about his idea for a site built around the concept, “What is your question? Journalists are standing by.” This weekend, he gave us a mockup for that idea at explainthis.org. I love the journalists-as-question-answerers idea — the Wilmington (N.C.) Star-News has been quite successful with it at MyReporter.com, and my paper, the Grand Island (Neb.) Independent, began trying out the concept a few weeks ago. (Jeff Sonderman has a good roundup of similar projects.)

Matt Mireles raises a good question about the project: Why use journalists at all? Why not let the experts answer and cut out the middle man? It’s a valid point, but I think journalists still have a role in answering a lot of these questions. “Sources go direct” is wonderful and all, but what if the question is about corruption or incompetence somewhere? Do we really want the “experts” answering those questions for us?

Take even Rosen’s sample question: “Why is corn still subsidized?” I wouldn’t expect an entirely honest answer from the American Corn Growers Association, even though they’re certainly experts on the issue. Answering questions like these is a key part of the craft of journalism, and I expect projects like these to start popping up soon at local news orgs around the country.

— Top tech blogs TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb are both lamenting the coming rise of organizations like Demand Media that offer cheap, mostly useless, ad-driven content. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington calls it “fast food content,” and RWW’s Richard MacManus calls them “content farms.” Both fascinating reads on the assault on quality in some corners of the Web.

— Three for the road: 1) Steve Buttry has a comprehensive (read: long) followup spelling out the details of his earlier proposal of a mobile-first news strategy; 2) Conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart talks to Mediaite about his plans to develop the right’s Huffington Post; 3) and CUNY prof C.W. Anderson has a great roundup of the news industry’s current battles and the ones you’ll be seeing flare up soon. It’s a short but sweet primer on the state of the journalism.

This week in media musings: More Murdoch fallout, and Dallas tears down that wall

Mark — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:28:14 +0000

After taking Thanksgiving week off, we’ve got two weeks to catch up on, instead of just one. And while that first week was relatively slow, this week has been a pretty eventful one, both in terms of media happenings and in important thoughts about journalism.

— Almost a month after Rupert Murdoch first said he plans on removing News Corp.’s sites from Google, that declaration (and its aftermath) are still the top item of discussion in journalism/new media circles. The story got another boost just before Thanksgiving when word spread that News Corp. was in talks with Microsoft about creating an exclusive search deal with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. (Yup, exactly as Cory Doctorow predicted.)

Much pondering ensued from just about every corner of the Internet, but here’s the most important stuff: On Tuesday, Murdoch gave attendees at an FTC conference the rationale behind his plans, during which he bashed online news aggregators and also said he’s against a U.S. government subsidy for news, but wants them to rewrite copyright law to stop aggregators. Arianna Huffington, the most prominent of those aggregators, followed him up at the conference with a speech that 1) noted that News Corp. sites do quite a bit of aggregating themselves, 2) defended the free-content model, and 3) extolled the virtues of citizen journalism.

Meanwhile, one of Murdoch’s top execs, Dow Jones CEO Eric Hinton, gave a speech in India that amounted to: “All these new-fangled future-of-media ideas might be great, but they’re not going to make any money.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded to the hubbub with an op-ed in Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal that amounted to: “Why can’t we be friends?” Oh yeah, and then a Microsoft exec told the Financial Times they’re not planning on paying any news organizations to leave Google in the first place. Clear as mud?

A few of the smarter pieces of commentary on the whole ordeal: Search engine guru Danny Sullivan and new media entrepreneur Umair Haque explain why a News Corp.-Bing deal wouldn’t work. As usual, Ken Doctor has some really sharp questions on the issue. And Sullivan also prompted an interesting discussion on whether infrequent visitors to news sites through Google News are worth anything. Sullivan and Jeff Jarvis say yes, and news orgs are blowing an opportunity; Steve Yelvington says no, not really.

— If the last four paragraphs have you feeling overwhelmed, reset for a while with two beautiful elegies for journalism as we knew it, focusing on two cities on either side of the country. In an essay for Harper’s, Richard Rodriguez examines the importance of local news orgs providing a sense of place through a look at the history and decline of San Francisco and its two longtime papers, the Chronicle and the Examiner. (Official/incomplete version here; illicit/full version here.)

And New York Times media columnist David Carr gives a picture of the collapse of the traditional media model (with a helping of hope for the future) by looking through the eyes of the young go-getters who flood New York’s media landscape. Both essays are lyrically written, and both highly insightful.

— The Dallas Morning News, one of the nation’s best newspapers only a decade ago, internally announced a reorganization plan this week in which some news section editors will report to sales managers, now called “general managers.” From the memo, this looks like one of the biggest breaches of the long-standing wall between news and advertising we’ve seen at a major traditional American news organization. The memo’s writer, Editor Bob Mong, its publisher, and other editors have backpedaled from that idea over the past few days, saying it’s not really much of a change from what a lot of other traditional news orgs are doing and won’t affect the integrity of the paper’s reporting.

A bit surprisingly, the commentary on the move from media and journalism thinkers has been cautiously optimistic. Alan Mutter thinks the news folks’ tenacity could rub off on the ad side, Canadian j-prof Mark Hamilton thinks the collaboration could help fund better reporting, and the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Jim Barnett says this may simply be a case of traditional news catching up to the online world.

I wish I could share their optimism, but there are far too many question marks for me to be anything but concerned about this deal. I don’t think the news/advertising wall should be sacrosanct (as Barnett notes, online news does fine without a wall), but there’s a huge difference between journalists working with someone who’s spent their entire career in advertising and working for that person. And there’s also a big difference between that superior being a seldom-seen, corner-office publisher and a hands-on immediate supervisor. But it’s not impossible for this to work well; a lot of it depends on how well these sales managers mesh with the news folks, and how well they understand the need to keep their hands off editorial judgment when it counts.

— A weird, weird incident involving Tiger Woods, Elin Nordegren, an SUV, a golf club, extramarital affairs and the Florida Highway Patrol transfixed much of the media world for about a week. Just about every columnist in America took the opportunity to write about celebrity, privacy, the 24-hour news cycle and tabloid journalism. Not much of it was very interesting. Two exceptions: Time media critic James Poniewozik wrote a sly critique of the traditional media’s ambivalence about covering tawdry stories like this, and St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans expressed his concerns about those media outlets outsourcing celebrity stories to organizations whose ethics they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

— After months of leadup, the cable company Comcast agreed this week to buy a majority of the media empire that is NBC Universal from General Electric. A few quick takes on various angles of this deal: The New York Times’ Brian Stelter looks at the Internet/TV divide and reviews Comcast’s new news holdings, paidContent’s Rafat Ali says the deal’s not about digital media, and the Times’ Richard Sandomir and former ESPN.com writer Dan Shanoff say this deal gives ESPN a legitimate competitor in sports media.

— Two great journalism school discussion-starters during the past two weeks: Steve Buttry offers some comprehensive advice for journalism schools on how to overhaul their curriculum for the 21st century (Buttry covers it well here — it’s worth a read), and tech pioneer Dave Winer makes the case for a semester of journalism education for everyone, framed as “How to be a citizen in the 21st century.” Wonderful idea.

— Before we’re done, there’s some nifty statistics and graphs that are worth a look. Slate tech columnist Farhad Manjoo marvels at Facebook’s relentless growth, The Awl has a magnificently depressing graph of magazine revenue, and Steve Yelvington and Damon Kiesow graph news sites’ users and wonder where a paywall is supposed to go. Enjoy.

This week in media musings: Murdoch’s game of chicken, and a lesson in process journalism

Mark — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:31:12 +0000

No time for much of an intro — we’ve got way too much to get to this week. (As always, a look at what I’m doing is here.)

— There’s no question what — or who — is the biggest story in future-of-journalism talk this week: Rupert Murdoch. After months of talking around it, he finally made a splash by telling an Australian interviewer he plans to remove all of News Corp.’s sites’ content from Google’s search index. (He also said he thinks the fair-use doctrine should be overturned and threatened to sue the BBC for copyright violation.) Almost immediately, he got a vote of confidence from another billionaire media mogul — Mark Cuban, who argued that whereas Twitter and Facebook are growing platforms news orgs can use to their advantage, Google is a competing news source whose time is slipping past. “Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008,” he said.

Well, this just about set the new-media folks’ hair on fire. Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow guessed that Murdoch plans to exclusively put his content on an (inferior) competing search engine, a scheme he called “a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet.” (Social media guru Jason Calacanis loves this idea, by the way.) Newser founder (and Murdoch biographer) Michael Wolff said Murdoch’s plan has its own curious but internally consistent logic, but he doesn’t have even the most basic know-how of how to build an online news business. The Australian site Crikey! and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan tried to not-so-gently explain to Murdoch how Google and Google News work.

Bill Tancer and Sullivan used numbers to show why Murdoch’s plan won’t work, and The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum countered with numbers of his own to show that not much of News Corp.’s revenue comes from visitors sent through Google.

I’m with Sullivan and Doctorow on this one: Any plan by Murdoch to erect a paywall, freeze out Google and offer content exclusively through a lesser search engine is doomed to fail, simply because his publications’ content don’t have enough value to draw people away from Google. He’s basing these ideas off of the success of the Wall Street Journal, but the Journal should be treated as an exception, not the rule. It offers a highly specialized form of information, and many of its subscribers are able to get the cost reimbursed on expense accounts. The work of the rest of his publications, frankly, can be replaced by tons of free news sites, dropping their value to virtually zero. Murdoch’s operating as if the web is still his own little media playground, ruled by scarcity. Instead, it’s ruled by abundance, and that causes the value of any one online publication to tank, even if they’re as large as Murdoch’s.

Still, I think a colossal failure of this kind by Murdoch would be good for journalism in the long run, because it would a long way toward disabusing publishers of the notion that people will pay for their easily replicated content on the web. And let’s face it: If Rupert Murdoch, with the most resources of any traditional-media publisher in the world, can’t succeed charging for content, your 50,000-circulation paper probably can’t either.

— A fascinating discussion was spurred last week by The New York Times’ publication of a story on a patch of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean. This was the highest-profile effort yet by Spot.Us, an initiative by David Cohn that allows reporters to make pitches for stories they’d like to do and raise money online through what’s commonly called “crowdfunding.” In this case, Lindsey Hoshaw raised $10,000 to spend a month at the garbage patch, producing a blog and an article in the Times.

The Times article was not outstanding. Not bad, to be sure — but pretty much your garden-variety, cover-your-bases Times feature. When the Columbia Journalism Review’s Megan Garber pointed this out, things got interesting. Cohn defends Hoshaw and Spot.Us in the comments, Garber responds, others chip in, and we have a whole (somewhat tedious, but still interesting to journalism nerds like me) conversation about whose fault a lackluster story is (probably mostly the Times) and whether Garber’s piece is an indictment of Spot.Us (it wasn’t, though the subhead makes it sound that way).

Hoshaw wrote her own response, concluding that “people want to feel connected to the stories they’re reading and the people who write them.” But the two most insightful takes on the situation come from Mathew Ingram, Jason Fry and Mike Masnick, who note that the real story here is that with all other things being equal (like, say, the author, the reporting and the subject matter), a personal blog offered a fuller, richer, more engaging picture of a story than an article in the venerable New York Times. That says a lot about the actual capacities of journalism in traditional outlets versus blogging.

And why was the Times’ story worse? Because it’s so limited by the strictures and traditions of establishment journalism. As Fry wrote, “you get the feeling that the Paper of Record took an interesting square peg of a story and made it fit into a rather dull round hole.” And the Times does that because, to lean on Masnick here, focusing on the product over the process has been the way it’s always done things. If we ever needed a case study in the advantages of process over product journalism, this is it.

— We got two thoughtful pieces on search and authority this week: First, Thomas Baekdal wrote about how much more influential people we know are in our purchasing decisions than impersonal general traffic and brand recognition, then connected it to the idea of personalized search streams through social media connections. Then, Clay Shirky wrote some preliminary thoughts on “algorithmic authority” — the idea that we’re actually willing to trust impersonal machines to find things and help make decisions for us, apart from any human explicitly lending authority to them. I’m still trying to figure out how to square these two ideas that seem contradictory at first, but I think both of them should play a big role in the future of search.

— While most online advertising is struggling to find a sweet spot, ads associated with news sites’ videos are booming, The New York Times notes. I had found anecdotally that most news orgs’ video efforts had been a ton of work for a small amount of revenue, so this is a pleasant surprise to me.

— Longtime New Yorker writer Ken Auletta’s new book “Googled: The End of the World As We Know It” dropped earlier this month, and this week he offered a little treat: The book’s original last chapter of media maxims that Auletta learned from Google, cut by Auletta because it didn’t fit with the rest of the book. Very Jeff Jarvis-esque. Good stuff.

— Sports Illustrated’s (SI.com, if you want to get technical) national college football writer, Stewart Mandel, has a look at Twitter and YouTube’s effect on the college football universe. He finds — not surprisingly — that social media and the increasing ease of user-produced content has had the same effect there that it’s having in every other of life: Democratizing analysis and opening up the conversation to a much broader group of people.

— Finally, if you’re wondering how to dive in a little deeper with this whole journalism-and-new-media stuff, you could do a lot worse than this list of 50 journalism blogs. It covers the bases quite well.

This week in media musings: What real-time search means for news, and journalism subsidies get a hearing

Mark — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:06:10 +0000

As The New York Times’ media critic, David Carr, noted on Friday, this last week has been a rather momentous one in future-of-journalism happenings. That means I’ve got a ton to cover, so I’ll try to keep it digestible for you. (Explanation of what I’m doing, as always, is here.)

— First off, this was the week real-time search officially took off. On Wednesday morning, The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital broke the news that Microsoft had reached an agreement to give its Bing search engine the ability to include Twitter and Facebook status updates. Four hours later, we found out that Google, too, had reached a similar agreement with Twitter (no Google-Facebook marriage, though — that would have been a surprise).

So now we have Twitter status updates available on Google and Bing, and Facebook updates on Bing as well. The tech blog ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has a handy-dandy chart to help us keep all the companies’ search strengths and weaknesses straight. He and Adam Ostrow from the social media blog Mashable both note that Microsoft’s plan for Facebook search is dependent on Facebook’s ability to persuade its users to make their status updates at least semi-public — and Facebook users have a history of fiercely guarding their privacy.

There’s a few different ways to examine the impact of these deals: The New York Times has focused on money, noting that this is likely a huge part of Twitter’s answer to the ubiquitous “But how are you going to make money off of this?” question, and then, in turn, wondering, “How are Microsoft and Google going to make money off of this?”

Several others have been talking about the value of this data. Catharine Taylor at Social Media Insider thinks most of it is “simply unimportant,” which is, well, nuts. (You seriously can’t see how finding out what people are saying right now about a given topic might be slightly valuable?) TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld posits (rightly, I think) that the greatest value of this data will be at the aggregate, “firehose” level in the ability to refine search results to reflect real-time results — sort of like an integration of a far more sophisticated version of Google Trends.

Then, of course, there’s the journalism angle. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum asks the same question that I can just about bet Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley were asking when they heard about the deals: “If tweets are worth money to a search engine, why isn’t the news?” Meanwhile, tech pioneer Dave Winer, in the most insightful post I’ve seen on these deals, argues that we should be beyond thinking about what this means for traditional news organizations: Google, Microsoft and Twitter are now in the news business themselves.

This is the dawn of a system, Winer says, where all of our news “flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested.” And instead of jumping in on this while it’s beginning, the moguls of traditional media are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will just stop by and decide to pay them — not because they’ve provided any serious value in this new media ecosystem, but only because they’re complaining loud enough. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Just read Dave’s post.

— The other big development this week was a report released by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie and UC-San Diego/Columbia University journalism prof Michael Schudson, which was followed by an avalanche of reactions from journalism pundits and scholars. The Nieman Journalism Lab has a fine summary of the report and the Cedar Rapids Gazette’s Steve Buttry has a comprehensive roundup of the reaction, so I won’t duplicate their work here.

The aspect of the report that got the most attention was Downie and Schudson’s recommendation of several avenues for increased government funding for journalism, summed up nicely by Michele McLellan here. And that may be the most valuable thing to come out of this report — it’s the first proposal of expanding public funding for journalism to be engaged with seriously by many of The People Who Think About Journalism, probably because it’s the first proposal that deserves to be taken seriously.

I have my own deep skepticism about publicly funding journalism — though I’m slightly more amenable to starting up new initiatives under the public-media banner than to using subsidies or tax breaks to prop up flagging newspapers — but it seems that Downie and Schudson’s report has finally gotten us past the knee-jerk “Over my dead body!” response to publicly funded journalism, even if the right answer is “No way — but here’s why, and I’m still open to hearing some ideas from the other side.”

— This week included a watershed moment for the sports blogosphere, too. Deadspin, a Gawker Media blog that towers over the sports blogging world, launched a daylong offensive against ESPN after, according to Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio, a PR rep for the network brushed aside his questions last month about a rumored affair and suspension by ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips. When the story turned out to be true and was broken by the New York Post last week, Daulerio retaliated by publishing reports of sexual misdeeds by a mid-level ESPN Radio host and an unknown-to-the-public marketing VP.

The reaction from the sports blogosphere was almost universally negative (though there were exceptions), which is notable because so many of those blogs generally operate with a very similar M.O. If you had to boil the sports blogosphere down to just a few of its defining characteristics, one of them would be its fixation on sexual scandals that only tangentially involve sports. Yet this week we found out that even regarding that, those blogs have a line. And when even the most powerful sports blog on the Web crossed that line, they heard it from their fellow bloggers. If you’re interested in diving deeper into this, the National Sports Journalism Center has a roundup of reactions, Midwest Sports Fans has an audio interview with Daulerio about the flap, and lawyer and former Deadspin associate editor Clay Travis uses the episode to give us a lesson on libel law.

— In the wake of the past few weeks’ adventures in news orgs’ social media guidelines, veteran journalist Gina Chen has an extremely helpful personal guide to the ethics of social media for journalists, complete with case studies. Over at MediaShift, meanwhile, Stephen Ward has some tips for news orgs crafting social media policies.

— The nation’s 12th-largest newspaper, Newsday on Long Island, has put a paywall around its online content. Newsday execs explain the move at Editor & Publisher, and news business expert Alan Mutter cautions that Newsday’s being owned by a cable company makes this move a tough one to replicate.

— Finally, two professors argue at SEED magazine that social media and the explosion of online publishing mean that soon, our society will be characterized not only by nearly universal literacy, but by nearly universal authorship as well. And if you’re a journalism student (or a working journalist, for that matter), Publish2’s Ryan Sholin has some helpful advice: Be great at one analog craft and one digital craft. Sounds about right.