Lots of wars and death in US magazines this month. Thank god there are celebrity magazines to talk about the lighter side of life

In depth article that recaps the issues that the news industry is facing, and hints at possible solutions to work around the current media crisis.

The diagnostic

“It’s the triple whammy,” Eric Schmidt said when I interviewed him. “Loss of classifieds, loss of circulation, loss of the value of display ads in print, on a per-ad basis. Online advertising is growing but has not caught up.”

What a good business model needs to be made of:

The three pillars of the new online business model, as I heard them invariably described, are distribution, engagement, and monetization. That is:
- getting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites;
- making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving;
- converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads.

The article then lists several possibilities for each of the above pillar.

Living Stories is an experiment rewarding serious, sustained reporting, different from the usual ranking mechanisms that reward instantaneity.

Fast Flip is “an attempt to approximate the inviting aspects of leafing through a magazine”.

YouTube Direct is a system “which any publication can put on its own Web site”, allowing “readers can then easily send in their video clips, for the publication to review, censor, combine, or shorten”.

Display ads will become a conversation, “now your users can communicate back to you”. A huge logistical challenge for brands, but certainly one that will reward those who manage to create an engaging experience from their advertisement.

These examples show that for each pillar there are possibilities to improve the current situation. But nothing comes easy these days, and there is no unique and magical business model. Each media will have to find its own model among a large range of possibilities:

“People have adjusted their cost curves to their own form of monetization. The Harvard Business Review is not fretting about a loss of advertising [most of its revenue comes from subscribers]. The free Metro paper is not fretting about low subscription income. They have different business models, and the same principle will apply on the Internet.”

The Atlantic: how to save the news

I found this graph fascinating, showing how the median days between US release and first leak is increasing. The studios are getting better at controlling piracy (you can’t totally get rid of it anyway).

More on Andy Baio’s blog: Pirating the 2010 Oscars.

Swiss journalist and entrepreneur Philippe Mottaz comes back to the blogosphere with a review of a book called The curse of the Mogul. The internet has been accelerating the exposition of malpractices and flawed offerings (referred below as “the magic”) that had been doomed for a long time.

[...] back in 2003 [the] Viacom’s CEO is trying to explain to the Google founders how advertising works in television. By and large, it’s fairly simple: backed by the ratings collected twice a year during a couple of weeks called the “sweeps”, you tell your advertiser that his commercial his going to be seen by x number of people in primetime. If he wants the slot, he’ll have to shell out a few millions dollars. Will he ever know precisely how many people have actually seen the commercial? No, admits Karmazin, but this is precisely the name of the game. [...]

For Google operates precisely on the very opposite model. When you advertise on Google, [...] you will know how many people watch your ad, how many people clicked on it, how many people transacted based on the add. High-tech vs. high-touch, algorithms and hard evidence vs. approximation and spin. As Brin and Page are finishing their explanation, Karmazin blurts out: “You’re fucking with the magic!” [...]

“The Curse of the Mogul” might be one of the most illuminating book about the media in years, [...] debunking quite a few myths, the biggest one certainly being that it is the rise of the Internet that might be the single most important reason for the downfall of the newspapers. Knee and his colleagues show quite clearly that the U.S media conglomerates were underperforming already before the Internet. Obviously, the case got worse because of the disruptive power of the net, but equally because of the blindness  – if not downright incompetence – of the moguls, so used to deal in “ magic “ that they never quite could understand the perfect storm that was building around them. The authors do not hesitate to convict the mogul of using “sham” attitudes to lure investors as opposed to what ought to be sound economics and good business.

The curse of the Moguel review by Philippe Mottaz: Part 1, Part 2

As the conclusion to this post, let me share a word taken from Philippe Mottaz’s website: “When speaking about traditional media, I do not believe in the death of print, or radio, or TV, I prefer to talk about the death of death”

I’m pretty sure this will turn (really) big and go mainstream very soon. Probably a small window of opportunity for startups to launch now, and be bought by the big TV networks 1-2 years down the road.

Watching TV Together, Miles Apart
For the lonely couch potato, help is on the way.

Simple technology, including video chatting services like Skype, is making it possible for far-flung friends to watch shows together, even if they can’t share the same bowl of popcorn.

Emma McCulloch and Jennifer Cheek, for example, used to meet to watch “Dancing With the Stars” together, but that ritual ended when Ms. Cheek moved to Hawaii.

So the women decided that Ms. McCulloch, who lives in San Mateo, Calif., would save the “Dancing With the Stars” finale on her digital video recorder and wait until the show was seen in Hawaii. Then, they would get on Skype to video chat while they watched the show.

Link

Update: bonus link (in French), La moitié des ados regardent la télé en surfant sur le net (Half of teenagers watch TV surfing the net).