Category: media

Café journalism

Iterating on the concept of citizen journalism (that never really took of completely despite countless efforts), the Winnipeg Free Press is rethinking the boundaries between journalists and their readers, opening a café where the public can get a hot drink and engage in conversations with the writers who will work from there. Fantastic experiment, I can’t wait to see how this influences the news coverage.

Ever wanted to have a cup of coffee with your favourite journalist? Now’s your chance. The Winnipeg Free Press has signed an agreement with a local restaurant operator to open Canada’s first “News Cafe.”

Situated at the corner of McDermot Avenue and Arthur Street in the Exchange District, the News Cafe will be a community hub where people can get something to eat or drink and interact with journalists working there.

Link

 

Snippets from the GlobalWebIndex “Wave 5 Trends” report

Several quick ideas coming from a report published by GlobalWebIndex, available on SlideShare. Sorry for the raw dump of quotes, it is meant to encourage you to read the full document that contains interesting pieces of information.

Sharing on Facebook is declining:

Facebook’s valuation is largely based on quality of the data and the ability to target consumers based on this data. However active sharing of data is in decline. Most users are increasingly passive.

The global aspects promised by technologies are reaching their limits. You need to go local (and speak people’s language):

“No such thing as a global online strategy. Localisation is key online”

About the business model of online:

“It is a myth that consumers won’t pay for content online”

How the changes in information circulation affects journalists (hint: it made them more relevant):

“Transmitter culture makes journalists, media owners, content producers and brands more relevant in the online economy”

What do we expect from brands?

“Consumers want brands to improve their knowledge. Much like apple does, blurring of marketing and information”

Tech companies in American media

A new research by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has come up with several interesting findings. The study “was designed to examine the media coverage that occurs when technology news crosses beyond technology-oriented outlets or news sections to the top of the American news agenda—to front-pages, the national nightly news, cable prime-time and other general interest news outlets. It did not delve into specialty publications or sections.”

  • The press reflects exuberance about gadgets and a wonder about the corporations behind them, but wariness about effects on our lives, our behavior and the sociology of the digital age.
  • The mainstream media’s coverage of technology was not vast. It made up less than 1.6% of the total coverage over the course of the year, ranking it 20th out of the 26 identified topics. That puts technology news in same range as the environment, sports and education. And while it trails far behind crime (4.7%), it comes in ahead of religion (.6%) and immigration (.9%).
  • The study examined which technology companies generated the most media attention in these venues. Apple, with its flashy press events and often drawn out releases of new products, narrowly outpaced Google in total coverage. Twitter and Facebook ranked third and fourth. Microsoft, on the other hand, once the feared technology behemoth, fell far behind—attracting just a fifth of the coverage of Apple and less than half that of Twitter.
  • For Apple, the most heavily covered technology company, 42% of the stories described the company as innovative and superior, and another 27% lauded its loyal fan base. But there were doubts. The most common such negative thread, that Apple products don’t live up to the hype, appeared in 17% of stories about Apple. For Google, the company’s advancements in making content easier to find topped its coverage at 25%. But it was only half as likely as Apple to be framed as having superior, innovative products (20%).

Link

How to save the news

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

Hollywood vs Pirates

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).

oscars2010_firstleak-20100203-022019.jpg

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

“U.S media were underperforming before the Internet”

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”

Chattable TV

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).

What teens (really) want

I just discovered Nielsen’s conference and report on teens, interesting findings that debunk a few “exciting but false” notions. Teens can read newspaper, react to traditional advertising,

“The notion that teens are too busy texting and Twittering to be engaged with traditional media is exciting, but false,” [...]. Instead of replacing traditional media with new media consumption, teens are simply making time for both [...]

Other myths that the report debunks are that teenagers’ preferences differ vastly from adults, that teens’ media and entertainment spending is insulated from the recession (they actually reduce it, with out-of-home entertainment more affected than in-home) and that traditional advertising can’t resonate with teens (once ads break through the clutter, teens like them more).

The leading type of media use among teens is still television, with the average teenager watching 3 hours and 20 minutes per day, debunking the myth of YouTube as the lead medium. Actually, Nielsen says that teens watch more TV than ever, with usage up 6% over the past five years in the U.S. [...]

Other key findings of the study include:
* Half of all teenagers use an audio-only MP3 player each day, while one in four watch video on an mp3 player.
* On an average day, one in four teens reads the newspaper.
* While teens multi-task in their media usage, this behavior may actually be lower than among adults.
* South African, Venezuelan and Indonesian teens are the biggest couch potatoes.
* 35% of U.S. teens may have DVRs, but they prefer live TV viewing.

Link

Living in a “community of emotions”

Here is a quote from Paul Virilio discussing the impact of media on society in a recent French TV show:

There is a phenomena of globalization of affects, a sort of “community of emotions” replacing the community of interests. The community of interests is an economical community, social classes, rich and poor. The community of emotions is something completely new and that can not be mastered by political power.

This is one of the topics that intrigues me the most these days. How we tend to forget our long term interests because of emotions, served in daily and easy to consume capsules by mainstream and social media, all fighting for a bit of attention in the chaos we now have learned to live with.

Like the example I was giving in an earlier post: why is it acceptable to have thousands of policemen run after illegal immigrants when they only cost a fraction of what a trader can lose in a few seconds? Because until this particular crisis came up, immigrants were generating more emotions than bankers. Exactly what Virilio is talking about.

A community of emotions means a society built on patches, constantly trying to deal with the short term without considering the big picture. A community of emotions means a society less and less able to make solutions and problems match.

Maybe people will notice this phenomena, understand it, and become more hermetical to information. Or newsrooms might reinvent themselves, and start wondering if it makes sense to put on the front page of the local paper those sordid “fait-divers”. If a grandma has been attacked in a particularly cruel way somewhere on the planet, should all the senior citizens of the world be freaking out tonight? What exactly do we gain as a community from that news being spread all over?

Information comes with responsibilities. The web might have contributed – directly and indirectly – to make us forget this old adage. Are the side effects just around the corner?