CBS buying CNET might make sense financially and the chart they released (see bottom of post) showing the various properties makes a good case for "synergies" of adding unduplicated audience in various verticals. CBS Chief Les Moonves, in PaidContent interview, makes a good case for the assets and how they all fit.

It's the operational part -- integrating the two -- that will be a challenge. Very different cultures, even if CNET is one of the more traditional-style companies in its space.

What do you think are/should be the rules of Twitter journalism?

A few folks have been using Twitter as a kind of live-blogging mechanism, so folks following a Twitter feed can read what a reporter has to say about an event or news scene as he/she types it in a handheld device. That can be perfectly valid, but it’s important -- as with any medium -- to consider the audience, and how they’re likely consuming what’s being provided.

A lot of the Twittering I’ve seen reads as if you have to be at the event to understand what was said -- you have to be so much an insider that you’re already on the inside. If that’s the case, what’s the point? To be pedantic about it, some questions:

Do your readers need more information? Should you give a full name of whom you’re talking about?

• Shouldn’t you say specifics rather than just allude?
  
• Can you sum up, or should you quote?
• Yes, it’s only 140 characters, but as Mark Twain might have said: I wrote a full article because I didn’t have time to Twitter. Writing intelligently in 140-character bursts is a hard thing to do.
  

What else?

Sometimes less can be more. This is the implication of my colleague Dorian Benkoil’s thoughts here last week about how newspapers (and other legacy media) might position their Web-based content to optimize revenue over eyeballs. Special interest magazine publishers have long worked this way, charging far higher cost per thousand ad rates for Time Inc's Fortune for example, than for its People, as the former has more attractive demographics for many advertisers than the latter. So a far smaller circulation can bring in as much revenue and perhaps greater profit margins than more circulation and costs. This has been the economics behind many subject-focused cable TV channels as well.

Here’s another way to look at more by subtraction. David Pogue, a New York Times tech columnist who I find entertaining and quite informative, had a column last month about why a product can be a success even with acknowledged flaws. Referring to Apple’s Mac Air he wrote:

…When your laptop has the thickness and feel of a legal pad and starts up with the speed of a PalmPilot, it ceases to be a traditional laptop. It becomes something you whip open and shut for quick lookups, something you check while you're standing in line or at the airline counter, something you can use in places where hauling open a regular laptop (and waiting for it) would just be too much hassle.

It's the same lesson I learned when I reviewed the Flip "camcorder" a couple weeks ago: if you change the shape and concept of something enough, it ceases to be that thing. It becomes a new thing, or a descendant of that earlier thing. But it's no longer the original thing, and you can't judge it on the same yardstick.

Lesson learned: Form—the products attributes—can create the function. Thus an entrepreneur can break out of a well-defined category (camcorder, laptop, cell phone) by changing some key characteristics—weight, time to boot up, capabilities—even a dramatic new price point.

Does this insight provide any guidance for the media industry? Should the local newspaper continue trying to be a general interest publication even when online? Is it already something else, in which case it needs to be evaluated by a different metric (i.e., time spent, return visits) than what has been used in the past (i.e., hits or clicks or gross eyeballs or total page views)? Or, perhaps, should legacy media be creating new “things” based on the old? What is the media equivalent of the Mac Air or Flip camcorder: a product that is recognizable but, by changing—often removing—product attributes is used by consumers (and advertisers in this case) in new ways?

Experiments with short form videos—first popularized from the bottom up thanks to the YouTube platform—have now become mainstream with the traditional video programmers. Viacom purchased short film pioneer Atom Films in 2006. But most attention continues to be on finding outlets for conventional programming, such as NBC Universal/News Corp.’s Hulu.

If I had the answer I’d offer it (though probably not here—a guy’s got to feed his family, or in my case, start paying college tuition). But I think it is an area ripe for brainstorming and another round of informed trial and error.

Ready. Fire. Aim.

I’ve said (and perhaps blogged — who can remember) that while I find Twittering for its own sake inane, from a societal perspective utility will come when enough people Tweet that a cloud is created to monitor the zeitgeist. So, let’s say a few hundred, or thousand, people give their thoughts on the Pope from inside his talk at Yankee Stadium. Or a bunch of people from a disaster zone (this is not them asking for help — which is also valid — but rather getting an idea of the general tenor of a situation): panicked; need help; all’s fine; more food. And so on. Amalgamate them and we can start to get a sense of what folks think or feel, at least feel enough to Tweet.

Today, BuzzMachine pointed to Twisorti, which parses for emotive words like “love” or “believe” or “wish”. It’s a start of the kinds of intelligence that will become the semantic Web. Imagine if the application were smart enough to not only search for specific words, but look at Tweets in general, and see what trends and thoughts are emerging, in general. Cross-reference that with search or SMS messages … well, you get it; it becomes a read on “society” — or at least the society that’s using the technology. (And of course, if we want to put our marketing hats on, a way for brands to monitor messages, at some point.) Even better is if and when the cloud can include not just Tweets, but all the bursts from everywhere. Like, whatever becomes the main competitor to Twitter. (Because, as we noted earlier, Twitter has a problem that may hinder its survival.)

There’s been a debate on a Poynter Institute journalism discussion group about how to increase pageviews, bring in new traffic to news websites, to increase ad views, when newspapers are struggling to bring in digital revenues, and that inventory is topping out. My friend and mentor Vin Crosbie points out how numbers from the Newspaper Association of America show that even for the best of the best newspapers, users are coming only an average of once per week, and spending only five minutes per session. Newspapers, he says, are general interest publications.

Meanwhile, another participant, Amy Gahran, has asked why newspaper execs are limiting their vision to commoditized pageviews on websites. Shouldn’t they be thinking more about how to add ad revenues to feeds, mobile distribution, RSS, widgets and the like?

And I’ll add a third thought: Newspapers aren’t really a single general-interest publication, but rather -- in a digital age -- an amalgam of targeted niches. Sure, in print, it’s one branded publication that you hold in your hands and flip through as you’re interested. But on the Web, it’s a local sports “vertical,” a local business “vertical” and so on. While the general interest local news areas of the site will probably remain commoditized, the more targeted areas with a high interest and usership should be sold separately and at a higher CPM. If the frequency is as low as Vin says, that can be made a strength, by asking advertisers to understand they’re buying engaged targeted readership, not frequency or reach.

Similarly, AP announced its test of a mobile initiative to give more content and ad outlets for digital distribution. . That should make some folks in that discussion happy.

Former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz’ inaugural commentary for the paper today repeats a fair amount of what he told the Chicago School of Business last month : that James Rothschild was annoyed over how the telegraph leveled the information playing field (and that we tend to overestimate technology’s effect in the short-run, and underestimate it long-run. (Witness the initial hype over the Web at first, and how it’s now part of daily life with little fanfare.)

But a lot of what he said at the CSB speech -- a thoughtful analysis of today’s media landscape -- wasn’t in the column and bears repeating. One crucial point he made was that B2B information applications now often lag behind consumer ones. Consumer-focused products tend to have better interfaces and applications than the high-priced business and financial services ones. He calls this a “real challenge for the B2B industry, which has so far been less affected by the digital age than B2C.”

“Much of the innovation is based on the broad consumer market,” B2C rather than the B2B market, he says. This is a see change. It’s been a given that people pay handsomely for business-oriented information, and get real value from it. But Crovitz notes that financial professionals with high-priced terminals at their desks today will often turned to Yahoo Finance. This movement has big implications for B2B information providers.

Other points he makes:

* Subscription plus ad revenue “works very well” as a revenue model. (In other words, the WSJ is smart to have subscriptions and ads; new owners News Corp., of course, considered doing away with them.
* Software and information are more powerful together than separate. “Information and software are more closely linked and mutually dependent than ever before. Changes in each affect the other. “The great changes in computing power” have shifted the information industry, changes in information have affected software..
* Neither content nor distribution is king: the consumer is.

At the Brian Storm (of MediaStorm.org) Hearst Foundation New Media Lecture at Columbia J. school. Brian talks about the fallacy of objectivity, or at leas the fallacy of being unwilling to be an advocate, pointing to Darfur, and that it was extremely hard to produce a piece for the non-advocacy Council on Foreign Relations about what’s happening there. “I think Bashir is a bad person,” and should go, he says of the Sudanese leader.

“If you’re a journalist and you don’t have an agenda, you don’t have a pulse,” Brian says much later. Sometimes you have to push hard to get [an audience] to give a shit on the things they should care about,” whether its the Sudan, Rwanda, post-Katrina New Orleans or danger to elephants.

Fascinating to hear him toe this line, which must be anathema to many in these hallowed journalistic halls. Brian notes how when working at MSNBC he was not allowed, for example, to put music in documentary work -- something he does regularly now (and a question about which sparked the discussion).

“Ethics, I do have them,” he says, implicitly arguing that advocacy is actually a more ethical position.

Objectivity, I would argue, is damn near impossible. Where you point the camera, even how you frame the shot, let alone the quotes you choose or the point you make when writing, or what-not, are all choices. With a genuflection to Nanda Kumar of Baruch College (where I just guest lectured in his class) I ask: Is Google an objective search engine? No. Choices are made in how to write its algorithm.

Fairness is possible, and disclosure of ones’ biases helps achieve that aim. But objectivity? Ever seen Rashomon?

Have you heard about the “Freemium” business model? It’s a label offered by James Governor Jared Lukin in a “name-that-model” contest proposed almost exactly two years ago in a post at A VC by Fred Wilson, a partner in a New York venture capital firm.

Wilson looked at many of the more successful Web ventures and observed that what they had in common was a basic service that they offered for free and a step-up premium service that they charged for.

The basic voice over IP service Skype, for example, lets users call anyone anywhere for no cost, so long as both the caller and callee are at broadband-connected computers. However, if you really want to be able to call anyone anywhere—that is, to a land line or cell phone -- there are per minute charges. Want voice mail? Upgrade to Skype Pro.

A wonderful service I use called LogMeIn employs a similar approach. It gives me access to my desktop computer from any other computer, anywhere. A free version lets me see all my directories and files and transfer them to my remote laptop. The upgraded version actually displays the screen of my desktop, with access to any program or file, as though it was on my remote computer.

There are many other examples.

But for the Freemium model to work, Wilson observed there are other characteristics that demarcated the more successful implementations and the others:

• Ideally, they don’t require any downloads or plug ins to start. Lots of exceptions here, but it is a helpful goal.
• Support every browser with any material market share. There is no excuse these days to be FireFox or Safari challenged
• Make sure the service works on various flavors of Windows, OSX, and Linux.

In short, he says, eliminate all barriers to the initial customer acquisition.

But unlike 30 day free trials before having to pay, a true Freemium experience ensures that whatever the customer gets day one for free they are always going to get for free. Nothing is more irritating to a potential customer than a “bait and switch.”

If Freemium is such a great approach, why wasn’t The New York Times’ foray into this model more successful? It gave away a basic service and, with Times Select, offered a premium upgrade.

Part of the answer (there is sometimes but not usually a silver bullet) may be that the model is most likely to succeed when the customer implicitly understands why the paid service has to cost money. Free e-mail accounts that offer greater storage for a fee. Termination cost on other carriers networks in the Skype model is explicit justification. In the case of TimesSelect, it would be obvious to most readers that arbitrary withholding of access to some portions of content was not related to significant costs. It may have made some sense as a “value” play, yet it clearly did not work. “But if your free service is loved and you do a good job articulating the value that comes with the paid service, you can convert to paying users with good results,” concludes Wilson.

The Freemium model was augmented one year later by another venture capitalist, Josh Kopelman. He has labeled his observation “The Penny Gap.” I recall meeting Kopelman when I was teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia. He had started Infonautics Corporation, the predecessor of today's High Beam Research, in the early Internet days. I assume from that he learned some lessons about offering a subscription service that gave users access to a wide range of magazines, journals, reference and newspaper material. (And that he was more successful with a subsequent venture, Half.com, acquired by eBay).

The Penny Gap says in essence that getting a user to go from free to any sort of payment, even a penny, is harder that getting a paying subscriber to pay more. Going from free to $1.00 is a much higher hurdle than from $1 to $2, even though the difference is the same. The Penny Gap is a disconnect with classical economic theory, which would hold that demand increases as the price decreases. As Kopelman illustrated in the accompany figure, getting users to make any financial commitment is the greater hurdle than the amount itself.

What does this say about the content-heavy online ventures of the legacy media business? In large measure it helps explain why they settled for the most part (well, except for The Wall Street Journal) on an advertiser supported Web model. From USA Today to Slate to The New York Times media sites have tried and failed to make a user pay model stick, despite offering some high grade content.

But by dissecting the successful non-media sites that have achieved a substantial user-pay component, could media firms find areas where they can truly find value added to justify a premium? I’m not optimistic. Two years ago I might have offered that a comprehensive ad-free video service could be sold at a premium. Recall CNN tried that with its Pipeline service, providing real time video streams and an archive of telecasts. It met many Freemium characteristics, including a presumption of additional cost for all the storage and bandwidth. Apparently Time Warner determined that more advertising revenue outweighed the subscription dollars. Hulu, the new NBC Universal-News Corporation joint venture, is all free, all the time. It has not made noises about offering paid-for premium content.

The bottom line is that as a generalization the media business may not get over the Penny Gap chasm. For those firms that have been on the electronic side, where advertiser supported has long been the total revenue stream, maintaining that model may be easiest to accept. For that segment of the print media that has been used to drawing at least some of its revenue from consumers, resigning itself to only advertising may be tougher. And perhaps a bit of a blow to its self-esteem.

Time Inc’s attempt to launch MagHound, a “Netflix of magazines,” in September is a great idea, and on the face of it something that should succeed. What’s better than getting to choose the magazines you want every month, rather than being stuck with multiple subscriptions to mags that will sometimes be dogs, and sometimes have a story or two you’re really interested in? (I know I’m not the only one who’s subscribed to a magazine after figuring that it’s cheaper than buying three copies at the newsstand. I know I’m also not the only one who’ll forego subscriptions to avoid not having the 8 or 10 “dog” issues of a monthly pile up.) I have in the past tried to get friends to participate in a "magazine trading" circle, where we all subscribe to 1 or 2 mags, then swap and share, but it never worked.

So, on the surface, it seems a great idea to charge $4.95 for three on up to $9.95 for seven magazines per month. But there are a few of reasons MagHound won’t work upon launch -- and they have largely to do with how this isn’t like Netflix:

* MagHound won’t have all the most desirable magazines. At least one major publishing house hasn’t signed up, nor have a few of the lesser that nevertheless have desirable titles.
* Unlike Netflix, fulfillment won’t be in 1 or 2 days. It’s more likely weeks. And even longer when fulfillment is from a house other than Time. One reason to subscribe to something like this is because, say, you hear about a hot story in Vanity Fair or Foreign Policy, and you want to get the mag shipped to you pronto to read it. But those magazines may not be available, and the won’t get there while you still remember why you wanted them.
* For Time, it’s not as winning a model as for Netflix, because it doesn’t buy the magazine once and then get to use it time and again for the price of two stamps, plus logistics and handling. Plus, postage for a magazine is horribly expensive compared to the sublimely engineered DVD packages Netflix devised.

If people wanted digital editions or a Web site, mobile edition, whatever-- which Time might consider offering at a discount, or they would offer some other digital access -- for an all-you-can-eat price, it might make more sense. (Oh, wait, that was called AOL.) Or if print-on-demand could be handled on a mass-customization level, where magazines were printed and bound quickly (and I mean like TODAY) as they’re ordered... but helas.

In theory, I love the concept. Get any magazine I want, for one subscription price. I’d of course prefer even more to get whatever I want at the Chris Anderson price of “$0”. Or at least the immediate gratification of click and BLAM, it’s here. (Even Amazon doesn’t take a week.) I hope MagHound refines its model before September and gets closer to what people really want in 2008.

When News Corp. first announced its intention to bid for Dow Jones, some critics moaned that Rupert Murdoch would impose his political ideology (presumably conservative) at the flagship Wall Street Journal. Jack Shafer at Slate, no knee-jerk Murdoch critic (“I genuinely admire the rotten old bastard”), nonetheless had his early list to be skeptical.

Rather than muck up a successful franchise that has outperformed the dismal newspaper industry metrics in advertising and circulation in recent years, my take at the time was why would he do more than invigorate management?

Well, I was wrong. Although there is no noticeable new slant ideologically, there has been a very visible change in editorial priorities. My own opinion is that they are taking the Journal 180 degree from where it should be.

For me (yes, I know, a sample of one), the attraction of the Journal was the unique front page: Distinctive both in physical layout and in content. It was clearly not my hometown Boston Globe—or your hometown whatever. I need not elaborate for anyone who has been a Journal reader.

While the Journal had moved away from the old six column layout, with most articles running one column down the front page, to a more conventional design with multi-column heads and less copy on page 1, the gist of the content was the same.

Now, many days I pick up the Globe and the Journal outside my door and I need to stare for a second to figure out which is which. Do I really need the Wednesday Journal to tell me about the vote tally from Tuesday’s primaries (and with an earlier deadline, less complete than the Globe). For that matter, what proportion of Journal readers even need the morning paper to inform them of the outcome? They got it from TV last night, from TV this morning, or online anytime.

There was certainly room for improvement in the management of Dow Jones that News Corp. could provide. Fresh thinking can be introduced. As one who has been following the ups and, more lately, downs of the newspaper industry professionally for 35 years, the fresh air being blown across the newsroom of the Journal seems to be a cold wind rather than a crisp breeze.

Prove me wrong Rupert. It’s your money and legacy. But if I’m right, can I get the old Journal back?

We know—or thought we knew—that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are smart fellows. But smart, as in understanding software architecture or how to manage a company or develop products is a different kind of smart than strategic smart. Apparently Messrs Gates and Ballmer don’t have the smart big acquisition gene.

I say this as an outsider. I don’t have access to the crunched numbers and five year outlooks no doubt ginned up by the Microsoft investment bankers. And, to be sure, many business pundits have a similar pat justification, all along the lines that both Microsoft and Yahoo have persistently tried to best Google but failed. “No one can compete with Google on their own anymore,” says Jon Miller the former chairman and chief executive of AOL. “There has to be consolidation among the major players.

Suddenly Microsoft, just a few years ago the bad boy of the computer galaxy, is—what—the white knight? Mark Read, director of strategy for the WPP Group, which owns ad agencies like JWT and Ogilvy & Mather, opined, “It is good for investment. It is good for competition.”

A combined Microsoft and Yahoo, notes The New York Times, would beat Google in Web traffic and come closer in ad revenues. Most importantly, the pair would give Google a greater challenge as it tried to enter display advertising, because Yahoo has the largest share of that market.

But wait a second. What does a merger with Yahoo really do for Microsoft—to the tune of a cool $44 billion? Lets look at some numbers.

Google has grown dramatically, going from zero to $17 billion in revenue. It is highly profitable, a bit (well, $200 million) over $4 billion in 2007. Very impressive. But Microsoft had almost 3.5 times that revenue -- $58 billion—and four times the profit-- $17 billion.

So what does Yahoo bring to the party? Not even $7 billion in revenue and a piddling $660 million in profit. It brings a search engine that’s technically pretty good. But Microsoft already has a comparable piece of technology. Yes, most of its revenue is derived form online advertising, nearly twice that of Microsoft.

And what’s the synergy of Microhoo? (or Yahsoft?). Not much that is obvious. Microsoft forecasts at least $1 billion in annual cost savings for the merged entity, from synergies in areas such as combining engineering talent.

Sure, a merger of this magnitude—pegged to cost savings rather than market opportunities-- would make sense if Microsoft was a struggling enterprise. It's not -- and a 29% profit margin at that. It has $21 billion in cash and short term investments. Assuming it actually realized the savings—so what? Microsoft already has the resources to compete with Google—if it is possible at all.

Then what does a Mircohoo end up with? Despite trying, Microsoft has not come up with a strategy to erode Google’s dominance in search and online advertising. Its share of the search market ended last year at 9.8%, down from 12% in mid-2006. Yahoo does better, but fell from an estimated 28.8% mid-2006 to 22.9% last year.

Now, let’s see. We take Microsoft’s failed strategy and add it to Yahoo’s failed strategy... and the best they can come up with is some savings effect, as the combined entity slides further behind.

I understand that the hope is that the two combined would bulk up to a third of the search market—perhaps in aggregate enough to prime the pump to attract more advertisers. But Yahoo alone had nearly a third of the search business in 2005 and that did not keep it from sliding downhill since then.

The combination of Time Warner with AOL in 2001 has been a disaster. However, it was primarily the outlandish $112 billion price tag, negotiated at the peak of the Internet bubble, that made it ridiculous. The notion of an old time content company wanting to modernize by associating with the new media start-up had some strategic sense, even if the conflicting cultures and stratospheric valuation doomed the combination. I could understand the potential synergies, even if not to the degree that could justify the cost.

I can also understand Microsoft’s necessity to segue from the operating system and packaged software business to a greater reliance on Internet-derived revenue. It knows it needs to modify its current business model. But I can think of better uses of $44 billion to get there. Glad I sold my Microsoft stock last year.

NPR’s On the Media in its show before the most recent episode brought up the issue of paying sources and brought back some poignant thoughts about whether and why sources should or shouldn’t be paid. Sure, there are all the usual arguments about polluting the system, encouraging untruths, and starting a slippery slope of checkbook journalism. But, “I've always just questioned that taboo on talking about money,” says guest Robert Boynton, an NYU journalism professor.

I’ve been asked more than once, “Why should I help you?” Some folks I’ve interviewed have even pointed out that I’m being paid to report, that the organization I’m working for (whether a newspaper or TV show) is money-making, even for profit, and so why should we reporters feel sanguine about asking or requiring that the grist for our work be provided for free? It’s a hard question to answer, when you can’t say “for publicity that will help your business,” or if someone isn’t buying the argument that getting the word out may help others in other situations or that simply getting it off their chest will be liberating.

In Japan, it’s common to pay sources, especially when they’re experts -- and, yes, they also get the advantage of publicity. There is, in giving over a token amount of cash, a display of gratitude, and acknowledgement that value has been given. I had one uncomfortable interview in Tokyo while working for Newsweek, when an expert in the construction and maintenance of the Bullet Train gave me some inside information about troubles the line had had in its earlier days. I wondered why he was telling me such info so frankly. At the end, he expected -- as he had come to expect from journalists -- a gratuity, and it was left to a Japanese co-worker to explain to him, with both in considerable discomfort, that American organizations didn’t do that. I was uncomfortable, too.

As OTM co-host Bob Garfield and guest Robert Boynton point out in the radio piece, even when no money is exchanged there is a currency of those who give their time and information in exchange for exposure, perhaps the chance to flog their point of view. Some journalists talk of disinterest in how money is made by the organization they work for, which I find a little odd. Is there another such for-profit industry, where the folks steeped in producing the product are willfully ignorant of how it's sold and makes money? There is certainly a coin of the realm, and one in which journalists spin and get spun, journalists and sources use each other in various ways. Boynton says it would be OK to pay, if it were disclosed that someone had done so. That would be an open and honest way of doing it. Let the consumer make his or her own decisions. And it would be more open than the hidden agendas the public sometimes can’t see.

The votes have been cast and the results are in.

I’m referring to the decisive TKO win for Sony’s Blu-Ray high definition DVD format over Toshiba’s HD-DVD format. Warner Bros. Entertainment announced yesterday that starting in May it will release high def DVD’s only in Blu-Ray. Up to now it has been selling them in both versions. Thus, the all Blu-Ray line up is now The Walt Disney Co., Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in addition to Warner. Blockbuster had stated publicly last June that it would henceforth only stock high definition DVD’s in Blu-Ray. That leaves only Paramount and Universal in the HD-DVD camp. Blu-Ray players have been outselling HD-DVD players. But the industry consensus was that most consumers were waiting for a standard to emerge before committing. That time might be now.

There is a certain irony here, in that in the last big format battle royale in the 1980s, between Sony’s Beta video cassette format and JVC’s VHS format, Toshiba was one of the few electronics companies that stayed with the Beta format for many years. Sony pioneered videocassettes with its ¾-inch industrial U-Matic and then revolutionized the consumer industry by using time shifting as the way to solve the chicken and egg dilemma for getting out prerecorded videos. But then it lost the marketing war with JVC and Matsushita. Most engineers agreed that Beta was the superior technology, but VHS was good enough. Sony tried again with 8mm cassettes, but that never got traction as a pre-recorded format.

Indeed, the lessons from the videocassette battle would have suggested that the HD-DVD format should emerge the winner. Though less technologically sophisticated, it is less expensive to manufacture. Beyond the earlier adopters, the mass market tends to favor low price over tech elegance (top example: Mac vs. PC). But that doesn’t seem to matter when it is the content providers who now have a say in the direction of the hardware victor

The apparent win by Sony is also a minor setback for Microsoft, which backed the HD—DVD format with an external player for its XBox. On the other hand, all 2.5 million Sony PlayStation 3 consoles are Blu-Ray ready.

There was great anticipation in the industry over Warner Entertainment’s impending announcement. It was courted heavily by both sides. But with stronger Blu-Ray disc sales in the U.S. and even a greater Blu-Ray preference globally, Warner threw its clout to Sony. Neither the manufacturers nor the studios were benefiting from the consumer uncertainty and, in the case of many studios and retailers, the cost of manufacturing and stocking multiple formats. Everyone was hoping for a winner—though Toshiba wanted its technology to be the one that won.

As word gets out to consumers, look for Blu-Ray players to drop in price as volume ramps up and more titles become available for purchase and rental.

(Photo from Gizmodo)

Who owns you? This is part of the battle brewing over social networks, and networking applications like Facebook. Robert Scoble, the Scobelizer, complains that when he tried to run a “script” on his profile on Facebook, Facebook detected it and kicked him off. He’s appealing the decision. He won’t say what the script is -- says he’s under a non-disclosure agreement with the company that wrote the bit of code that will somehow do something to Scoble’s Facebook profile -- but it seems to be something that would somehow take the info on Facebook, and run some other application on it.

A clue comes from a comment Scoble writes in response to someone who says that in a “walled garden,” the point is that it is walled. “We fundementally (sic) DON’T want someone wholeheartedly using our graphs. Especially not a friend, who we trust to not do that,” writes the commenter. Scoble replies: “What about info you’ve made public? Like, your name? And other stuff that’s on your public profile on Facebook? Are you saying that no one has the right to use that? How about this? Can I write down your email address and put it in my address book? Or, how about your birthday?

“So, why am I allowed to write down your phone number or email address, but my computer can’t take it out of Facebook and put it into Outlook for me? Or another program or service I’m using?

“How about something that actually ads value, like something that’d see that you’re on both Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and could mash those three together?”

So, Scoble is implying that what he wants to do is use publicly available information for private uses that he’d have permission to regardless of technology. This, I would guess, would be legal -- putting aside the Terms of Service issue -- in the same way that making copies of material for purely personal use are also legal.

He also alludes to a holy grail of social networking I think we’ll see more of this year: the social network mashup, applications that allow use of networking and profiles across platforms. Google’s Open Social is a step in this direction, though one that’s more push out than inbound in the way Scoble describes. Media companies and publishers are signing on with Google’s scheme so they can, say, write a widget once and have it spread across myriad platforms, rather than having to write or tweak new code for each. (And then they’re still having to write for Facebook, if they want to reach its millions of users. MySpace is a whole ‘nother issue.) I would expect to see a bunch of such apps come out this year, many with funding, and a few to catch on.

We’ll see, too, continued battle over closed vs. open that’s been part of the conversation since the earliest days of AOL and Prodigy vs. Netscape and Mozilla (and Internet Explorer, which provides the enticement of openness AND the control of digital rights management).

In a way, Scoble is arguing both sides of the coin. He owns the right to scrape his own profile, his own information -- though in joining Facebook, he signed terms of service that said he couldn’t run such applications on the closed network. Facebook, too, is trying to have it both ways. When they were exclusive to the academic community, they had a closed system that, while potentially very large, was limited to people with some similarity in mindset and orientation, at least in the broadest sense, and, probably, less likely to use the system for certain kinds of commercial behavior. By now allowing anyone from any background to register and use Facebook, and open up the API to all developers, the company is trying to reap the benefits of openness, but still with a closed system.

Facebook now has many millions of users. But how long will those millions remain when they are a) hit with an increasing number of unwanted marketing messages, un-needed invitations from non-”friends,” ever more mass messages, fewer directly relevant personal messages, b) finding it increasing difficulty to manage it all, and c) Open Social is on the way? We’ll see shakeouts this year among social networking applications, and an increasing number of profiles lay fallow. Facebook won’t die, and they’re smart enough that they may come up with a graceful solution that leads to more openness and integration with other platforms. The apology they gave due to the controversy that broke out over their Beacon system proves they are a company that’s able to hear complaints and try to adjust. But they will having a tough time overcoming the tension between walled garden and open access.

While my colleague Dorian Benkoil has been writing about entrepreneurial journalism, I’ve been studying a slightly different universe, media entrepreneurs. In collaboration with Anne Hoag at Penn State, we have been seeking to learn whether media entrepreneurs are different than entrepreneurs in general. That is, does one go into the media business motivated by a different set of goals than other sorts of entrepreneurs, say, in restaurants or pharmaceuticals? And, more broadly, what is the state of media entrepreneurship today?

I first discussed this line of research in an entry a few years ago at my Who Owns the Media? Blog. More recently Anne and I have pursued this notions of media entrepreneurship and have made some encouraging findings about the vibrancy of bottom up media. This is, indeed, a phenomenon that was recognized in America's earlest days. In our most recent paper we note that

It was Frenchman Alexis de Toqueville who first observed in the 1830s the role of media entrepreneurship in the United States. In his second volume of Democracy in America, Toqueville identified the media entrepreneur (though not employing that term) as peculiar to American democracy in a passage titled, “On the Literature Industry.” He may well have been the first to recognize the inherent interdependencies among media, capitalism and democracy, noting that democracy creates a mass market for “literature” (Newspapers, books and a few magazines were then the only mass media) because citizens seek to be informed in order to participate in their democracy.

We characterize media entrepreneurship as “the creation and ownership of a small enterprise or organization whose activity adds at least one voice or innovation to the media marketplace. In her initial work, Anne found that in measuring the incidence of media entrepreneurship in comparison to other U.S. industries, media on the whole were at least as entrepreneurial, and often enjoyed greater rates of entrepreneurship.

In the most recent line of our research we undertook extensive interviews with 14 entrepreneurs who started media businesses. Though not any sort of statistical sample, we did strive to locate a diverse group of subjects. About half were involved in traditional media—newspapers, book publishing, cable and film—while the others were in some type of online media venture.

Although the entrepreneurs we interviewed have come to their media ventures by many different routes and are at different stages in life, there are some striking similarities in their motivations and attitudes toward entrepreneurship as well as their process for discovery and exploitation. In brief, they are hard pressed to recognize any particular barriers, regulatory, technological, structural or otherwise. And while they are working to make their ventures profitable, their first thought about being “successful” is often a reference to having an “impact” or having influence in some sphere.

From my point of view the most noteworthy insight was that this impact appears in two distinct forms. Some view running a media enterprise as more than just an entrepreneurial venture. The media’s power to influence, for this group, is a prime motivator for becoming an entrepreneur. Others exploited their media ideas for reasons similar to those of entrepreneurs in general. We refer to the former group as “missionaries” and the latter the “merchants” -- a potentially significant organizing concept for media entrepreneurship.

For example, typical of the of the missionaries are the comments of one interviewee who said that merely running a business, “holds absolutely no appeal to me…When you say that, I think of payroll taxes, balancing a cash register. When you say media, I think creative, influence, reach.” She added that a media business was appealing because “you can help people in the masses. There are very few other ways to do that."

A minority of those we spoke to we determined were “merchants.” In general, they responded that running a business, not necessarily a media business, was the motivating factor. Merchants talked about success and rewards in terms that could apply generically to any enterprise:

“It’s rewarding from a self fulfillment stand point that, hey, here’s a concept that I took….We brought it to the marketplace and made it successful. That’s, you know, part of it. There’s a real sense of fulfillment now the fact that we have people working for us. People depend on us for their livings. We're supporting other families, paying taxes and being good citizens. … There’s a satisfaction that comes from that."

The research supports the notion that prospects for new media players—and hence voices—is strong. Or at least there are many entrepreneurs who perceive great opportunity. Combined with our data that shows rapid growth in the number of media businesses overall, it bodes well for diversity of formats and sources of media-supplied content. Perhaps most encouraging is that these entrepreneurs barely recognize the existence of barriers to entry to the media business.

Mark Glaser calls the entrepreneurial acumen of journalists into question, but most start-ups fail, in any industry. He and others in comments give examples of those who’ve succeeded. This on the heels of Jeff Jarvis’ entrepreneurial journalism contest, which, if it works, will help seed a new generation of journalists not encumbered by the need to have a “job”. I’ve taken a fairly traditional route, myself, getting an MBA before becoming truly entrepreneurial. But then, I’m 1 or 2 generations away from most of the folks proposing projects to Jarvis’ contest.

There are a few advantages they have over some of the older folks like Dan Gilmor or Bill Scoble that Glaser sites as having failed, chiefly that they may not be as wedded to older ideas of what a journalist is or can be. They probably don’t think of “entrepreneurial journalism” as an oxymoron. Some may say that true journalism can’t be entrepreneurial, because a journalist should not have commercial concerns. (If you worry about whether to put an ad on your site, or where, that will affect how you display the content, for example.) And the anxiety of being laid off can be debilitating, while the sense of charting one’s own destiny and earning money from folks who are actually consuming the product, rather than an in-between entity, can be liberating.

There is something else that can be a challenge for many journalists: I’ve found successful entrepreneurs to be relentless optimists, skilled socially (at least when necessary), willing to make hard choices even when it’s not fair, and not being stopped by unfairness directed at them. Journalists, but contrast, are often a bit negatively oriented, and gripe about things that haven’t gone well -- newsrooms are full of, if not malcontents, certainly half-contents. Then, again, so are many workplaces. There is a such thing as a postive-minded journalist, and I hope entrepreneurial journalism isn’t an oxymoron.

That newspapers continue to lose advertising market share to the Internet is not a revelation. That newspapers are losing share of local advertising is a reason for concern. According to the latest tally, newspapers accounted for 43.7% of the local online advertising pie of $8.5 billion for the first 10 months of this year. This was down from a 44.1% share of a smaller total in 2004. The online revenue of local TV stations, on the other hand, did not decline so precipitously.

Local advertising traditionally has accounted for about 85% of total revenue for newspapers in larger market, even higher for small market newspapers. Local TV stations receive a far higher proportion of their revenue from spot national advertising, while radio stations have tended to be in between, though in most case closer to newspapers than TV. The primary local competitor for newspapers has historically been directories (e.g., Yellow Pages) and direct mail. Increasingly, cable has been able to siphon off local dollars with the capability to insert advertisements down to the neighborhood level.

What must be most unnerving to newspaper publishers and, to a lesser extent other local media players, is that pure play Web sites now have the largest share of local on-line advertising revenue—43.7% by the reckoning of Borrell Associates.

How can this be? Didn’t the publishers take solace in the fact that their local papers had a built in advantage over the upstarts thanks to their identification with the local market? And that all-critical brand equity?

It is becoming evident that the value of ad placement based on search terms, Zip code or Internet address proves more effective for the local advertiser even if the page viewed does not directly contain information that is congruent with the location of the user. That is, the value of the local newspaper or radio station has been that the advertiser had a high degree of confidence that anyone listening to that station or reading that paper was in their local trading area. But online the advertiser may not only be assured that the ad is placed in view of an individual within their target trading area, but may also have specific demographic or other characteristics desirable for that advertiser. Not to mention the added delight of knowing when an ad may have been seen and responded to in the form of a click or more.

Of course, this is true for the online site of any local medium. Too often, however, it seems that while the publisher’s sales force was working on convincing the paper’s current advertisers to try the online version, the new players had no such blinders. They were marketing to anyone, which often meant new service providers and merchants who had not been print advertisers: smaller in size but far greater in number. A version of the long tail effect. And that is where much of the growth is coming from. It’s not just old advertisers in new bottles.

Just now, minutes after the WSJ sent out an alert about the George Mitchell baseball drug report, someone put up a list of the players names on Wikipedia. I saw it on public Twitter while randomly visiting the public page there.

Wow. How can a newspaper hope to compete with that? And why wouldn't a newspaper, to save effort, simply -- assuming the list is accurate -- link to it? Journalistically, I can see the rationale of wanting to control the accuracy and therefore keep it on the newspaper's site. There will be tons of lists in tons of publications (hats off to any that add value). ... But, the speed of the list by what seemed to be a private individual, and on Wikipedia to allow other fervent folks to correct it - that's something that proves the power of community and individuals. (And one more caveat: I'll bet you that some Web editors -- you know who you are! -- will copy and paste that list without saying they did so.)

When I first saw on Jeff Jarvis’ Facebook page that he was assembling the jury for his “entrepreneurial journalism” contest, I quipped that what used to be an oxymoron is now worthy of a prize. Wonderful, isn’t it, that students in J-school now can ask for a few thousand bucks to start their own publishing businesses. Jarvis points to a post by NYTimes’ Saul Hansell, one of the judges, who says that no one starting out in journalism should ask advice of anyone who’s been in the business more than five years.

Fair enough. The ideas Hansell mentions -- a hyper-local site for Brooklyn's perennially troubled Bed-Sty neighborhood, a magazine for Muslim women, etc. -- are great niche ideas. I do find myself wondering where the business model for supporting deep, investigative journalism comes from. Perhaps, from the same place it comes from now: Other "verticals" like business, tech -- and perhaps a bunch of ad-supported hyper-local blogs and community apps -- that make enough profit to pay the expensive journalistic productions.

Is a large circulation newspaper likely to generate more revenue by charging for its online edition or making it free to maximize advertising revenue? Is the online version of a newspaper a complement to the print version—or a substitute? The stakes are high and the answers have been elusive. With few exceptions, since the dawn of the Internet Age, newspapers have been wrestling with whether this new conduit would be its friend or its death.

Of course, we will know in the long run, when some media historian looks back on this time from 20 years hence. But that doesn’t help today’s decision makers. That is why the research of University of Chicago economist Matthew Gentzkow published earlier this year in The American Economic Review is so helpful.

In this highly data driven paper with the typically academic title, “Valuing New Goods in a Model with Complementarity: Online Newspapers,”, Gentzkow blends consumer data from the Washington, DC market with newspaper operating results to address three questions: What is the relationship between print and online versions on 1) the demand for either diversion, 2) on the welfare of consumers, and, crucially, 3) on the impact of charging consumers for the online product?

With 30 pages of assumptions, explanation and calculations, Gentzkow makes a well substantiated finding that, The Washington Post would have been better off charging a modest sum for its online version (on the order of $6.00/month) until about 2004. After that, however, the growth in online advertising expenditures crossed over to affirm that it is significantly more profitable to set a zero price for the online edition when one factors in even a small transaction cost for online payments. He suggests that his findings are robust enough that they would likely apply to other big city newspapers.

Along the way, Gentzkow upends the early assumption that the print and online versions of a newspaper were complements. Applying a more sophisticated demographic model than had been used in the past, which simply looked at newspaper readers and online readers, Gentzkow concludes that the substitution effect is “nonnegligible." He does add that ”it is “small, however, relative to some earlier predictions.” In other words, real but not likely “to threaten the survival of print media,” at least right now.

Gentzkow further quantifies the “consumer welfare benefit” created by having a zero consumer price for online newspapers, which he put at $45 million annually for The Washington Post’s market. For the 2000-2003 period that came at the expense of Washington Post Co. stockholders, as he calculated it lost money by giving away the online edition when it could have made a profit by charging for it. (Among the factors here is that, as substitute products, by charging for online, some print subscribers would have continued with their subscriptions instead of switching to the online offering). Starting in 2004, however, the Post was more profitable with the free online version that it would have been with an online use charge

Having seen considerable discussion about whether The Wall Street Journal would be better off making its online version free, as the The New York Times has done Gentzkow’s approach is another data point (a rather large one at that) to reinforce the advertising supported model, for mass market newspapers, at least. There are numerous instances, however, where a consumer-paid model will still be needed. In the magazine business, for example, advertising revenue for many of the mass audience magazines, such as People or TV Guide, can be 50% or more of total revenue. But there are many niche publications, such as The Nation or Weekly Standard, that are highly dependent on subscriptions for the bulk their revenue. It is likely to be the same for niche online sites.

(Finally) Getting around to posting some info I compiled on tough times for business magazines. Late October, for a panel on magazines at the Future of Business Media conference, I prepared some figures and charts about business magazines, based on the Publishers Information Bureau (PIB) data for the first three quarters of this year compared to the same period in '06. Looking at the visuals, they show some trends. (Click on the pictures to see them more clearly.)

For one thing, in dollar terms, most of the "majors" are down in ad dollars, save Forbes, which went up in ad dollars. (See below for a note on PIB's methodology that casts some doubt on these figures.) Forbes, interestingly, has for years had the "free Web" philosophy, and now puts material dating back years up for free, and makes the (disputed) claim that it's the number one destination for business news.

It's also worth noting for business mags that while dollars in aggregate are down 2.7 percent, ad pages were down 6.8 percent, which means page rates were increased. For how long can ad rates continue to go up in the category as competition for ad dollars increases. Also, while Inc. and Fast Company are up, that's against years of previous losses. So it's a relative thing.

Conde Nast Portfolio isn't on the chart I prepared because it's new, and therefore the $13 million-plus it's gotten this year is compared to zero for last. Nevertheless, that’s quite a feat that, if annualized, would put Portfolio in the top four. But while those dollars would seem to be coming from the other business magazines – taking a significant slice of a shrinking pie – executives at the mag point out that it has also gotten a lot of its revenue from luxury brands very familiar to the Conde sales force but not so used to many of the other business magazines. So, they're reaching into a different pie for a significant chunk of their wealth.

Finally, I came across some figures that showed that business magazines, until a few years ago the unparalleled leaders in ad pages and for a while in ad dollars, too, have declined heavily next to celebrity mags.

Business magazines faced similar issues before. In the 1980s, when certain kinds of business-to-business advertising declined, business mags rejuvenated themselves by pitching to new classes of advertising, such as cars and liquor. This time, they may want to do the same thing, but it's harder to think of a major ad category that’s both underserved and appropriate. Pharmaceuticals? Everyone's going after those dollars; and would they be the right fit? Tech? That territory's well-trodden and going aggressively to the Web. Speaking of the Web, that didn't exist in the '80s, nor were there cable business channels competing for the dollars. Not to mention financial portals like Yahoo and Google finance and CNNMoney, which is relaunching with more video this winter.

A few caveats: PIB figures are based on rate cards, which are notoriously inaccurate and always subject to discounts of 20 percent or more, especially for the best clients. Over here is a spreadsheet with business magazines sifted from the PIB figures, on which the above two charts were based, along with an aggregated chart of all the biz mags.

That question, raised indirectly last night at the Hearst-funded new media discussion at Columbia J-school, sent a chill down my spine. Iranian born blogger and iconoclast Hossein "Hoder" Derakhshan, talked a lot in ways that took shots at conventional wisdom. He talked about "the tyranny of the popular," how in a world of Digg and Delicious and other "most e-mailed" and other popularity features, we find ourselves under constant pressure to get on those lists to get our stuff viewed. (Wikipedia book Author Andrew Lih countered that he sometimes searches Digg in a way that helps him find the least popular to get emerging or unheralded info about the online crowd-sourced encyclopedia). He talked about corporate censorship in journalism, how someone reporting for a mainstream news org can have a perfectly valid journalistic idea kyboshed for reasons having nothing to do with the validity of the idea, but rather because it may not conform to pre-conceived notions or myriad other issue.

An audience member, at the microphone, asked if there were government bloggers. I think he meant to ask if there were government bloggers in Iran. But he could equally have been asking about the U.S. Are there government bloggers? What's to say there aren't? We've seen reports of government employees staging press conferences, pretending to be things they weren't, putting out video news releases as if they were news reports. So who's to say there aren't bloggers claiming to be independent who are in fact working for the government? Some would say that government bloggers could be a good thing, if they're open about it. Why not? If government people blog in ways that shows their viewpoints, and those viewpoints can be picked up – or picked apart – by others, that only adds to the conversation. It's just a more modern equivalent of the press release or press conference or other attempts to influence news coverage or the conversation. Inevitably, something delicious would find its way to a government blog.

At a time when companies are increasingly going direct to consumers with their media, circumventing traditional media and the need for conventional coverage or conventional ad buys, it seems only logical the government will do so as well. (If there is some sort of Justice or Defense or State department blogger or bloggers I'm not aware of, by all means, chime in.) Companies that have tried to do Web media without disclosing that they were from a company have been burned. Government should heed the same lesson.

News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch has made news with several talks this week.

Yesterday he declared that "the sky's-the-limit profits from traditional broadcast TV are over….Free-to-air television faces a lot of challenges, just from the sheer fragmentation of the audience.” Overall he characterized broadcast television as a "highly challenged industry in America."

This may actually be on the minds of some of the striking Writers Guild of America members. The Wall Street Journal reported than some of the writers who work for the soap operas are resigning from the union and going back to work. The audiences for the soaps have been sinking for years. “Writers and producers in the genre fear that by the time the strike finishes, their audiences won't return.”

On Monday Murdoch publicly admitted that he expected the online version of The Wall Street Journal will soon be free. News Corp. will likely close the deal to acquire Dow Jones next month. "We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million [subscribers], having at least 10 million to 15 million in every corner of the earth, keeping up-to-date minute by minute with all business and economic news from around the world," he told an audience in Australia.

Such comments give some insights in News Corporation's strategy and business model. Clearly, advertising will play a larger role in the business model for online content. On the other hand, he is hedging his bets on advertising from broadcasting. First, he advocates making television productions very high quality, so they can be sold to the global market “and then be brought back to America--or to anywhere in the world, for that matter --and be sold as DVDs.”

So, television becomes more consumer financed, while online becomes the prime advertiser-supported medium. At least in Murdoch’s view. How will this be affected, if at all, should DVD’s be supplanted by online delivery, such as by Netflix or Amazon’s Unbox or iTunes video service? Actually, News Corp has a bet there, with Hulu.com, its ad-supported online video venture with NBC Universal.

News Corp. has developed a “portfolio strategy”: When the crystal ball is cloudy, invest in a range of possibilities. Not all need to be a success. Two or three big ones will do.

Talk about Google entering the mobile phone sector has been rampant of late. It has driven Google’s already stratospheric stock price up an incredible 20% in the past month.

What Google is apparently working on is not the hardware per se, but an open operating system and applications that play to its strengths in search, mapping, YouTube and, of course, targeted advertising. Various accounts has it speaking with Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile in the U.S., possibly others globally.

The first question anyone following this thread would ask is why would any of these players consider opening up their tightly controlled phones? Right now, for example, Verizon customers who want GPS directions pay $10/month or $3.00 daily for data that cost Verizon almost nothing to provide. Other mobile phone data services bring in anywhere from $5 to $45 month. Why would Verizon agree to an open system that would blow open this cash cow?

The answer lies in the same metrics that lead The New York Times to forgo $49 from 220,000 subscribers to its Times Select service. And it is the same calculus that my colleague here Dorian Benkoil (and various commenters) put together for scenarios that might make it more profitable for The Wall Street Journal to give away its online product and forego the $60 million, plus or minus, in subscription revenue. That is, the potential for advertising revenue is greater than the current and projected revenue from the walled cell phone garden.

What are the stakes? In 2006, an estimated $301 million was spent on ads for mobile phone in the U.S. One research firm guesses that should increase to $2.12 billion in 2011. (How can they predict to two decimal places four years from now? Someday I will examine a bunch of these past forecasts and see how they line up with what really happened). But this projection likely assumes that the current cell phone industry model prevails. If a more open network evolved, with advertising dollars available to replace lost subscription revenue, that $2.1 billion would be higher. How much? Ah, there’s the rub.

What I am suggesting here is some credibility to the notion that the carriers, like much of the media industry, might do better from an advertising model than from user revenue for their data services. The most likely carriers to be amenable to a deal with Google would be number three Sprint-Nextel and number four T-Mobile. Word is that the latter may be closest to a deal. But Verizon could want to get in on the act as well to counter AT&T’s excluive with Apple. In any event, Google would likely need to split revenue more generously with the carriers than it does in the media world because the carriers are in a much stronger bargaining position.

If Google does get its foot (or whatever) in the mobile phone world, the impact could be every bit as great as has been its impact in the Web universe. It might force Apple to open up the iPhone even more than it has planned to, as much to accommodate its current partner, AT&T, than out of true belief.

I’m not ready to buy Google stock at $700—but then, I thought it was rich when its IPO priced it at about $85, so don’t take advise on this from me. Still, if they pull this off, $700 may look cheap by 2011.

In a sign the universes of marketing and journalism are converging, Hilary Schneider, EVP of Yahoo's Local Markets and Commerce Division and the Yahoo publisher network gave a list of attributes (she wasn't completely clear but I think she meant) that journalistic content has to follow. She was speaking at the Online News Association Conference. And, surprising, the New York Times' International Herald Tribune's Michael Oreskes, giving the second-day keynote, stole her slides and showed them again. With some paraphrasing:

1. Obligation to the truth
2. Loyalty to citizens
3. Disclosure and verification
4. Maintaining independence (her slide actually said "an independence" but I'll trust that was a typo
5. Independent monitor of power
6. Forum for public criticism and compromise
7. Make the significant interesting and relevant
8. Keep news competitive and proportional
9. Exercise personal conscience

It as a bit surrealistic. Schneider spent some time talking about brands and marketing, and Oreskes was all about democracy and free speech.