Dorian Benkoil senior consultant at Teeming Media. An award-winning journalist and editor, he was a foreign correspondent for AP and Newsweek, and international and managing editor for ABCNews.com. At ABC News he moved to the business side, handling sales integration and business development, before joining Fairchild Publications as General Manager for their Internet division, becoming editorial director for mediabistro.com, then a consultant for Teeming Media in New York. He graduates this year with an MBA from Baruch's Zicklin school of business. Learn more about him at Benkoil.com or his blog - MediaFlect.com.
Robert Cauthorn is a journalist, former vice president of digital
media at the San Francisco Chronicle, and was the third recipient of
the Newspaper Association of America's prestigious Digital Pioneer
Award. He launched one of the first five newspapers web sites in the
world and is generally considered to have delivered the first
profitable newspaper web site in 1995. Cauthorn has been in the middle
of the transition from old media to new and is recognized as
frank-talking critic when he believes newspapers stray for their
mission. In mid-2004 he became the president of CityTools, LLC a new
media startup based in San Francisco.
Ben Compaine has divided his career between the academic world and private business. He was a journalist when manual typewriters were considered state of the art, but also led the conversion of his college newspaper to cold type. He has started and managed weekly newspapers. His dissertation at Temple University in 1977 was about the changing technologies that were going to unsettle the landscape of the staid and low profit newspaper industry. Since then he has focused his research and consulting on examining the forces and trends at work in the information industries. Among his most well-known works (and the name of his blog) is "Who Owns the Media?".
Vin Crosbie has been called "the Practical Futurist" by Folio, the trade journal of the American magazine industry. Editor & Publisher magazine, the trade journal of the American newspaper industry, devoted the Overview chapter of executive research report Digital Delivery of News: A How-to Guide for Publishers to his work. His speech to the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference was one of 24 orations selected by a team of speech professors for publication in the reference book Representative American Speeches 2004-2005. He has keynoted the Seybold Publishing Strategies conference in 2000; co-chaired and co-moderated last year's annual Beyond the Printed Word the digital publishing conference in Vienna; and regularly speaks at most major online news media conferences. He is currently in residence as adjunct professor of visual and interactive communications and senior consultant on executive education in new media at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and meanwhile is managing partner of the media consulting firm of Digital Deliverance LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut.
About this blog
Two forces have shattered the news media. Technology is the first. Although media technology is undergoing its greatest change since the day in 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg first inked type, for more than ten years now the news industry has mistaken new technologies merely as electronic ways to distribute otherwise printed or analog products. Estrangement is the second. The news media has lost touch with people's needs and interests during the past 30 years, as demonstrated by rapidly declining readerships of newspapers and audiences of broadcast news. How we rebuild news media appropriate to the 21st Century from the growing rubble of this industry is the subject of this group weblog.
The below is from Steve Outing, who posits that allowing only paid subscribers to participate fully in a community’s news site can be a component of a valid business model. He may be right. But what about the competing issue of blocking those who haven’t paid from commenting and participating. Do we create a separate class of reader/citizen? Does the paper have an obligation along these lines? Not taking a position. Just asking the question.
A paid subscription also will allow you to interact with the site and its staff, and participate in discussions, daily chats and comment threads; free readers won’t have their voices heard. (I have to say, this is not a bad idea. Many popular newspaper Web sites have comment threads that are out of control and populated largely, it sometimes seems, by idiots who drown out the sane and smart voices. Charging to be part of the conversation is one way to create more rational, intelligent and useful discussions — albeit smaller — between journalists and readers, and readers and other readers.)
There've been an number of tech issues here on Rebuilding Media - apologies to any who've been affected. Until they're resolved, I'll be working more aggressively on MediaFlect and Naked Media.
I'm pleased to report that the Out of Town News kiosk in Harvard Square is not ready for a 30. It apparently has found a new proprietor. I wrote in November that the long time owner was intent on
closing it when its lease expired at the end of that month. It agreed with the landlord-- the City of Cambridge-- to remain open through January while a new operator was sought.
The Cambridge Chronicle reported last week that
there were four bidders. The high bidder was an outfit that runs several other newsstands in the Boston area. At $140 per square feet for the 451 square foot landmark, the rent will actually be a bit
higher than the previous owner paid. Reports of the death of Out of Town News were pre-mature.
Sure, Alex Rodriguez is a star, and it's a big deal in advertising and entertainment circles that he's signed with a given talent agency. But why exactly is this worth interrupting us on Monday evening (I'm signed up for general Wall Street Journal alerts, not every last smidgeon of entertainment or sports news).
WSJ.com Editors to DORIAN
show details 7:40 PM (1 hour ago)
Reply
__________________________________
NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal
July 21, 2008
New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez has signed on with the William Morris Agency. William Morris, the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based talent representation company, has a client list that includes some of the biggest names in entertainment, sports and the corporate world. For Mr. Rodriguez, the move marks the latest turn in his relationship with Scott Boras, one of baseball's most successful and controversial agents. Mr. Boras, who has represented Mr. Rodriguez throughout his career, said he will continue to represent Mr. Rodriguez in any baseball-related negotiations.
The Wall Street Journal Online Wants to/Does not want to be free, Part 7
Did I say in November that Rupert Murdoch said that the Wall Street Journal Online would do better with a totally ad supported business model? As Emily Latella would have said, “Never mind.”
We had some discussion here last summer on the scenarios that might justify a free strategy, wherein lower ad rates and foregoing $60 million or whatever in subscription revenue could be made up by 10x greater readership.
Apparently the new owner of Dow Jones is backing off. A report on a Wall Street Journal bureau chiefs’ meeting last week says that “Murdoch has scaled back his ambition to make WSJ.com entirely free.” According to one who was there “He said he originally thought making it free would bring in the biggest audience, but that after studying it it’s not as simple as he thought.”
SAJA, the South Asia Journalists Association, has a roundup of front pages covering the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Many carry the same image if a distraught man.
Could this be a sign that there's not enough room in the market for all the feed readers? (I know I'm not alone in wondering why we need so many different ones, and when the shakeout would come.)
CNET.com has, they say in an email, decided to turn off Newsburst, their attempt at a feed reader page.
They will provide a link for people to import their favorite feeds to other means.
Reuters reported that News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch said on Tuesday he was planning to boost the numbers of subscribers to the Wall Street Journal's Web site more than tenfold by making access free.
"We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having 1 million (subscribers) having at least 10-15 million in every corner of the earth."
I don't want to bump Ben's post down with a long one of my own, when some of what I say overlaps, so I'll just point over here to my thoughts on TimesSelect, some remarks from the NY Times' publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Rupert Murdoch, and where it's heading.
Pulitzers are out. Surprisingly, Wall Street Journal is the only one with two, this time. And it's heavy on NY-area, as usual, and East Coast, as well.
The challenge of media competition from ground level
This letter to The Wall Street Journal yesterday succinctly sums up the state of competition in the media world today and the rapidity with which the landscape is changing. It helps explain why the National Association of Broadcasters, of all special interest groups, is opposing this particular flavor of radio merger.
XM and Sirius
March 1, 2007; Page B7
The thought that a merger between XM and Sirius could create a monopoly is absurd ("Making Radio Waves," Review & Outlook, Feb. 21). They would offer only one of many content options for consumers. It's a moot point anyway. By the time the merger is completed, satellite radio will have won the battle with radio but lost the war. When I subscribed to XM three years ago, I immediately quit listening to traditional radio. Satellite radio is simply a superior choice. However, now that my 927 favorite songs reside on my iPod, I have little need for radio of any kind. Why scan the dial in hopes of finding a song that I like when my iPod contains only songs that I like?
Federated Expected to Drastically Reduce Newspaper Advertising
More down news for big city newspapers: Federated Department Stores, owner of Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, is expected to trim (perhaps "hack" is the better term) its current $825 million expenditures for newspaper advertising by 25% to 50%. Federated’s department store brands reportedly are the single largest advertiser for newspapers. Spot TV is also expected to suffer. According to Advertising Age the new mix will favor national TV and magazines.
Lots of talk here at the We Media conference in London at BBC about "blogs vs. mainstream media." It's an artificial divide. Any journalist worth his salt reads the blogs on his beat and those inform the coverage, at least, and are quoted by name if he's honest. And the bloggers repay the favor, giving the journalist more voice by commenting, linking, and taking it further. It's more of a feedback loop than a divide.
The webcast (QuickTime) of my Rebuilding Media colleague Bob Cauthorn's lecture last month at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism is online. Although Bob could tell you its contents better than I can, he addresses topics such as why today's local newspapers aren't really local; why newspapers shouldn't blog but should work with outside bloggers; how newspapers could better use their readers' input to focus their news instincts; the value of free newspaper archives online; why newspapers should be open tagging their online content; why Yahoo!'s hiring of reporters is merely a Geraldo Rivera-like stunts and not really journalism; and much more. His speech was part of the New Media Lecture Series sponsored by the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. — Vin Crosbie
Finally: The New York Times to Cease Printing Daily Stock Tables
The New York Timesannounced today that it would cease printing the daily stock listings, except on Sunday. It joins, among others, the Tribune Co.’s papers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Orlando in cutting back on the pages of agate type. This has been a long overdue measure. The Internet has provided financial data faster and easier for years. Most investors who need to know the price of their securities would have found online access worth the price of an ISP service long ago. It's a no-brainer for saving tons of newsprint at a time when big city newspapers are under cost ands revenue pressures. The Times Co., however, declined to provide an estimate on its savings.
John Naughton Foresees the End of Traditional Broadcasting
British TV reviewer turned internet guru, John Naughton, foresees the end of traditional broadcasting and the rise of a new media ecology amid unending change. He names a few of its characteristics he foresees, in a Guardianessay (free registration required) that's adapted from the UK Marketing Society's Annual Lecture he delivered on February 28th. Worth reading.
Interesting idea: a blog about just a single story, in this case a Financial Times piece on blogging. Can't help but wonder if writer Trevor Butterworth did it this way to go outside whatever constraints FT placed.
Can you imagine any other medium having a story about one company (in this case Prosper, a would-be peer-to-peer loan network, an "eBay" for people to lend each other money), that on the same page, has a comment from a competitor? (Moral equivalent on TV: someone jumps in front of Lou Dobbs or Jim Cramer to mention a competitor when they mention some company.)
Nickname: Dave Nicholson
Review: Dave from Zopa here. Great to see all the positive comments from people. We're planning on a U.S. launch in Q2 this year, and we'll be going head to head with Prosper.
Date reviewed: Feb 14, 2006 1:38 PM
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer about the WashingtonPost.com Blog Shutdown
Here is the transcript of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's video interview with Washingtonpost.com Editor Jim Brady and BoingBoing.net Co-Editor Xeni Jardin about why Brady temporarily turned off PostBlog's comments function after receiving hundreds of abusive postings. The interview video is also available in two formats.
Eight months after hiring the services of McKinsey & Co.consulting to give News Corporation an online strategy (and nearly a year after a conclave of News Corp. senior managers failed to produce one), News Corp. Chairman & CEO Rupert Murdoch has hired away from McKinseyJeremy Philips to his media company's online aquisitions strategy. At age 33, Philips, a former world champion debater, is News Corp.'s youngest senior executive.
Merge or demerge? The Guardianventures that the days of the sprawling media conglomerate could be over and reports that Sumner Redstone, who built the Viacom media conglomerate and has now split it up, told the cable news channel CNBC that "synergy" if not dead as an idea was certainly in its "death throes." But Mediaweek meanwhile points to a Jordan Edmiston Group investment bank report about how 2005 was the record year for media mergers and aquisitions, with 525 deals totaling US$55.8 billion in value, one third of which involved online media deals.
Yahoo's going to give (sell, really) advertisers an application that lets them compare the effectiveness of their ad buys online vs. offline media. I imagine they believe the model will show how much more effective online advertising is. And that the "apples-to-apples" comparison of ad spends in different arenas another kick in the teeth for offline advertising.
Time Inc.Cuts Staff; Los Angeles Times Ends National Edition
This year might as well be the start of The Great Depression for professional journalists and they are the story. More than 2,000 newspaper jobs have been lost this year, plus untold numbers at magazines and broadcasters. This erosion has been accelerating; each week late this year seems to bring new announcements of cut staff, shut bureaus, and ended editions. Latest are reports that magazine publisher Time, Inc., has cut 105 people (including uncharacteristically several top executives) and that The Los Angeles Times is ending its national edition. Both companies tried to cast these changes in a positive light, but flickering shadows of departing staff (the Times recently cut 85 staff) portray dimming pictures.
"There are more unknowns and potential threats swarming around the media business today. I've been in the business a long time and it feels like today is very different in terms of attitude at major media businesses or the entities that feed into media. I think a challenge all of us face in the traditional media space is the balance between tradition and economics. Our businesses tend to be a little too reverential to tradition and not as much to the consumer. Thanks to the power of digital technology, we're seeing pretty dramatic shifts in consumer behavior and demand. We have to pay heed."-- Robert Iger, CEO of Walt Disney Co. in an interview in The Wall Street Journal, Dec 5. (sub required)
Why 'Verified' Circulation Is Now Separate From 'Paid' Circulation
The Audit Bureau of Circulations, the organization that since 1914 has verified the circulation claims of newspapers and magazines in the United States, this year created a new circulation category called "verified" circulation. Yes, you read that correctly. For decades, publishers have driven so many loopholes through the ABC's auditing rules that the organization now has had to make verified circulation a separate category than paid circulation. Folio magazine, the trade journal of the magazine industry, tries to explain the, ah, A-B-Cs of it.
Ringtone Pricing May Lead Music Industry to Misprice Online
The Wall Street Journal's 'Real Time' columnist Jason Fry a week ago wrote that the success of selling popular music ringtones for mobile phone ringtones "has led the recording industry and the wireless carriers to a dangerous fantasy: Since people will pay $2.49 to download a snippet of a song, there's no reason they won't pay that much to download the whole thing." Today, his readers' published responses indicate that that they (i.e., people who pay a subscription to read WSJ.com) won't pay US $2.49 per downloadable song and think that the best download price is less US $1.00. It's a common story in the online media market: When there's no match between what the seller charges and what the buyer is willing to pay, there isn't a market.
Stowe Boyd at the Corante Social Architecture symposium puts a quote on screen that, in a nutshell, defines today's mainstream media and hesitancy to release the reins to its audience:
"Managers would rather live w/ a problem they can't solve than with a solution they don't fully understand or control" -- Eric Bonabeau
New York Times' Paid Online Content Hits 135,00 Subscribers in Two Months
The New York Times has about 135,000 paid subcribers to its TimesSelect service, according to numbers released last week. That would total revenue of about $6.7 million in the first two months of the offering, at an average subscription price of $50. The Times said about 90% of those who signed up for a two-week trial converted to paid. Martin Nisenholtz, who heads up the on-line operations of The New York Times Company, added that the numbers were "at the high end of their expectations" (sub to TimesSelect needed).
Lots more buzz about what classified advertising guru Peter Zollman is calling Google's "all-out move" into the classfied advertising space. Seems the non-media media company has filed for a patent to control an application that would tie into other Google functionality, including the recently disclosed Google Base, to give full classified ad-like functionality to listings. For free, I assume?
One managerr of unaffiliated local sites that give listings for locals and tourists told me yesterday he thinks newspapers are going to start folding in five years, maybe ten. Wonder if he was reading this news.
Jeff Jarvis has loudly taken it to Dell, and Dell probably should have listened. Now it looks like IBM is going to offer a solution to help companies learn what's being said about them. Hope it works, and that the humans reading the resutls can interpret them to good effect for the companies. Human intelligence is the ultimate soft ware.
Now NBC and CBS are making shows available for 99 cents, and Disney's put a few into iTunes for $1.99. One stop closer to where it should be: Pay to watch what you want, when you want. Unfortunately, for NBC and CBS I still have to subscribe to another service for the privilege of giving them another $.99 per episode. C''mon guys, let's do it for real. Real "on-demand" for an on-demand (computer) world -- not just to subscribers, or people with certain types of DVRs. How about some better package pricing? (The whole season for a steep discount -- just like music albums discount from the per-song fee.)
Amazon is going to be selling access to porttions of books online, as well as the whole thing. How about per-article or per-video pricing for news sites? How can we slice and dice the content for more incremental revenue -- without killing subscription fees or ad revenue? For some, it's already being done in the archives.
Lots of people got excited (one way or another) about NBC News' announcement that it would air the Nightly News for free online. Now comes a post in a CNET News discussin board that they're going to be putting other shows online for free. Not sure it's reliable. Or that I'm not being played ...
We here have evidence people will pay for content on the Internet, but not news. Well, yes, but what about WSJ.com? Maybe it's not news people won't pay for, but rather news they don't absolutely need. And maybe, then, there has to be another way to pay for what news organizations produce (whcih is the strategy of sites like MSNBC and CBS, which are going for advertising support.)
NY Times wants to "build a site that can sustain that level of journalism" that supports a $250 million budget and 1,200 journalists, says publisher Arthur Sulzberger, answering a question at the Online News Association about whether the Times plans to distribute its info or try to get people to the site.
It's about "building the NY Times site," which means, I guess, ads and other revenues that accrue from clicks, and not a more wire service model.
Information "does not yearn to be free. Opinion, quality opinion does not yearn to be free," he says a little later..
A bunch of journalists, many from mainstream media, are setting up a new group blog under the name Pajamas Media, to, says the story, get their word out and make some money by aggregating their material and serve ads on it. The piece also points out that there may be a conservative slant, that this may be an answer to a liberal blog ad network, and that they hope to raise the credibility of blogs.
My Rebuillding Media Compatriot Bob Cauthorn will speak at IfraExpo 2005
on Tuesday in Leipzig. He and Lutz Glandt, the former managing director of WAZ Mediengruppe, will be the keynote speakers about the 400th Anniversary of the Newspaper: Forever Young. Their keynote address is an invitation-only event, part of Ifra's The Publishers Lounge program (is there a pun in that title?); so if you didn't already know about it, you're probably too late. Nonetheless, if you'll be at this international newspaper industry conference, which runs Monday through Thursday, look for Bob or drop him a note by clicking the Comments icon below this posting.
Let's ignore the political context of this for a moment and think of it no matter who is holding political office:
"I believe that when the history of this [invasion of Iraq] is told, what will be perceived as the most awful is the collapse of the U.S. media as a critical voice. … Once we [British also] were in there, we were telling the same lies. The spin doctors have done some gruesome things. The price is we live in ignorance."
— Novelist John Le Carré (David Cornwell), The Guardian G2, 6 October 2005
Editor & Publisher magazines interviews the editor of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, who last month won the $10,000 grand prize in the University of Maryland's Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. Also, Interactive Narratives has a podcast interview with him. Worth reading and listening.
Yes, it looks to be a gathering of digital media gliteratti (or at least technoratti), and yes, not everyone can afford the price. But we'll be at the We Media conference tomorrow, blogging away. We hope to not overlap too much with PaidContent's Rafat Ali — whom we surmise will take a content-meets-money approach. And we will try to find whatever's most relevant, even if it's whatever Al Gore has to say.
Let's try this Technorati tag for: We Media. We Media is asking for this tag: wemedia. We'll try.
Esquire magazine has created a wiki version of an article about wikis to test whether wiki-fying something actually makes it better. (And -- the sometiems editor writes fearful/jokingly -- put line editors out of a job.)
Speaking of The Guardian, it's online wing is beta-testing a new service called Been There. Lloyd Shepherd. the deputy director of digital publishing, blogs that, " Essentially, it’s a platform for people to recommend things they like to do in places they love, and for other people to say if they agree with them. … The main trick we’ve tried to pull off is the combination of 'travel journalism' with massive user input. It works like this: someone writes a profile of a 'place' … and then people start adding tips for things to do in that place. … And, for the first time anywhere on [Guardian Unlimited] adding tags to the tips. You can add tips with any tags you want. Finally, the feedback loop: every tip has a “do you agree” button next to it. … But here’s the real Big Media exciting thing (bloggers look away now) - once a week, we’ll be running a section in the Travel section of the newspaper about a particular city, with users’ tips a big part of it. So, citizen media storms the Big Media gates once more."
Jeff Mignon of 5W-Mignon media makes an interesting case that the success of Wikipedia shows that newspapers' strength is in context, not just information. "I had, on several occasions during focus groups, listened to readers saying that they feel more idiotic at the end of reading their newspaper than at the beginning. Why? Because they are confronted with articles filled with concepts, events, names... that they have forgotten or that they do not know."
Amid circ scandals (see Vin's earlier) and other questions over ads and reporting, we now have the second filing in two years with Interpublic saying its books may have been cooked. Is this indicative of a few bad apples, or an industry on the make?
OJR's profile of three citizen journalism projects -- Bluffton Today (of course), New West, and NowPublic -- is a nice profile of all three. Intriguing that on NowPublic, "Changes to the site's front page and inside pages are determined by registered members' votes." What I'd like to know more of is the economic model for these guys. (from Dorian)
... The little people, too, suffer the effects of fraudulent circ figures. Last week Newsday announced another 45 layoffs as editors cited the new circulatoin figures..
According to The Wall Street Journal Microsoft reports that its Xbox Live online gaming service for the console that helped pioneer the online-gaming boom has more than two million members who pay an annual subscription fee of $69.99. That's the tidy sum of $140 million. This is money that comes right out of discretionary budgets of families-- the same "pot" from which they spend for newspapers, magazines, movie admissions, DVDs and the like. $140 million here, $140 million there-- and it's no wonder why there's less left for the old media.
WKRN-TV and KRON-TV Switch to Videographer Journalists
Varietyreports that Young Broadcasting's WKRN-TV Nashville and KRON-TV San Francisco are combining the jobs of reporter and cameraman, sending reporters out as 'videographer journalists' who video their own reporting. The BBC in the UK and NY1 in the US have been using that model for years, but Young is the first major US station group to experiment with it.
Number of New Users of Digital Audio Players to Decline
Much as the number of new users of the Internet sharply declined since the 1990s, the Yankee Group reportedly predicts that "As the total installed based of digital audio players increases, ... the number of first-time owners will decrease. The trend will begin in 2006 and continue to gain speed. By the end of 2007, less than half of digital audio player sales will be to first timers. The precipitous decline in new user adoption will fall to below 5 percent by 2008." Yankee nonetheless forecasts that by 2010 more than 65 million Americans will own digital audio players -- an installed base larger than American daily newspaper circulation.
NYT's Keller and Nisenholtz on Newsroom Integration
I recommend reading Online Journalism Review's interview with New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and Vice President of Digital Operations Martin Nisenholtz. It's an excellent look at why a major news organization decided to integrate its legacy and new-media news operations.
RSS User-Agents Excluded from UK & Irish Website Traffic Statistics
The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the UK and Ireland, and the member organizations of JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards), which comprise most of the major online publishing and advertising organizations there, have agreed to exclude RSS User-Agents from their members' websites traffic statistics. Thus, excluding RSS from the measurement of their online page impressions. the JICWEB members then asked the ABC UK's Internet Technical Group to review and suggest new ways of measuring the 'reading' of RSS.
Reed Elsevier to be Online Only Business, CEO Predicts
Reed Elsevier CEO Sir Crispin Davispredicts that by 2008 his $10 billion company's revenues from online publishing could surpass those from print publishing, delivering better margins and higher sales volumes, and that within 10 years, "You could see Reed almost as an entirely online business."
Dan Rather via Esquire: "News is what somebody somewhere doesn't want you to know. All the rest is advertising." Plus, what he'd want for his last meal prior to execution in Texas.
Milverton Wallace, founder of Europe's NetMedia conferences, writes in the academic online journal FreeSide Europe about the "agora of the 21st century, a space where a diverse array of digital modes of communication intersect in cyberspace -- email, instant messaging, text messaging, multimedia messaging, weblogging, audioblogging, moblogging, mobcasting, podcasting."
Nokia Network's Director of Communications Thomas JonssontoldThe Washington Post that 2005 will be the year of music (read iPod) on the mobile phone; 2006 will be the year of television on it; and 2008 will be the year of "my connected life," when the years-old dream of cell phones that are Internet terminals will finally become a widespread reality.
If you really like music, you'll get it by hook, crook, or purchase. A UK survey of 600 music fans found that those who regularly download or share unlicensed music also spend nearly four times as much purchasing it as those who don't download.
Technosavvy readers here know what the terms RSS and podcasting mean. But the Pew Internet & American Life Project today reports that the vast majority of Americans still have no idea what those terms mean. Is that simply a fault of publicity? Are the technosavvy truly early adopters' indicative of tomorrow's mainstream? Do you see the mainstream by driving Wankel-powered SAABs and using OS/X on Macs. Go figure.
Media critic Brian Lowry of Variety examines traditional media' blogs and concludes, "Alas, these demographically motivated incursions by conservative old media into the online realm almost invariably reek of desperation, much like an aging hipster uncomfortably trying to squeeze into jeans from the young men's dept."
In his Village Voice column, Sydney Schanberg (the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist of The Killing Fields cinematic fame) parses "how to 'read"' news stories" in this era of news overload.
In today's Media Guardian from London, Danny Meadows-Klue, CEO of the Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.K. and former chief of new media at the Daily Telegraph, writes an excellent overview of how CraigsList is savaging old media's classified advertising revenues in a "...the collision of the new economy and traditional business models."
MIT Technology Review Editor Says Print's End Coming Soon Than Expected
The disappearance of print periodicals will come sooner than people think, MIT Technology Review Editor-in-Chief Jason Pontintold the Magazines Publishers Association second annual IMAG Magazine Leadership Conference in Atlanta. He also noted that readers are beginning to circumvent the idea that editors know what's good for them, by self selecting their own content in an increasingly fragmented digital environment where "discreet brands tend to disappear" and users can instead select content by writer, topic or frequency.
NetImperative today reported that BBC Channel 3 will stream its the new comedy series The Mighty Boosh one week ahead of its TV transmission on 26 July. A BBC spokeswoman said, "It is one of a number of pilots that BBC Television will be undertaking over the next few months, exploiting the opportunities that new technologies offer to look at how programmes might be delivered beyond the traditional linear broadcast."
More Than Half of Movie Studios' Revenues from DVD and VHS
In a story about differing video DVD standards, The New York Times today notes that DVD sales accounts for 47.9 percent of the Hollywood studios' revenues and another 12.0 percent comes from sales of VHS tapes. Theatrical releases account for only 23.1 percent.
Even Journalists Can Get Carried Away by Blogging's Immediacy
Journalism is a craft or profession that requires certain disciplines, one of which is getting corroboration of facts before publication. Blogging is a quick mode of publication. Even experienced journalists sometimes let blogging's speed of publication overwhelm their journalism. An example occured Thursday on the 'E-Media Tidbits' group weblog at the Poynter Institute, an organization whose mission is teaching mid-career journalists better journalism. One of its contributors happened to be in London during the bombings, couldn't access the BBC News website from his hotel room, and concluded that the site had crashed due heavy volume. His posting is getting heavy play in the blogsphere, which makes it look true. Unfortunately, it's not: the BBC News site did not crash. Should he have waited and double-checked the facts before posting?
Vin Crosbie
Dorian Benkoil
Bob Cauthorn
Ben Compaine
