Online Media Cultist

Gone are the days when the vast majority of the public was collectively comforted by Walter Cronkite and other legendary news anchors. Technology alone did not drive this new age of splintered interest, where many people – and many more each day – draw their news from a number of sources, many of which are likely online.

A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism warns that these trends and the resulting loss of audience and revenue for traditional media companies are driving a phenomenon that it calls hyper-localism, “…’hyper-local’ coverage in newspapers; encouraging citizen journalism on the Internet; and giving rise to opinion-driven television personalities like CNN’s Lou Dobbs and Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.”

There is a danger if most people truly choose to get their news from a narrow channel of “hyper-local” sources. Jon Stewart likes to joke that members of his influential audience only get their news from The Daily Show, for instance. Likewise, if someone chose to believe the gospel of Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh without visiting a single other news source, that would likely not be a good thing.

However, the reality is that now that the choices are many, people are finding a full and rich palette of news sources and are able to cobble together their own version of the truth of the whole on their own. This undoubtedly frightens traditional media companies, but in the end the trend is a good one in that people have the freedom to utilize print, television, radio, and online sources in any way they wish. And while traditional newsroom staffs in the United States are sadly shrinking due to budgetary concerns, it is still possible for people to find an enormous amount of high quality news reporting (in aggregate more than ever before, most likely).

Excellence in journalism will never go out of style. The way in which people find and access and integrate that journalism into their understanding of the world will likely forever be on the move, and that’s a good thing in most ways.

A subject area that I’ve paid increased attention to of late is how traditional media companies – large media companies who predate the Internet era and are now online – are looking at ways to adapt and stay relevant in the ever evolving and revolving online world. Recently, I’ve looked at how Reuters is utilizing blogs and presented my theory for how Netscape has spearheaded the drive toward the future of news online, what I call hybrid social news. Finally, news came out last week that media jobs overall in the U.S. have shrunk by a whopping 88% in 2006 while, at the same time, it seems that blog traffic at top U.S. newspapers is exploding.

In the midst of all this change, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at The Economist, a venerable print magazine that is well known for publishing serious and intelligent economic and political news and analysis with a global focus. Like Reuters, The Economist has only relatively recently branched out to incorporate blogs with its online offerings. It is also trying to find the right balance in holding some of its content behind a paid subscription wall, putting it in league with the likes of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

I spoke with Daniel Franklin, The Economist’s Executive Editor and head of online content, late last week by phone. Economist.com has recently made more of its content available to unpaid members, Daniel said, in an attempt to draw in new online readers while still maintaining a benefit for having a subscription to the print magazine.

At present, The Economist maintains two blogs, Free Exchange and Democracy in America.

Free Exchange espouses to be a forum where Economist journalists can interact with readers about economics. Interestingly, whereas most blogs today are personality driven, The Economist’s blogs maintain the same anonymity as their other offerings (the print magazine has no bylines). So while Free Exchange has a bloggy look (time stamped pieces published from newest to oldest, with comments area on each post) the content reads more like traditional magazine copy.

So instead of a conversation between individual journalists and readers, Franklin and The Economist think of reader comments as more as “letters to the editor,” a new realm for reader feedback. Indeed, looking at the few posts I could find with more than one or two comments, it seems that the anonymous poster “Economist.com” does not respond to reader comments. It should be noted that Free Exchange’s commenters are highly literate and well mannered, a rare treasure to be cultivated within the blogosphere. It will be interesting to see if The Economist’s blog authors will at some point be unleashed or prompted to interact directly with readers.

Democracy in America was launched during the run up to the 2006 midterm elections, but Franklin deems it such a success that they’re keeping it around for the long run. Overall, Franklin is happy with Economist.com’s blogs in terms of readers and numbers, and is thinking about expansion, with a European-focused column next on the horizon.

While Franklin was engaged and enthused about the importance of blogs in helping to fill out The Economist’s online offerings, their implementation is somewhat cloaked at present. For example, I was made aware that a blog or column called “Democracy in America” existed as part of Economist.com, but it took me quite some time to figure out that I had to click a link underneath “Today’s Views” on the home page to find it. If blogs are to find their full-throated potential in The Economist’s online future, they will need to be given better promotion within Economist.com (a search for “Democracy in America” does not bring up any relevant results!) and the blogs themselves will need to provide fuller interaction between writers (anonymous or not, and hopefully not) and readers.

Overall, Franklin’s online strategy for The Economist is sound. “We’re trying to reach a global audience who are curious and interested in the world,” he said. Online, The Economist is attempting to expand upon its traditional readership by providing content that appeals to specific interests. Blogs are a natural tool to help achieve this strategy, and it will be interesting to see how The Economist evolves its blogging strategy over time.

Cuts in U.S. media jobs rose by 88 percent in 2006, 17,809 positions slashed versus 9,453 in 2005, according to a new Challenger Gray & Christmas survey. Large traditional media organizations such as The New York Times Company and Time Inc. were cited as having to reduce staff in order to compensate for reduced revenue from print publications.

This year will likely be little different, with large, traditional media companies scrambling to beef up and modernize online media offerings in order to stay relevant and solvent. The idea of a newspaper publication going to online-only production is no longer a joke (though some old school ink-stained newspaper cats may laugh bitterly at the notion) and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that 2007 will see a major U.S. newspaper do just that.

As eyeballs continue to drift away from paid print offerings to free online publications, as advertisers slowly but surely realize that the online medium is a much more efficient way to reach target markets, and as content publishers optimize the ways in which they can monetize their offerings, the “new media” or online media takes another step toward being the dominant force in how information and entertainment is transmitted in people’s daily lives.

This process will play out over a number of years. Print publications will forever hold some role (nothing can ever replace the tangible feeling of reading a book in your favorite comfortable chair or ruffling through a newspaper on the subway) but that role will become a niche one, meeting the needs that can’t be met by online media.

Online media will always have its bumps and roller coaster rides, of course. There will be layoffs and screaming of bubbles bursting and “the end of web 2.0″ and market shifts and rumors of imminent collapse and advertising market crashes and other such talk. But we can safely say now that the dark years of 2001 – 2003 are over. They one day may be seen as akin to those early years of the automobile industry when cars were derided as the latest fad.

Online media ain’t no fad.

People are reading them blogs. More than ever before, many probably don’t even realize it.

Unique visitors to the blogs published by the top 10 U.S. newspapers has more than tripled year-over-year (1.2 million in December ‘05, 3.8 in December ‘06), according to Nielsen/NetRatings, accounting for 13% of traffic to these sites.

Five years ago, very few people knew had heard the word blog. Today, it’s a household term but many misconceptions still surround it (it’s all dreary ramblings about lovelorn teens, or political hack rants, etc.). The flexibility and morph-ability of blogs is proven out by their steady integration into online mainstream media properties. “Professional-level” blogging means high quality writing, interesting stories, personal observations, unique coverage, and a friendly, engaging, and interactive style that was until recently sorely lacking in the mainstream media.

Taken historically, audiences have been bleeding away from the staid and stodgy network television broadcasts to the more colorful cable news stations for many years. For some time, print publications simply republishing online was good enough. But no more: there’s simply too many ways to access a teeming galaxy of observations, opinions, spins, alleys, crannies, and nooks for traditional media companies to stand pat.

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion notes that Dave Winer predicted some time back that The New York Times would one day become “one big blog.” This somewhat echoes my own observation that the future of mainstream media websites lies in embracing what I call hybrid social media platforms, a mixture of user submitted content, editor-selected content from all over the Internet, and “original coverage” that encompasses straight news and news plus alike (more on this below).

This transformation is already happening, and that’s a good thing for traditional media and the blogosphere both. “Straight news” reporting is essential and always will be, but the hunger is out there for what I call “news plus,” which equates to all the vibrant, funky, diverse, and kaleidoscopic offerings that the blogosphere brings to the online table.

The biggest winners of all are news readers and consumers, who more than ever before are dictating the kinds of media they want and are getting it.

I usually like to call out wire stories as nearly something of a hazard for news seekers online. Sure, it’s hard news in the purest form, “just the facts, ma’am,” and so on, but it’s sometimes arduous to weed your way through the very sameness of the coverage (for a current example, search for “Bush to send more troops to Iraq” in Google News) to find something interesting, compelling, or unique. The desire for new, fresh, and diverse angles and perspectives on the news is a large factor in the blogosphere’s elevation beyond its roots in naval gazing-style journaling (somewhat ironically, the naval gaze lives on long and strong in the teen-centric social networks these days, MySpace chief among them!).

Because of the wild success of blogs – the most popular of which employ an accessible, friendly, and engaging style, with a comments area where the author converses with readers – mainstream media sites have scrambled over the last few years to add blogs to supplement their more traditional news coverage. This convergence between traditional and new media is a good thing for everyone, I’d argue, and will help to continue to raise the bar for transparency, quality, and value for blogs and traditional news sites both. Everyone is continuously encouraged and compelled to compete for eyeballs, and that’s a good thing.

It’s intriguing then that Reuters, as major a wire news service as they come, has a pretty sizeable section devoted to Reuters Blogs. It’s pretty clear at first glance that blogging is taken seriously by the leaders of the organization as the most recent post (a week old, already ancient by blogging standards!) under the Reuters Editors blog is written by Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger. Mr. Schlesinger doesn’t go so far as to respond to those who took the time to comment, but he must be given credit nonetheless for putting in the effort.

Clearly, some areas of Reuters Blogs are more active than others. MediaFile, where reporters Eric Auchard and Ken Li hang “hang out at the corner of Media and Technology,” appears to be the most vibrant, with frequent updates and nice tidbits of geeky coolness like the Spark stationary bike, which enables you to race against your friends on an LCD screen while you get your workout on.

Other blogs are looking a smidge less than active. It’s a Wrap, a blog that covers entertainment news, looks to be relatively wrapped as the most recent post is dated December 12th. I’m as big a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen as they come, but Borat movie news seems kind of 2006 already, doesn’t it?

There are also blogs that provide links and some pictures associated with Reuters audio interviews and one called From Reuters.com, which is supposed to be a place where “we invite readers to post comments on major events and send questions to newsmakers and our correspondents on the frontline” but is pretty difficult to tell what it actually is in practice. There are several diaries from a “video embed” scattered in the midst of a reporter embedded with the British army in Afghanistan, which may well be a wonderful and much needed bit of personal reporting from the warfront, but it’s unfortunately buried among other stories that don’t seem all that related to one another.

It will be interesting to see how Reuters plays out its experiment with blogs. One reason why Reuters Blogs seems to be less frequented and updated than it might be is because its blogs are not integrated with the rest of the site and its torrent of up-to-the-minute wire story reports. The New York Times, on the other hand, does a really nice job of mixing its article pages with links to its blogs.

Do a search for a current news story at a popular news aggregator/search engine, and you’re likely to get a large number of results. But the catch is that most of the results are likely to be the same or very close to the same, because all the news sources that have picked up the original Reuters or Associated Press wire story (and basically republished it for your convenience) are usually listed near the top.

And that’s great for when you want to get a quick sense of a story or the very latest on a breaking news event. My take on the blogosphere is that it has the potential to take the reporting of major news sources and wire stories and add on-the-scene “citizen journalism,” personal opinions, much needed analysis, and a glorious and occasionally stinky concoction of conversation, arguing, pontificating, punditizing, and storytelling along route.

Now a company called Mochila offers a service that allows bloggers to republish AP stories, with a three-way split of any ad revenue that results.

I think this idea is a loser in several respects. As I mentioned, there are already countless ways to get your eyeballs on AP stories. In fact, it’s hard to avoid them sometimes! As a consumer of news, I want there to be fewer and better organized places to read AP stories (Newsvine is a pretty great solution if you’re a wire story hound and you’re looking for a community to hang out with at the same time), not more.

Further, legitimate bloggers will seldom feel compelled to republish entire articles. What’s the point, aside from grabbing 30% of potential extra revenue? As Techdirt rightly points out, a prime source of business for Mochila may well be nefearious sploggers who are looking to flood the Internet with oceans of AP stories in an effort to snag search engine traffic.

I think that smart traditional media companies who will survive and thrive in the web 2.0 and post-web 2.0 era will actually eschew wire stories (because they’re pervasive and therefore don’t add a great deal of unique value) in favor of niche coverage, unique coverage, and value-added coverage. In other words, the traditional media world – both print and online – will co-opt the best aspects of the blogosphere. And that competition will in turn be good for the blogoshere, and so on it will go.

Therefore, my advice for bloggers is: don’t get hoodwinked by the promise of a few extra cents on top of your adsense revenue. It’s not worth it, and it really isn’t what you got into the blogging game for in the first place. Avoid the company of sameness. Stick to writing about what you’re passionate about and add something good and glorious and bold to the Internet conversation.