Online Media Cultist

In a trend that we’re likely to see throughout 2008 and over the next few years, two US newspapers – the Cincinnati Post and Kentucky Post – have shut down their print editions. The Kentucky Post will live on as an online-only publication.

I love HBO’s The Wire. I mean love. It’s so gritty, so real, has such great characters, great writing, great stories, and is occasionally deeply and richly and oddly funny in that way that The Sopranos defined.

And I dig exec producer David Simon – from everything I’ve seen he’s super smart, interesting, and obviously has been behind one powerhouse of a show about his hometown of Baltimore, now going into its fifth and final season.

There’s a great interview with him here on Ain’t It Cool News. But I do have to take issue with him when he says:

And newspaper managers - who have so much contempt for their own product that they give it away for free, misreading the internet as advertising for the product, when it was the product itself - they tell us they are going to do more with less. You do less with less, that’s why they call it less.

I do get where he’s coming from. He’s an old newspaper guy, and the upcoming season of The Wire takes a look at how the media is partly complicit in the plight of the inner city, how stories are driven by bottom lines and sensational headlines instead of by a dedication to getting to the real stories and real problems, which ironically cost more money and tend to sell less well with the populace.

But blaming advertising-supported online content is pointing a finger in the wrong direction, I’m afraid. Newspapers were consolidating under monopolistic corporations well before people starting heading online in droves for news and information. Further, while the Internet is ripping to shreds old models for how content providers and traditional media companies make money, there’s every chance, I would argue, that the online world can and in some ways already does provide a platform where top-notch reporting can find an audience and make money at the same time.

If you enjoy reading The New York Times’ columnists online like I do, but don’t like the idea of paying for it (same!), you’re in luck: it was announced today that The New York Times will end its TimesSelect program, opening up a number of areas of the site, including some of its vast archives, to the public for free.

The Times claims that it generates $10 million a year from the program off 227,000 subscribers (people who buy print subscriptions were automatically included in the program as well), but that the lure of online advertising revenue based on page views is the rationale for ending the program.

TimesSelect was an interesting experiment to see if people would pay for highly valued content. However, free content supported by online advertising is the overwhelmingly dominant model, so it makes sense for The New York Times to follow suit.

Will The Wall Street Journal be next?

Great snapshot statistics of where advertising dollars were, and more importantly where they’re headed, over at Internet Outsider.

The upshot:

US advertising revenue at 4 big online media companies–Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), AOL (TWX), and MSN (MSFT)–grew by $1.3 billion in Q2, or 42%.

US advertising revenue at 15 big television, newspaper, magazine, radio, and outdoor companies (Time Warner, Viacom, CBS, etc.) shrank by $280 million in Q2, or 3%.

I’m curious to see what the numbers are when looking at media/online media company advertising statistics as a whole (beyond just the largest companies), but nonetheless these are pretty startling numbers.

I’d really like to blockquote the entire (relatively short) article, but instead I’ll highly recommend that you check it out for yourself. The present and future of media is online, and ad spending is beginning to reflect that.

If the US economy does slow down – as it looks like it might due in part to the deflation of the housing market and a surplus of bad debt – I wonder what that will do to ad spending. It’s possible that the rate at which advertisers switch over from traditional media to online buys will only increase, in the hope of getting value in hitting more eyeballs in a targeted way.

Which is where the real value is in any economy. The big shift has already begun.

There are those in traditional media who get it, and many more who still do not.

HBO gets it, as they are allowing episodes of the upcoming series Flight of the Conchords to be available on video sharing sites (YouTube and others, I’m guessing).

What’s to get? You have to let go of your content. Set it free, allow people to take it, embed it, post it on their MySpace profile, their blog, e-mail it to their friends, and basically do whatever they want with it. Allowing people to do that essentially creates a free workforce of grassroots marketers, and exponentially increases the odds that new people will see it.

It’s a counterintuitive thing for traditional media folk to wrap their minds around. Traditional conventional wisdom says: I have high quality original content, so I need to keep tight control over it. On TV, that will force people to watch or subscribe to my channel. In print, that will force people to buy or subscribe to my newspaper or magazine. And on the web, that will force people to visit my website. He shoots, he scores, drinks on me at Hoolihan’s!

It’s the web part that’s different. There are just too many distribution points available to force content to be available at just one. Even high quality content will be lost in a sea of other stuff. Attention spans are short, choices are infinite, and competition for attention sits around every e-corner.

A good recent example of not getting it is VH1Classic.com’s choice to not allow classic music videos to be embeddable.

Check out the Flight of the Conchords fellas, below. They’re from New Zealand, and they’re pretty great. Looking forward to seeing their show on HBO (and online!). Hey, I’m marketing for them right now…

The days when old guard traditional/print media journalists could get away with (fearing and therefore) ridiculing the vast wilds of the new media are mercifully near their end.

Therefore, it’s almost stunningly baffling that David Bullard, a columnist for South Africa’s Sunday Times, could so fundamentally misunderstand what’s going on in the blogosphere today. In a hateful, condescending piece called “Name and shame offensive bloggers,” Bullard equates bloggers as “the air guitars of journalism,” written by those “who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism.” Bullard fails to realize, of course, that many blogs are written by professional journalists and are published in online versions of mainstream media.

The biggest misconception comes when Bullard relates that all blogs focus upon the “tedious minutiae” of daily lives and muses that the growth of the blogosphere can be explained by “modern narcissism.”

While surely some blogs do fixate upon narcissistic minutiae, this ignores the teeming raft of writer/bloggers that inject serious news, personal takes, opinions, reviews, and interviews into the broader online conversation. It ignores the fact that the blogosphere is increasingly the place where people turn for news, particularly in terms of breaking news events and stories that involve technology and the online world.

The column turns nearly xenophobic at its end, referencing “some anonymous, scrofulous nerd pumping meaningless drivel into cyberspace at all hours of the day and night simply because he can’t get a girl to sleep with him.”

Vinny Lingham smartly notes that, “This is exactly the mentality that is leading to the decline of offline print as a source of information, because the people entrenched in the offline world are so resistant to change, they cannot keep up with the times.”

Bloggers Blog: “Using miscellaneous personal blogs as a comparison tool between blogs and journalism really isn’t fair to blogs.”

Vincent Maher says that David Bullard owes South Africans an apology for “a dazzling display of arrogance” and then goes on to break down (and crush) the column line by line.

Bullard’s column is called “Out to Lunch.” Indeed.

The Washington Post is one of my favorite sources for political news, and I often find myself heading over there after checking out ABC News’ The Note in the morning (which has frustratingly been in Mini-Note “under construction” mode for several weeks now).

That said, my eyes nearly popped out this very morning after reading an article entitled Giuliani’s Lead Shrinks, Clinton’s Margin Holds. The reason had nothing to do with the journalistic quality, however, nor anything to do with the current stage of the 2008 presidential horserace.

It was that the first two paragraphs are riddled with links.

11 of them, in fact, in the space of 101 words. That’s a lot of links; in fact, it’s downright linktastical.

If the links went somewhere interesting there could perhaps be concessions made – I’m not an anti-linkite after all – but this is sadly not the case. Each and every one of the 11 links heads for a tag or subject search page. So, as I’m reading “Giuliani’s Lead Shrinks, Clinton’s Margin Holds” and I want to read WaPo and other related stories about such topics as “New York,” “Arizona,” “GOP,” or eight others, I can whisk right over and check it all out.

And don’t get me started about the search result landing page. Check out the New York page. Excitement central, right?

So, in conclusion: a couple of relevant links here and there to add depth and texture and context to the story, great. Linky adventures attached to any word that’s capitalized? Wouldn’t hurt to lay off ‘em every now and again.

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.