I don't know if anybody is still reading Mediasavvy. Since I launched Coastsider in May 2004, I haven't been posting much here. However, if you're still interested in what I have to say, there is a place where you can see it. I joined Jupiter Research as an analyst covering media in July 2005, and I'm now blogging there. I've added a feed from my Jupiter blog to the nav bar on Mediasavvy.
I will continue to post at Mediasavvy from time to time, when I have something to say that is more personal and wouldn't be appropriate to post on Jupiter's site.
Posted 02.18.06 at 09:27 AM to Analysis.| Comments (0) | Link |
Microsoft is now censoring US-based blogs that might (OK, probably) offend the Chinese government.
MSN is censoring Michael Anti's blog, which has been irritating Beijing for some time. Microsoft's excuse--"Most countries have laws and practices that require companies to make the internet safe for local users"--doesn't square with what they did. They are censoring Michael Anti not in China, not in packets bound for China, but in America for Americans.
The Internet has always lived under the shadow of corporate censorship. So far, it still possible to find spaces where we can be free. But the noose has also been tightening for some time. In this case, we have one of the largest corporations anticipating the needs of one of the world's most repressive governments, and taking care of business before it's even asked to do so.
The problem isn't Microsoft, although they do seem to be pretty forward-thinking in this regard. The truth is that Google, despite its understandable desire not to be evil, will be confronted at some point in the not-too-distant future to perform an act of pure evil or its shareholders will find a management who will. You can take that to the bank. Literally.
Corporations are amoral. Corporations are made up of people, but they are not people. Their only imperative is to maximize shareholder value. That can be a pretty good system as long as you recognize its limitations and plan accordingly.
Posted 01.06.06 at 11:21 AM to News.| Comments (0) | Link |
I just made interesting sale.
Back in September, I covered a murder in Coastsider. I was first on the scene and got some great photos of the crime scene and Sheriffs at the site.
The story itself is lurid and heartbreaking. The central character, Charles Loo, is a resident of Singapore. Last week, I got a call from the Straits Times in Singapore. They wanted to buy photos that I had posted on Coastsider for use in the paper.
I'm not certain there's anyone left who still questions whether bloggers can be journalists. At the same time, most pros still use demeaning term "citizen journalism".
I don't know what "citizen journalism" means, but I don't think it'll be too long before we can just erase the word "citizen" as a meaningless qualifier. After all, professional journalists become so objective that they're not citizens any more?
Posted 04.18.05 at 12:02 PM to Analysis.| Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Link |
Knight-Ridder, publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, bought the company that publishes the San Mateo Daily News, and four other free papers in Burlingame, Redwood City, Palo Alto, and Los Gatos. This is a significant media shift, both in the Bay Area and nationwide.
The big monopoly metro dailies are facing death from a thousand paper cuts, from the Internet as well as from free dailies and weeklies. The NY Times just bought into a free paper that competes with its own Boston Globe. The SF Examiner has launched a new edition in Washington, DC. This probably marks the beginning of the end of big papers' strategy of using zoned editions to compete in suburban markets.
In the corporate press release, Hilary Schneider, senior vice president/operations for Knight Ridder, said, "These newspapers are widely embraced by the communities they serve. They provide the kind of 'micro-local' coverage that larger metro dailies often do not, but that many consumers and small advertisers clearly seek."
Significantly, the newly-acquired company will report to Hilary Schneider at the corporate home office and not the San Jose Mercury News. I expect to see KR provide the capital to expand this mini-chain throughout the Bay Area, both deepening their coverage in Santa Clara County, the Mercury News' home market, and broadening it in San Mateo County, where the Chron and ANG (SM County Times, Pacifica Tribune) are dominant.
In northern California, KR also owns the Contra Costa Times and the Monterey Herald. I worked for the Mercury News in the mid-nineties, as one of the architects of their Web site.
Posted 02.16.05 at 11:28 AM to News.| Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Link |
I just received a note from Hallmark apologizing for the poor performance of their site on Valentine's Day. Apparently, despite their best efforts to prepare, they got twice as much traffic as they expected.
This is good news for every in online publishing, but especially those of us who specialize in connecting people to one another. Soon, we may be hearing more about Metcalf's Law than Moore's Law.
Posted 02.16.05 at 11:24 AM to News.We owe you an apology. First, the most important three words of this letter - WE ARE SORRY.
This Valentine's Day, our site was up and down all day. For many of you, that meant frustration and wasted time when you were simply trying to send or retrieve an e-card.
We thought we were ready to handle a huge amount of traffic on Valentine's Day. Obviously, we thought wrong. We were surprised by double the amount of traffic we expected. And we cringe at the disappointment we caused to some of you.
In short, we made promises to deliver that were not kept. And for those of you who experienced that disappointment, we are so sorry for any frustration we may have caused.
Rest assured this experience will serve as a lesson for us. We are now challenging our team to reevaluate every step we took to prepare for Valentine's Day...because it wasn't enough.
With our deepest apologies, The Hallmark.com Team
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The National Newspaper Association (the trade association for small-town newspapers) has some stern words for WalMart, which has mounted a public relations and advertising campaign to fend off its critics:
So why is it that community newspapers in America are good enough to help you fend off critics with free PR, but we're not good enough for your paid advertising?
You can't have it both ways.
Based on a number of previous conversations I've had with newspaper publishers and editors across America, I don't think you will find very many who are willing to give you the requested free PR space to fend off attacks from your corporate critics.
In other words, if you want us to run your free PR, you have to be an advertiser. There is no other way to read this. They're not saying, "We wouldn't carry your puff pieces even if you were an advertiser." They're saying, "Take out an ad and then we can talk about communicating your message with a little free coverage on our news pages."
Posted 01.22.05 at 10:18 AM to News.| TrackBack (1) | Link |
As my strategy for Coastsider develops, two things become clear: the focus of the site must be ruthlessly local, and I would love to have a general news feed.
The local focus is key. I'm simply not running stories that don't directly impact my local community. That not only gives the site its character, it makes a lot of decisions about what to include and what not to include a lot easier.
But I also know that it would improve Coastsider's role as a daily habit for my readers if I had news headlines on the site. The problem is that no general news feed that I would want to run (NY Times, BBC, NPR, Washington Post, Yahoo, Google, etc.) can be featured on a commercial site.
I sort of get that rationale, and I expect it to change as we become more comfortable with syndication. But I'm not sure what to do in the meantime.
It seems to me that it would be possible for sites like mine to pool their resources and link to interesting state, national, international, business, and technology stories. These links could be aggregated and filtered and delivered to participants. The closest thing to this now is the most-linked list on Technorati, but it's a little raw and also not available for syndication.
This would be a great open-source project. It's well-defined, doable, and would be a great resource for the community.
Posted 11.13.04 at 03:30 PM to .| Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Link |
My friend Dustin sent me a note I wanted to share:
I saw these quotes in different media sources and thought you might
appreciate the way they illuminate Hollywood's understanding of technology:
"This is an interesting way to start my career at Disney," Mr. Ovitz said he
replied, adding that "My mind was spinning like a Univac trying to figure
out" what to do.
-- Ovitz's Testimony on Disney Tenure Portrays a Thwarted Deal Maker, The Wall Street Journal, 10/27/2004
"In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for
Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had
missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had
5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty
impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power."
-- In '52, huge computer called Univac changed election night, USA Today, 10/27/2004
Posted 10.28.04 at 08:22 PM to .| Comments (0) | TrackBack (4) | Link |
I love Netflix. Their service is remarkable. In my town, where there is no video store, I see their unmistakable red envelopes everywhere.
However, I was cheered to hear that Amazon might get in the market and would be prepared to switch tomorrow, given the opportunity. I'm sure I'm not alone.
After months of price increases, Netflix has announced that they're lowering their price by nearly 20%. Amazon is already having a positive effect on Netflix customers.
"We started hearing rumors about two weeks ago, and we were able to confirm them," [Netflix founder Reed] Hastings said in an interview. "We think we will compete successfully with them because we have great scale, we ship 3 million DVDs a week, and we have five years of experience in this market.
What I really want is a way to find movies. Netflix has the worst site of any major ecommerce player. Try to find movies by director. Try to get decent recommendations based on your past rentals. Try to find a list of recent releases that isn't larded with garbage. Try to find critics' recommendations that aren't laundry lists of the greatest films ever made.
There' is no question that I'm missing movies I really want to see because they aren't top of mind when I'm on Netflix. I can't wait for Amazon to get into this market with their recommendation software and with the Internet Movie Database.
I would pay $5 more per month just to not deal with Netflix's crappy web site.
Posted 10.18.04 at 12:01 PM to News.| Comments (1) | TrackBack (4) | Link |
Friday, Jon Stewart broke through the curtain on CNN's Crossfire. If you haven't seen it already, you must view one of the streams of Stewart's appearance.
He did something that no one approved for appearance on TV has been willing to do: he told the truth about the corrosive effect of cable TV news on our democracy. It was only a couple of minutes in 24 hours that day, but you could feel the refreshing breath of fresh air.
What's amazing is that you don't see this more often. Everyone's a media critic and if you're paying attention, you know this already. But if you're not paying attention, you're not getting this message.
To continue stating the obvious, to say that the Daily Show is the best show on TV is like saying that 30-year-old Talisker is the best way to get drunk.
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The finalist list for the Online Journalism Awards confirms my suspicion that Online News Association's idea of a small site (fewer than half a million unique visitors a month) is way too high.
Belo, the Orange County Register, Congressional Quarterly, Ventura County Star, PBS, WBUR, and the Fresno Bee are all nominees in the small site category.
Coastsider serves a community of 30,000 souls. I will never have the resources to compete the smallest of the organizations. I'm stunned that the Online Journalism Association so strongly favors corporate journalism, whether for profit or not. They're completely missing the revolution.
Posted 10.07.04 at 02:59 PM to .| TrackBack (1) | Link |
I was listening to a story about yet another stolen election in some faraway country on NPR and I wondered if political corruption in nominal democracies is having an effect on voting in the United States.
All markets are international. Including the market for voting equipment. If you were selling voting equipment to a typical third world government, would absolute security and reliable audit trails be considered a feature or a bug? Could you justify selling an unhackable version in your home market and a hackable version overseas? Would you want to maintain twice as many SKU's, one set hackable and one not?
I've looked around a little bit and I can't find any information on the size or potential size of the global market for voting equipment. But I'm beginning to wonder if the potential of selling voting equipment in undemocratic countries is affecting the quality of the equipment manufacturers are willing to sell us here.
I don't know of anyone who has written about this. Perhaps someone should.
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I love Yahoo. I think they're good people and they have a terrific product that they're making better every day. But Google is beating them at their own game.
Yahoo owns Overture, which arguably invented keyword advertising, the online ad segment with all the momentum right now. I am buying ads for a small regional site at five cents each on Google, with no monthly minimum. Yahoo will sell me those same keyword clicks for ten cents and a monthly minimum of $20.
Yahoo owns the number-two webmail service (after Microsoft's Hotmail) and it's very good. Until recently, Yahoo mail offered its users 2 megabytes of storage for free. Google announces (and still has in beta) a webmail service that offers 1,000 megabytes of storage for free. Yahoo responds by raising their limit to 100 megabytes, more than enough to keep their existing customers, but only 10% of what Google is offering.
Yahoo and Google are both great companies and I'm happy with my relationship with each of them.
But keeping your costs low is key to success on the Web, and I think Google has figured out something about keeping their costs low that even Yahoo (whom I've always thought of as cheapskates) can't seem to approach.
Should we be worried about Yahoo?
Posted 06.22.04 at 12:56 AM to Analysis.
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When I built Coastsider, my goal was to make the design, and the underlying markup, as simple as possible. I wanted to do the layout with CSS only -- no tables.
Tables brought back too many memories for me of the original News.com site, which was a twisted mass of nested tables designed to over-determine how the site looked on the reader's computer.
Right before releasing Coastsider, I decided I was unable to assure the site would look right without a basic three-column table layout. I held my nose and added the table. But at least I wasn't nesting my table.s
Today, I came across an intractable problem that forced me to nest a second table inside my layout. I'm sure the problem is that I don't know CSS well enough to fix this without nested tables. But I'm out of ideas and out of time. Nested tables beat the alternative, which looks awful.
Posted 06.17.04 at 12:32 AM to .
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News sites have been wringing their hands about whether blogging is journalism and whether newspapers should let their reporters blog.
They're missing the most important point about blogging. Suddenly, millions of their readers now have better-managed web sites that are better integrated with the Web than any online news Web site.
I'm not saying that the Tribune Company should rush out and buy WordPress for their newspapers. But the blogosphere has evolved into a sophisticated network that online publishers should emulate and build upon. I've been discussing the elements of this network in this series:
- RSS feeds put your headlines on readers' desktops, especially the most influential 1% of Web users -- the people who can drive traffic to your site. Don't worry that you can't control it or measure it. Trust people to find you.
- Comments let your reader participate directly in the reporting process, amplifying, correcting, and just blowing off steam. Letters to the editor and separate bulletin boards now seem absurd.
- Archives should no longer be in a separate database. Your Web site should be your archives, which should be free and open to anyone who wants to read or link to your news. Why shouldn't readers be able to search your archives using Google? Think before you answer that question.
- Trackback points to people who point to you, creating context for every news story you publish, and giving back traffic to people who are pointing their readers to you.
- Your community should be the focus of your site. And you should be integrating your site with bloggers and other sites in your community.
Blogs have changed the way people use use the Web and the way they create Web sites. The online news industry has the most to learn and the most to gain from thinking like bloggers. Whether news sites blog, or whether they accept blogging as journalism is immaterial. Posted 06.15.04 at 05:09 PM to Analysis.
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