Month: May 2002

Here’s a cardboard tag I found attached to the neck of a bottle of “Mystic Cliffs White Merlot”.
What caught my eye, even before the novel notion of white merlot, was the large “88” on the tag, which looks a lot like a Wine Spectator score.
You look a little closer and you see that “88 percent of consumers prefer…” Aha! They conducted a taste test and determined that the average shopping mall patron prefers it to…what?
Take another look: “88 percent of consumers prefer the color of White Merlot to White Zinfandel”.
Admit it: some days you’re ashamed to say you make your living in marketing.

Don’t confuse the future of news with the future of newspapers
It’s not a foregone conclusion that newspapers will dominate online news, unless you believe that the future of online news will be repurposed from other media. There’s a reason that newspaper experiments with television and radio have failed and their web sites will fail — media don’t converge, they diverge.
Read “The Innovator’s Dilemma” again. The news of the future probably won’t be copyrighted by Belo or Gannett or Knight-Ridder — or Disney or Microsoft or AOL/TW for that matter. The cost structures and margins are so much lower in online publishing that newspapers are constitutionally incapable of adapting. Someone else will do it for them. Just because this didn’t happen in 1999, that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.
What percentage of newspapers’ budgets are spent gathering and editing local news? When you subtract production, distribution, advertising sales, world/national news and feature syndication fees, and all the editing and overhead allocated to these functions, what share of a newspaper’s budget is spent on the one thing they do that no one else does better?
Now, give that budget to a much smaller company with no unions, no corporate parent/stockholders demanding a 25% profit margin, zero marginal costs, and a drive to deep link promiscuously.
Smells like the future of news to me.

Recently A.H. Belo’s Dallas Morning News and Rodale’s Runner’s World have sent cease-and-desist letters to indepedent web sites to make them stop linking to stories on their sites (“deep-linking”) instead of to their home pages. [Thanks to Chilling Effects for posting the letters.]
Rodale and Belo are trying to exploit the Web while conducting their business so as to decrease its value for everyone else. They are strip-mining the commons.
They have three options:
1. Allow (or encourage) deep linking and take advantage of the network effect to increase their business and improve the value of their product to their customers.
2. Use simple technical means to prevent unauthorized deep linking. This is boneheaded and self-destructive, but it is legal, moral, and ethical.
3. Use lawyers to assert their unproven right to prevent deep linking. This is not only less effective than (2), but also has a chilling effect on linking globally, decreasing the value of the Web for people who have never heard of Belo or Rodale and have no interest in their products.
I have no problem with the media making money on the Web. My livelihood depends on it. But the Web doesn’t owe them a business model. If publishers want to move their product on the Web, it’s up to them to make the numbers work, and not up to everyone else to turn the Web into a “virtual newsstand”.
Belo and Rodale are pillaging the Web by trying to make it more like print so they can make a buck. The tragic irony is that they will fail. But the damage they do could be permanent.