Archive for March, 2007

The 2008 campaign is already in deep meta

Jay Rosen explains how he and Arianna Huffington are organizing bloggers to cover the 2008 presidential campaign, with a dozen or more covering each candidate.

It would be great for one of our contributors to ride the bus with John McCainÖ once. But weíd rather have a high school English teacher with some writerly flair and a fascination for McCain who sifts the news for clues to the evolution of his public character. Meanwhile, another contributor might stick with a single factor affecting McCainís chances: what movement conservatives think, say and do. A third could observe on McCain and the environment, sticking to that beat. Another might look at McCain and his tangled relationship to veterans of the United States military. In some cases, a contributorís expertise might “make” the beat. If you make ads for a living (and youíre eloquent) weíd welcome your take on McCainís ad makers. If youíre a nurse and you want to write about health care, yes.

This effort may be better organized and connected than most blogging efforts, but it’s just the beginning of a full-on blogging circus in 2008. And then there’s the meta-coverage: All the traditional news media reporting on what everyone is writing and reading in the “blogosphere”. And the meta-meta-coverage: bloggers writing about what the “mainstream media” is saying about the effect of blogging on the presidential race.
We’re nearly a year from the first primary and the media are already talking about the Clinton 1984 mashup, the vandalism of Edwards’s Second Life headquarters, and the hacking of McCain’s MySpace page.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

March 30th, 2007

Save the (news) whales?

San Francisco Chronicle business columnist David Lazarus thinks newspapers should get an antitrust exemption that would allow them to opt out as a group from giving away their news on the Net and start charging for it.
If there was ever an industry that needed more protection from antitrust, it’s not the newspaper business. Most newspapers are still wildly profitable by most conventional standards as a result of their local monopolies. http://archives.cjr.org/year/91/6/joa.asp”>They’ve already got one sweet exemption in the form of the Newspaper Preservation Act. And Lazarus’s own employer is under fire for http://sfbayguardian.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=3213″>you don’t need to charge for the news in order to produce professional journalism.
I was quoted in the Times this week as saying, “There is absolutely no question that the next 10 years are going to be really bad for the newspaper business. March 29th, 2007

USAToday.com redesigns, with predictable fallout

A couple of years ago, I was on a panel with some newspaper execs and one of them declared, rather self-importantly, “If we eliminated [journalistic touchstone X], our readers would be all over us.” What I was thinking, but didn’t say in the interest of comity, was it’s nothing compared to the reaction you’d get if you stopped running Beetle Bailey.
Newspaper readers are notoriously resistant to changes in their beloved morning ritual, and especially hate redesigns. And now, USA Today has gone and completely redone their website. They’re in for it now.
They’ve added a ton of welcome interactive features: news from other sites, comments on stories, forums, links to stories on other news sites and blogs, headline voting, user-contributed photos. But the comments on the announcement of the new design are uniformly negative. Unfortunately, there’s no archive of how the site used to look.
There are things I really like about the site. In addition to all the interactive features, which are great, they’ve avoided the classic newspaper website mistake of trying to put a link and a promo for every single site feature on the home page. They label headlines with the number of comments and recommendations. At the same time, the page seems loose and disorganized. The headlines have no summaries, white space (which I love) is arbitrarily determined by photo placement. Stories are arranged by time and not by importance, which correct for blogs and questionable for news sites. There is too much information above each headline (section, time, comments, recommendations).
So, the new USAToday is a mixed bag of great new features and a design that could use some tweaking. But, most of all, I agree with readers in comments that the publishers should be participating in the conversation and explaining the design goals and tradeoffs that went into their new look.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

March 5th, 2007

Area man discusses satellite radio, the virtues of syndication

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to appear on an hour-long discussion of the future of radio in the wake of the proposed merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio networks. We had a good, far-ranging discussion of the competitive environment for traditional radio stations. It was interesting to hear from all over the country, as KQED Forum is broadcast live over Sirius. You can still stream the discussion from KQED’s website.
Monday, I also able to participate in a discussion of the impact of the Internet on the news business, as the moderator of a remarkable panel that included the managing editor of WSJ.com, the publisher of Slate, and the supervising producer of CNN.com. It was fun to participate in a more upbeat discussion of the news business than I usually hear these days. Of course, these guys are all working on the online side of their businesses.
Bill Grueskin of WSJ.com shared an interesting anecdote about how Digg made a two-year-old column one of the most-read stories on a particular day. Interestingly, WSJ.com is getting tremendous lift from promoting their videos to bloggers. We’re all beginning see the value promoting individual stories to bloggers and aggregators, something I’ve been pushing for some time. And I’m still doing it. I’m working on a report on long-tail syndication strategies this month.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

March 1st, 2007