Category: Media

USA Today’s redesign, which emphasized its new consumer-created content features, was widely reviled by its users.
But the new features have been a spectacular success with users. In one month, USA Today’s pages per visit have doubled after a year of resolute flatness, according to Compete.com. Meanwhile, Neilsen//NetRatings says that site registrations are up 380%. Topix saw similar — but less spectacular — results with its bulletin boards. More on Topix in my upcoming report on Consumer Created Content.
It’s clear that now is the time to begin planning for adding comments to your site if you haven’t done so already. Now is a good time for clients to call us to talk about consumer created content for media sites.

Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Yesterday’s announcement that MySpace is becoming a news aggregator is a leading indicator of a brand-new era for the news business — and the content business in general.
The last big change was the emergence of the Web itself and the rush by media companies to move to the web. Over the last ten years, we’ve seen the media slowly adapt to this new environment as they shift their content online. The next shift could be just as profound as the last one.
A little over a year ago, in The Future of News, I advised publishers to deconstruct their sites in order to get the best audiences for their individual news items. Since then, Digg has moved from startup to one of the 100 most popular sites on the web. In 2007, publishers are trying hard to get readers to “Digg” their stories.
Now, MySpace is entering into that market with a whole new audience — one that is younger than the typical news audience and already strongly interconnected.
But this is a lot bigger than MySpace trying to swipe a bit of Digg’s mojo. This is the beginning of an era in which a whole new set of intermediaries are about to emerge in the media business. This could threaten the current Web business model of a lot of publishers, just as Web itself threatended their old business models.
I’m going to be talking and writing more about this in the coming months. It’s a scary new trend, and it’s not one that can be controlled. We need to find a way for media companies to thrive in this new environment.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

“Only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr… are to upload new photos”, according to a Reuters story that says user participation on most “Web 2.0” sites isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
That’s funny, I didn’t realize that Flickr was having a problem getting people to upload photos.
Consumer created content is now the big leagues, but we still don’t understand it all that well. It’s a reasonable (and old school) rule of thumb that only one percent of any site’s readers will post content on it — but that’s plenty. That’s consistent with the Flickr number from Hitwise, if the posters are uploading once every five visits.
But just because the participation rate on any given site is low, that doesn’t mean that posting by Web users is limited to a small number of people. In a recent survey, we found that nearly a third of online consumers have posted content to a social network, blog or media site. My report on consumer created content, which goes a lot deeper into who these people are and what they think, will be out shortly.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Topix is evolving. They’ve increased their focus on geographical communities and bought the domain “topix.com”. But, most importantly, they’ve done a great deal in their new launch to empower the people who are posting to their sites.
Topix’s software does a pretty good job of surfacing locally relevant news. And their message boards are active, but they do contain a lot of aggressive and dumb comments. However, their mass-market, laissez-faire approach has resulted in steady growth in audience and intensity of use in the last year.
Now, by empowering locals to become editors for their community pages, Topix should be able to increase the relevance and interest of the stories on their community sites and create an atmosphere where people want to participate.
Rather than cherry-picking markets as Backfence did, Topix is throwing their creation on the mercies of Web. This is a bottom-up approach to widescale citizen journalism. The result is likely to be spotty. There will be great sites where Topix is adopted by the locals, and probably some places where the crazies will take over. Topix has already seen some great adoptions in some communities, just as individuals in other places have adopted Yahoo and Google groups for local communication.
Topix is evolving into a good community journalism platform for people who don’t have the skills to install WordPress or Expression Engine, and don’t want to pay a fee to TypePad, and aren’t prepared to deal with the limitations of Blogger.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

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.

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.

USAToday.com redesigns, with predictable fallout

March 5, 2007 Barry Parr

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.

Satellite radio: a match made in heaven
The proposed merger of the Sirius and XM satellite radio businesses addresses the biggest issue we identified the last time we looked at the business: building a stable subscriber base. Of course, combining their businesses will greatly decrease their overhead and programming costs, but this merger is very much about subscribers.
Both services are trying to expand rapidly and reaching the limits of the early-adopter market. They’re moving from pre-installation in luxury auto brands to economy brands. We’ve been concerned for a while that as they expand their target market, churn could increase to a point where their subscriber buckets were leaking faster than they could fill them.
It doesn’t help that more and more cars are coming pre-installed not only with satellite radio systems, but with connectors for MP3 players. So, they’re not only competing with free radio, but with the customer’s own music collection on a device they know and love.
By combining their businesses, Sirius and XM will not only greatly improve their chances of reaching a stable and profitable subscriber bases, they decrease any consumer uncertainty over which to choose and whether either service will be around in a couple of years.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

I’ve been saying for a long time that I don’t know why more local papers don’t cover their communities the way the Wall Street Journal covers theirs. Even within the constraints of budgets and talent, most local papers are capable of providing more perspective on their communities than they do.
In a column introducing the Journal’s new look, publisher L. Gordon Crovitz reveals that the new WSJ will be more like the old WSJ than ever.

The biggest change is the one Managing Editor Paul Steiger describes: The Journal’s news department is increasing the proportion of articles that are exclusive, telling you about facts, trends, ideas and analysis you won’t see anywhere else. A little over half of the Journal in recent times has been this kind of unique coverage — more than any other newspaper, which is one reason the number of people subscribing to the Journal is up by 10% this year, when most newspapers have many fewer such subscribers.
Still, this means that almost half of our news was available to readers the previous day, often online. We now aim to make 80% of your Journal what-it-means journalism, devoting the other 20% to ensuring that you haven’t missed anything of importance from the previous day. This approach reflects our vision of a Journal you can use throughout your day, with the print Journal focused on what the news means to you and The Wall Street Journal Online focused on what’s happening right now.

Further down he quotes Journal editor Bernard Kilgore as saying in the 1940s, “It doesn’t have to have happened today to be news.”
I can’t think of a better strategy to compete with the Web’s ownership of generic news than the one Kilgore articulated sixty years ago.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.