Category: Media

Microsoft is ending its exclusive deal with MSNBC for local and non-US news. Jupiter found in our Future of News report that MSNBC.com is the breakaway leader in US national and international news, and clearly a big part of the reason for this is the distribution that Microsoft is able to give it.
There are a couple of lessons here. One is the continuing primacy of distribution over content on the net in general and the Web in particular. Content is still staggeringly important, but there are still precious few outlets with the distribution to provide the the economies of scale necessary for worldwide news coverage. Call it the “small head” of the long-tailed market.
The second lesson is that there is little synergy between content and distribution. It’s better to the able to shop for the best deal on content than it is to be bound to a news-collection network. Remember: Wal-Mart doesn’t make anything. They use their distibution power to shop around and force their prospective suppliers to figure out how to cut costs. I’m not arguing that content producers wouldn’t like to own their distribution, but that if you separate the content and the distribution, the value of the parts will be greater than that of the merged business.
The third lesson is that we will see fewer comprehensive sources of national and international news over time. Headline news is increasingly a commodity, and in the future MSNBC.com will continue to need Microsoft more than Microsoft needs MSNBC.com.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

David Card asks if tagging is “the new, new thing or meme that runs out of steam in 6 months?“. I agree that tagging is moving against the tide of the net. The informal creation of metadata through linking is one of the great unsung assets of the Web, at least among its primary beneficiaries in the publishing business. But it works because it’s in the linker’s self-interest to create meaningful links.
In a game of tag, no one wants to be the one doing the tagging. Tagging requires a little extra unnecessary effort that most folks are not only unwilling to make, but aren’t prepared to learn. The net depends on the altruism of the few and the indifference of the many.
But I’m really going to miss those cool-looking, pointless, tag clouds.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

After two years of experimentation, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is no longer changing the layout of its pages depending on the day. They called it “dayparting”, borrowing a term from TV advertising. This was perhaps not the best pool in which to fish for metaphors.

Good theory, and we saw some gains in traffic early on. But, two years of hard-won experience made it clear that we can’t be all things to all people all the time. People might want to play games or shop or read celebrity gossip, but they weren’t coming to our site for that (well, maybe for the gossip).
SeattlePI.com is, first and foremost, a news site.

Terry Heaton has a good analysis why this doesn’t work, focusing on the fact that readers don’t come in via the home page any more, an idea I explored in our Future of News report.
The big aha! in the story is their realization that they’re a news site. But they’ve only implicitly acknowledged the real lesson in their conclusion.

Meanwhile, we’ll stick with the news-oriented layout that we’ve been using between midnight and 1 p.m. on weekdays. We’ve redesigned it a bit for the Seattle Seahawks’ history-making playoff run (which, hopefully, will last beyond tomorrow). Interest in the team is at an all-time high — at least, among our users — and we wanted to make it easier for people to find all of our Seahawks content when they come to the site.

They are, first and foremost, a local news site.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Today’s West Virginia mine tragedy is also a media tragedy. And it is yet another illustration that newspapers are often out of date by the time they reach us. In this case, the mistake is well-known and was publicly corrected before most of us read it. But newspapers are full of stories that their readers can find in more current and often more complete versions online.
Jay Rosen uses this as an occasion to look at what newspaper should take responsiblity for. But it makes me wonder: what’s a newspaper for?
We’ve known for a while that newspapers are unsuited to covering breaking news. This is a mistake that editors and publishers are doomed to repeat until they rethink their role in the community.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Hearst’s Houston Chronicle dropped mandatory registration Monday as part of a redesign of its site.
It will be interesting to see how dropping the registration requirement will affect the use of, and links to, its news stories by bloggers and others on the Web.
Registration data has to be a lot less useful in selling advertising than it was in the old days. Advances in behavioral targeting have made the kind of primitive demographics captured by registration to seem awfully primitive. Then, there’s the fact that Internet advertising has become a lot easier to sell in the last couple of years.
But, I’ve long considered the fact that only one industry (newspapers) requires registration to read its content to be prima facie evidence that registration is a bad idea.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

The general lack of enthusiasm for buying Knight-Ridder, either the whole company or the individual papers, is making me wonder whether the company’s stock is properly priced after all.
To justify the cost of buying the company for more its current price, you’d have to either cut costs or increase revenue. No big newspaper company is going to achieve any special cost-cutting advantages without dramatically changing their business model. For another media company (or any other company) to do this would be to incur huge risk of failure with little upside potential.
The market seems to be saying that newspaper companies are doing a pretty good job of managing the decline of their core products. Keeping these companies as pure plays may be the best way for us to manage our portfolios.
The big question remains. Can newspaper companies create the next-generation news services that the Internet audience demands, or will they remain cash cows for someone else’s big ideas?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

My reaction to Microsoft’s Live.com site was similar to my reaction to Google’s new toolbar. The ability to display RSS feeds on a page or a widget isn’t enough to get you into the game anymore. I’m about as excited by that as I am about the ability to add a clock or the weather to something.
One thing is clear from live.com: the Spartan look of Google will soon become as ubiquitous as the information-intense look of Yahoo was in the late nineties.
The big news is that RSS is going to be everywhere and it’s going to continue to get easier for ordinary users to display headlines wherever the like without knowing how they’re doing it. We’re all going to have to become aggregators. And we’re all going to have to get better at writing headlines.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Apple’s new iPod is not so much a video iPod, as it is an iPod that happens to play video. They’ve added a bigger screen and 50% more storage, and taken away a third of the size from their base iPod, making it an extremely attractive upgrade to a well-loved product.
Not many people are going to buy one of these to play videos, but plenty of people will buy them. In other words, video adds no value to the new iPod.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

These days, your name’s top Google results are an important part of your identity. I just discovered that stories from a community news site that I operate are the number one or two result when you Google nearly every elected official in the community, as well as the editor and publisher of the local newspaper.
How did I beat out the local paper of record? I focused on making my site friendly to search engines. The local paper, by comparison, has stuck its archives in a database that is apparently impenetrable to spiders.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

There’s an hilarious report of Jon Stewart tearing up a panel of editors at a Magazine Publishers of America event on MediaBistro this week. It’s way too long, but worth reading nonetheless, and includes an brilliant ad libbed analysis of the role of websites in magazine journalism:

Actually, though, Jon turns to Jim [Kelly, the managing editor of Time magazine] and addresses an ‘issue’: “With the speed of news today, how does Time stay relevant?” Jim reminds Jon that Time has a website. Jon shakes his head. “I’m not asking you how you get people to subscribe,” he says.

I had to Google Kelly to get his title, because if there’s a masthead on Time’s website, I couldn’t find it.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.