lawshead

The Skinny

The Number

3

That’s the number, of course, of the publications to which WikiLeaks leaked the Afghan War papers. The papers: the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. Marketplace reporter Eve Troeh and Poynter’s Kelly McBride do a good job of connecting the dots: the power of scarcity as a few big old media brands connect with new media leaked files to create huge impact. I’ve talked about the power of the Digital Dozen — the 12 or so going-global media companies who will fare well in this next generation of digital journalism; this story supports that notion.

The Quote

Hugh Hefner, in Deborah Solomon’s New York Times Sunday Magazine’s “Questions for….” feature:

Q: Playboy’s circulation, which peaked in the ’70s at 7 million, is down to about 1.5 million. Is there money to be made in magazines these days?
A: Certainly in Playboy’s case they make money by being in other businesses. To begin with, it was the magazine that carried the brand; now the brand carries the magazine.

The Quote

“The question is whether people will trade freedom for convenience. I think they will. They have before.”

Read more »

4 Questions for the Blog Matchmaker

World-class blog expert John Wilpers shares the tips of his trade, including: “I consider myself a blog matchmaker: I match the needs of information companies (newspapers, magazines, online-only news sites) for ever broader, more relevant, and deeper content with the needs of bloggers for exposure, broader platforms, enhanced credibility, and increased revenue opportunities. There are blog wranglers out there cramming websites full of blogs without regard for the benefit of the company or the blogger, creating blogger ghettos distinguished only by the fact that the content is created by non-staffers”.

Read more »

13 Tips for Using Twitter in the Enterprise

Barry Graubart is a guru of smart, company use of social tools, in addition to serving as Vice President, Product Strategy & Business Development at Alacra. He recently participated in an SIIA seminar I led around Law #1: “We’re Becoming Our Own and Each Other’s Editors.”

His thinking impressed the breakfast group and he followed up with 13 suggestions, which we’re sharing more broadly.

Read more »

Ask the Agency Guy

Q: The Sports Illustrated tablet demo has now been viewed more than a 600,000 times on YouTube alone. What do you think about it?

A: What’s interesting is not about the tablet, per se. It’s about multi-touch interfaces. which are fast becoming standard. The interaction in the demo is nifty, but not necessarily unique to SI (or even particularly futuristic at this point). In a sense, this is really just another web page…just a few months ahead of its time. Maybe even less.

Read more »



Content Bridges

I wonder how much the Gumbo-like turns of circulation accounting will matter to ad buyers.

News Flash! Circulation Up 1042%!

Seriously, I wonder how much the Gumbo-like turns of circulation accounting will matter to ad buyers. Increasingly, across all media buying, they are focused on audience. They want to know who (gender, age, household status, region, clickstream behavior, recent buying behavior and more) and they want to target these on the fly, as the world turns, spinning ever more quickly. So audience targeting is getting to be instantaneous; a 20th of a second is what we hear it takes.

Read more »

Gannett’s Whimper & Bang Show Strategies Plainly in Flux

So Gannett’s decided that it’s go-it-alone, devise-its own-local-marketing strategies approach didn’t work.

Read more »

Weigel and Nasr “Sins” Put the Church of High Integrity on Trial

Thinking about the recent terminations at the Washington Post and CNN, though, I wonder if the press priesthood is still another cultural institution in the process of being swept away, encumbered as much as it has by habit as by principle.

Read more »

Nine Questions for 2H, 2010: Brains on internet, Reuters’ app success, TV tabs, Last Man Standing and Angelo’s question

Are we beginning to see the Last Man Standing strategy play out in the U.S.’s biggest cities? The New York Times is planning on building out 10-15 regional editions, on the model of its Chicago (partnered with the Chicago News Cooperative) and Bay Area (partnered with Bay Area Citizen) models. Now the Wall Street Journal is renewing its previously announced regional forays, into Chicago, L.A. and perhaps other places. WSJ CEO Les Hinton noted this week that “we’ve done focus groups and see a growing antipathy among high-end readers, towards what’s happened to their local newspapers.” One publisher’s nightmare is another’s opportunity.

Read more »

Newsonomics of...

The Newsonomics of the Dead Cat Bounce

Are there any positive growth numbers to report? Which categories may be turning positive — maybe national or retail display ads — as the sagging economy continues to plague the traditional classified strengths of auto, recruitment, and real estate?

Read more »

The Newsonomics of Replacing Larry King

Can CNN find a digital upgrade to the analog King?

Read more »

The Newsonomics of Tablet Ad Readiness

We can look at each of the major revolutions in digital news and commerce, and see how news companies responded.

Search. Late.

Paid search. Way too late.

Video. Late.

Social. Too late.

Mobile. Largely too late.

News companies have used old yardsticks to measure new technologies, and the results have been, predictably and disastrously, too little, too late.

Read more »

The Newsonomics of Copyediting Value

That’s left me wondering exactly what value is in good editing. Are there any Newsonomics of editing, value to be gained and harvested?

Read more »

Touts

ProPublica’s “Investigations Elsewhere”

ProPublica has built quite a reputation for itself, in it short life. Its own work -- from the privatization of higher education to rogue nurses to BP's unreported pollutions has put it on the map. In addition, it also offers a handy index of the aptly named "Investigations Elsewhere." Pulling from sources as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, Parade and Mothers Jones, and including major dailies around the country, it's a great showcase, and check-in on the state of longer-form investigative pieces. We see a half dozen new pieces added daily.

Yes, budget cuts have hurt the form, but it's getting new life -- witness the energy brought by ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity and Center for Investigative Reporting, among others -- that's extending back to major dailies. The partnerships with the foundation-funded national investigative groups has helped, as has the determination of those heading certain newsrooms and investigative pros, doing the work, even as their papers are challenged seemingly on every front.

Source

Does the Newspaper Industry Need a Strategy?

That’s the key question Poynter news analyst Rick Edmonds asks in his Thursday column, “Are Newspapers Sticking to a Premium Strategy Amid Digital Disruption?”

Citing a McKinsey study on how industries deal with the advent of “low-cost rivals,” Rick lays out good arguments for how the industry approaches are too little, too late, too limited. He’s right. In mid-2010, there isn’t a cohesive industry strategy. In fact, lower-cost entrants — AOL, Yahoo/Associated Content, Demand +++ — aren’t just pests; they’re changing the economics of producing content. That’s not a small issue. It may well lead the next wave of disruption.

Source

Rubel: The End of the Web as We Know It

Marketing master Steve Rubel points to Morgan Stanley’s recent forecast that mobile info consumption will surpass PC-based consumption by 2015 and draws a few conclusions that all publishers should take to heart. Number one, in my estimation: the need for collaboration, between and among brands and with technology providers and distribution companies.

The mobile revolution is transformative, not a niche of what is mainstream today. As Mashable points out, “The mobile wealth creation/destruction cycle is in its earliest stages”.

Source

The Onion: Boston Globe Tailors Print Edition for Three Remaining Readers

Need some great ideas to retaining those precious print subscribers? Stories printed on pancakes, features on dating in your sixties, and new Jumbles.

"We'll be bringing our readers the same high-quality news we always have, just focusing on the five or six topics that interest them."

A must-see for all newsrooms.

Source

Harlan Ellison: Pay the Writer

Writer Harlan Ellison's impassioned, profanity-laced tirade against those who expect writers to work for free is making new rounds via the viralness of .... the free web, of course. We can have good abstract talks about content factories, content mills and the Pro-Am world. Ellison's rant is a perfect 3-minute tonic: plain-speaking in an age of analytic excess.

On YouTube, the 2007 video has now gotten almost 400,000 views.

Source

Community Daily Pay Walls: A Tourniquet?

Good, in-depth piece by Nat Ives at AdAge on community dailies' paywalls. Nat concludes that you can learn something from the experiences in Harlingen (TX), El Dorado (AR) and Norwalk (CT), but that's there's hardly a panacea here. I recently did a panel with Arkansas Democrat publisher Walter Hussman at ASNE in DC, and came away with a similar feeling.

Smaller-market dailies can take a different route than metros. So far, it's not a route to prosperity, but one of staunching the bleeding....and waiting for a better digitally oriented business model to come along. In retrospect, given the carnage the metros have suffered, that's not a bad strategy, it's just a wait-and-see one that looks relatively good in 2010.

A key question for smaller community dailies: where are you going to find growth in your business? My sense is that even with a paywall, smaller dailies' abilities to reach out to higher-quality local bloggers, even smaller weekly newspapers, radio stations and TV broadcasters could enlarge their presence -- making them a small community center -- and that can give them a foundation for digital ad growth.

Finally, the article makes the point that the smaller papers receive more ad revenue from local advertisers than do metros, whose loss of national advertising (moving more quickly to competitive digital plays) has been another big negative. That national/local ad dependence further defines large market/small market difference.

In some sense, just as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, though still printed on newsprint, are no longer the same category of newspaper companies as the Philadelphia Inquirer or San Francisco Chronicle, neither is the Inquirer or the Chronicle really in the same business as the El Dorado News-Times or the Norwalk Reflector. The fact that they are all in still in newsprint no longer defines them; their size of market and audience, and their scale and uniqueness of content, does.

Source

$17 Billion Target for Local News Companies: Directories

Alan Mutter pinpoints an old-is-new opportunity -- the next wave of competition for the local directory market, put at $17 billion. The players here -- incumbent Yellow Pages, newspapers, local broadcasters and Google, each with too-numerous strengths and weaknesses to note here. Good post on a serious pot of money that should get new focus for local news companies of all kinds.

Source

Poynter’s Mobile Media: Worth a Daily Stop

Twitter feeds have only upped the high blood pressure quotient of following the news business news. One quite timely addition to our daily Romenesko reading is Poynter Institute's new Mobile Media blog, ably edited by Damon Kiesow, managing editor for online at the Nashua Telegraph, and Regina McCombs, a Poynter faculty member. The blog launched earlier this year -- just in time for tabletmania. Great daily point of reference on the news biz and all things not PC.

As Kiesow wrote near launch:

"Needless to say mobile is the next big thing for journalism and the Web in general. Many of our posts so far have been focused on the iPad, Kindle and the coming war between Apple, Google and Microsoft. The first one to hire Arnold Schwarzenegger to go back in time to destroy the original iPhone prototype wins.

We are also looking for examples of media companies (large and small) doing cool things with mobile devices. This could include streaming live video from a cell phone, writing stories with a Blackberry, using location-based social media or creating a great mobile ad sales strategy. Basically anything journalism (or news revenue) related that does not involve a desk and a PC".

Source