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“instead of delivering advertising to people, we deliver it to pages. And when you charge by the page/impression, the more pages the better. That’s why online advertising economics are so messed up.”
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“This is really two separate projects – there’s a rebuild of the backend and a rollout of the new design. Rather than develop it over 18 months with a big bang at the end, we’re doing it step by step.”
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“Try, just for a day, to stop using this word. You’ll be amazed at how differently you think about the world. Web users become people looking for information. Application users become employees trying to get stuff done.”
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“Commentary: An online journalism pioneer examines the state of the industry through the example of his hometown Florida newspapers… Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller is Editor in Chief for OSTG, owner of Slashdot”
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US: “The Conference Board said its gauge measuring help-wanted ad volume was 26 in June, the lowest reading since July 1958. It was 32 a year earlier.”
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“The majority of adult internet users in the U.S. (57%) report watching or downloading some type of online video content and 19% do so on a typical day.”
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Full Pew report on online video: “The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s first major report on online video also shows how many video viewers have contributed to the viral and social nature of online video.”
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“I suspect a lot of people are going to key on on this finding: Overall, 62% of online video viewers say that their favorite videos are those that are ‘professionally produced’.”
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“In looking at newspaper websites, it becomes clear pretty quickly that their homepages are bloated. They try to stick as much data as possible on the homepage (including ads).”
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“XTimeline, a tool for making timelines about pretty much anything that tickles your fancy, also offers users the opportunity to create timelines from RSS feeds.”
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“BBC Berkshire is among the organisations turning to the web to collect information on England’s severe flooding.”
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“A map showing photos, videos, flood warnings and BBC audio reports across Berkshire. Click any marker or line for more details.”
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“We’ve come a long way, There’s a growing recognition and appreciation of why citizen journalism matters. Investments, from media organizations and others, are fueling experiments of various kinds. Revenue models are taking early shape.”
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“In 1990 the Post Co.’s newspaper division contributed 48 percent of revenues and 51 percent of operating income; last year newspapers accounted for 25 percent of revenues and 14 percent of operating income.”
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“On closer look, the site is even more of a portal site. It’s very much a community site. There is plenty of good stuff going on here with UGC, blogs and calendar.”
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“when your entire business model is predicated on scarcity (i.e., the scarcity of pages for advertising), how do you deal with the sudden abundance that the Internet has created?”
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“The problem is that on the web there’s a nearly infinite amount of space. So when traditional media companies try to sell space online the same way they sell space offline, they find they only have a fraction of the pricing power.”
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“IFRA is to use the Daily Telegraph’s development of an integrated newsroom as the basis of a training programme aimed at teaching senior US editors how to manage seismic organisational change.”
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“Newspapers’ online ad revenue increased 31.5% in 2006 to $2.7 billion. In the first quarter of 2007, online ad revenue increased 22.3% to $750 million. Still, online represented just 5% of the $49.3 billion in total newspaper ad revenue in 2006.”
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Blog from Borrell Associates, a media research firm specializing in local Internet advertising.
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“Which major newspaper will be the first to throw away its newsprint and scrap its presses – and peddle its wares by internet alone?”
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“Online advertising — and maybe all advertising — is about performance. Whether you’re selling CPC or CPM-based advertising, if you can’t deliver results commensurate to your characterization of your site’s performance, you won’t retain advert
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“while domestic at international users view an average 12 pages per month at British news sites, Americans see just four.”
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When the Press Fails: Political Power and the New Media from Iraq to Katrina by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston; American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media by Neil Henry
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“To persist in using panels that undercount or ignore the diverse populations that are the future of consumer marketing is to deny marketers the insights they need to build their businesses.”
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“In total, online businesses accounted for 10.3 percent of NYTCO’s revenues in Q2 versus 8.0 percent last year.”
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“By Mark Briggs: A digital literacy guide for the information age. An initiative of J-Lab and the Knight Citizen News Network.”
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“We have taken a sample of nine of these companies – Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn, CollectiveX, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, Haystack, and ONEsite”
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“Now what gets me really excited is to think about the ad model that could happen in this environment of machine-driven semantic relationships.”
Entries from July 2007
links for 2007-07-30
30 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-07-29
29 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“People aren’t wasting any time trying to figure out how to monetize all those thousands of Facebook apps that have sprung up over the last couple of months. At least three advertising experiments have launched – the most promising, by far, is RockYou.”
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“Which articles do you often refer back to? Which ones are you always forwarding to people or referring to in speeches and seminars? Which are the articles that changed your mind, shaped your thinking or simply summarised a complex issue?”
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“Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or “membe
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“It’s tempting to think that people read your blog. Sadly, they don’t. They skim them. So always make your content skim-friendly. Write it with “skimmabilty” baked-in.”
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“The gatekeeper has always been with us, it’s just that the job descriptions and qualifications have changed. It’s no longer crusty city desk editors and executive producers. It’s you and me.”
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“Monitoring tools like Recent Changes and History were made available to let the community moderate. Requiring registration to edit made contributors more accountable… Most importantly — a clear goal for the collaboration was set.”
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Homophily: “Organizations play a very powerful role in bringing together similar people and in creating homogenous views on a variety of topics.”
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“For you to identify their complete region of interests, you necessarily have to show them things in and out of that region. The best way to make those connections is to mix it up.”
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“So we figured we’d use this new found expertise for good and offer the newspaper industry some unsolicited advice on how to improve their websites. “
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“Attention economics will reshape business economics. It is not just a question of re-thinking marketing, but re-conceiving business.”
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“Attention is ultimately what counts – attention profiles have value only because our attention has so much value… [b]ecause it is so scarce or, more accurately, because its relative scarcity has been rapidly increasing. “
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“On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development”
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“Shane Richmond is asking for contributions to a list of classic blog posts on online journalism. For some reason my comments don’t seem to have gone through, so here’s my list of the essential reads for online journalists:”
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“Use print to explain…Use multimedia to show… Use interactives to demonstrate and engage.”
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“I’d like to toss out objectivity as a goal, however, and replace it with four other notions that may add up to the same thing. They are pillars of good journalism: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency.”
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“carefully consider whether the content we’ve found online was ever intended to be seen by a wider audience and if any harm could be done by exposing it to that audience – and then, rather than seeking access, we link, quote and clearly disclaim”
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“We have a phrase in TV that simple packages are clip- link-clip-link. I know it reduces the medium to its basic principle but you see the idea. An interview clip is then linked to the next bit of content by a bit of script. “
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“One advantage of traveling to journalism workshops around the country is getting to hear great photojournalists talk about their work. We thought we’d collect some of their wisdom in one place as inspiration to their peers.”
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G. Stuart Adam: “To journalists, editors, and teachers who want to understand the creative process and how it can work for them.”
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“To help you learn some of these skills and start experimenting with online journalism, we’ve assembled a list of sites and programs that will help you quickly and easily begin using multimedia and the internet to advance your reporting”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-07-25
25 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“This redesign seems more traditional (old-fashioned?) in nature. It’s neat. It’s clean. But you have to scroll down a bit to reach the blogs, video and most viewed/most e-mailed features.”
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“The changes go beyond the logo. The new site is easier to use and has a cleaner look. It labels the breaking news better, adds spots for more video and photos, and offers more opportunities for you to participate.”
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Principles of scripting video packages, from Andy Dickinson.
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“More than 59 million people (37.3 percent of all active Internet users) visited newspaper Web sites on average during the second quarter of 2007, a record number that represents a 7.7 percent increase over the same period a year ago”
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Bivings report analysing content and functionality of 100 US newspapers: “Overall, we found that the use of interactive features by newspaper websites increased across every category from 2006 to 2007″
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“Our research examined the websites of the top 100 newspapers in the United States, as determined by circulation (via the Audit Bureau of Circulations). We evaluated all of the websites on the presence of lack of various web features.”
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Simon Waldman reignites his blog.
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“Still, it seems impossible for the New York Times or other newspapers to overcome the 10% problem without beginning to value online ads at a premium, the same as they do in print”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-07-24
24 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“Chris Boyd, chief executive of the British ABC, told MediaGuardian.co.uk that there were no plans for ABC In Britain to add such a figure to its audit certificates.”
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Yesterday, the Ledger launched NJVoices, a local version of the Comment is Free and HuffingtonPost. It’s the same idea: Invite in some opinion leaders — including the paper’s own columnists — and give them a platform to have their say
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“While I applaud the channel for sparking such interaction, there’s some risk on having viewers participate in a third party venue…. little control over how other people respond to the submitted videos.”
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“The 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.”
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New local blog network.
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-07-23
23 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
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Should Newspapers Become Local Blog Networks? » Publishing 2.0
“What’s becoming clear is that blogs are now the organizing principle for newspapers’ original online content. And these are “real” blogs, i.e. driven by one or two individual bloggers, with (often active) comments, RSS feeds, the whole nine yards
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“Down, down, down. There’s no other way to describe the Q2 financial performance of US newspapers and frankly for this year at least there is no light at all at the end of the tunnel.”
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Gloom and doom as advertisers desert US papers from Greenslade
“It is often said that media commentators in Britain should not pay too much attention to what is happening in the US. Our industry is in a better state of health than theirs.”
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Newspapers’ Ad Sales Show Accelerating Drop – WSJ.com
“Total print and online ad revenue was down 4.8% to $10.6 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to the Newspaper Association of America, compared with its full-year decline in 2006 of 0.3%.”
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Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Web Strategy Analysis: Homepage Breakdown of the top 10 Blogs
“As blogs reach nuclear status, it’s interesting to see how they start to monetize from ads, focus less on navigating away from the sites, and how much content they continue to share.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-07-21
21 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“For at least 10 years we are going to have to have an act of faith and pump money into digital markets without significant return… and we will do it with the expectation that things will change”
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“There are 10 guidelines we would like you to be aware of, and which we expect all participants in the community areas of GU to abide by”
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“87% of the crossover users reported that their time spent with newspaper media had remained the same or increased.”
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Scarborough Research: “81% of newspaper website users also read the printed newspaper in the last 7 days. Crossover users visit their newspaper website for: breaking news (96%), articles seen previously (85%), things to do/places to go (72%)”
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“Yes, my local paper does a great job of covering local news and issues. Maybe as an old guy, I’m still willing to pay for that. But the younger generation? With pretty-darn-good free alternatives, I don’t see them being motivated to pay.”
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“Blue Lithium Labs just released a 9-month study that found advertising on user generated content sites does better than other sites.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-07-19
19 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“Find video on the home page and section fronts. Share your photos and video with us and other readers. Find larger photos, more photo galleries and more multimedia tools and features, Give feedback on stories directly and immediately.”
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“16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30.”
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“The evidence shows that young Americans are estranged from the daily newspaper and rely more heavily on television than on the Internet for their news.”
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“Dubbed ‘Audience-FAX,’ the new voluntary initiative will collect newspaper-provided data from in-market print, online and and combined readership”
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I should read these, no less than once.
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-07-17
17 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“But search advertising is at the extreme end of simplicity — just a few lines of text. When you get to visual display ads, and then video ads, the complexity increases geometrically.”
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“Post often, Post irregularly, Stay on topic, Post chronologically, Engage in conversation”
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“The strongest may be successful enough to dominate specific categories. The weakest may be picked off by pseudo-specialist features added to generalist search-engines.”
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“Engage the community. It’s not journalism—it’s a conversation. Trust the audience. Focus on strong, well-defined communities. Leverage social networking. There is a robust hyperlocal advertising business. Keep costs down. Hyperlocal works.”
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Came across this old Steve Outing column: “let’s explore the possibilities, from dipping a toe into the waters of participatory journalism to embracing citizen reporting with your organization’s full involvement” [via Mark Potts]
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“To really go sufficiently hyperlocal, LoudounExtra.com needs to identify EVERY discreet community and determine whether someone is already blogging about the community to include them in their blog network.”
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New local site from the Washington Post
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“The site, LoudounExtra.com, is an experiment in hyperlocal news; it will have church schedules, restaurant menus and real-time high school football scores… The paper publishes a section about the county twice a week.”
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Q2 IPA Bellwether report: “Budgets for internet advertising grew faster than those allocated to any other medium in the U.K. during Q2… Some 21.8 percent of companies reported increasing their online marketing spend”
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“We nee much more experimentation in journalism and community information projects… Dealing with the issues of trust, credibility and ethics is essential; as are more tools and training, including a dramatically updated notion of media literacy.”
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“It fell far short of the original aim of producing over 80 feature stories, but in over a dozen interviews conducted by phone and e-mail, contributors uniformly described a positive, “though frequently exasperating,” experience.”
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Insider’s account of Assignment Zero.
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-07-16
16 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“There is still time and opportunity, and newspapers still have tremendous advantages in content resources and community brand and good will.”
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“And the bonus ninth reason: I believe the sleeping giant is awake. For the past year or more, we’ve seen newspaper companies giving the web more attention and more money”
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“I thought I would try punting a blog post on to My Telegraph… Yes, the blogoshere, like pop, will eat itself.”
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List of media and newspaper sites using the Drupal CMS.
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If only everyone read: “How to write a five-sentence email… All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.”
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“Gelato is an open source tumblelog CMS… Tublelogs are the ADHD version of blogging, meant for easily throwing up mixed media posts made up of photos, videos, chat logs, links, quotes, and short paragraphs.”
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Another tumblelog cms.
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“Play with me on this one: Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?”
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“Tom Friedman suggests that when the cameras are always rolling we’ll all be a lot more careful… I think instead we’ll all be a lot more confident that the awful things we do are perfectly normal.”
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“The sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty… the representations of the people who play in it don’t have human needs… Even at peak times, only about 30,000 to 40,000 users are logged on”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-07-14
14 July 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“Newsvine is a good example of a startup CJ site aiming to be a mainstream news destination… Newsvine uses many of the tenets of ‘web 2.0′ in its design – such as user-generated content, reputation, voting, comments, friends lists, tags, and more”
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Forrester European ad spend figures: “Forrester’s analysts predict that spending on online advertising will rise from €7.5bn last year to more than €16bn (£11bn) in 2012.”
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“The value of European online marketing — including email, search, and display advertising — will more than double from around €7.5 billion in 2006 to more than €16 billion in 2012, 18% of total media budgets.”
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“The demise of this ambitious startup is unfortunate, but not unexpected, I think. While Backfence’s aims were noble, the company made what turned out to be some key strategic errors early on.”
Categories: Daily links
Hello. I'm David Black. I work as Group Director of Digital Publishing at Trinity Mirror plc. This personal blog includes links on the trends transforming newspaper and classified businesses online. 
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