If you’ve ever studied Mass Communications or Journalism you always discuss the purpose of Mass Communications in your introductory course. One of those purposes is to pass on cultural ideals/norms/values.
We just had sloppy joes for dinner. I had to pass on Adam Sandler’s Lunch Lady Land to my kids. So, here’s me inculcating you.
Another side of this whole paid content debate is the concept that Google is stealing the newspapers content and is evil. Pretty much anyone who is out there advocating a pay wall for newspapers stories is also a proponent of keeping Google away from their content. The funny thing is the opposite is true. If you want more traffic on your web site and more people reading your news stories, then Google is your friend. Google probably sends more traffic to your news site than any other source.
The Guardian has an interesting look at this debate pitting the NY Times Maureen Dowd against Jeff Jarvis examining whether Google is friend or foe.
Dowd says Google has hijacked journalism. “Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy. Robert Thomson, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like Google as “tapeworms”.”
Jarvis on the other hand has faced the facts. “I had been naively thinking – hoping – that there would be an orderly transfer of power, print to digital, and that many of the incumbents would survive and some might lead the transition. With some exceptions, I no longer believe that.”
Twitter has been in the news a lot this week with the race to million followers between Ashton & CNN and Oprah’s introducing twitter to her huge audience, not to mention the techie audience blowback to Oprah and her new followers. I’m glad that Oprah has introduced twitter to a whole new audience (especially since Twitter for the most part survived the additional users). And all the new users and Oprah don’t bother really bother me because their not in my network and if the do happen to comment on something that I’m searching for, I welcome their input.
Mitch (see comment) sent me a Business Week article this week about the latest attempt to charge for online content fostered by Steven Brill. He’s proposing creating a consortium of a lot of different content providers that the reader would pay a subscription fee to access the content. I really don’t believe charging for online content will work in most circumstances, because readers will seek out the free content somewhere else and in most cases advertising models on free content will generate more revenue than subscriptions because of the higher traffic generated on the free content models.
But besides what I think, there’s a lot of buzz around . Here’s a couple of analysis of Brill’s model that makes sense to me.
According to Nielsen online video viewing in the United States is now over three hours a month to 169 minutes a month on average. Those numbers are significant, but the bigger part of the analysis to me is
“Since the number of minutes per user is increasing at a faster rate than the number of videos per user, that means people are gradually moving to longer and longer videos–from 2.4 minutes in February to 2.7 minutes in March.”
Which means long form video (like Hulu) is really starting to catch on.
Paid content will not save newspapers. Despite what many old journalism hands have said (including pay wall poster child Little Rock’s own Walter Hussman). Paid content limits your audience size and audience growth eventually flattens out. Here’s what the former head of NYTimes.com has to say about paid content…
Thanks to Jack Lail for pointing out this video.
Here’s a hilarious video about what happens when a blog hires some laid-off newspaper employees
Thanks to Chris for sharing the video.
I spent all morning banging my head against my computer and several search engines trying to remember the name of visual timeline tool that I found that was pretty cool– Vuvox. Vuvox is a web tool that alllows to create a collage of photos, video, audio and text to tell a story. Here’s a good example of one (be sure to hit the full screen button to get the full experience).
Some other timeline tools I found while I was trying to remember Vuvox include
I recently seperated my twitter from my facebook and I am only trying to twitter when I have something to say– which hasn’t been much lately. This video is a pretty good example of what twitter can become
Make sure you watch until the fail whale appears.
Scripps closed the Rocky Mountain News today– it was a great newspaper, a great website, a model of how a news operation can change. Unfortunately, the JOA in Denver didn’t give Scripps enough flexibility to stop the losses it had seen this past year ($16 million).
Here’s a long video on the end of the RMN (21 minutes, but it’s worth it.). If you can watch it in full screen in HD.
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.