I usually don’t make quick hits on a topic, but I just read a post on Reflections of a Newsosaur that made my blood pressure rise.
This sums up his opinion best:
“If we are going to save the tradition of professional journalism, it is vital for publishers to begin producing content that is sufficiently unique, authoritative and valuable to motivate”
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Your editors is probably thinking “damn right!”. We do that everyday, set up the pay wall now!
Resist the temptation. If you read his full post he does make some compelling arguments and even admits that not every market is capable of charging for its content. But your management will overlook that little caveat.
Newspaper web sites must shift their primary focus from connecting people-to-content to connecting people-to-people first, a.k.a. social networking. This is how news is going to get consumed as well as generate new revenue. Will this revenue support the current newsrooms? Highly unlikely. News organizations need to restructure. Many are being forced to through layoffs.
We need creative minds to think of new ways to monetize the changing media landscape. Attempts to setup pay walls is nothing more than last gasp efforts to retain a dying business model in a new media world.
Filed Under: Media, New Media by Eric Kaiser — Comments Off
March 5, 2009
Back in 2004 Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, with music by Aaron McLeran, created a video called Epic 2014. The video painted a bleak future for newspapers where Google and Amazon took over the media landscape. This foretelling video was received with skepticism by many in the newspaper industry, but some did see it as a wake up call. It’s interesting to look at that video now some 5+ years later.
Google indeed has changed the media landscape through Google News and the host of other tools and applications they provide in addition to their search. Amazon recently released the Kindle, which isn’t in direct competition with newspapers, but certainly puts another nail in the coffin of print.
Google’s latest foray into journalism comes in the form of “Patch“. Patch is being underwritten by Google’s president of advertising for North America and Latin America Tim Armstrong through his private investment company, Polar Capital Group.
Patch, in a nutshell, is a way to find about, and participate in, what’s going on around you. Google’s plan is to put small teams of journalists around the country to produce hyper-local content. This is not a new idea, Yahoo had a similar newspaper initiative some 6 years ago that failed. But oh how times have changed. Thousands of journalists are out of jobs. Talk about ripe for the picking.
Google was asked why don’t they bail out newspapers, now we know why. This is a serious shift in their business from indexing content to creating content.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know this could be devastating to newspapers. I’m sure this action by Google will spawn numerous lawsuits. I would imagine most newspapers will take measures to prevent their news from appearing on Google News. I also wonder what this will do to their relationship with the Associated Press.
What’s equally surprising is how this venture has remained below the radar screen. Thanks to John Battelle for posting this on his blog. Please check his post out for more information.
I’ve just finished Day 1 of DrupalCon here in Washington, DC. The session topics were varied and thought provoking.
I went to:
The Themer’s Toolkit
The Keynote: State of Drupal by Dries (which was awesome)
Drupal in the Newsroom, from Mother Jones to New York Observer
Drupal Module Developement Kickstart
Beyond the Web: Drupal Meets the Desktop
Going Live: Content Scheduling With Slot Machine
I won’t bore you with all the details of these sessions. But let me highlight a couple of things as it pertains to newspapers.
There are 1400 Drupalers here this year. That’s 600+ more than last year’s conference in Boston. I’m sure there would have been more, but the conference sold out! This speaks to the community and enthusiasm behind Drupal.
There are a lot of newspaper and magazine people here. I have no way of knowing how many, but I’ve already met 3 new people this year from the newspaper industry. And one of them was from Sweden.
Dries gave a very good overview of how Drupal has evolved from a class project to a full blow content management system. He gave an excellent presentation that I can best sum up by saying we can’t understand and plan the future of Drupal until we reflect and process the history of Drupal.
The “Drupal in the Newsroom” session was interesting in how it spun into how to deal with commenting on newspaper and magazine’s web sites. We are all struggling with how to make these comments relevant instead of annoying. Nick Aster from Mother Jones magazine has some great insight into this as did Allen Freeman from McClatchy Interactive. Here’s their presentation if you would like to listen for yourself.
Nick’s angle was to somehow create a way of collecting these comments and serve them back to the reader as more of a solution to a problem. This would help weed out some of the nonsense. Possible solutions here are allowing users to tag comments as a solution or recommend a comment. The more votes a comment gets the higher up the thread it would go. I like the idea of empowering the community to do things like this. Another key point was getting the reporters and editors involved in the conversation. And please note the use of the word “conversation” over comments. That’s essentially what’s going on here. But the reporter and editor’s voices are missing from the conversation. What a perfect venue for a newspaper or magazine to engage it’s audience on a daily basis.
What is also worth noting here is McClatchy as well as Morris Interactive have embraced Drupal. These are two very large media companies. The reasons why Drupal is popular are varied, but one common reason is the Drupal Community. There is no other CMS that I’m aware of that has this large, or enthusiastic, community around it.
If you are in the publishing business you should, if you’re not already, take a hard look at Drupal. I cannot think of any reason why a news organization should spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a proprietary system. Out of the box it will do the same if not more than any system you will purchase. Don’t embrace Drupal simply because it’s free. Embrace it because of the community and it kicks ass.
