Tag: new media

Living in the fishbowl

Students already know — or, least, they should know — that their Facebook and MySpace profiles can and will be used against them when they’re looking for a job. Now Ross Kerber reports in the Boston Globe that personal information posted to employment services such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com is ending up in the hands of marketers.

Which has me thinking about LinkedIn, a professional social-networking site that I joined about a year ago at the invitation of citizen-journalism pioneer Lisa Williams. As best as I can tell, I haven’t gotten any sales calls due to my LinkedIn profile. But I suppose it’s only a matter of time. We’re all living in the fishbowl now.

Google ads and “the long tail”

Does Lou Ureneck really think the little guys whose ads have popped up on his Web site about fishing in Greece would otherwise be taking out ads in newspapers? The Boston University journalism department chair writes about this in an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe:

[T]hose little Google ads that are popping on my website are chipping — more like hacking — away at newspapers by cutting into their revenue streams. A newspaper spends an enormous amount of money on its newsroom and production plants to bring me my morning paper. It needs that revenue to operate.

Google, on the other hand, spends not a dime on the collection of news. Its business, in part, is based on aggregating the work of others — or getting a cut from the advertising that appears on the websites of others. It’s a brilliant business model. No wonder it has a market capitalization of $160 billion.

In a sense, I am contributing to problems of newspapers by jumping into Web publishing and accepting advertising. Is this fair? Well, fair or not, it clearly is inevitable.

In fact, Ureneck’s site, and the advertising that appears on it, are examples of “the long tail,” an economics concept popularized in an article and book by Wired editor Chris Anderson. The long tail refers to tiny transactions that are too inefficient for anyone to bother with in a mass-market environment, but that become worthwhile as the cost of making those transactions goes down. The idea is that the Internet has reduced that cost nearly to zero.

An example of this is the limited number of books and CDs even a large retailer like Borders or Barnes & Noble can carry, versus the much larger selection offered by a virtual retailer like Amazon.com. But even Amazon is a mass marketer compared to hundreds and thousands of smaller sites. As the long tail lengthens, the size of the mass market might shrink (which is Ureneck’s concern.) But it’s not going to go away by any means.

As for Google and the news business, well, that’s been the subject of uneasy conversations for some time now. Late this past spring, Washington Post journalist-turned-UC Berkeley professor Neil Henry got his cookies toasted for seeming not to understand that Google News actually drives users to news organizations’ Web sites (and their advertising) — thus making, not costing, them money.

Ureneck asserts that Google “spends not a dime on the collection of news.” True, but as of last week, the company now intends to spend many dimes so that others can collect news: It’s subscribing to the Associated Press and other news services, and is featuring their full content on its Google News site. (Yahoo! News has been doing that since the beginning.)

If you think Google has been getting something of a free ride, then maybe you’ll see that as good news. But Poynter’s Amy Gahran cites a Forbes article that notes this “could diminish Internet traffic to newspaper and broadcast companies’ Web sites where those stories and photos are also found — a development that could reduce those companies’ revenue from online advertising.”

It’s all very complicated.

Analyzing the online news audience

The Shorenstein Center, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has issued an intriguing new study on user trends at news sites. You can read the whole thing (pdf) here, but let me offer a few observations and comments.

1. The study, titled “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet,” prepared by Shorenstein’s Tom Patterson, shows that a trend we’ve already seen with newspapers’ print editions is happening online as well: the national newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal) are doing much better than large and medium-size regional dailies, whose growth is stagnant. In fact, the study finds that the Times now accounts for “well over 10 percent of the online newspaper audience.”

This is serious — but not, I would argue, quite as serious as it might appear at first glance. Nor do I think it represents any major diminution in people’s interest in local news. Consider:

  • In most parts of the country, the national papers (especially the Post) are not as easy to get in hard copy as they are online. The Web sites of the national papers represent huge growth potential that simply isn’t available to regional papers, since getting the Baltimore Sun or the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (to name two of the papers included in the study) in print is easier and more convenient than reading it on the Web.
  • Readers outside a regional paper’s coverage area aren’t all that interested in what that paper has to offer. Nearly all of a regional paper’s target audience already has the option of easy home delivery. An exception that proves the rule: the Globe’s Boston.com might be the most popular regional news site in the country (depending on whether you consider the Los Angeles Times to be a regional or a national newspaper). And a lot of that, Globe insiders will tell you, is because of the “Red Sox diaspora.”
  • Most regional papers’ Web sites fall far short of the Times’ and the Post’s, which are models of how to do online journalism. Thus readers have an additional incentive to stick to print.

2. Shorenstein reports that the Web sites of PBS and local public television stations are losing audience. I’m not sure what to make of that, but I will point out that news is not the dominant programming paradigm on public television. Perhaps what this really means is that “Arthur” and “Sesame Street” aren’t as popular as they used to be. Certainly “The NewsHour” site is looking pretty good these days.

3. But we also learn that NPR and local public radio stations, which are far more news-oriented than public television, are losing online audience as well. And though I don’t pretend to know why, I do wonder whether podcasting has something to do with it. If you go to the podcast directory at the iTunes Store, you’ll see that NPR programs do very well. (Actually, so does the aforementioned “NewsHour.”) It could well be that the most Net-savvy of public radio’s listeners are going straight for the podcasts and not bothering to visit the Web sites. Podcasts are powerful; streaming audio (and video) is a loser.

Besides: I’m willing to bet that more than 90 percent of public radio is consumed in people’s cars. Even though public stations like Boston’s WBUR (90.9 FM) are trying to beef up their Web presence, the Web-print synergy that exists in the newspaper world has no analogue when it comes to radio.

4. The Shorenstein study finds that the growth of Digg.com is off the charts. The report describes Digg as an aggregator not much different from Google News or Yahoo! News, but that’s not quite right. Digg is a social-networking site that allows users to submit news stories that the community then votes on. Those that get the most votes rise to the top.

The readers’ choices tend to be tech-oriented, and those that aren’t can often be pretty juvenile. But the Internet, especially in its Web 2.0 incarnation, is all about community, conversation and participation, and Digg.com has found a way to apply that to news. There are lessons to be learned from that.

Update: GateHouse Media’s Howard Owens calls the Shorenstein report “seriously flawed,” and points to this for another perspective.

On the map

The New York Times today has a good and important front-page story on how simple mapping tools offered by Google and Yahoo! are changing the way we communicate. If you want more, Wired went deeper last month.

The revolution in free, Web-based software tools is astounding. Less than a year ago, when I showed my students mash-ups such as ChicagoCrime.org and this Boston.com mash-up of political contributions in the governor’s race, the likelihood of a non-programmer pulling off such a feat seemed nil. Now anyone can do it, and publish the results to the world.

Drawing the line on Herald comments

If you have some thoughtful — even caustic — criticism you’d like to offer about the Herald’s State Employee Payroll database, have at it. But if you’ve come here to bash Herald employees and to publicize their private information, you’ve come to the wrong place. You know who you are.

The salaries paid to public employees is public information. You might like it. You might not. But making public information public is not illegal, immoral nor, as best as I can tell, fattening.

What Craig hath wrought

I’ve been catching up on some new-media blogs this afternoon, and have run across a couple of favorable references to this post by Ryan Sholin, titled “10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head.”

I agree with a lot of it, despite a tone that stands out for snottiness even in the generally snotty world of blogging. But I want to take serious issue with this:

It’s not Craig’s fault. Newspaper classifieds suck and they have for years. Either develop simple database applications with photos and maps to let your users actually find what they’re looking for, or partner with a good third-party vertical who can. Anything less is a waste of your time.

Uh, actually, it is Craig’s fault. Not in the sense that Craig Newmark did anything anything wrong or evil when he created Craigslist. Rather, I’m talking about a simple reality — he and newspapers are in two different businesses, and his business has caused serious damage to the news business.

A large daily newspaper is an enormously expensive undertaking, and, traditionally, about a third of its revenues came from classified ads. Many newspapers actually made a pretty decent transition to the online world. As I recall, the Globe had a searchable help-wanted database on its Web site 10 or 12 years ago, and the Herald wasn’t that far behind.

But they still needed to charge money — lots of it — in order to pay for their journalism. When Monster.com and Craigslist came along, offering free and nearly free classifieds, there was no way that newspapers could compete. I recall reading a couple of years ago that help-wanted revenue at the San Jose Mercury News dropped from something like $115 million to $15 million in just a few years. (Note: Since I first posted this item, I found the article describing this.) Not surprisingly, the Mercury has been cut to the bone, with rumors of more cuts in the offing.

Could online newspaper classifieds be improved? Sure. But you have to wonder what the incentive is. The Globe is now partnering with Monster.com, which makes a lot of sense. No way, though, can this be as lucrative as the days when the Globe had a near-monopoly on the local classified market, and the Sunday paper was as popular for all those job listings as it was for the news it contained.

State employees online II

The Herald’s online database of state-employee salaries seems to be working as intended today. You can search by name, look up entire departments and sort by name or salary, among other features.

Adam Gaffin has some ideas on how to make it more usable — although it looks like at least a few have already been implemented. Personally, I’d make it so that you could download the whole thing into an Excel spreadsheet.

I’ve looked up a few people this morning, and found out that they don’t make as much as I’d assumed.

Update: Joe Dwinell shares some tips, including how to pull parts of the database into Excel. What about the whole thing? “Sorry, it’s too big to e-mail.” Yes, but it could be posted as a downloadable file.

State employees online

Herald city editor Jules Crittenden may think the print edition is what matters, but the most interesting thing going on in his paper today is online: the Herald has unveiled the entire state payroll as of April 2007.

I think there are some legitimate privacy concerns, but the fact is that these are all public records. On balance, making them readily accessible is a good thing — although I’m less than thrilled with the Herald’s page-one tease calling it “Find-A-Hack.”

Herald Web guy Joe Dwinell calls the online payroll a “searchable list.” Maybe I’m missing something, but all I see is a non-sortable table broken into 3,979 Web pages that you have to click on one at a time. Perhaps further refinements will be coming.