Delivering tomorrow’s paper
If Rupert Murdoch is predicting the end of newspapers as we know them, then we should probably listen. In 1960, 80% of Americans read a daily newspaper. Today the figure is closer to 50% and falling. Globally circulation is falling too. Between 1995-2003, global newspaper circulation fell by 5%. In Europe the fall was 3%, and in Japan, 2%. Many young people (‘digital natives’ as Mr Murdoch calls them) don’t read a newspaper at all and, if the current trend continues, the last newspaper (probably read by a digital immigrant) will be thrown into a bin sometime in the year 2040. So what is going on? The explanations are varied and legion. More people are reading news on the Internet, fewer retailers deliver newspapers door-to-door (less children doing paperounds), less people are using public transport (and drive to work listening to the radio instead) and less people are sitting down to breakfast at home (less opportunity to read newspapers). And you can¹t just blame the Internet either because the decline in newspaper circulation predates the web. It’s not all bad news though. Some local papers are thriving and in the UK sales of quality papers are actually increasing thanks to innovations like compact editions. However, Internet-based news and opinion does have a significant advantage over paper-based products because of functionality and interactivity. Phrases like conversation and discussion really mean something on blogs because readers can actually contribute. OhmyNews in South Korea, for example, is produced by 33,000 citizen reports and read by 2 million Koreans. Add to this developments like photoblogs, video blogs and podcasting (blogging with sound) and newspapers are looking like yesterday’s news. Incidentally, to put this piece into perspective, it¹s interesting to read in Prospect magazine that in 1892 London had 14 evening papers. Now it has just one (the Evening Standard) plus a free afternoon paper aimed at women called Standard Lite.
Internet video and video on demand
Of all the media trends that are around at the moment one of the biggest is digital video. This is variously called video on demand, mobile video and Internet video. Whatever you call it it’s changing the media landscape forever thanks in part to devices like Apple¹s video iPod and tie ups like the recently announced deal between Pixar and Disney, which puts Apple firmly in the driving seat when it comes to unlocking Disney¹s digital attic. Of course there are still issues like bandwidth, but the rapid uptake of broadband will partly solve that problem. Implications? We’ll be watching a lot more old (retro) TV and film content as and when the digital archives are opened up. We’ll also be watching what we want, when we want on whatever device we want which will lead to a further decline in families sitting down to watch TV together. Families will still be watching TV but they’ll be watching different shows on different devices in different places.
What is a mobile phone?
What is a mobile phone for? The question used to be an easy one a mobile phone is a phone that you can carry around to make and receive calls. These days the question is a bit trickier. Mobile phones (like computers) have converged with communications and it is difficult to see where the join is. Mobile phones are mail boxes, cameras, video cameras, entertainment centres, newspapers, music centres, TV sets, messaging systems, scrap-books and devices you can make and receive calls from. A book called Thumb Culture : The Meaning of Mobile Phones for Society asks this question to a cornucopia of 25 technology experts and academics and comes up with some interesting answers. Two of the more interesting ideas are whether mobiles are anti-revolutionary and whether bloging (mobile blogs or moblogs in particular) are journalism or just exhibitionism.
Reader created news
A newspaper in the US has taken the idea of customer co-creation a step further by asking its readers to choose which story is used on the front page each day. The Wisconsin State Journal (the State’s second biggest selling newspaper) allows readers to go online between 11am and 4pm each day to vote for one of five top stories. The winner usually appears on page one the following morning. We’ve seen reader created newspapers in South Korea and a magazine for MTV and Nokia in Europe that’s written and illustrated by customers but this appears to be a first. Consequences? One thing nobody expected was that sports stories have started to appear on page one.
The symbiosis of mainstream media and blogs
I read through an article on blogging in the Financial Times this morning to help me as I develop some frameworks on the changing content creation landscape. The article was clearly negative on blogging being the transformative media it is touted to be, though brought out some interesting points. The writer makes the point that blogs are not self-sufficient – they depend largely on the mainstream media for their fodder.
“The present round of chiselling may feel exciting and radically new – but blogging in the US is not reflective of the kind of deep social and political change that lay behind the alternative press in the 1960s. Instead, its dependency on old media for its material brings to mind Swift’s fleas sucking upon other fleas “ad infinitum”: somewhere there has to be a host for feeding to begin. That blogs will one day rule the media world is a triumph of optimism over parasitism.”
Cute metaphor. Yet symbiosis is far more apt than parasitism. Mainstream media in its online form largely gets attention through blogs. Blogs add immense value to the original articles, by identiyfing what’s important, pointing out flaws, adding other perspectives, making visible to all the conversations that stem from media pieces. Blogs depend on mainstream media, with its resources and editorial capabilities, for sure. Yet media is increasingly dependent on blogging for the direction of attention and layer of value-add created.
Newspaper headlines and search optimization
An interesting article in the New York Times on how newspapers are finding the art of writing headlines is changing. Back when you were solely trying to draw attention from readers of a broadsheet, being clever was the name of the game. But now that online content is starting to become a significant revenue stream for newspapers, and much of their traffic comes through search engines such as Google News or other new aggregators, creating headlines is becoming a very different art. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making your website friendly to search engines. As it turns out, headlines are a critical part of this. Google and other search engines very heavily overweight words that are in page and story titles. Words used in titles need to be relevant to the article, so search engines can classify them. It’s been very interesting to me as this blog has gained traction to see how people are finding the blog, and what gets good search engine rankings. For example posts on this blog come up #1 on Google for a wide range of search terms, including “monetizing eyeballs“, “client sophistication“, “blogging serialization“, and many others. These are all words that are in the titles of the respective blog posts. Understanding how this works strongly influences what I – or any blogger or editor – choose to use as headlines.
Part of what the newspapers are doing is setting up dual pages, one with the traditional newspaper headline, the other with the search-engine friendly version, intended for different human or automated readers. The thing is that you are not just targetting search engines, but also news aggregration sites such as Memeorandum and Daypop News. Michael Parekh makes some interesting points on this regarding optimization for multiple platforms. Tagging and other approaches will help on this front, but for now content creators need to work out their priorities in how they optimize their sites and content to be found on the web.
Massively multi-player sex games
This is going to be big. Naughty America: The Game is a massively-multiplayer game, due out in the next few months, in which players assume the role of characters who meet, date, and have sex. Up until now the big multiplayer role-playing games such as Everquest and World of Warcraft have been set in fantasy worlds. Now it will be in sexual fantasy worlds, where characters can invite others back to their apartment, designed to their own taste with home decorator tools. Or they can flirt or have sex in a whole variety of realms including the beach, back alleys, a cruise ship, or theme rooms such as make-your-own-porn. And just so it isn’t too tame, you can switch to sex mode, where you can turn on personal webcams, or of course set up in-the-flesh dates. A good overview article discusses some of the ins-and-outs of the market, including how Naughty America intends to deal with distribution, fears of sexual predators, and bringing people into a new experience. However, interestingly, Second Life, the biggest free-form online world, is said to be one-third based on sexual interactions. I think that the only potential limitation here is the quality of the graphics. But if it’s not good enough now, it will be soon. Having recently delved into World of Warcraft and been staggered at how far the multiplayer online games have come in the last years, I don’t doubt that a significant portion of many people’s lives will be spent in virtual worlds, as and when the graphic and interaction quality is up to it. And sex will be part of that virtual interaction.
Online video heats up
YouTube, recently the belle of the ball at the Digital Hollywood conference, has just raised $8 million from Sequoia Capital in a Series B round. YouTube is currently the leader of the pack in providing online video hosting, but it still doesn’t have an evident business model. Apparently it will start putting advertising into its site – which it currently doesn’t do – by mid-year, but the costs of hosting video means this revenue stream has to be significant. Far more likely it will look to cut deals with major entertainment companies to be an outlet for video content, in turn tied in with related revenue streams. However YouTube is far from alone in the space, with Jumpcut launched yesterday, and yet to be released service Motionbox declared the best video service by TechCrunch, even before its launch. Both of these services allow video editing, with Jumpcut in particular having some nifty video mashup and remix features, while YouTube is just an upload site. Bubble, bubble, toil, and maybe trouble on the other end of this boomlet, but it has a very good run to go first.
Internet video becomes true new media
We all know that television will migrate to distribution over the Internet. Broadcast and cable will certainly co-exist with the Internet as distribution channels for moving image content for the foreseeable future, however broadband access and the availability of capital for new media ventures mean that the Internet is already becoming a viable alternative for television viewers. Some traditional free-to-air television channels will at some point simultaneously broadcast their programs over the Internet. However what is more interesting is how video programs over the Internet take advantage of the channel and the media consumption patterns of the likely audience. Case in point is Heavy.com, which targets young males with a showcase of funny, sexy, and crude short videos, set in an extremely advertising-intensive frame. It looks different from just about anything else out there, with few words, and plenty of user-driven interaction, movement, sound, and color. The site is openly modelled on video games. An a very interesting recent article in the New York Times that discusses some of the dynamics of advertising to this demographic, says that the site had 5.5 million visitors in February, while the company estimates it will take in $20 million in revenue this year. Advertisers like not just the audience, but the depth of exposure they get from the in-your-face advertisements. Around half of the videos are amateur productions submitted by the audience, though selected by the site editors. Heavy.com is now ramping up its own video production capabilities. Of course, this is just one facet of the Internet video world, with other players like Youtube, Videobomb, OurMedia, and others providing a whole new domain of user generated and filtered content. Heavy.com is showing the way in actually doing something new which has not done before, rather than simply distributing traditional content in new ways or taking text and image models into video. There will be a lot more exciting and new in this space in the very near future.
The state of news media
A great report just out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism on The State of the News Media 2006, focusing on the US news industry. It provides detailed analysis across all news media, including newspapers, online, TV, radio, alternative and more. The new major emerging trends they picked out this year are:
* The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories.
* The species of newspaper that may be most threatened is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century.
* At many media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over.
* That said, traditional media do appear to be moving toward technological innovation – finally.
* The new challenge to the old media, the aggregators, are also playing with limited time.
* The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if will ever be as big as print or television.
Underlying these trends is the game being played between traditional media and new media organizations, with a large convergent space in the middle, and possibly the beginnings of hardball tactics as we have seen in the music industry over the last years.
