BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: newbiznews

  • Stewardship v. ownership of our news, money, and society

    18 comments on Stewardship v. ownership of our news, money, and society
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    In this week’s news from Wall Street and in last week’s news convention we are seeing the problems that arise when people who are granted stewardship over our assets — charged with the care of our news or our money — instead think they have ownership of them.

    The most appalling moment at last week’s Online News Association meeting in Washington came when a representative of the World Association of Newspapers showed off a would-be “standard” for publishers to tell search engines what they may not do. He demonstrated how a news site marked up its content and then showed how a search engine — French, no surprise — followed the instructions. Et voilà: The news site’s content didn’t show up at all. And they were proud of this. I was frightened. They have created a system to hide news. (Our news.)

    Here was WAN’s protectionist view of how to preserve news — or rather, its control of news. Luckily, search engines are ignoring it, pointing out that most of these controls exist already and that WAN’s reputed standard could become a boon to spammers. The standard is meaningless, useless, and dangerous. But according to a representative of the Newspaper Association of America, that hasn’t stopped them from signing on. What are they thinking? We need to find more ways to get our journalism into more hands and more conversations and to involve more people in that process, sharing more information. Not our august associations of newspapers. They want to protect their ownership of news.

    I heard more than one news executive I respect say at this year’s meeting that the ONA feared becoming the online organization of a dying medium. Wonder why. The hall was filled with employees of old-media organizations that happened to have added new-media arms. The awards they give each other are almost all to their own kind. And they say the blogosphere is an echo chamber.

    If I were the ONA, I would cancel whatever schmanzy digs it has reserved for next year’s fest in San Francisco and hire an abandoned factory floor or put up tents in an empty field and I’d open the thing up, begging all the new practitioners of news to come and share. The organization acts as if online news is their domain because theirs was the news business. They owned news.

    No more. Now — thank goodness — the press-sphere is made up of an endless variety of players: professionals, former professionals, bloggers, witnesses, technologists, aggregators, analysts, networks, platforms, business people, foundations, NGOs, search engines….

    News organizations didn’t own the news as they thought. They were stewards of it. Their stewardship is proving to have been inadequate. Their definition of protecting the news has been to protect their control of it — see: WAN, NAA.

    The same can be said of our financial institutions. Their stewardship of our own assets is proving to be disastrous. They thought they owned the industry. Instead, they had the privilege of handling our money so long as they had our trust. They have failed horribly.

    The same is said — but too often not meant — when we talk of government. Politicians’ stewardship is clearly lacking.

    The original definition of stewardship made it clear that the people who took care of a household and managed its assets — its stewards — acted as servants, not owners. Their control was granted based on trust.

    We need new systems and new stewards. I’m not suggesting that the mob take over news, finance, and government. We’re too busy for that. We need stewards but we need stewards we can trust. The key to trust today, in any of these arenas, is openness and transparency. Hiding from the world is no way to get there.

  • The start of reverse syndication (and end of the AP?)

    57 comments on The start of reverse syndication (and end of the AP?)
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    New Jersey’s Star-Ledger today put out an entire edition without anything from the Associated Press within. The sharp-eyed reader will notice lots of local news by staff plus articles from other papers–Washington Post, LA Times, McClatchy, the Glouceseter County Times–and content from online services such as Sportsticker.

    It’s one more nail in the heart of the AP as other papers cancel their contracts and more threaten to.

    At the same time, Political announces that it will give stories to papers with ads attached that Politico and Addify sell and they will share revenue with the papers. Politico’s deal is the first major substantiation of the reverse-syndication model, a product of the link economy. It’s another nail in the heart of the Associated Press, which is built instead for the content economy.

    The old syndication model in the old content economy just won’t work today when all the world needs is one copy of a story up in the cloud with links to it. Today, the more links that article can get, the more valuable it is. So sharing value with those who send links to it only makes sense.

    The AP is not bad (no matter what foolish things it may have done in the blog kerfuffle recently). It’s just expensive. Papers the size of the Cleveland Plain Dealer say they pay $1 million a year. As they get more local, as reverse syndiction models come to the fore, as they have to tighten budgets, the industry-supported AP syndication model is mortally threatened. Still, this isn’t about the AP. It’s about the new architecture of news and media.

  • How to build a network

    16 comments on How to build a network
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    I was talking with a media exec who started a blog ad network — bless him — but who I thought was taking too high a share of the revenue: at least half. That’s a natural reflex, perfectly understandable: Get what you can. Other networks do that. But the problem for me is that by taking too much, he excluded me from the network — I’m sticking with BlogAds, which takes only 20 percent — and the problem for him, then, is that this slows the growth of his network and a smaller network is a less valuable network. He understands this will because he’s a smart media guy. He wants a large network.

    I was actually just trying to channel the network wisdom of Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, and Tom Evslin, who had talked about how to grow networks at a Union Square roundtable about collaborative production more than a year ago. I wasn’t sure I was getting it right, so I went to Evslin’s blog and asked him for a reprise, which he has just provided, brilliantly. I’ll summarize:

    The first counterintuitive lesson: Companies that build large networks on the web don’t charge users what the market would bear; they charge as little as they could bear. That is how they maximize growth and value for everyone in the network on top of the platforms they provide.

    In his blog post, Evslin takes this a step farther, pointing out that if you run a network that depends on scale, such as an ad network, then the more pages you have to sell, the bigger and better advertisers you can attract and the more you can charge. So if you take a smaller commission for each ad in the network, more sites will join it with more pages, which can now be sold at a higher value.

    It gets even more head-scratching: Evslin argues that if you are too profitable, then you will attract competitors who will undercut you and steal market share. “If you’re doing well but running at or close to breakeven,” he explained, “you’ve made it impossible for anybody to undercut you without running at a deficit, which is hard to get funding for.”

    So, to sum up: Take the minimum value out of the network to make it grow to maximum size to enable its members to charge more for their value while keeping costs and margins low to block competitors.

    That’s not how old networks operate. Cable companies wrap their wires around you and squeeze maximum fees out of you. Ditto phone companies, newspapers, and retailers. But they all face competition from next-generation networks.

    craigslist is the Evslin poster child. It foregoes revenue for most listings in most markets—charging just for job ads and for real estate in a few markets—and that turned it into the critical-mass marketplace for most listings. “If Craig now attempted to maximize revenue by charging for a substantially higher percentage of ads, a door would be cracked open for competition,” Evslin writes. “There is no chance at current rates for a competitor to steal Craig’s listings (and readers) by charging less.”

    I’m writing about the network model in the book and this will also be a key topic of discussion in our event at CUNY on new business models for news; that’s why I’m talking about it.

  • A stake through the heart of the has-been Inquirer

    34 comments on A stake through the heart of the has-been Inquirer
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    What the hell are they thinking in Philadelphia? Inquirer ME Mike Leary just sent a memo saying they are going to hold all but breaking news for the paper and even restrict bloggers from using their blogs to work on stories in progress.

    Let me make this very clear to Inquirer ownership and management:

    You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

    And my message to staff, the few of them left:

    Get the hell out now! Get away from these fools or you’ll get it on you. Let’s hold a new Norg meeting right now and organize a competitor to the ailing Inquirer. It won’t take much to kill it now. Let’s put it out of its misery.

    And my question to readers:

    Do you care?

    : LATER: What a rotten time for Norgman Will Bunch to be on vacation and offline.

    : An online producer elsewhere asked me for stats on the cannibalization of print by online. I responded:

    That’s not the point. The point is that we need to make the leap over to the next medium and business model and an extra 10 or 100 saved copies now is NOT going to save the business as it was. It’s short-sighted and foolish. So forget that calculation and ask, instead, how to invent the next product and drive audience and advertisers there and reshape the staff — completely — around that. It will be a smaller scale business — no longer a monopoly — but likely more profitable in the longrun if it also relies on collaboration.

    : Here’s Steve Outing’s reaction.

    : As I write this, the top story on the Inquirer’s Philly.com: Paris Hilton. Oh, yeah, that’s local. But I guess they have to fill the page with something because they don’t have those stories from what’s left of the newsroom staff.

  • A newspaper’s life-and-death struggle, played out in a new medium

    18 comments on A newspaper’s life-and-death struggle, played out in a new medium
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    At the Star-Ledger’s new LedgerLive daily news show from the newsroom (unofficial motto: It’s not TV, damnit), we are watching a big, old paper fight for its survival as it announced buyouts and a possible sale. And the grand irony is that we’re watching this even as the paper reinvents itself in a new medium: online video. The new show and the momentous news about the newspaper came in the same week.

    I was in the newsroom on Friday to watch LedgerLive being broadcast and I heard the staff talking about the paper’s and their future, of course. Some of these folks are going to be, well, independent in the fall if they elect to take the buyout and it comes off as announced.

    But what struck me listening to them is that they are not prepared for that independent life. I was looking at this from the perspective of being both a former newspaperman who did find a new life in the academe and elsewhere and from the perspective of now being a journalism educator. It is vital that we prepare journalists for this new and independent life or we will lose their journalism. Preparation, to me, means both training – it’s a great thing that Ledger print people are making video in the Rosenblum Method – and setting up an infrastructure to help them create sustainable journalistic enterprises if at all possible. The first factor is why I’m trying to establish a continuing education program for professionals at CUNY. The second is why I’m holding a summit for new business models for news there. That’s my perspective.

    I thought the journalists there would benefit from hearing from someone who found life after print and so I suggested to the Ledger’s digiczar, John Hassell, that they get hyperlocal postergirl Debbie Galant to make a video for an upcoming episode of LedgerLive. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d predicted but it did turn out the start of an entertaining discussion that captures the life-and-death questions journalists across the country are facing now.

    Debbie’s message aired on Tuesday from her (very nice) garden in metaphorical PJs:

    Baristanet weighs in on The Star-Ledger

    On today‘s LedgerLive, reporter Carol Ann Campbell responded in her PJs:

    A clip from Ledger Live 08-06-08

    Unfortunately, this reprises an us-v-them, pro-v-am rivalry. Fine. Let’s get that out of our system.

    And then I’ll challenge Deb to come back and now share her secrets with her still-ink-stained peers: How do you find life after print, Deb? What would you advise a print journalist in the post-print era to do? And I’ll challenge Carol to imagine a new world where she might operate independently. It’s hard but it may be very necessary.