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| Thursday, October 5, 2006 |
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A new meaning for American soil 
Vroom at the top
| | There's a buncha high-level IT blather (by quotees, not by Gordon, who's doing the quoting) about ROI and "global networked IT services", and about BT now being in a position to compete with Google... but that's just a red herring sandwich. |
| | The real story is that a major carrier is finally starting to grok, at the top, that the main benefits to incumbency are not just ownership of the pipes. There are countless creative things that an incumbent carrier — with existing relationships with customers, with "plant" all over the place, with science and business advantages out the wazoo — can do to make money, other than just by creating false (or any other kind of) scarcities in the backbone and the last mile (or acre, in the case of wireless). |
Even Fox's?
Saving paradise
| | OneWebDay is a great idea, but why not use it to address this threat to the Net's freedom? Can I suggest a theme song for next year's party? It's that Joni Mitchell tune where she sings, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." |
| | That woud be Big Yellow Taxi. And the larger lyric goes, Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. |
Newspapers 2.0
| | Recently a slew of articles in outlets that cover media, including a cover story in the Columbia Journalism Review, have advocated private, local ownership as the savior of the embattled metro daily. Rochester reporters are watching what happens in Philly with interest, but also with a healthy dose of skepticism. What if a local millionaire owned the D and C rather than Gannett? |
| | Now the cycle may be repeating itself at the Chicago-based Tribune Company. Tribune is busy fending off a stockholder revolt from its largest shareholder, the Chandler family, on one hand and a revolt inside its largest newsroom on the other. LA Times Editor Dean Baquet said in the pages of his own newspaper that he wouldn't make the latest round of cuts ordered by the company. His publisher is backing him up. A handful of Los Angeles billionaires are waiting in the wings with offers to buy the (profitable) paper from Tribune. |
| | What's so troubling about all of this to most journalists is not that newspapers have become unprofitable. Just the opposite: they're failing on Wall Street despite their profitability. |
| | "It's not like you're talking Bethlehem Steel, which was bankrupt," says Orr. |
| | As Tim Rutten reports (and I pointed to yesterday), the LA Times has a monetary value of $2.5 billion and "a balance-sheet-engorging 20% margin". So why does Wall Street hate it? |
| | Simple: Because newspapers are a rusty industry. They have tail fins. They print lists of readers every day on the obituary page. Worse, as a class they are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that. |
| | So, to help the papers out (as I did for public radio on Tuesday), I immodestly offer ten hopefully helpful clues. |
| | First, stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There's advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow's fishwrap behind paywalls*. Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisilble. If you open the archives, and make them crawlable by search engine spiders, your authority in your commmunity will increase immeasurably. Plus, you'll open all that inventory to advertising possibilities. And I'll betcha you'll make more money with advertising than you ever made selling stale editorial to readers who hate paying for it. (And please, let's not talk about Times Select. Your paper's not the NY Times, and the jury is waaay out on that thing.) *Dean Landsman was the first to call this a "fishwrap fee". |
| | Second, start featuring archived stuff on the paper's website. Link back to as many of your archives as you can. Get writers in the habit of sourcing and linking to archival editorial. This will provide paths for search engine spiders to follow back in those archives as well. Result: more readers, more authority, more respect, higher PageRank and higher-level results in searches. In fact, it would be a good idea to have one page on the paper's website that has links (or links to links, in an outline) back to every archived item. |
| | Third, link outside the paper. Encourage reporters and editors to write linky text. This will encourage reciprocity on the part of readers and writers who appreciate the social gesture that a link also performs. Over time this will bring back enormous benefits through increased visits, higher respect, more authority and the rest of it. |
| | Fourth, start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You're not the only game in town anymore, and haven't been for some time. Instead you're the biggest fish in your pond's ecosystem. Learn to get along and support each other, and everybody will benefit. |
| | Fifth, start looking toward the best of those bloggers as potential stringers. Or at least as partners in shared job of informing the community about What's Going On and What Matters Around Here. The blogosphere is thick with obsessives who write (often with more authority than anybody inside the paper) on topics like water quality, politics, road improvement, historical preservation, performing artisty and a zillion other topics. These people, these writers, are potentially huge resources for you. They are not competitors. The whole "bloggers vs. journalism" thing is a red herring, and a rotten one at that. There's a symbiosis that needs to happen, and it's barely beginning. Get in front of it, and everybody will benefit. |
| | Sixth, start looking to citizen journalists (CJs) for coverage of hot breaking local news topics -- such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires and so on. There are plenty of people with digital cameras, camcorders, cell phones and other devices that can prove mighty handy for following stories up close and personally. Great example: what Sig Solares and his crew did during Katrina. |
| | Seventh, stop calling everything "content". It's a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the '90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online. It's handy, but it masks and insults the true natures of writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still, blessedly (if adjectivally) call "editorial". Your job is journalism, not container cargo. |
| | Eighth, uncomplicate your webistes. I can't find a single newspaper that doesn't have a slow-loading, hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive, confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things. Quit trying to "drive traffic" into a maze where every link leads to another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park. And please, get rid of those lame registration systems. Quit trying to wring dollars out of every click. I guarantee you'll sell more advertising to more advertisers reaching more readers if you take down the barricades and (again) link outward more. And you'll save all kinds of time and hassle. |
| | Ninth, get hip to the Live Web. That's the one with verbs such as write, read, update, post, author, subscribe, syndicate, feed and link. This is the part of the Web that's growing on top of the old Static Web of nouns such as site, address, location, traffic, architecure and construction. Nothing wrong with any of those static nouns (or their verb forms). They're the foundation, the bedrock. They are necessary but insufficient for what's needed on the Live Web, which is where your paper needs to live and grow and become more valuable to its communities (as well as Wall Street). |
| | Lemme unpack that a bit. The Static Web is what holds still long enough for Google and Yahoo to send out spiders to the entire universe and index what they find. The Live Web is is what's happening right now. It's dynamic. (Thank you, Virginia.) It includes all the stuff that's syndicated through RSS and searched by Google Blogsearch, IceRocket and Technorati. What I post here, and what others post about this post, will be found and indexed by Live Web search engines in a matter of minutes. For those who subscribe to feeds of this blog, and of other blogs, the notification is truly live. Your daily paper has pages, not sites. The difference is not "just semantic". It's fundamental. It's how you reclaim, and assert, your souls in the connected world. It's also how you shed dead conceptual weight, get light and nimble, and show Wall Street how you're not just ahead of the curve, but laying pavement beyond everybody else's horizon. It's how your leverage the advantages of history, of incumbency, and of already being in a going business. (The hard part will be raising your paper's heartbeat from once a day to once a second. But you can do it. Your own heart sets a good example.) |
| | Tenth, publish Rivers of News for readers who use Blackberries or Treos or Nokia 770s, or other handheld Web browsers. Your current home page, and all your editorial pages, are torture to read with those things. See the examples Dave Winer provides with rivers of news from the NY Times and the BBC. See what David Sifry did for the Day Fire here in California. Don't try to monetize it right away. Trust me, you'll make a lot more money — and get a lot more respect from Wall Street — because you've got news rivers, than you'll make with those rivers. |
| | That's enough for now. More later... |
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