Media Gleaner

Government run media? Canadians should be outraged

2011-04-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

The Toronto Star has obtained documents that outline the Harper government's plan to axe the National Press Theatre (where Parliamentary Press Gallery Association moderates government news conferences) and replace it with a government-run briefing centre based in a mall in Ottawa.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Privy Council Office and the PMO are pencilling in $2 million to create the government's own media centre.

No. Hell no. This is odious, antidemocratic and authoritarian in too many ways to count. You need look no further than China to see how government involvement in media muzzles news reporting to the detriment of a country's population.

Dangerous path to embark upon. Canadians should be outraged.

C-Span spawns a star: Anthony Weiner

2011-04-18T18:52:00.000-07:00

Never thought I'd see the day when I became a C-SPAN fan - most days the U.S. House of Representatives is a snore. But after Penelope Trunk's blog turned me on to Anthony Weiner performances in the House today, I'm hooked. Spent an hour watching him on YouTube. This guy can talk a blue streak, and, as Penelope points out, makes encylopedic knowledge of parliamentary procedure entertaining. Seriously. Check him out.

A quick Wikipedia search also revealed that he's:

1) friends with Jon Stewart and
2) played hockey in college.

How cool is that? He's practically an honorary Canadian.

PS: Penelope's blog post talked about how it's dumb to break rules before you understand them. She's right. It's hard to break them *right* unless you do.

Does Google Search Change Spell Death for Demand Media?

2011-04-18T16:59:00.000-07:00

It's a little early for producers of thoughtful content to crow about how eHow traffic fell 50 percent after Google changed its search algorithm last week. eHow producer Demand Media, of course, said that the effect of the algorithm change was "significantly" less than the 50 percent reported. The fact Demand Media didn't say how much less does mean that it must have hurt. As did an almost $7 drop in their share price during trading on Monday.

But that's not enough to break Demand Media's business model. Demand Media pays pennies per word or video byte compared to other content producers such as news organizations or magazine publishers, and it's lamentable that content created in response to searches gets traffic that should go to content created with greater standards in order to provide more value to readers. Changes in how search engines display results is certainly Demand Media's Achilles heel. But playing search engines is Demand Media's game so adapting to such changes is also part of their business plan. I wouldn't hold your breath unless Google gets aggressive about changing code frequenlty to avoid its engine being played.

AOL marriage with HuffPost brings an Internet pioneer full circle

2011-02-07T11:06:00.000-08:00

Interesting how discussions with friends and colleagues on Twitter and Facebook sometimes turn into the inspiration for posts on my other blogs, be it Moto-Mojo, my blog as a "motorcycling mobile journo" or here at Media Gleaner.

After I tweeted the first announcement I saw this morning about AOL acquiring Huffington Post, it wasn't long before a former colleague commented that he thought it bode ill for HuffPost, since founders so often don't stay when their companies are bought.

Yet I don't think Arianna Huffington is going anywhere. She came to the table willingly and has just been handed the reins of AOL's content candy store to remake in the HuffPost image. Given her stated intention to grow HuffPost exponentially, I think we should take her at her word that this is a marriage made in heaven.

Opinion Divided

Opinion on today's announcement has been sharply divided. Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, hailed it as a smart move on AOL's part, and wondered why newspapers hadn't done what HuffPost did -- and didn't try to duplicate its success once it had.

Howard Fineman, senior political editor of the Huffington Post, wrote that this is yet another sign that old-style journalism must learn to take advantage of and work with citizen journalism in order to meet the demands of a global, 24-hour news day.

Salon called it "AOL/Time Warner all over again," and a "flashback to 2000 and the colossally ill-fated AOL/Time-Warner deal."

Business Insider did a nice, tidy list of what's in it for AOL and what's in it for HuffPost. In brief, Arianna just made a whack of cash for her shareholders while AOL just took a shortcut to prime time relevance after almost a decade of wandering the desert. So, there's no need to rehash that here.

I've always had a soft spot for AOL. From the early days when it struck a deal to put news from the San Jose Mercury News online, those of us working in newspapers who saw our future on the Internet hoped we could convince our newspapers to do the same. Then the Time Warner debacle hit and almost sank the ship. "See?" newspaper editors everywhere crowed. "The Internet is a flash in the pan."

They were wrong, but were unable to see past what came next -- the bursting of the overpriced, overhyped Internet bubble -- to realize it.

Old Media vs. New Media

My former colleague, Glen Farrelly, with whom I worked with at Quicken.ca (aka Moneysense.ca after it merged with MoneySense magazine) at the time of the AOL Time Warner merger, told me on Facebook today that he never understood why the merger hadn't worked. At the time, it looked like a perfect marriage of old and new media. But what Time Warner shared with old media such as newspapers was its resistance to new media, and a belief (as I once heard an editor at The Gazette in Montreal say) that the Internet was a "passing fad."

Now "old media" is finally cluing in to Web 1.0 and having trouble *understanding* Web. 2.0 let alone transitioning to it. And AOL is investing heavily in one of the best known Web 2.0 creations.

In the interest of full disclosure, you should know I worked as the product manager for AOL Canada's finance channel between 2003 (two years after the merger) and 2005. And am now a blogger for WalletPop Canada, its current finance channel. And one of the first things I did after getting hired at AOL in 2003 was try to get a grasp of exactly why those expected synergies never happened. There are two great books on the subject, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for the Digital Future by Kara Swisher, the journalist who broke the story, intuiting what was going on based on a pattern of AIM messages and log-ins and log-outs by AOL execs. Brilliant journalist, brilliant and engaging book. You could almost hear Kara cheering today when she wrote about the merger, calling it a "bold and definitive move" that is good for both parties.

The second, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner by Alec Klein (if memory serves, it's been seven years since I read either of them), does a more thorough analysis of the business failures of the merger.

Why the Time Warner Merger Failed

But what both books agreed on was that the deal was upside down: it was the equivalent of a boa constrictor trying to swallow an elephant. Time Warner was bought with AOL shares whose price was hugely inflated thanks, in part, to some creative accounting of advertising sales. Following the acquisition, the pensions of Time Warner employees dived in value, which would have deep-sixed the kind of cooperation required to merge two such different entities even had Time Warner employees seen AOL and the Internet in general as an easy ride into the digital age. But they didn't. They saw AOL as an upstart kid trying to tell adults how their business should be run.

Almost all efforts to merge operations were resisted, mightily, within Time Warner ranks. Major passive aggressive behaviour.

10 Years Later

It's somewhat fitting that the acquisition of HuffPost comes almost exactly 10 years since the AOL Time Warner merger was announced. It's AOL's second chance to create the "synergies" so ballyhooed during the Time Warner merger.

As the pioneer who started the content game on the Web, it would be fitting if AOL, now that it has found an eager bride in HuffPost, will finally make that happen.

Open File, Demand Media, and how news can take advantage of SEO technology

2010-09-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

A former colleague from my days as a reporter at the Montreal Gazette asked me this morning what I thought of Open File, which invites story ideas from the community, gets feedback from the community on whether folks want to hear more about it, and then assigns stories to a reporter.

It seems to be a reasonably good way of vetting ideas for stories that will engage a community. It's not nearly agile enough to compete with the Demand Media business model, though, which uses search algorithms to try to get ahead of the content or "news" curve (defining "news" very loosely to include celeb shenanigans, among other things). Portals such as Yahoo, AOL and Sympatico use real-time stats to find out how well any one story is clicking. That impacts how long it will remain on their home page and whether they accept pitches on that topic again from channel editors for home page use (the equivalent of section editors pitching to A1) any time soon. But that's still following the news and sought-after-information curve rather than trying to get ahead of it.

My sources inside several Canadian news organizations say that they're not even taking advantage of real-time data to give what they're showing on their home pages a leg up, though, and if they want to become destinations (rather than followers in the SEO game) I firmly believe they need to refine the Demand Media model to get ahead of the curve.

That will result in their stories landing on the top of search results, which gives an opportunity to use the traffic sent their way to let people know about the stuff they aren't yet looking for -- because they don't yet know they need to know about it. And that positions the news organization as a knowledgeable source, so it becomes a reliable destination in the user's mind.

That kind of judgment is what news organizations are good at and it's the the Achilles heel of the Demand Media business model - no one considers sites that use Demand Media content as "destinations" for repeat visits. Demand Media content is poorly written, poorly researched and doesn't engage an audience sufficiently for them to remember where they read the content. News organizations can do a much better job, engage the reader and give 'me a reason to stick around and read more. But many news organizations are not doing a good job at SEO so readers can find them and become engaged.

This is a hard sell to news organizations who don't trust SEO and look at Google as a thief. Google may very well be a thief but it's a well-heeled thief and we're not gonna win the copyright battle; that horse has left the barn. We can, however, win the SEO battle if we get smarter about it.

What would 30% more engagement do for your business?

2010-09-10T18:56:00.000-07:00

According to an experiment by IBM, that's what hiring an editor can do for your bottom line. This isn't a revolutionary idea and shouldn't be a surprise. Editors are in the business of engaging readers, and it's our job to get readers to respond to a call to action, even if that action is clicking on a headline or buying a magazine or newspaper. But, to my knowledge, it's the first time anyone has been able to prove it empirically.

IBM served pages of unedited versions of content to a random sample of users and edited versions to the rest, and measured the clicks of the edited versions vs. the unedited ones for a month. Voila: 30 percent more clicks.

Reports the editor, somewhat smugly.

Small biz is better at social media than big companies

2010-08-31T10:43:00.000-07:00

A new Regus survey says that small businesses are doing a better job of leveraging social media than big companies. When it comes to acquiring new customers through social media:

44 percent of small companies have done so, compared with
36 percent of medium sized companies and
28 percent of large businesses.

Well, duh. A push of the tiller can turn a sailboat must faster than a tanker. The list of stakeholders who have to approve any and all parts of a new initiative can pile up pretty quickly at a portal, for instance. That explains the popularity of the "do it and apologize for it later" approach. At the last portal I worked for, we started tweeting the newest and best stuff that could drive traffic to our channels long before management approved a social media policy and sanctioned the use of Twitter as part of its marketing plan.

There are many benefits of the skunk-work approach, especially inside big companies. If it doesn't work, it was a single employee's initiative, little effort was wasted and the failure was limited. If it does work, you have easy justification for building it into the business plan, management can take the credit for being forward-thinking, and you're the new golden child.

Predictably, financial institutions have had the hardest time getting traction in social media - they're heavily legislated and have to deal with compliance rules regarding how they contact the public and whether that contact constituted advice or a service.

But 58 percent of respondents to the Regus survey said they'd used social media for keeping in touch with business contacts. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are now being used more than job boards to recruit talent, touch base with folks who have skill sets and advice you can tap, and tie into communities who can help grow your business.

It really isn't rocket science, but I've seen so many examples of people doing it wrong that I wrote a list of Facebook No-Nos for Small Business and How to Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Network - or Destroy Your Career for AOL Canada's WalletPop blog.

You spam your friends' friends or connections of your connections at your own risk, yeah? It's a little crazy that people need to be told that.

iPad app declares war on newspapers. Hunh?

2010-07-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

What am I missing here? Just read this post on TechCrunch about how former Google and Bing engineers have started a company called Hawthorne Labs, which has created an iPad app called APOLLO that's supposed to crawl the Web and deliver personalized news to build a genuine Newspaper of the Future™, and thus “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”.

If they deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry, I suppose they'll be able to crawl only broadcast sites? Rumour and inuendo from bloggers who comment on news published by ... who? Who do they think produces news? I guess they could gather links to magazine and wire service sites. They haven't declared they want to nail shut their coffins.

I repeat: What am I missing here?

$1 billion sale ends Canwest newspaper bankruptcy

2010-07-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

A $1 billion deal selling the Canwest chain of newspapers closed the bankruptcy chapter in the chain's history yesterday, putting former tabloid mogul and National Post publisher Paul Godfrey at the helm of the largest English newspaper chain in Canada.

A committee of holders of senior subordinated notes led by Godfrey have a 45 percent equity stake in the newly-minted Postmedia Network Canada.

The chain, born in 1904 when William Southam created Southam Inc. after buying The Hamilton Spectator, The Calgary Herald, The Edmonton Journal, The Ottawa Citizen and The Vancouver Province, among others, eventually included the majority of Canada's large metro dailies, including The Montreal Gazette. Southam sold the chain in 1996 for 2.1 billion to Conrad Black's Hollinger International, which also acquired many of the Canadian print holdings of Thomson Newspapers.

Hollinger sold the papers and the Southam Newspapers name to Canwest in 2000, which had an eye on integrating the small market papers with its Global TV holdings. That never happened.

Struggling with a massive debt load after the acquisition, Canwest sold many of the small market newspapers to Torstar, Transcontinental Media and Osprey Media and created Canwest News Service in 2003 from the large market newspapers, but that only delayed bankruptcy.

Revisiting 'content farms'

2010-07-10T11:40:00.000-07:00

The Nieman Journalism Lab's Week in Review quoted something I wrote here last week on how newspapers can beat content farms at their own game by learning how to use algorithms as Demand Media does to find out what people want to read about.

I'd agreed with what Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Fry had told The Wrap, saying that the main problem with the Demand Media business model is that "people seeking information will have their time wasted reading crummy content produced for spiders, not readers.”

The problem with "demand" content is that it's poor quality content and doesn't build loyalty to the sites that use it. So I suggested newspapers can beat the content farms at their own game by using the business model to produce quality content created for readers.

The Neiman Journalism Lab's roundup countered my musing with an argument from Harvard prof Ethan Zuckerman, who said dictating content based on search would be a bad way to run a newspaper: “You’d give up the critical ability to push topics and parts of the world that readers might not be interested in, but need to know about to be an engaged, informed citizen.”

He's right. We still need to tell people about things they don't yet know they need to know. Breaking news, investigative journalism, consumer reports, scientific breakthroughs, analysis of the impact environmental degradation and industrial agricultural practices are having on our lives ... all these fall outside what an algorithm will likely discover from web searches.

But clearly, if we aren't also providing them with timely access to information about the things they are searching for, we won't have an engaged audience that considers us a destination - which is precisely how we CAN beat content farms at their own game. Poorly written content won't inspire people to return or spend very much time reading it.

But if news organizations aren't drawing people in with solid, well-written information about the things they are searching for - and doing it better than the content farms - then:

1) we won't be able to get the other "important" information in front of them in a timely manner, because even if we publish it they won't be on our sites to see it, and
2) they will turn to us only during moments of crisis for "important" information and we can't build a business model on that.

News organizations shouldn't abandon our mandate to beat the content farms at their own game. But we can adapt -- learn to use technology to keep a finger on the pulse of what people want to know about -- in order to become a destination that can still tell them about what they need to know about, and fulfill our mandate.

The end of The Canadian Press as we know it?

2010-07-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

Concentration of media ownership in Canada is about to get even tighter. The Canadian Press, a cooperative of Canadian newspapers that have shared stories since World War I, is poised to become a for-profit news agency owned by CTVglobemedia (owner of the Globe&Mail), Torstar (owner of The Toronto Star) and Gesca (owner of Montreal's La Presse).

This is huge - a turning point for CP, which was abandoned by CanWest three years ago and more recently, last year, by Sun Media, which started the QMI Agency as its own news service.

It's also inevitable.

The triumvirate of buyers includes two players - the Southam newspaper chain (now owned by CanWest) and Torstar - who experimented with sharing news production back in the late '80s, with an eye to dropping CP. Southam insiders wanted to pull out of CP and start its own news service long before the Southam newspaper chain was bought by Hollinger (Conrad Black's media enterprise) and later by CanWest. The cooperative contract called for Southam to feed its news stories to CP and pay CP to use the CP feed. Southam felt like it was paying for the privilege of providing the majority of the stories. That sentiment never changed and CanWest pulled out in 2007.

If the deal goes through, it means Canadians will have even fewer sources to turn to for a different take on news - the majority will come from three sources: CP, QMI or CBC. I wonder how this will impact CP's distribution of stories from the Associated Press, a cooperative of American news media.

Yet even before the defections CP was struggling and this may be the only way it can survive. CP had to get permission from Ottawa to delay some payments for its pension plans last year because the plans were running a $34.4 million deficit.

The turmoil in the news industry may be about to get even rockier.

Go here for analysis from the Canadian Journalism Project.

'Demand' content isn't the problem

2010-07-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

"Demand" content isn't the problem. It's the execution.

The era of "demand" content is upon us, and news organizations need to take note. Newsrooms can learn a lesson from companies using algorithms to find out what people are searching for, and then write about it.

Most criticism of Demand Media and Associated Content and their ilk devolves to calling them "content farms" that are to journalists what factories are to Chinese workers. Can "content farms" kill real journalism? Sure. If all you can get for an article is what you usually get paid for 15 minutes worth of work, you're going to spend only 15 minutes writing it. Which may or may not provide enough time to check more than one source, discern whether the source is full of BS, or write something captivating enough to hold your reader.

But discerning readers can tell the difference between churned out, formula-written copy and in-depth reporting. "Demand" journalism isn't the problem. It's the execution. Content derived from non-original research that results from formula writing can't inspire or hold readers' interest. The holy grail for content websites is to increase engagement - the amount of time spent on the site. and repeat visits "Demand" content doesn't tend to encourage a return to the site and readers don't spend as long reading it as they do on better-written and more engaging content. Well-researched, captivating content keeps a reader online and clicking for "more" longer.

The bigger problem is that search engines serve the pablum first.

“What bugs me is that this stuff essentially games Google to show up high in search results, making it more likely that people seeking information will have their time wasted reading crummy content produced for spiders, not readers,” former Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Fry told The Wrap in an article posted yesterday. “That makes search worse for all of us.”

It will also have an impact on whether talented people become journalists or decide to do something else that will actually earn them a living. The squeeze is on freelancers, in particular, by websites such as DirectFreelance.com, where freelancers are asked to bid on projects for which clients are frequently unwilling to pay more than $1 for a 400-word article. That comes to a fraction of a cent per word. Essentially they're looking for "writers" to find an article someone else wrote on the topic they want for their website and rewrite it just enough to fool plagiarism software.

The other trend is aspiring writers getting sucked into writing for free for "exposure." While it's true you can't sell your work unless you already have bylines to show as samples, this trend goes much further, in that some sites suite as Suite 101 have enslaved small armies of writers and pay a pittance of pennies only if what you wrote gets clicked and displays an ad. You could starve writing for Suite 101.

Derek Finkle launched Canadian Writers Group to combat that trend, representing freelancers to magazines to get them better rates than they could ostensibly negotiate for themselves. A recent article by the Ryerson Review of Journalism that talks about his battle lamented how magazine rates have been at $1 a word now for decades. Of course, he takes a cut. Because a lot of people are really terrible at negotiating, he might have a solid business model.

But freelancers now being paid pennies per word would love to get $1 a word.

What's needed is for newsrooms to adapt to the demand model and use it to produce quality content that will blow the content farms out of the water.

Get quality journalism in top search results

2010-06-30T07:32:00.000-07:00

I couldn't have said it better:

"When a publisher's high-quality content is optimized for search, everyone should win. Users have a better search experience when quality journalism appears at the top of the search results. Search advertisers benefit from appearing in well researched, information-rich content. And publishers can benefit from previously
untapped revenue streams," Robertson Barrett wrote at eMedia Vitals today.

I've watched, astonished, as major publishers not only don't optimize their content to make it show up higher on search engine result pages but have discussed making it impossible for search engines to find their content.

Hello? The search economy is here, folks. The horse left that barn years ago. Putting up paywalls and making it impossible to find your content through search is suicide.

Instead, work with the search engines to make sure quality journalism tops the search results.

Court throws out Viacom case against YouTube

2010-06-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

A judge has thrown out Viacom's case against YouTube, saying YouTube is protected by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement as long as it removes videos when asked to do so by the copyright holder.

This reinforces the concept that websites can't be held responsible for copyright infringement of its users are as long as the infringing material is taken down.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wondered whether the legal fees Viacom spent fighting for an outdated distribution system wouldn't have better spent buying ads next to the to the pirated videos.

Excellent point. When your business model no longer works, you need to find a new one.

Content on demand: Is this the future?

2010-06-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

Writers and editors need to keep their eyes on Demand Media, which for the last four years has been perfecting the art of producing content on demand. Run by Richard Rosenblatt, who also founded and sold MySpace, Demand Media uses algorithms to troll search engine data and traffic logs to find keywords advertisers will pay for. Those topics are then offered up to a small army of freelance writers and videographers.

This has been a successful strategy for Demand Media, which has become the single largest video contributor to YouTube, and has gone from a startup to $200 million in annual revenue in four years.

That success is probably why Yahoo bought Associated Content, a Demand Media competitor. And why Google has applied for a patent that it could potentially use to stop Demand's use of search statistics to determine those topics, and develop its own content model.

Success for operations such as Demand Media and Associated Content, however, could be the death knell for freelancers. They get paid so little to pump out this "content on demand" that, as Wired pointed out when it wrote about Demand Media last fall, freelancers have to produce an article or video almost every hour of a work day to earn a living from it.

Similarly, websites such as Verbumsoft, where freelancers can bid on content contracts, have sprung up. At first blush, they look like a good idea - a way to connect someone who needs editorial or writing services with someone who can get the work done.

But the people offering the contracts are willing to pay only pennies per word - sometimes as little as $1 per article, so paying to become listed as a freelancer on such a site (you have to pay an annual fee of $100 to respond to posts at Verbumsoft) is a waste of money for trained journalists. The people offering the contracts don't care that you can't research and write something for $1. All they care is that it won't trigger red flags in plagiarism-detecting software. Which means all they really want is for "writers" to steal someone's work and change it enough so that plagiarism software won't flag it.

You don't need to be an editor to understand that the quality of content produced at that speed isn't very high.

Yet this trend is even being seen asserting itself at establishments like Forbes, which his increasingly dependent on "Top 10 auto death traps" photo galleries and such to drive traffic. Forbes laid off most of their reporters last fall and brought them back this spring as freelancers on contract (without benefits). But reporters who used to write an article a day are now being asked to write as many as four pieces a day. You know as well as I do that when you research and write that quickly you're not producing quality content.

This growing economic pressure to produce cheaper and cheaper content could deep-six news operations already working on shoe-string budgets. Only a few of the strongest brands with national audiences (and a smattering of niche publications producing content their audience can't find elsewhere) will survive and will probably have to charge a premium for their content.

And we might be getting closer to the day when a computer program will write and edit these things and post them without the help of humans. We aren't there yet, according to Google.

How viral video can save the music industry

2010-05-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

The Justin Bieber phenomenon is only the latest youngster to hit the top of the charts after being discovered on YouTube.

AdMaven Nicholas Kinports goes into some detail about how YouTube has replaced TV as a platform for showcasing/marketing hot musical talent. And echoes British actor, writer and director Peter Serafinowicz's lament that physical media is disappearing.

"If our industry as a whole won’t come off of our high horse of pricing [physical] albums at $13.99 to match or best digital prices, consumers won't see records on the shelves anymore.

If they aren’t buying it at Best Buy and they aren’t buying it at Target where are they buying it? The answer is they aren’t. They are streaming it on sites like YouTube and Facebook" a source at Universal Music Group told Kinports. "Music has become so fluid you can literally listen to it anywhere you want. It’s not confined to a car or iPod. The music industry has to figure out a way for them to pay for it without paying for it. The artists have to be sold in a different way.”

Again, the solution being forwarded is radical, but already being done by independents: give your music away for free.

But where's the profit? Kinports thinks it would come from releasing a limited number of physical media and selling them as collector's items at $100 a pop.

He might be onto something. If physical media becomes rare, it becomes worth something.

Why I steal movies ... even ones I'm in

2010-05-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

That's the provocative header on a piece British actor, writer and director Peter Serafinowicz wrote recently for Gizmodo. Serafinowicz frankly admits that he downloads movies illegally, despite the fact he earns his living from DVDs, movies and books. It's one I struggle with, as well. I've downloaded music that I already own on cassette, vinyl or CD, rather than digitize my original copies, because it's easier and I've already paid for it once. Next post will be about how the music industry is reacting to the fact very little physical media is being sold any more.

Which is another point raised by Serafinowicz: physical media is disappearing, in favour of downloads and digitized media.

Serafinowicz rationalizes that torrents are too geeky and hard to use for the average Web user for illegal downloads to gain real traction. I disagree: you might have to be a tiny bit tech-savvy to download a torrent app and VLC or another media player ... but it's not rocket science.

His most valid point is that even though he downloads illegally, when given the opportunity to download legally, at a fair price, from iTunes, he will - largely for the same reasons I've cited:

- better quality video and
- it's a good thing to have pirates promoting your work and getting it in front of new eyeballs, to grow your fan base.

The music industry didn't get that and paid for it dearly, as artists found out they could promote their own work on YouTube, cut out the studio as a middleman and keep all the profits, and learned how to give away free samples to reel people in and make them want to buy the collection.

It's a lesson TV might be starting to learn (as evidenced by the growing number of shows that can simply be downloaded from network websites) and one Hollywood has yet to learn.

'Poof, you're gone' - Twitter bug magically makes followers disappear

2010-05-10T16:47:00.000-07:00

Gizmodo reports on the bizarre Twitter bug that surfaced when a Turkish tweeter ostensibly discovered by accident that if you "accept username" (fill in username with the tweeter you accept) it forces them to follow you. So he and his girlfriend had a lot of fun making famous people follow them.

That's not all. Twitter's attempt to roll back the forced follows reset the number of followers of those famous people to ZERO. There is, of course, an arcane explanation - the bug is part of an old text command.

Reader Rhainor explains on Gizmodo:

"Its intended use was for people who have their tweets protected. If you try to follow someone who's protected, instead of instantly following them, it sends a request to the user ("'username' has requested to follow you"). To allow them to follow you, you 'accept' the request (in my experience, by clicking a button, but for people who rarely use Twitter.com, the text command makes sense)."

Ahem.

What a way for Twitter to discover the bug.

Producer thanks pirates for stealing his film

2010-05-08T11:09:00.000-07:00

"Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download," Producer Eric Wilkinson wrote in an email to RLSlog. "Most of the feedback from everyone who has downloaded “The Man From Earth” has been overwhelmingly positive. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the net!"

Read more about what he said here.

This is exactly what the music industry got wrong, and what Hollywood still needs to learn. Word of mouth, even by "pirates," is worth more to your success than trying to squeeze a few extra sales out of people who are evangelizing and promoting your art for you. The marketing machine has changed not just to include your consumers but you need them to spread the word.

Conan O'Brien's comments in a recent appearance at Google highlighted how broadcast executives failed to understand the role of social media when a groundswell of support for him materialized after it became clear he was being shunted in order to give Jay Leno back his time slot. They thought it was something O'Brien was doing and wanted him to stop it. They didn't understand that he didn't start it, but was responding to it on social media's home turf. But they finally realized that sanctioning his tweets would just be dumb.

Journalists rejoice: there's work in 'them there hills'

2010-04-26T20:24:00.000-07:00

OK, so it's not exactly a gold rush. And the number of journalists being hired by the likes of AOL and Yahoo may not be anywhere near approaching the legions that have been let go by print media over the last five years.

But there's good news for working journalists - at least those savvy enough to develop the skills to work online - for the first time in a very long time.

If we needed more evidence that "curated media" is the wave of the future, we only have to look at recent moves by master content aggregators such as Yahoo and AOL, both of whom are aggressively hiring more journalists to run their content shows. This has been accompanied by declarations that they're not getting out of the aggregation business, but mostly looking at ways to more smartly "surface" content from their partners, while spiking it with strategic original content.

AOL has a long history as a content producer and of hiring journalists away from print media to lead its content teams, although there was a lull - not quite a hiatus - while the beleaguered company came to terms with the massive indigestion caused by buying Time Warner in 2000. That critical point in AOL's history, beautifully chronicled by Kara Swisher in There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere ( a joke about a man digging in a big pile of manure), was the metaphorical equivalent of a mouse giving birth to an elephant. For the next nine years, resentment of Time Warner properties toward the perpetrator of the unwieldy (and, as it turned out, impossible) absorption of its huge portfolio of content companies, handicapped what had once been the earliest innovative media darling of the Web as it fought internal battles. While those battles raged and eventually ended in AOL spinning off on its own again, Yahoo! took the opportunity to grab the larger share of the content market and become the content behemoth it is today.

Although Yahoo! began as a search engine, by the late 1990s it had diversified into a web portal and started its first experiments with original content. With the hiring of LA Times editor Dave Morgan to head up its sports coverage two years ago, along with the launch of the highly popular Shine, an original women's lifestyle content site, it showed it was ready to play hardball in content. This year, the portal showcased very aggressive coverage of the 2010 Games in Vancouver and has brought on veterans including former WashingtonPost.com editor Russ Walkerto to build out Yahoo News.

But don't count AOL out of the race. With the launch of new content properties fueled by daily posts from a growing army of bloggers, AOL's is definitely not bowing out of original content. In the last two years, AOL has launched Lemondrop, an original women's lifestyle blog property, the men's site Asylum, an entertainment blog called PopEater, a new classifieds website, WalletPop, and more recently, Lifestream, a stand-alone product being touted by AOL on TechCrunch as "what Google Buzz should have been."

As Avertising Age asked recently, while noting that AOL "is snagging talent from all sectors: Wall Street, publishing, consulting, Google, Yahoo, social-news aggregator Digg, Time Warner and even its own huge diaspora of former employees," why does everyone want to work at AOL all of a sudden?

The portal landscape is gearing up for some battles. Although there may not be gold in those hills, journalists no longer need to wonder what their second act will be while print media learn how to play in the new sandbox.

Short, sweet and quick

2010-04-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

Fast and prolific seems to be the new formula for writing for news websites, even at media icons such as Forbes, where rehired reporters have been asked to punch out a story an hour: http://bit.ly/8ZTTpo

And so it begins ...

2010-04-16T06:45:00.000-07:00

Twitter has launched Promoted Tweets, its first foray into earning advertising revenue: http://bit.ly/bYCWbI

The speculation of how the micro-blogging site is going to try to make money has its answer. Now to see if it works.

Never underestimate the power of a Twitter feed

2010-03-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

A clever use of a Twitter feed leveled the playing field for a staff-starved campus blog called Onward State so it could compete with a 112-year-old college newspaper for student eyeballs. Most exciting is that they used Googlewave for the blog's tiny staff to collaborate in real time, an interesting solution to keeping everyone up-to-date on daily workflow. It's a model that The Daily Collegian, their print competitor with 10 times the staff, and newsrooms worldwide might want to mimic. Greg Ferenstein on Mashable.com examines the successful social media strategies of Onward State, and compares the world views of two camps of student journalists and their professional counterparts. http://bit.ly/bL4QYt

Italy's cyber-bullying decision sets a precedent

2010-03-24T06:40:00.000-07:00

Three Google executives were convicted in Italy on February 24 over a bullying video posted on the site, setting a precedent. I pose this question: If Google & Facebook are liable for cyber-bullying through their websites, then are cities liable for permitting crime on their streets? http://bit.ly/cSbON3

Control-freak alert

2010-03-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

Apple's penchant for controlling every aspect of a user's experience has resulted in the company applying for a patent for technology that stops your cell phone if you don't watch ads. http://bit.ly/c3iPmj

In other news, Apple doesn't care if its iPad ad goes viral? No surprise there. Apple doesn't control YouTube http://bit.ly/cATvQv

Bleacher Report signs deal with Hearst

2010-03-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

Will the Bleacher Report deal with Hearst be the petri dish where cit-J proves it can save newspapers? http://bit.ly/dyTPUf

As long as readers are clear about who they're reading, citizen journalism can provide a valuable resource to traditional media -- and provide reports that might otherwise never see the light of day. This is an interesting test.

Media consumption has definitely changed

2010-02-26T11:24:00.000-08:00

Reuters reports that more people watched live webcasts (http://bit.ly/bWnejI)of Obama's inauguration than watched it on TV.

I noticed my own media consumption habits changing several years ago. As a journalist and early adopter of technology, I can't regard my own behaviour as typical. But it dawned on me last Wednesday, while watching a webcast of the U.S. House Committe on Oversight and Government Reform grilling Toyota President and CEO Akio Toyoda (http://bit.ly/cTx81P), that it's been almost a decade since I looked to TV for breaking news.

Even my entertainment requirements have shifted to my laptop, as I prefer to use it and an HDMI cable to feed DVDs and other media to my TV. The TV's actually a recent addition (I don't subscribe to cable), because it was awkward to have more than two people gather round a laptop to watch something. When I'm alone, I still tend to just watch a DVD on my laptop, unless it's something with special effects that are more spectacular on a larger screen. Unlike my TV, I can watch things on my laptop while walking on my treadmill, soaking in the tub, or as I nod off at night.

If every news outlet synced up webcasts with live broadcasts of news, and every TV show provided downloads of episodes as they were airing, I'd happily download them, instead of buying seasons on DVD or, the alternative for many, watching torrents.

TV and the Web aren't just merging. They already have. Just as in traffic, some folks are early mergers and some are late mergers.

But we're all merging and it's time for broadcasters to catch up by providing streams or downloads with geotargeted ads.

Apple's new app rules: No swimsuits, no skin

2010-02-21T09:25:00.000-08:00

From Day 1 I found Apple to be patronizing: the first Macs wouldn't give me my floppy back until I asked (and *WAITED*) for the Mac to give me *permission* to remove it, in sharp contrast to PCs providing a button that let me eject my floppy immediately, any time I wanted it.

So news that Apple is censoring what applications can be sold in its App Store doesn't surprise me. What is surprising is *how puritanical* they're being. Tech Crunch reports that no app that displays any skin at all is being allowed (today, anyway), which is giving rise to burqa jokes. Check it out: http://tcrn.ch/cx5tUG

'I was perfectly content before I was born'

2010-02-21T08:31:00.000-08:00

Chris Jones has penned the most incredibly raw, no-holds barred profile of Roger Ebert. After cancer surgeries removed his thyroid, salivary glands and most of his lower jaw, Ebert suffered through several disastrous attempts to rebuild his jaw and is refusing further surgery. He's still reviewing films, though, and living his life on his own terms. He just isn't holding anything back these days.

Ebert is dying in increments, and he is aware of it, says Jones. And follows with this most amazing quote: "I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear," he writes in a journal entry titled Go Gently into That Good Night. "I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris."

Read the entire profile here: http://bit.ly/cfbvy9

RIP, Charlie Wilson

2010-02-21T08:25:00.000-08:00

`Feminists like me because I am an unapologetic sexist, chauvinist redneck who votes with 'em every time.'

We've lost another Texas icon. The man who secretly armed Afghanistan to rout the Russians, Charlie said he didn't like feminists to know he voted with 'em, 'cause life was more fun when they were mad at him. http://bit.ly/bLhH0S

iPad? Really?

2010-02-21T08:22:00.000-08:00

MadTV's prophetic iPad ad demonstrates why Apple should've had at least one woman on the product name team: http://bit.ly/aZ6pkk

It's too soon to tell whether Apple is filling a need we didn't yet know we had ... or just glued together four iPhones. Book publishers, clearly, are happy to see alternatives to the Kindle. But as long as we can't loan an ebook to a friend and can't transfer ownership, I think book publishers need to rethink how much they want to raise prices on ebooks.

China's censorship of Google

2010-02-21T08:21:00.001-08:00

Interesting: Thomas Friedman analysis of what's behind China's censorship of Google compares China to Enron: http://bit.ly/4W9ZLU

The blog is the new resume?

2010-02-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

This post is almost 3 years old, and before Facebook and LinkedIn became stand-ins for online resumes. But it's prophetic for 2007: http://bit.ly/6AI1vT

Nevermore

2010-02-21T08:17:00.001-08:00

Sad. The visitor who puts roses on Edgar Allan Poe's grave on Poe's birthday was a no-show for 1st time in 60 years: http://bit.ly/7XBgxV

Only 1 out of 10 Londoners know who Steve Jobs is

2010-01-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

Apparently only one out of every 10 people on the streets of London who were asked who Steve Jobs is knew he's the CEO and co-founder of Apple. More thought he's a trade union leader. Three percent thought Bill Gates was an American comedian.

Would love to see this survey done in North America, to see if recognition of these major American players in the IT industry is any better on this side of the pond. Nonetheless, it's humbling to hear that names I hear every day in my industry are a mystery to nine out of 10 Londoners. Read the full story on Computerworld: http://bit.ly/5nqbwE

Putting a fresh 'spin' on advertising

2010-01-13T10:13:00.000-08:00

Ran across AArrowads.com while looking up the company of someone who said something smart on a LinkedIn discussion today. Was struck by the freshness of their approach: they've turned humans bearing street signs into performance art, and in doing so have managed to draw attention not only to the clients buying their "sign spinning" service, but to themselves, winning spots on such venues as The Today Show. Well done, fellas!

Check them out on YouTube:
http://bit.ly/84LJMV

No new revenue model for journalism?

2010-01-13T09:47:00.000-08:00

The news businesses, foundations and journalism schools need to abandon efforts to find new funding models and concentrate instead on cultivating and studying innovation in news gathering and production, Robert Niles writes on the Online Journalism Review. That means the industry should quit looking to print editors and broadcast station managers for leadership, he says. Instead, they should study online publishers and editors who are making nascent efforts work. http://bit.ly/74taeY

The paradigm shift for journalists

2010-01-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

Being a journalist in 2010 means you can no longer write something and wait for someone to read it, warns Robert Niles says at the Online Journalism Review. Now you have to become a community organizer: http://bit.ly/82cCmJ

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

2010-01-07T09:53:00.000-08:00

In his new book, Lanier says the web started having a negative impact on our lives instead of a positive one with the rise of "Web 2.0" designs that valued the web's information content over individuals. "It became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data ... Here’s just one problem: It screws the middle class. Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor. This is why newspapers are dying. It might sound like it is only a problem for creative people, like musicians or writers, but eventually it will be a problem for everyone." http://amzn.com/0307269647

Pepsi pulls out of Superbowl to go social

2010-01-06T10:25:00.000-08:00

Pepsi's taking a huge gamble by abandoning a multi-decade, multi-million dollar Superbowl opening ad position. Instead, it's launching a $20 million social campaign:
http://bit.ly/7w7Ihr

Phoney sheep

2010-01-06T10:20:00.000-08:00

This is a bit off the media path - but art is content, even in three dimensions. And talk about incredible found art - this artist has created sheep from old phones and their cords. They are spectacular! http://bit.ly/6TTBvt

Finding 1,000 True Fans

2010-01-06T10:13:00.000-08:00

The long tail is a money-maker for big Web content aggregators - but it's a mixed blessing for Web content creators - artists, producers, inventors and makers. Kevin Kelly's The Technium post describes how creators can reach an audience that can sustain them through such tactics as finding 1,000 True Fans: http://bit.ly/wBoag

The PayPal Wars

2010-01-06T10:05:00.000-08:00

The right people are more important than the right digital strategy: we can learn from the success and stumbles of PayPal, writes Eric Jackson in his new book The PayPal Wars. PayPal almost went under before its marriage with eBay, but the main thing it did right was to have smart and fast-thinking people on its team, he says: http://bit.ly/8y8kEC

How to increase traffic to your blog

2009-12-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing shares 5 good ways to use social networks to increase traffic to your blog. I like the idea of tweeting your blog post idea to get feedback and additional resources to make it a better post: http://bit.ly/73IGEv

The Big Money Facebook 50

2009-12-14T11:03:00.000-08:00

Facebook has been "colonized" by some of the biggest and best-known multinationals, including Coca-Cola, Disney, and McDonald’s. Check out The Big Money Facebook 50, a ranking of companies making the best use of Facebook: http://bit.ly/4s5bcS

A licence to be kind

2009-12-13T19:47:00.000-08:00

A cool card concept for those who believe in paying it forward: KINDRED gives you a licence to be kind: http://www.kinded.com

Facebook grows up

2009-12-13T19:46:00.001-08:00

Facebook now has 300 million users. And is finally making money off those hokey ads http://bit.ly/TMOZ9

Inside GoogleWave

2009-12-13T19:44:00.000-08:00

This video gives a good explanation of *how* GoogleWave works: http://bit.ly/4E7xe7 This one demos the interface: http://bit.ly/UonK7

The myth of the fold

2009-12-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

Joe Leech's thesis is that real estate "below the fold" - any content that the user has to scroll down to find - being a barrier to users is a myth. This may be true of media websites, where a user plans to spend some time. But I'd like to see the same tests done on portal home pages. http://bit.ly/2iKOEe

Mobile ad revenues totop $4 billion in 2015

2009-12-13T19:35:00.000-08:00

Mobile ad revenue is the new frontier, mostly from search: http://bit.ly/XDk9y

Traditional media torn between two audiences

2009-12-13T19:29:00.000-08:00

Traditional media is caught between a new audience with new expectations -- and an old audience expecting old-fashioned propriety. http://bit.ly/4Oorah

Can Facebook crash your computer?

2009-12-13T18:38:00.001-08:00

Here's some great info on viruses like Koobfrace that target social networks: http://bit.ly/31sTsT

Hello, TTC?

2009-12-13T18:36:00.001-08:00

Get with the program: Ottawa's worked with Googlemaps for a public transit route planner. Where's Toronto? http://bit.ly/1YPsPZ

Why you shouldn't play Facebook games

2009-12-13T18:32:00.000-08:00

There's a lot hiding under the surface of Facebook games, but it's not your data they're hiding: http://bit.ly/3MkukO

Plus: Who's clicking on those cheesy ads: http://bit.ly/3vID2Y

Web TV wants to be free

2009-12-13T18:30:00.000-08:00

Online viewers get their own guide to Web TV: http://bit.ly/q84s5

It's true: nothing's ever for free

2009-12-13T18:16:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports that RealAge (an admittedly useful tool for estimating your real age, based on your lifestyle choices) sells your data to Big Pharma: http://bit.ly/1Sn06Z

Dontcha just love Fox?

2009-12-13T18:12:00.000-08:00

Oh dear. Fox wouldn't ... manufacture news, would it? Heh. A video used in a segment claiming massive crowds for a book signing was actually from a 2008 McCain/Palin campaign rally. Fox is blaming a production error: http://bit.ly/3GksSC

YouTube wants you to be a citizen journalist

2009-12-13T18:08:00.000-08:00

YouTube Direct plans to make it easy for TV and online news editors to get video from "citizen journalists" and even order up footage in advance of events: http://bit.ly/1974KE

A cornucopia of Molly

2009-12-13T17:03:00.000-08:00

Outspoken Texan Molly Ivins may have been the only print American journalist in history to gain her own constituency. Her pet phrase for George W. Bush (The Shrub) was adopted wholesale during his eight years in office. I never turned off the Ivins Google alert for her name since she died of breast cancer three years ago and there hasn't been a day gone by that an alert has come up linking to someone wondering what she'd think about something in the news.

The last month has been a rich feast of Molly alerts, with review after review of Bill Minutaglio's biography: Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life. Finally managed to snatch a day to read it. Her battle with alcohol long preceded her battle with cancer, but what was little known to her legions of fans was that she was born to a privileged Houston family - her father was the lead counsel for Humble Oil and she rubbed elbows with Dubya during her high school years. Looks like it was her fractious relationship with him that led her to become one of the loudest American voices for the poor and underprivileged.

This loving review of Molly's bio in The Statesman made me weep: http://bit.ly/nqDic

Read an excerpt from the bio here: http://bit.ly/4A0Lp

And here's a treat for those of you who've never seen Molly at her best, especially if you're in need of a laugh (warning: racy langauge): http://bit.ly/812Gic

Canadian scientist, author arrested at U.S. border

2009-12-13T16:59:00.000-08:00

Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, was beaten and arrested by U.S. border guards while trying to get back into Canada this week. I know Dr. Watts, and he does have an acerbic tongue. Apparently at the U.S. border that warrants being maced, beaten, arrested, and being taken to the border and dropped off in your shirt sleeves.

http://bit.ly/5oNu3s

The battle for press freedom has moved online

2009-12-13T16:54:00.000-08:00

And that means that half of journalists jailed around the world are freelancers, bloggers, and independent contractors, with little or no institutional support. Even mainstream wire services are increasingly depending on freelancers to cover conflicts in the Middle East, so there's no one to call for help when you get taken hostage. http://bit.ly/5w7KQH

Do publishers want to get Napstered?

2009-12-13T16:51:00.000-08:00

If the publishers force Amazon to raise prices on e-books, that's what will happen, Jack Shafer argues on Slate. On a more basic level, here's a question that needs to be asked: Ebooks cost less to make than printed books. Why shouldn't they cost less? http://bit.ly/uGlzO

Who's on Google's payroll? You'd be surprised.

2006-04-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

Google's Adsense program means dollars in the pockets of bloggers and creators of personal Web sites, many of them in developing countries.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0329/p13s02-stct.html?s=widep