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NJPA Notes
July 27, 2010 NJPA Notes will be on vacation next week. It will return on August 10.
July 28 This week:
August 18 Engaging
the Community through your Blog — webinar
Philadelphia Newspapers Launch Local Version
of Groupon-Like Deal Site Philly.com launched a local group buying website, PhillyDealyo.com, on Monday. Like Groupon and similar sites, PhillyDealyo.com allows restaurants, retailers and service providers to offer coupons that kick in when they attract at least a certain number of users. PhillyDealyo.com said its typical deal will be activated when accepted by 50 people. … Mondays through Fridays, Philly Dealyo subscribers will receive daily emails alerting them to the deal. The deal, ranging from 45% to 70% off the value of a product, is used like a gift certificate. A deal, for example, could consist of paying $20 through Philly Dealyo and receiving a $40 coupon to a restaurant. The deals are activated if the minimum number of people purchase the coupon, its so-called “tipping point.” “When a deal tips, customers receive a coupon in their account,” Philly.com said. “If the deal does not tip, customers are not charged.” For the rest of the article: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Headlines/philadelphia-newspapers-launch-local-version-of-groupon-like-deal-site-62039-.aspx
In Surprise Move, FCC Defends Loosened
Newspaper Cross-Ownership Rules – But Copps Vows Tighter Ban In a surprise move, the Democrat-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Wednesday defended changes to media cross-ownership rules adopted in the George W. Bush administration that loosened somewhat the ban on same-market common ownership of a newspaper and broadcast station. Under Chairman Julius Genachowski and with a 3-2 Democratic majority, the commission had been expected to take a hard line on media cross-ownership policy. But in a filing with the U.S. appeals court that had put those rules on hold, the FCC affirmed agency’s 2007 decision … to allow newspapers in the biggest markets to own either one radio station or one television broadcast station, but not the top-rated outlets. … But a fellow Democrat on the commission, Michael Copps, immediately attacked the official FCC position – and vowed to return to a more strict ban on cross-ownership. The Newspaper Association of America (NAA), which has repeatedly argued the rule is outdated and should be completely scrapped, noted that as much as anything the FCC filing was made to assert its rule-making authority. … NAA President and CEO John Sturm said in an interview. “The good news is it looks like the court is finally going to get a chance to make it’s opinion known.” … The filing was condemned by so-called media democracy groups, including Washington-based Free Press. “We are disappointed that Chairman Genachowski directed the agency to defend a defective (cross-ownership) rule that has been widely criticized both for its substance and for the manner in which it was adopted,” Free Press Policy Counsel Corie Wright said. “We are also disheartened because the current commission had the opportunity to fix a number of loopholes in the rule through the FCC’s reconsideration process. But it declined to do so. As a consequence, the rule could allow local newspapers and TV stations to merge in virtually any market, resulting in less diverse and democratic media.” For the rest of the article: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Headlines/in-suprise-fcc-defends-loosened-newspaper-cross-ownership-rules-but-copps-vows-tighter-ban-62065-.aspx For a related article:
Google to Government: Keep Your Hands Off
Journalism Google just published a response to some ideas recently floated by the FTC on how to rescue journalism. Google’s message: “business problems require business solutions rather than regulatory ones.” The FTC document outlines the crisis facing, in particular, print media, and expresses doubt that any new online business model will emerge that can support original journalism. It then goes on to outline a number of possible policy solutions, including:
Google says either of these proposals would be bad news for consumers. More broadly, Google rejects the underlying premise: that journalism can’t save itself without the government’s help: “The data suggest that publishers have yet to come close to maximizing their ability to attract and keep users engaged with their online offerings.” For the rest of the article: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-to-government-keep-your-hands-off-journalism-2010-7
Wikileaks May Have Just Changed the Media,
Too The website Wikileaks has published more than 90,000 leaked U.S. military records about the war in Afghanistan. Marc Ambinder has a lot more about the content of the classified archive, but there’s another fascinating aspect to the story: Wikileaks gave the New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel access to the archive several weeks ago. The rogue, rather mysterious website provided the raw data; the newspapers provided the context, corroboration, analysis, and distribution. “Wikileaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing,” Times editors said in an online note. “The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today.” While the impact of the documents and newspaper reportage on the war in Afghanistan will take a while to suss out, the publication of these documents will be seen as a milestone in the new news ecosystem. Unlike the Pentagon Papers situation, we’re “watching the traces of a major story unfold in real time,” said C.W. Anderson, who studies media culture at CUNY. “If you’re a PhD student or comm/journalism researcher who wants to study how news diffuses in 2010, here’s your case study,” he tweeted. This story – and the organization behind it – is obviously singular. It’s being described as one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history. (Though it’s worth noting that the value of the information is not totally clear yet.) But it also fits into a broader trend. Traditional media organizations are increasingly reaching out to different kinds of smaller outfits for help compiling data and conducting investigations. NPR is partnering with several journalism startups to deliver their information out to a larger audience. The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University broke a large story on renewable energy in association with ABC’s World News Tonight. ProPublica’s 32 full-time investigative reporters offer their stories exclusively to a traditional media player. New conduits have opened into the most highly regarded newsrooms in the country; while that’s probably a good thing, it adds a layer of complexity to a story like this. While ProPublica and others are certainly journalism outfits, Wikileaks is neither here nor there. … The New York Times’ David Carr may have nailed the issue when he tweeted that it was the “asymmetries” that Wikileaks introduces into the equation that have the government spooked. An administration official told Politico, ““[I]t’s worth noting that Wikileaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan.” But the truth is that we don’t really know what Wikileaks is, or what the organization’s ethics are, or why they’ve become such a stunningly good conduit of classified information. In the new asymmetrical journalism, it’s not clear who is on what side or what the rules of engagement actually are. But the reason Wikileaks may have just changed the media is that we found out that it doesn’t really matter. Their data is good, and that’s what counts. For the rest of the article: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/07/wikileaks-may-have-just-changed-the-media-too/60377/
5 Ways News Organizations Respond to
‘Unpublishing’ Requests Most news organizations are reluctant to remove content from their websites. They want to preserve the integrity of the archive, and worry that if they unpublish a story based on one request they’ll have to do so for everyone who makes these requests. Some news organizations have experimented with alternatives to unpublishing that have allow them to both maintain the public record and, when appropriate, appease the person who wants the record erased. To better understand this issue, it helps to look at some of the reasons people make unpublishing requests:
Here are five ways to handle these requests.
For the rest of the article: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=187067
Are Hyperlocals Replacing Traditional
Newspapers? All politics may be local, but apparently not enough journalism is. As newspapers keep cutting back on staff and printing skimpier editions, journalists, entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens have responded by creating websites to cover the local news they feel is going underreported – like the serious windstorm that hit Tracy Record’s Seattle neighborhood in 2006. “Every day we break stories,” says Record, the editor and primary reporter for West Seattle Blog, a site she and her husband created as an information hub after the storm. “In the past hour, I learned a major parks project is being delayed because of drainage trouble and just broke that on our site.” She also covers car crashes, crime, council meetings, bake sales and walkathons for the 70,000 or so Seattle residents who live west of the Duwamish River. “If they were able to get the local news they needed elsewhere, we wouldn’t have wound up doing this,” says Record. Hyperlocal has become a buzzword as familiar to news junkies as eat local is to foodies. The idea is to get residents involved in the reporting not just by sending in tips but by writing content about important local issues such as school boards and transportation. In professional newsrooms, “we spend too much time on craft and not enough time on community,” says Michele McLellan, a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri who spent the past year studying nearly 70 of the best hyperlocal sites. “Many of the new sites, even if they don’t have the most polished reports, are flipping that: community first.” … … “Many journalists would say good journalism is about good storytelling,” says … former WashingtonPost.com editor Adrian Holovaty. “As much as I love a compelling story, I think good journalism can also be about organizing information in intelligent ways and giving people tools that let them help each other.” For the rest of the article: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2005729-1,00.html
Arianna’s Answer If you had to declare a winner among Internet media companies today, the victor easily would be Arianna Huffington. Her site, The Huffington Post, attracted 24.3 million unique visitors last month, five times as much traffic as many new-media rivals, more than The Washington Post and USA Today, and nearly as many as The New York Times. HuffPo’s revenue this year will be about $30-million – peanuts compared with the old-media dinosaurs, but way better than most digital competitors. And HuffPo has finally started to eke out a profit. … But a closer look at HuffPo’s financials shows just how tough that future is turning out to be. HuffPo has a big audience, but like most websites, it can’t monetize it very well. Right now, HuffPo generates just over $1 per reader per year. That’s nothing compared with the mainstream-media outlets that HuffPo hopes to displace. Cable-TV networks and print newspapers collect hundreds of dollars per year from each subscriber, and then generate hundreds of millions in ad revenue on top of that. The comparison isn’t perfect – TV and newspapers have higher fixed costs than websites – but it gives you a sense of how radically things are changing. Yes, money is gushing out of old media – nobody knows this better than Newsweek, which is struggling financially and has been put up for sale by its parent, The Washington Post Company – and some of that money is flowing onto the Internet. But something strange happens to those ad dollars as they make the journey from old media to the Web – somehow, by some weird, bad voodoo, those dollars turn into dimes. Or nickels. Or even pennies. A recent report by eMarketer, a leading researcher of Internet media, says online ad spending will grow more than 10 percent per year over the next few years, approaching $100 billion by 2014. That will still represent only 17 percent of all advertising spending. The hard truth is that advertisers want to put messages on websites, but they just don’t want to pay very much for that privilege. And perhaps for good reason. When was the last time you clicked on an Internet ad? Or even noticed one? “Maybe it’s time that someone says the unsayable – that online advertising just doesn’t work. A website turns out to be a not very good advertising vehicle,” says Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair columnist who also runs Newser, an ad-supported news-aggregation website that attracts 2 million unique visitors a month and will generate a few million in revenue this year. Online advertising rates have been dropping for a decade. Wolff says his average CPM (what he can charge for delivering 1,000 impressions of an ad) fell 20 percent in the past two years, from $10 to $8. The average for the Internet is only $2.43, according to comScore, a market-research firm that tracks Internet traffic and ad spending. And nobody expects ad rates to bounce back up – ever. … In this low-margin world, companies that operate on a massive scale have a big advantage. Google reaps billions of dollars by showing zillions of cheapo ads. That’s why Internet giants AOL and Yahoo now are pushing into the online content business, hiring journalists. But both are also pursuing a low-cost, low-value strategy, as evidenced by Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Associated Content, whose business involves paying freelancers $100 or less to churn out stories based on whatever keywords are most popular on search engines. The growing presence of big players will likely put even more pressure on ad rates, further squeezing the little guys. This is what The Huffington Post – and every other online news site – is up against. For the rest of the article: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/25/arianna-s-answer.html
Getting Beyond Pay vs. Free: Analyzing the
Subscriber Media moguls continue to swagger and bloviate over the need to get online readers to pay for content. But millions of professionals have been paying for content online for years. There is no secret to paid content. Readers will pony up cash for content that makes or saves them money. At a longtime financial data provider like NASDAQ OMX Group, the question isn’t how to get their financial service customers to pay for the Global Index Watch service – but how to keep that base happy and ensure that the product continues to deliver value. “It is several decades old, and we have been publishing digitally for thirty years,” says Randall Hopkins, senior vice president, global data products, NASDAQ OMX. The service goes to nonprofessional and institutional investors, but “what we have done historically is publish the information without a lot of feedback,” he admits. … “We are being much more precise in our knowledge of who is using what and for what purpose,” Hopkins says. “Our goal is to make sure that we create product strategies that align with the needs of the consumer.” … The analytics are giving the company paths for product development.… Hopkins says he can now see specific types of users clustering around certain kinds of data, where before he just saw the subscriber base as one large undifferentiated pool. Now he can identify smaller groups of users with their areas of interest and create products that super-serve them. The analytics are also being applied to the free areas, where the company previously had no insight. “We can get more information about the usage and profiling about the free space. There are clear product opportunities for content producers to identify where the free information is attracting users and what the next step would be for that information,” says Hopkins. … For the rest of the article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132617
AOL Launches AOL Advertising Politics AOL appears to be positioning itself as a go-to ad destination for politicians and advocacy groups looking to persuade the masses prior to the 2010 mid term elections. The company on Thursday (July 22) rolled out the AOL Advertising Politics hub (www.advertising.aol.com/politics), which is designed to serve as a sales tool and do-it-yourself ad purchasing platform for political advertisers. The site provides detailed information and recommended tactics for multiple varieties of political campaigns, ranging from fundraising to location-based get out the vote efforts. And of course, the site directs user to two different buying options. They can launch a campaign on their own via AOL’s Ad Desk platform, or opt to contact a sales rep. Overall, it seems that AOL is betting that its massive reach and its breadth of buying options will appeal to political media buyers – particularly the less experienced groups that may jump online in a big way this fall. For the rest of the article: http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/digital-downloads/broadband/e3ic0d7c3a6d02f0164b756353cc1eb9918
Expansion of ‘Dot Jobs’ Domain Raises
Concerns, Opposition The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Employ Media, which are exclusively licensed to administer the .jobs domain for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), are proposing to revise their original charter. This move is being opposed by a coalition of employment websites and associations, including NAA, Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. If successful, SHRM and Employ Media would expand the .jobs domain from employer websites (such as Microsoft.jobs and Verizon.jobs) to include free “location” and “occupational” sites (such as chicago.jobs and IT.jobs). NAA and others submitted a letter to ICANN on July 15 urging the organization to reject the SHRM/Employ Media proposal. For more information and the NAA letter: http://www.naa.org/Public-Policy.aspx
Spokeo Sued for Allegedly Violating Fair
Credit Laws A Virginia resident has sued online data aggregator and broker Spokeo for allegedly “unlawfully operating and profiting as a consumer reporting agency.” In papers filed Tuesday in federal court in the Central District of California, Thomas Robins of Vienna, Va. alleges that Spokeo is violating the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act by offering inaccurate data about consumers without effectively allowing people to remove incorrect reports. He is seeking class-action status. Spokeo allows people to search for detailed reports about individuals. The company gleans information from a variety of databases, including social networking sites like LinkedIn and MySpace. While it offers some basic information for free – including people’s addresses, phone numbers, estimated age and household composition – Spokeo sells other data, including estimates of individuals’ wealth. Robins alleges that Spokeo correctly lists some data about him, such as his neighborhood and siblings’ names, but that most of the other data is wrong. He says that contrary to Spokeo’s report, he “is not in his 50s, is not married, is not employed in a professional or technical field, does not have a graduate degree, and has no children.” Currently seeking a job, Robins says he is afraid that “the inaccuracies in his report will affect his ability to obtain credit, employment, insurance, and the like.” For the rest of the article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132349&nid=116778
Research Brief: According to The Consumer Reports Index for July, by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, the economy is showing broad improvements in the condition, behavior and expectations of consumers. … The Consumer Reports Employment Index numbers show job creation increased to 51.1, its highest level since April 2009. The Employment Index has pointed to employment growth in three of the last four months. In July 7.8% of Americans started a new job versus 5.7% that lost their job. Consumer spending across index categories rose in July, particularly in the area of personal electronics and major home appliances. Per capita retail spending was up slightly for July ($274), reflecting June activity, from the prior month ($234). The Trouble Tracker Index, measuring the financial difficulties faced by consumers in the past 30 days, declined to 57.6 from 63.5 the prior month, and is slightly below July of last year (58.8). The most notable improvement was in the proportion of Americans that missed a mortgage payment, down to 2.4% from 3.9% the prior month. … The most common difficulties faced by Americans are:
For the rest of the article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132609
Research Brief: According to the American Express Global Customer Service Barometer, 61% of Americans report that quality customer service is more important to them in today’s economic environment, and will spend an average of 9% more when they believe a company provides excellent service. However, only 37% of Americans believe that companies have increased their focus on providing quality service:
Jim Bush, Executive Vice President, World Service, says “Customers... expect superior service... (and) are focused on getting good value for their money... consumers say companies haven’t done enough to improve their approach to service... it’s important to see customer service as an investment, not a cost.” … Importantly, consumers are far more forgiving if a company has earned their trust over time. 86% of consumers report they’re willing to give a company a second chance after a bad experience if they’ve historically experienced great customer service with that company. But companies who get it wrong should realize it’s at a cost:
For the rest of the article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132166
New Video Devices Aplenty, but Who’s on
Offense? As quotes from the late New York Yankees “Boss” George Steinbrenner were resurrected by the dozens this past week, one that stuck out for me was: “Look, if you’re not on offense, you’re on defense.” So while economic forecasters spend the summer debating the pros and cons of stimulus versus austerity, it’s clear that the macroeconomic picture in the U.S. is not looking good. Are we on offense? Or defense? … Let’s examine who’s on defense. Here’s the starting lineup: 1) Skittish national advertisers ran with the cable upfront for fear of getting creamed in scatter as they did in 2009/10. … On the digital side, they all talked the talk at Cannes, but the walk is likely to remain to be all about ROI on their whopping 5% to 8% of spend. … 2) Privacy-stricken government regulators remain convinced that we are on a clandestine mission to behaviorally target our way onto people’s devices and into their personal lives, grabbing all the private data we can along the way to eventually deliver addressable video creative at the household level. … 3) Overzealous corporate procurement officers continue to squeeze agency margins from the bottom up, many getting performance bonuses on how much they can save marketers on their “agency partner” expenditures. So much for the value of ideas. 4) Big agency brands are struggling to remain relevant while believing that shuffling their executive decks and racing to integrate digital from outside their walls into cross-channel offerings within their venerable Madison Ave. nameplates will be enough to stay alive. … 5) Skittish cable operators whose “triple plays” are being eroded by the scaling of IPTV, IP-enabled TV sets, video program guides – and beware the Apple in the room, AppleTV, complete with the iTunes platform. … In short, it’s mid-season, and there are a lot of players on defense. Now let’s look at who’s on offense. 1) Apple continues to stun the media distribution world with its closed iTunes platform. We whine, we moan, yet, we buy – in the millions. … 2) Print publishers, despite their loss of ad pages, are in a fight for their very survival and new revenue streams. The debate over paid versus free content continues, but as e-readers and iPads continue to scale, both newspaper and magazine publishers are moving quickly to put their traditional content on digital steroids – including online video. Will a business model follow? Enhanced print ads and video ad insertion should be a no-brainer here. Necessity is the mother of Invention. 3) Google. … 4) Media service agencies. Long the cash cows of the agency holding companies, media service agencies are busy racing to build out their own demand-side technology platforms to replace those intermediating their business from the outside. 5) The database companies. As more data becomes monetizable, the data gatherers once searching for a business model have become the new stars of Madison Avenue. … Perhaps, in these chaotic times, the best offense is a good defense. But whether you’re on offense or defense, the question is, are these really opposing teams? For the most part, no. Interdependencies abound. The question is, will the marketing line item itself follow the defense, or more importantly, who among marketers will be brave enough to go on offense? From where this creative sits, healthy balance sheets have always beat big ideas, which is why, Mr.Steinbrenner, we in the American Advertising League just might be in for a very long ride before the offense gets back on the field. For the rest of the article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132384
iPad Disconnect Could Prove Costly for
Media, Advertisers The major disconnect between the explosive adoption of Apple’s iPad by consumers and businesses and the fumbled, reticent response from so many media and advertising players could quickly become a lost cause – literally. Companies that fail to keep pace with consumer habits and demands will miss interactive opportunities and new revenues triggered by the integration of the iPad and other e-tablets into routine, corporate and educational activities. Apple reports that it sold 1 million iPads in the first month, compared to the 20 months it took to sell its first 1 million iPhones. The sale of more than 3 million iPads and 13,000 apps – generating $2.2 billion revenues in the June quarter and making it Apple’s third-largest business behind iPhones and Macs – promises audience reach and experience that exceeds conventional print and analog media. … 80% of Fortune 100 and 60% of Fortune 500 companies are deploying or piloting the iPhone. Within its first 90 days on the market, half of Fortune 100 companies are deploying or testing the iPad for service, sales and other enterprise functions, according to Apple COO Tim Cook. More than 400 schools have officially adopted iPhone use for their faculty, staff and students, he said. Likewise, Google is in the process of building a comprehensive mobile presence that will put it alongside Apple at the center of the evolving mobile Internet ecosystem, where platforms and operating systems, advertising monetization and apps collide. Credit Suisse analysts estimate the two companies will emerge as the dominant platforms with more than a combined 40% global share by 2015. All of this begs the question: Are content providers and advertisers proactively responding to these cues fast enough with innovative formats and applications to reinvent themselves? Although some notable strides are being made, media and Madison Avenue generally are moving slowly and cautiously to creatively mine the iPad or other platforms they don’t control for fear of compromising their crumbling legacy silos. Many remain skeptical about turning over content and advertising on Apple’s revenue-sharing iTunes and AppStore, even as they recognize the pressing need to reach consumers cross-platform. This damaging disconnect could be partially a matter of perspective. Moving beyond familiar and comfortable content and advertising forms to wade through the unknown to create potentially more lucrative endeavors can be as liberating as it is intimidating. The potential represented by the iPad, iPhone and other interactive mobile devices is not about rocking television’s video dominance or saving newspapers. It is about discovering and capitalizing on new content, commerce and communications trends exploding across multiple platforms. For the rest of the article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132599&nid=116944
Why Interruption Still Trumps Engagement I know we’re not supposed to say it out loud, but a lot of CMOs and agency types think that advertising is going the way of the dinosaur, the Model T and conversation without emoticons. Consumers want to engage with content instead of get interrupted by ads, or so the logic goes, so we celebrate social campaigns like the recent one from Old Spice, and find favor only for commercials that are entertaining. Making a sales pitch just isn’t credible anymore. Now that we’re well into the social-media revolution, I think it’s time to revisit the three assumptions on which this argument is based: The first assumption is that ads aren’t credible so they can’t play a meaningful role in our conversations with consumers. But nobody wakes up in the morning hating ads, do they? That’s like saying a particular print font angers you, or that the hardcover book format keeps you up at night. I say ads aren’t credible when they’re useless or dishonest, which, unfortunately, describes most advertising. … Telling a half truth or a made-up benefit isn’t the same thing as outright lying, but it’s certainly not credible and consumers know it. Yet we continue to do it. … This relates to the second assumption, which is that consumers don’t want to be bothered. Commercial speech is an intrusion, so brands must avoid producing anything that even hints at a sales purpose, and then wait and hope to be invited to do so at some later date. “Permission marketing” is a glorious babblespeak idea that shows… we’ve forgotten there are good reasons why consumers want to know things they may not have asked for: Relevance. … The third assumption is that entertainment is an alternative to selling. It’s not, and it never was.… Purpose matters… and … that’s a part of every conversation we have with consumers. They know we’re trying to sell to them, whether we acknowledge it or they consciously think about it. Is it possible that consumers suspect our motives when we produce “content” without any admission of sales intent? Could the all-time lows in corporate reputation and credibility be partially a result of these purposeless conversations? We can entertain all we want, but perhaps we’re just swapping empty social calories for the substance we once aspired to deliver via advertising. Brands always had conversations with consumers, whether via broadcast TV or chiseled on clay tablets. The rules have also been consistent over time: Tell the truth and tell it with relevance, immediacy and meaning. That’s why ads that interrupted with sales messages worked so effectively for so long; making the content worth consumers’ time meant that brands could risk asking for the sale. It’s not a new idea, and today’s consumers aren’t a new breed of human being. Yet we’ve assumed that the old rules no longer apply. I’d choose effective interruption over pointless engagement anytime. Why wouldn’t you? For the rest of the article: http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=145003
Don’t Confuse Your Personal Experience with
Good Strategy I’ll never forget a conversation I had with my graduate advisor my first semester as a sociology grad student. I had scheduled a meeting to discuss my first big research project with him and made the comment, “Well in my experience...” He stopped me mid-sentence, his eyes got large, and he took a deep breath. “Listen to me,” he said. “Your personal experience is irrelevant here. You are not a representative sample.” Sasha Pasulka published a brilliant post on Seattle 2.0 recently explaining how she learned this lesson firsthand. As she Tweeted about her plans to launch a new email newsletter, she was mocked by a friend who replied, “Welcome to 2003!” Despite her skepticism that her readers would voluntarily provide their email addresses, people signed up “in droves.” Her conclusion, “I should have done this years ago. I did not, because I was thinking like me, and not like my market.” … My eyes were really opened when I talked to a friend who runs a website for ranch and farm real estate brokers. He recently told me that every time he sends an email to his customers, his fax machine goes nuts with responses. For the rest of the article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132355
10 Ways for Newspapers to Take Advantage of
the Hiring Boom After recessions end, employers start hiring again. The increase in hiring demand creates opportunities for just about everyone in the human capital marketplace. This includes job seekers, of course, but it also includes the companies that provide services to employers. Wanted Analytics recently published a white paper which examines ten ways that newspapers and other suppliers in the human capital marketplace can take advantage of the hiring boom. For the white paper: http://forms.madisonlogic.com/Form.aspx?pub=93&pgr=432&src=2820&tgt=1938&ast=9362&cmp=2203&frm=662&autodn=1&pi=397592
SCS Layout-8000 Version 12 Soon to Arrive The last upgrades to Software Consulting Services’ Layout-8000 in Version 11 include more dummying options, manual dummying (multiple ads can be dragged and dropped onto a page), automatic dummying, and one-click placement with a recommended page. … Layout-8000 is now updated every other week in one downloadable file that installs in one command. A single command also reverts to the prior version. … The Nazareth, Pa.-based newspaper-publishing software developer said it will release Version 12 later this summer … providing a view of pages and convenience for frequent design tasks. An interactive list of ads shows placement conflicts. PDF ad images are previewed. For the rest of the article: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Headlines/scs-layout-8000-version-12-soon-to-arrive-62047-.aspx
Just Add Water Publication design maestro Roger Black announced his latest venture today, Ready-Media, a collection of pre-existing templates for print and web publications. Ready-Media is a joint venture along with David and Sam Berlow of Font Bureau, publication designer Robb Rice, and newspaper designer Eduardo Danilo. The service offers a smorgasbord of already-designed magazines in a variety of formats, city/regional, trade, travel, etc., as well as newspaper and web designs. Clients can choose a variety of fonts online and even see how they’ll look in the layouts. The new venture’s website states “never before has world-class media design been so available, so accessible, so affordable.” For the rest of the article: http://www.spd.org/2010/07/just-add-water.php
College Journalists Are Good at Consuming
Multimedia but Bad at Making It. Why? Earlier this year, I judged a prestigious national contest that chose the best college newspaper website in the country. It was a tough decision. Usually, when a judge says he had trouble selecting a winner, all the entries were so damn good it was hard to tell the difference. But in this case, nearly all the entries were so damn boring it was hard to tell the difference. The contest I judged is SPJ’s Mark of Excellence. It receives more than 3,600 entries in nearly 80 categories – everything from editorial cartooning to radio news reporting to TV sports photography. A more recent addition has been “Best Affiliated website,” and I was asked to pick a first, second, and third place from 2009. The winner was Ball Bearings from Ball State University, followed by The Short Horn from University of Texas-Arlington and the State Press from Arizona State University. Besides the winner – which is truly inspired, you really gotta see it – the runners-up and the nine other finalists featured very similar designs and nearly identical content. … Most of the stories on these sites are mere “shovelware,” meaning print articles are tossed online without much thought. Or pictures, graphics, or video. What’s so weirdly depressing is that I’ve seen many of these newspapers in print – and they kick ass. From the design to the writing to the photography, you can tell talented students sweat and bled for their paper dreams. Their print editions have verve. Their online editions have templates. Smarter people than me have noticed this. Ask most college newspaper advisers, and they’ll grumble, “I’m old and telling them to work harder online. They’re young and telling me print is their priority.” Educated explanations for this irony focus on the technical: Students don’t have the desire or the time to learn the complicated programs to create truly edgy websites. But I believe the real reasons can be best explained by psychology, not technology. Here’s what I’ve seen at the South Florida college newspaper I advise... Dead Trees Make Me Feel Alive Everyone has a Facebook page. But not everyone has a newspaper page. College students don’t seek status the way adults do. Adults compare cars and careers and their kids’ schools – it’s all about raw purchasing power. But college students are too cool to be capitalistic. Scarcity is their currency. … Print is special to college journalists precisely because it’s old tech: Hey, I must be important because they killed trees to publish my words. A living thing died for my genius – and not yours. … The Velvet Page Since websites have an infinite amount of space that costs nothing, and since newsprint has a limited amount of space that costs a lot, and since all print stories run online anyway, college journalists interpret “online exclusive” as “you think I suck.” … The In-Your-Face Factor Nowhere else in South Florida are newspaper racks so closely bunched. Even if our students don’t read the school paper – and most never do – they’ll probably walk by at least two of our bright-red bins on their way to class. Nothing motivates a student journalist like seeing his front-page story splashed all over campus. And he can easily impress his friends by tossing them a copy and nonchalantly saying, “Here, look at this.” … Ugly Ain’t Easy Many college newspaper websites look like ours – not as clean as Facebook and only a tad less cluttered than MySpace. Alas, it takes a lot of time to maintain even a homely newspaper website. It requires a lot less time to design a fetching print edition. … Printing Money The web is the combustion engine. Print is a buggy whip. Web, renewable energy. Print, fossil fuel. Journalism advisers use these analogies to convince students to spurn print and embrace the Internet. Doesn’t work. Why? Because the most intriguing jobs are still in print. There aren’t a lot of them, and they’re dwindling every day. But college students rarely contemplate the odds when considering their careers. It’s the same reason college rock bands and rap groups think they’ll hit it big: Those other musical acts suck, but we’re going to make it. Whenever I meet new recruits at our student newspaper, I ask them, “What do you wanna be when you grow up?” The answers almost always involve traditional print or broadcast: editor of Elle, music reviewer for Rolling Stone, investigative reporter for The New York Times, anchor for CNN, foreign correspondent for NPR. I never hear, “Content producer for a cutting-edge multimedia website.” For the rest of the article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-koretzky/college-journalists-are-g_b_650423.html
Writers Explain What It’s Like Toiling on
the Content Farm “We are going to be the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year,” AOL’s media and studios division president David Eun said last month in an interview with Michael Learmonth of Ad Age. Eun suggested that AOL could double its existing stable of 500 full-time editorial staffers in addition to expanding its network of 40,000 freelance contributors. Many of the jobs will be added to its hyper-local venture, Patch, while the majority of AOL’s freelancers will work for the company’s content farms – Seed and the recently acquired video production operation, StudioNow. These two areas into which AOL is ambitiously expanding are the fastest growing sectors of the journalism market. Hyper-local networks like Outside.in and content farms such as Demand Media are flourishing. As Eun’s bold prediction indicates, more and more journalists will end up working for new online content producers. What will these new gigs be like? To better understand, I reached out to people who have already worked with some of the big players. Life of a ‘Content Creator’ The former “content creator” – that’s what Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt calls his freelance contributors – asked to be identified only as a working journalist for fear of “embarrassing” her current employer with her content farm-hand past. She began working for Demand in 2008, a year after graduating with honors from a prestigious journalism program. It was simply a way for her to make some easy money. In addition to working as a barista and freelance journalist, she wrote two or three posts a week for Demand on “anything that I could remotely punch out quickly.” The articles she wrote – all of which were selected from an algorithmically generated list – included “How to Wear a Sweater Vest” and “How to Massage a Dog That Is Emotionally Stressed,” even though she would never willingly don a sweater vest and has never owned a dog. “I was completely aware that I was writing crap,” she said. … “Never trust anything you read on eHow.com,” she said, referring to one of Demand Media’s high-traffic websites, on which most of her clips appeared. Although chief revenue officer Joanne Bradford has touted Demand’s ability to give freelancers a byline and get their pieces published to “a great place on the web,” the successful writers I interviewed made great efforts to conceal their identities while working for the content farm. For the rest of the article: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/07/writers-explain-what-its-like-toiling-on-the-content-farm202.html
The Problem with Online Ad Creative No One
Wants to Hear HBO’s “Six Feet Under” delivered the greatest closing segment in a television series finale I have ever seen. The final two minutes features Claire, a struggling late-20something artist. The camera angle is from high above as we watch her drive alone on a road surrounded by desert as the day closes in on sunset. She had attended her brother Nate’s funeral that morning. The segment is driven by heart-pounding music (“Breathe Me” by Sia) as viewers travel into the future to learn how and when the rest of the main characters we grew to love, take their last breaths. The show concludes with Claire’s own future passing well into her ‘90s. Many could argue the closing segment from “M*A*S*H” reigns supreme – and they would likely be right, humming the show’s theme song (“Suicide is Painless” by Johnny Mandel) while delivering their winning argument. What is the common ingredient in both of these achievements? Music. Mixed with content, music … [creates a binding] connection with the audience. That’s why movies rely on music scores and songs in the forefront to elevate the senses of their audience, and television commercials do the same exact thing. … Next time you watch an ad on television, really listen to it, too – and you will likely hear music. So what’s the problem with online advertising creative? It can’t be heard. The Web is overwhelmingly experienced in silence.… So for the most part, online display ads flash, float, rollover, pop under, and expand – but whatever shape they are seen in, they are not heard. This eliminates the subtle or overt use of music in the ad experience to help cement an emotional connection. … Still don’t believe music makes such a difference in the connection content forms with an audience? Consider the closing segment for the final episode of “The Sopranos.” Many hated the abrupt ending – but everyone who watched can name the song played at its conclusion.
Privacy Hearing: FTC Official Regales
Congress with Tale of Lost Souls Gamestation’s April Fool’s stunt made its way into the Congressional record today during FTC consumer protection chief David Vladeck’s testimony at a hearing about online privacy. In discussing potential new privacy laws, Vladeck stressed the need for short and concise notifications to consumers. Many current privacy policies don’t effectively communicate companies’ practices to consumers, Vladeck said. And, he added, lengthy and dense policies definitely won’t work on smartphones or other small screens. To illustrate just how few consumers read privacy policies, Vladeck told lawmakers about Gamestations’ prank, which involved adding this clause to its terms of service: “By placing an order via this website on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul.” Even though Gamestation provided an opt-out link – and gave anyone who opted out an $8 voucher – only 12 % of users opted out, while 7,500 users agreed to sell their souls. “I don’t believe these consumers really meant to transfer their rights to their souls to an online gaming company,” Vladeck said, adding that the incident “drives home the need for short and concise notices.” For the rest of the article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132541
The Value of Content and the Value of
Courage As a member of the Dow Jones leadership team responsible for creating and satisfying customer demand for quality news and information across our different franchises, including The Wall Street Journal, I think a lot about the value of content. Those of us involved in the marketing of news media can agree that this is a daunting task – but something we eagerly tackle each day. What is the underpinning of success in this enterprise? One answer is … courage. This realization came to me during a Saturday morning conversation with my 11-year-old daughter about the speech she will deliver standing at the Bimah in front of our Temple congregation at her Bat Mitzvah. The purpose of the speech is to describe the personal relevance she finds in her reading from a section of the Torah. My daughter’s Torah portion is from the book of Numbers, the story of the Jews coming out of Egypt and heading into Israel. The connection she would make between herself and an overwhelmed, exhausted band of ex-slaves, if any at all, intrigued me. The connection she made was that she, and they, didn’t like change. She, and they, were not fearless in the face of change. She, and they – and I suggest, we – need to be more courageous as we face a world of unpredictability and flux. Below is my check list of how to be more courageous, and successful, as we seek to correctly value quality content – particularly in the eyes of our readers:
Change and courage aren’t new challenges for any of us, personally or professionally. Many times it’s not the elimination of those demons that unveils opportunities, but it’s the ability to outsmart them with tools, techniques and tricks for managing the risk. For the rest of the article: http://www.inma.org/blogs/value-content/post.cfm/the-value-of-content-and-the-value-of-courage ___________
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