Posted by Sebastien on the 2006/10/31 at 03:25
in Newspapers - 2 Comments
Following Harry’s last post, I happened to find the following very actionable mini-manifesto (registration required) from Dave Morgan in MediaPost. Dave Morgan is Tacoda’s CEO (Tacoda is a behavioral targeting advertising network) and their biggest customers are major newspapers. He feels that newspapers can’t wait any longer before they embrace the Web and if they don’t, they will lose to GYM (Google, Yahoo, MSN). According to Mr. Morgan, newspapers have the following biggest competitive weakness vs. GYM: lack of scale and lack of vision.
He offers the following strategic advice for them if they want to be successful:
- Set their digital divisions free. “Newspapers need to stop the forced integration of online and print teams. These two groups are like oil and water, and the print people bring the online folks down. Newspaper should “rightsize” their print business according to future print revenues and invest in their online business according to future online revenues. Forced integration online causes great customers and great talent to flee.”
- Think beyond the page. “Local newspapers cannot simply repurpose themselves online.”
- Embrace user-generated media. “Newspaper Web sites need massive audience and ad impression scale. They will need to be twenty times bigger in three years than they are today. They cannot get this growth through newsroom content alone; not by far. As Fast Company noted, newspapers need to be the place where everything local is posted, shared, discussed, criticized, or mashed up. That means lots and lots of user content and very little “publisher control.”
- Create local ad networks. “Someone needs to aggregate every site and every page and every blog with any local connection onto local ad networks to create the kind of massive scale that advertisers want. This is already done on the national level; it should be done at the local level.”
What it means: this is a brilliant wake-up call to the newspaper industry but I think every offline media should read this mini-manifesto and filter it through their own business rules and environment.
Posted by Harry on the 2006/10/31 at 12:32
in Media - 1 Comment »
Newspaper journalist and blogger Mark Evans has some interesting insights for the newspaper publishers and the media conglomerates that own them; lower ROI’s are now the norm, get used to it, “reposition your newsrooms to cover less news” and “focus on providing analysis, perspective, context”. In other words, newspapers are now a niche business, no longer the mass media they once were - or least that’s what they’re rapidly becoming. Which begs the next question, what about convergence? Wasn’t the concentration of all that billion dollar traditional media (cable/broadcast/newspapers/radio) supposed to stave off the global media onslaught? Paradoxically, the focus of that battle was other media-laden 800-pound gorillas (Newscorp, anyone?) when in reality the true menacing hordes are the thousands of citizen journalists that report, however erroneously, what’s happening in their small part of the world. In fact, right now, the real scoop is that Mark Evans himself is the “next generation newspaper”, as evidenced when Om Malik pulled a Business 3.0 on Business 2.0, and that media behemoths are ill-equipped to battle anything less than other media behemoths.
What it means: Media fragmentation will continue and those that can harness the of power citizen journos may win, but they’re a wily bunch as are their readers. A new local media paradigm will eventually emerge.
Posted by Sebastien on the 2006/10/30 at 07:54
in Politics - No Comments »
Read in November 2006’s Wired Magazine: Daniel Rosen is a candidate for U.S. Representative in Nevada’s Second Congressional District. “Rosen’s pitch to the people of Nevada’s Second Congressional District is that if they send him to Washington in November, he’ll vote exactly the way his constituents tell him to. Really. Each of the district’s 358,000 registered voters would be able to log in to a secure Web site and record their preference for every piece of legislation that comes before Congress.”
What it means: although I’m a strong believer in using the Web to democratize the political process (the real “power to the people”), this might be pushing the envelope too much. I like the general idea but, at the same time, an elected official is put in office to represent people, need to be able to take decisions based on complex dossiers and can’t really manage by polls (in this case votes, but you know what I mean). In any case, this might stimulate more people to vote and that’s good! Expect the next 10 years to be really interesting though in terms of social applications applied to politics.
Posted by Sebastien on the 2006/10/29 at 12:32
in Meta-Praized - No Comments »
Many people ask us: “for all the posts you write on Praized.com, you must have read 10 other articles that did not make the cut”. The answer is obviously, yes! But starting today, and once a week afterwards, we’ll write a Meta-Praized post that covers the top articles that did not make the cut. Remember, you can always get a taste of what we’re following by looking at the various articles we’ve “dugg” on Digg.com. Feel free to add us as a friend: PraizedDotCom
According to TechCrunch, Digg.com is in acquisition talks with News Corp. It seems like they’re asking $150M for the company but sources say they won’t be able to get it. Rumour has it that they will go to a second round of financing with GreyLock Partners (who have also investments in Farecast, Oodle, LinkedIn and Facebook among other things).
By the way, I am also completely addicted to Digg.com. It’s a great way to track new trends. If you want to see what the Praized team think is cool on the Web, we’re using the PraizedDotCom alias in Digg. Please feel free to add us to your friends’ list.
Update: “Digg’s Adelson Brushes Off Acquisition Rumors“. Erick Schonfeld from Business 2.0 magazine asked him: “…under what circumstances would he sell Digg to a larger entity. He said he would only consider it if he believed that a larger company could do more to democratize media than Digg could on its own.”
United Talent Agency in the New York Times: “One of Hollywood’s top five talent agencies has created an online unit devoted to scouting out up-and-coming creators of Internet content — particularly video — and finding work for them in Web-based advertising and entertainment, as well as in the older media.”
What it means: traditional media still makes or breaks creative careers
MySpace and TBS in MediaPost’s Online Media Daily: “ In the Stand-Up or Sit Down Comedy Challenge, aspiring comics will compete for a $50,000 prize by submitting performance videos for MySpace users to rate. The top five finalists will then be invited to appear in a one-hour special hosted by comedian George Lopez and filmed at The Comedy Festival in Las Vegas. The show will be broadcast on TBS on Nov. 17.”
What it means: great use of a “multi-media” strategy (and also see above)
Social network fatigue in the Wall Street Journal: “Ms. Thompson belongs to a fringe of Internet users now renouncing MySpace and other social-networking sites — not in spite of their popularity, but because of it. That highlights a dilemma facing NewsCorp’s MySpace and Facebook Inc.: While it takes a critical mass of users to make these sites work, having too many users alienates some, especially when they attract an ever-growing cacophony of advertising and in some cases, spam.”
What it means: beware of rising privacy issues in social networks.
