Quote to Note: Extreme Journalism Management Advice
December 30, 2009
My hard copy New York Times ran a story on page B1 with a jump to B2. The article was “Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites”. By the time you click the link, the article may be a goner unless you pay. That’s the summary of the write up, which continues the News Corp. global push to make life tough for their kids. Those “kids”, by the way, are the ones abandoning traditional media. I am not too interested in the write up, but I read it and wrote down a quote that is a keeper. Here’s what I noticed as important:
One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter [pundit and blogger]. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly them out alive.”
The “they” are traditional publishers, I believe. Joke or regret? When I think about the publishing outfits for which I have worked, I am not sure. There was a fictional murder in a film. I am not too good at visual recollection but “Citizen Kane” comes to mind. I also remember writing a paper about newspaper wars. The phrase that comes to mind is “yellow journalism” and I associate that phrase with sensationalism and pros like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. As a result, I am not sure if Mr. Mutter was cracking a one liner or referencing what those sufficiently desperate may do to resolve a stressful situation. Anyway, this is a heck of a quote.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 30, 2009
I am not sure to whom to report that Tess licked my hand when I was typing. Technically that is a form of emolument and, therefore, must be disclosed. I suppose I report this fact to Jefferson County Animal Welfare Unit. When I walk my dogs, the officer eyes me carefully.
Google Everything! Too Late, Dude
December 28, 2009
There were some major events in information access that I recall from my student research. Among the nails on the information highway were:
- The shift from clay tablets to more portable and less breakable media like sheepskin
- The change from hand copied documents to wood block printing
- The move from live performances to recorded performances
- The abandonment of a person on a horse bearing a message to a series of dots and dashes transmitted over a wire.
I am now a veteran of other, somewhat less significant shifts; namely, the move from a mainframe to a gizmo I can hold in my hand. I use a computer to create text instead of writing with a pencil on paper unless the airplane person tells me to turn off any device with a switch. I no longer visit the library to do research because I can access information online. Because I don’t do much scholarly research, I can get by with the free services that offer the effluvia of modern information flows of which this Web log is an example.
The write up called “Search, but You May Not Find” in the Ne York Times reminded me of these previous information disruptions. What is interesting is that when the disruption is finally recognized as significant, it is too late to do much about it. For an interesting example, look at what happened in Europe after the invention and diffusion of the printing press. The technology had been invented in China earlier, but the political climate and consumer climate in Europe was different from that in China when the invention was put in use. In Europe, the printing press set in motion a number of billiard balls, and their complex interactions caused some exciting events. In addition to outright murder and large scale political upheaval, the fracturing of the more or less solid institutions had interesting effects.
This editorial (maybe a better word is polemic) documents that a similar shift has happened. Google has become the new Gutenberg, an idea I developed in my most recent monograph, “Google: The Digital Gutenberg”. As I point out in that monograph, it is now too late to do much about Google. I argued in my 2005 monograph “The Google Legacy” that if Google were killed in 2005, more Googles would proliferate. The reason is that former Googlers would just take their Google learnings and go forward. Ergo: more Googles.
The objections to Google and the implicit appeal of the editorial (maybe polemic) is to stop Google. I don’t anticipate that the anti Google forces will show up in Mountain View with flaming torches and clubs. Today’s methods will be legal and somewhat indirect.
I think suggesting that Google is in some way different from other commercial enterprises is silly. Google is 11 years old, and it is doing what Ronald Reagan supported with enthusiasm. You might want to dust off your economic texts from graduate school, but the pro Google forces will point to that fun writer Joseph Schumpeter or one of his kissing cousins, and you will be talking as Google expands into the soft, fatty underbelly of existing markets.
Someone missed the boat. Image source: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/eduwonkette/upload/2008/06/holding_a_mirror_up_to_the_edu_1/missed-the-boat.jpg
Let’s face facts. The people who are making Google popular are the same people who have made iTunes the big cat in the mobile music world. The children of executives who run publishing companies, television stations, music companies, and other types of media firms are doing the driving. Mom and dad can write essays (maybe even vitriolic ones), but the demographics are tough to fight.
Will “killing Google” accomplish more today than if Google had been “killed” in 1998 or 2004? Nope. The reason is that the shifts from clay to sheepskin make sense because they make certain information tasks easier. In addition, other benefits accrue. These range from intellectual freedom to better, faster, and cheaper. Information is power and when a new medium such as that I described in my monograph “Publishing on the Internet: A New Medium for a New Millennium” emerges, there is not much any one person, industry, or trade association can do. Maybe ?inggis Qa?an could pull it off, but even he would be hard pressed to control the information access methods in today’s world.
My take aways from this op-ed piece were:
- Traditional publishers are using their information dissemination tools to mount a campaign against Google. Other vendors are mentioned, but these guys are small peas next to the Google rutabaga
- The arguments are presented without the context of the demographic shifts that prefer the online approaches exemplified by Google and any other outfit that undermines the former dominate information mode
- The howling, like King Lear’s, is coming too late. The guy is outside, miserable, and not getting much traction. Maybe the outcries will produce a hearing but those take time. Time is running out for the displaced information modes. When Google shows up to answer questions, the company just says we are an ad outfit. What’s more American than marketing?
In short, interesting approach. Too little. Way too late in my opinion. In short, the patricians in New York and London will understand the core truth of Heraclitus’ observation: ????? ??? ??? ????? ?????.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 28, 2009
No one paid me to write this. Heck, I even pay for a hard copy of the New York Times and pay for online connectivity so I can post my added goose musings. I suppose I can report this to TSA, but I think that organization is occupied with other matters today.
An Original Aggregator Teeters on the Brink
December 28, 2009
I sat on this write up for about a week. I read the December 20, 2009, “Revised and Condensed” write up in the New York Times. I don’t know if the piece is available online because I don’t use traditional media’s online services. I am more interested in how the traditional print and magazines to which I subscribe present information about the challenges consumer publishing in the US faces.
For your information, I ran a quick query before scheduling this write up for release on Beyond Search on December 28, 2009, and, to my surprise, this link on the New York Times’s Web site worked. Glory be!
My plan for this write up is to highlight some of the more striking points set forth in the article with the subtitle “A Reader’s Digest That Grandma Never Dreamed Of.” I won’t point out that Ms. Sperling, my anti-Arnold English teacher in high school, would have given the headline writer an F and inked in red: “A Reader’s Digest about Which Grandma Never Dreamed.” But why fiddle around with the small stuff when the overall point of the article is of larger import. I will comment on that at the end of this short write up.
Now that you have the plan of attack, let’s look at the passages I found interesting.
this sentence captures exquisitely the decay, the loss of a future, and the end of a traditional information company :
Walking the hallways now, it’s hard to imagine the bustle. More than half of the building is empty, a ghostly warren of empty cubicles and unused bathrooms. You can walk for long stretches without seeing anyone. A stand-alone brick addition has been condemned because of mold, a company spokesman said.
Ms. Sperling would have inked a circle around “mold” and written you have confused a frame or model with a saprotrophic fungi. Man, she was a picky one. She wanted the word spelled “mould”.
Image source: http://i.pbase.com/g5/61/391661/2/67960731.z5oyTWFv.jpg
The Nook Hook: Not Knowing What You Do Not Know
December 28, 2009
Short honk: I don’t have a Nook. I read Engadget’s “Nook Fails to Communicate, Download Purchased eBooks”. If true, this Barnes & Noble adventure is another example of folks not knowing what they don’t know. Barnes & Noble runs gift shops with some books in them in Louisville, Kentucky. The idea that a retail outfit can manufacture a consumer device is an example of the “lateral thinking” that Edward DeBono advocated in1970 when technology was different in its reach and scope among book store management. Clicking a hyperlink in a browser makes information technology child’s play. Live and learn that information technology is complicated. I will not include a reference to Google’s investment in technology to permit scaling. I will not toss in a comment about Amazon’s and Microsoft’s investments to achieve a similar end. I will just ask that you read the Engadget post and think about those book lights, notebooks, and greeting cards where books once filled shelves. I am looking forward to other dedicated reading devices from other outfits into the consumer electronics market.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 27, 2009
Okay, I want to be upfront. I was not paid to write this news item. I will report this fact to the Government Printing Office, an outfit still in the paper business and on top of publishing innovations.
Real Journalism Explains the Amazon Kindle
December 28, 2009
I looked at the article “Is Amazon Working Backward” and skipped it. I own a couple of Kindles, and I hate the devices. I am going to be 66, and the gray on gray screen, the dorky controls, and the weird limitations on content search drive me nuts. But some folks at Kindle Review read the article, and I think there was some mild disagreement with the NYT’s method. You can read “NYTimes Misuses Kindle Review States to Attack the Kindle”. Make your own decision. Your can follow the links in the Kindle Review write up. For fun, let’s assume that Kindle Review is on target. This begs the question, which outfit, blog or newspaper, does a better job of handling information in a fair and objective manner? I leave it to you.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 28, 2009
Listen up, people. I was not paid to write this. I am reporting this sad state of affairs to the US Marine recruiter in Louisville, Kentucky.
Google Described as a Giant Transaction Machine
December 26, 2009
I find it more fun than watching snakes sun themselves to learn from media mavens what Google is. The former grand vizier of Business Week said in “Google & Media: Biting the Hand that Feeds You”:
Google has become this massive transaction machine, and as everyone knows, transactions are the antithesis of relationships. If a brand wants a relationship with its audience, Google is getting in the way. It’s how Google was able to siphon nearly $22 billion last year in advertising from traditional media. And it’s the most obvious proof that media brands have diminished in value. People are more routinely turning to Google to get information, rather than a brand known for its expertise in a given area.
Are Google’s advertisers abandoning traditional media because Google is siphoning them from magazines and newspapers? Nope. I think that Google is delivering what advertisers think they want or need. Google is not running an ad sales operation in the mode of the 1980-style magazine or newspaper. Google is sort of there and people have to do their own heavy lifting.
The metaphor of a “transaction machine” may contribute to a fundamental misunderstanding of what Google is. A transaction is one part of Google’s functionality. The big part is that the company is functioning as a trans-national computing platform that scales reasonably quickly and economically. Software allows a platform to perform a large number of functions. Seizing on one fails to characterize the whole of the Google operation. But a failure to perceive reality accurately is one of the contributing factors in the decline of traditional media. Just my opinion.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 26, 2009
No one paid me to point out that this source article misses some of the Google’s more obvious features. I think I have to report my freebie penchant to the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel. What do you think?
AOL 2010 Unveiled
December 26, 2009
Short honk: I must admit I was surprised to learn how AOL will position itself in 2010. An organization that converted Relegence.com into Love.com has deeper thoughts than I. Navigate to Business Insider and read “AOL Is Just as Much a Journalistic Organization as The New York Times.” If you are a new media enthusiast, you can listen to a podcast in which the secret plans for AOL are disclosed. Here’s the stunner:
AOL is just as much a journalistic organization as The New York Times, as Bloomberg, as NBC News, as all kinds of organizations new and old.
Okay. The ambiguity in this statement is as delicious as it rhetorical halo.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 26, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I was not paid to point out this secret. Nevertheless I will do my duty because the Central Intelligence Agency needs to know this fact about a company so, so close to the “special” landing area at Dulles Airport. You never know, do you?
It Is Marketing, Not Content?
December 23, 2009
I read with interest “Why Marketing Is Crucial for Publishers.” I have been under the impression that marketing supported sales. Sales produces revenue. Therefore, I thought, marketing has to make money. The publisher makes information too. I wonder what the relationship of marketing to information is. Probably money.
After reading the article, I am not sure. I keep coming back to the marketing – money hook up, but I think another angle lurks behind the words. Read the article. Verify my impression.
One idea that caught my attention was:
To best monetize a site, the ad sales team must harness the audience insight of the marketing team at a detailed level and align ad sales with generating more traffic.
The idea that sales and marketing are going to fall in love and get married strikes me as a Hatfield and McCoy problem. Sales makes sales, earn a commission, and head to the golf course. Marketing does “stuff” that is tough to tie to direct revenue. Sure, marketers can trot out traffic analysis, but the person who lands the sales is the hero. Apple had a brief marriage to a Pepsi marketer, and the company needed to bring the founder back to survive.
One passage that I noted was:
Here’s a simple example: The marketer knows his/her site has 20% of their visitors playing online games, where these visitors stay for between 15 and 30 minutes. Are the ad slots on those pages not worth more because the visitor watches the ad for so long? You bet! But the ad sales team can’t take advantage of it. Here’s another: The ad sales team knows it can sell its “health section” at a $20 cpm. What if the marketing team could buy search terms to generate traffic at less than $20? The marketer would reach its goal of more traffic and the ad sales would generate more revenue. From a technology perspective, the tracking of user behaviour already exists from both an ad perspective and a marketer perspective. Combining these two data sets is what will unlock significant value for both parties.
With automated ad systems, why have a sales person? The reason is that certain types of ads require a human to seal the deal. Inefficient and non-Googley for sure. But for most information companies, the notion of relying on semi autonomous agents is like a jigger of cod liver oil followed by a chunk of Limburger cheese. The idea of having a sales person and an AdWords program in order to “generate traffic at less than $20” strikes me as an expensive proposition.
Publishing, online or not, have some other tough math problems to solve. Online won’t do the job. The reality is that online cannot support the chubby overheads that were possible in the good old days of traditional publishing. Talking about getting sales and marketing to spend the rest of their lives together is far fetched in my opinion. One of the functions, maybe both, must be moved to software. Fire the humans. When that happens, the information companies may have a chance to generate sustainable income.
Tough love is needed for tough times. Fantasies of sales and marketing becoming soul mates is an idea that might have taken flight in the 1970s. A different approach is needed for publishers, online or traditional, in these uncertain times. I thought that information companies had to produce compelling, high value content to generate traffic and earn money. Guess I was wrong. I guess a great product and magnetic information are no longer important.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 23, 2009
Oyez, oyez, this is an uncompensated write up. No sales people or marketing pros involved. For that reason, I wish to report this miserable state of affairs to the National Drug Intelligence Center, which I hope is open during the snow storm in DC.
Quality Journalism Chases New Revenue Angles
December 20, 2009
I live in rural Kentucky so news doesn’t reach the goose pond as it does in a real city. I noticed in my hard copy Wall Street Journal, page W13 (?!) for December 19, 2009, an advertisement with the headline, “Engage journalists and bloggers with the perfect pitch.” There is also a news release on MarketWatch—part of the for fee service available on the Sony eBook reader—about this Dow Jones product. Paying for marketing collateral strikes me as an interesting approach. Charging Sony WSJ subscribers for a marketing pitch. That’s better than Google’s subsidizer model in my opinion.
Image source: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/242/446538765_bfa89f9875.jpg
With news of the London Evening Standard, owned by a certain high profile Russian business person (Alexander Lebedev, an alleged former KGB professional, I wondered about the combination of “journalists” and “bloggers”. Obviously media ownership and the economic crisis makes strange bedfellows. I thought “journalists” were a breed apart from “bloggers”. I am not even a blogger. I am an addled goose and marketing shill, flogging my studies chock full of patent references and the odd Latin or Greek phrase. This high quality journalism business is too sophisticated for mere waterfowl.
I plunged forward in the full page advertisement from the Wall Street Journal about the Wall Street Journal’s software. The product carries the name of Dow Jones, which is a unit of News Corp. As you know, the News Corp. stands for quality journalism and premium content. (I wrote about paying more for the Sony digital WSJ than the hard copy recently. I think the price difference was about $140. The paper edition was cheaper! I find that hard to grasp, but the addled goose was never a top notch economist like those employed by News Corp.)
The idea which I gleaned from a quick trip to http://www.dowjones.com/product-mrm.asp is:
a news-enabled media database and journalist/blogger contact management tool that helps communications professionals pinpoint and engage the right influencers and quickly evaluate the outcome of their media relations activities. Dow Jones links its global collection of traditional and social media with journalist and blogger contact, profile, beat and pitch data so that media relations professionals can easily understand what journalists and bloggers are writing about today and then easily correlate resulting media coverage to their efforts.
I as skimmed the marketing information for this product, I got the impression that this product allows a person with a story idea or a marketer to develop a mailing list and crank out a bunch of targeted emails. I don’t know about you, but I thought this sounded a bit like a spamming program or spamming system.
According to FinChannel.com:
The launch marks the further expansion of Dow Jones’s workflow solutions for communications professionals. The company’s media monitoring and media evaluation tools are used by Global Fortune 2000 companies, public relations agencies, government and nonprofits to research campaigns faster and more thoroughly, stay ahead of breaking news, monitor social media conversations, detect issues earlier, measure campaign effectiveness and easily share campaign results with executives and employees.
Here’s what the software can do, according to the Dow Jones Web site:
Craft highly relevant and personalized pitches, increasing the likelihood that your story will be covered… Understand at a glance what journalists and bloggers are covering today and how best to contact them … Fine tune your contact list to those most likely to be interested … Find the right editorial opportunity for your story … Email a personalized pitch that will get results.
In order to buy the product, Dow Jones provides a “contact me” button. You can also download a free eBook. I found that interesting because books are subject to considerable scrutiny these days. I suppose a book that is about buying a product from Dow Jones is different from the content provided in the newspaper. I think marketing collateral is “free” and okay to use.
You can download a fact sheet and learn about other Dow Jones marketing programs like Insight, which I don’t fully understand because I didn’t bother to download the brochures on these topics. I must admit that I did not visit the “Knowledge Center”. The addled goose has a tough enough time understanding a commercial spam system, thank you very much.
I do understand one thing. Not a single word about the cost of this system. Other thoughts:
- I wonder if those spams urging me, a subscriber to the hard copy newspaper, to take out another subscription were generated by this system?
- Who makes the determination about journalists in the database?
- Who makes the determination about bloggers in the database?
- What are the rules for removing a person or entity from the database?
- What are the tracking mechanisms in place for licensees; that is, what does Dow Jones collect about the users of its software?
- How does the email blast get around spam filters?
Interesting stuff. Right up there with the free Evening Standard and the Washington Post’s running stories from Web logs as hard content.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 20, 2009
Okay, okay, another disclosure. A freebie. Who is the oversight authority today? I will report the non paid status of this article to none other than the Council on Environmental Quality. Keep information pure, I say.
Murdoch Business Acumen Sparkles
December 19, 2009
I read in the hard copy version of the Wall Street Journal a short self-congratulatory article called “Sony Reader to Offer Journal Subscriptions.? In my Harrod’s Creek, mine-drainage edition, the story was on B6 in the December 18, 2009 edition. I did a quick search on Topix and found lots of articles about this news development. I am very sensitive to the value of an important news story, and I fully expected to have to pay to see information about this news development. Was I wrong? Yes.
The story reported that Sony and the Wall Street Journal have crafted a deal for digital subscriptions. The idea is that I can get the Wall Street Journal plus some other high-value content on my Sony reader. My Sony reader suffered a broken screen. My queries to Sony went unanswered, so I disassembled the device to see what was inside and vowed never to buy another Sony book reading device. The device lacked sufficient rigidity for the rigors of this addled goose’s fast-paced life. Fatal flaw in my opinion.
The information that interested me in the Wall Street Journal and Sony announcement was I would have to pay $20 for the digital edition and another $14 for the MarketWatch information. I have documented the spam I have received from the Wall Street Journal, and I demonstrated that if I simply hold out, the Wall Street Journal will sell the paper edition to me in Harrod’s Creek for less than $80 per year.
So, let’s think about this bit of Murdoch business acumen. I wait for an email or coupon promotion and buy the paper edition for $80. I know that $80 does not cover the cost of much more than a pizza for the IT guys in lower Manhattan on the Sunday night shift.
For a mere $240 a year, I get a digital edition. For the electronic version on the Sony gizmo which costs somewhere between $150 to $400, I pay $160 more.
Yep, maybe that will work for some folks. I don’t think this will work for me in Harrod’s Creek. I heard that newspapers are being given away in a number of cities. Why? People aren’t buying them. So, will differential pricing work? In my experience, the old pricing models are not amenable to the rigors of the digital crowd.
If I search Topix for the phrase “brilliant pricing models”, will this news story come up?
Stephen E. Arnold, December 19, 2009
You got me between a rock and a hard place. I was not paid to write this article, but I have to report to the Council of Economic Advisers this sad situation. I wonder if any of those bean counters can find a way to make this Wall Street Journal pricing work?
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