No offense to John Yemma, editor of the CS Monitor, but besides the SEO optimization and its experimentation with a “weekly,” I didn’t see much related to how his publication is innovating. There’s a ton of folks I see saying the same thing. You need a hybrid model. Know your audience. Experiment. The list goes on. What’s lacking is real evidence of what works. And why is that? I submit that a big reason is because it’s early folks. Just like radio and television evolved, the commercial internet is less than twenty years old and the reality remains very few (if any) have been successful monetizing content.  

It’s convenient to be dismissive of the pay wall when you view it as a huge Wall of China blockade. OK, maybe that’s a bad example with Google’s current backdrop, but the point is that pay walls will likely exist in many forms — micro-registrations, metered sections, or daily and weekly subscriptions.

The weekly and monthly charges aren’t any different than what cable and other providers charge for just “accessing” content. As the demand for relevancy (think search) continues to occupy more of our time, quality journalism will demand a higher premium. That’s why it’s so important for media companies to be experimenting — now. Yemma’s right, however, about where differentiations will come from: timely delivery and putting the audience first.

How are we using technology to create a more relevant product? We’re not going to “save” media by out-featuring each other. We can and will re-cement media by using the technology to deliver the experience consumers want most: intelligent, meaningful news that’s accessible where they are in the moment.

If publishers execute on those two things effectively, pay wall variations become a hell of a lot easier (and transparent) to climb. When media companies figure out the right formula for assembling teams that can produce and deliver quality content to any platform at any time on any device, hide your wallet.

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As expected, there wasn’t many specifics around what’s most likely to work, but it certainly provides an anchor for lively discussion. Part of Vincent Graff’s segment including a quote describing what we’ll be left with if journalism can’t be monetized — “We’ll be left with a bunch of gossip and chat.”

I don’t think anyone doubts Varian’s view that only very specialized content will draw consumers in enough to where they’ll pay. The experimentation is taking place, albeit it seems only sparse. Most news organizations appear to have implemented some form of user-generated content by now, but sadly that’s just not enough.

Did they really think opening up comments on stories would make that much of a difference? Fact is, most comment streams look terribly stale when compared to the real-time conversations happening in niche communities and social networks like Twitter.

In my view, the best thing that newspapers can do now is experiment, experiment, experiment. There are huge cost savings associated with online news. Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and distribution, with only about 15% of total costs being editorial. Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet. Hal Varian, Chief Economist

On a brighter note, some news organizations have realized that information sometimes needs to be packaged in other ways in order to be valuable. The example I always use is Mint.com. The way they’ve used the aggregated data of their user base is not only creative but it drives interest. More interest is exactly what newspapers need.

As far as experimentation, I think that will come in the form of real-time curation and collaboration with citizen journalists and other hyper-local sources. The move to more open styles of reporting and media coverage will tap into an ecosystem of information sources that will provide other forms of advertising and e-commerce.

030910 Hal Varian FTC Preso

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How can anyone really think using community and curation tools won’t be a boon to media companies and publishers? The ones that get it are already committed to establishing better ways of sharing and collaborating, baking that mindset into every part of the business.

Not so long ago every pundit preached “community” this and “community” that (me included).  Sure that’s a part of it, but in less than a few years, things like Twitter, Google Buzz and a newsier Facebook have forced private and public institutions alike to look outside of their comfy websites and community hubs.  Brands and online publishers realize the conversations happening in other online environments and niches can often overshadow much of the activity taking place on their own web properties.

The BBC’s recent statements underscore much of the shift taking place not only in media outfits but in corporations, where internal and external teams are scrambling for the right mix of engagement and listening.

"For BBC news editors, Twitter and RSS readers are to become essential tools, says Horrocks. Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand."

Image by George Dearing via Flickr

• Top 10 Enterprise Products of 2009 [ReadWriteEnterprise]
  Not sure why Salesforce Chatter is on the list…
  (tags: enterprise2.0 collaboration microsoft socialnetworking enterprise sharepoint mindtouch readwriteweb)

• Rupert Murdoch: Journalism and Freedom – WSJ.com
  "Quality content is not free. In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract customers by providing news and information they are willing to pay for."
  (tags: business media WSJ newspaper publishing journalism newspapers murdoch news)
• Why Open Source Phones Still Fail [PC Magazine]
  (tags: mobile opensource iphone apple android nokia linux google)

Image by George Dearing via Flickr

• 3 Flavors of Social Search: What to Expect [ReadWriteWeb]
  (tags: social+search)
• Top 5 Budget Social Media Monitoring Tools | Our Social Times
  And if you need to monitor your internal or external community data you can use Telligent Analytics 3.0.
• Top 50 Journalism Blogs
  (tags: media blogs journalism news press)
• Four-Out-Of-Five New Media Users Interact With Companies & Brands Online, Up 32% From 2008
  "the frequency of interaction is increasing, too, with more than a third (37%) of users engaging companies or brands via new media at least once per week (up from one-in-four last year)."
  (tags: customer+service new+media social+media social+networking interactive)

This is well worth the listen if you’re interested in how old and new media are converging in the publishing business.

Image via CrunchBase

• The Right Way For Media Companies to Create Social Media Policies [PBS // MediaShift]
  I like the analysis of the "Wrong Approach" — "The idea that journalists not comment in any manner on stories or their news organization is too sweeping. It runs against the grain of social media and its love of collaboration and transparency."
  (tags: policy media social+media PBS)

  

• CNN Now in "Horse Race" with Huffington Post and Daily Beast [Beet.TV]
  "CNN.com has taken notice of the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast as "opinion destinations" and wants to be a "horse in that race," CNN.com General Manager KC Estenson told me last night, after the industry introduction of the revamped CNN.com site."
  (tags: beet+TV media online+media publishers blogs news+sites news journalism)

  

• The New Facebook News Feed and What It Means
  "The real-time flow of social activity data is very exciting, but many people have cautioned that it will be a net-negative for users’ experience of the web as we’re flooded with an overwhelming quantity of low-quality information. Confronting this issue is an obvious next step for social software."
  (tags: social+networking social+streams activity+streams facebook)

And look at the stock prices of the publishers…geez.

Budget help from Mint.com

Jeff Jarvis presented to the Aspen Institute recently and delivered a framework he thought newspapers should adopt to stay relevant.And say what you want about Google’s intentions for working with publishers, but the fact remains that the web is eventually what we’ll flip through for our news pages. That means Google (and Bing) will surface and provide various side doors to much of that content.

Google’s search strategist Marissa Mayer had another way of describing it.

Google’s Marissa Mayer told the assembled news makers that they have to find ways to insinuate their content and value into our own hyperpersonal news streams. In other words: This ain’t about getting people to come to your home pages anymore."

Here’s Jarvis’ recommendations:

* Reverse-syndication. We suggest that the new news organization (NNO) we envision in our ecosystem can create highly targeted content that can be distributed on the sites of other members of the network. So, for example, a new news org could create voting guides for every state assembly member and all the hyperlocal bloggers in the state could offer them to their readers. This content could carry both metro and hyperlocal advertising sold by and benefiting both sites. It is in the NNO’s interest to help these bloggers succeed. Thus they should collaborate on creating and distributing everything from news to calendars to functionality.

In the link economy, value is created by he who creates content and she who delivers audience. So in this networked ecosystem, large players and small will find ways to mutually create and share in more value.

* The embeddable paper. Once you embrace hyperdistribution, then you’ll find new and simple ways to get readers to become distributors. In this post I suggested that we should enable any content to be placed in YouTube-like players that carry brand, advertising, states, and links.

Lo and behold, Silicon Alley Insider just made it possible to embed its stories on this blog or anywhere. In fact, you don’t need to follow that link above; you can read the story below (and I imagine it won’t be long before there’s an ad there, along with the Insider’s branding, links, and data collection).

* API The New York Times has an API (application programming interface) enabling developers to incorporate its headlines, driving traffic to NYTimes.com. NPR and the BBC have APIs that enable others to use more content; as public broadcasters, their goal is simply broader distribution. The Guardian’s API offers full content but requires developers to join its ad network. Thus the Guardian wants to get its journalism into the fabric of the web, as they put it, and support it at the same time. Fingers crossed that it works.

* Specialization. One-size-fits-all news was a product of our means of production and distribution and a very small number of topics aside, that just won’t cut it anymore. Whether by geography, interest, or community, news must become far more specialized. In the link economy, this is how content rises in search to be discovered and it is how value is added with advertising.

Specialization sounds like a way to decrease, not increase audience but with the efficiencies specialization enables, many more publics can be served more deeply and each is bound to be more engaged. In our New Business Models for News projections, we ended up – to our surprise – with an equivalent number of journalists working in our hypothetical ecosystem when compared with the legacy newsroom, but these journalists were all covering much more specialized topics in much greater depth, creating more journalism for more communities than before. Specialization becomes a way to grow.

* Social engagement. In our NewBizNews models, we projected 12 page views per user per month because this is in line with existing news sites and thus, a conservative assumption. But it’s also a shameful assumption.

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“Services are not offered for free at all. There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material – data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not dollars, it’s attention.”

Fred Wilson posted a few quotes from his venture capital partner Brad Burnham this morning where Burnham addresses the ongoing "freeconomics" debate. I think his quotes underscore the stage of infancy we’re in. When we’re debating the value of resources and the allocation of said resources, that tells me there’s a lot of things in flux.

There’s one example that encompasses much of the freeconomics debate these days — paid content. Future newsrooms and publisher models are good examples to analyze. News organizations can (and should) spend much more time understanding their own networks in order to provide the right mix of reporting, editorial and community dialog. If they don’t get close to their constituencies, (in this case readers} the punishment will be irrelevance.

There will always be some version of free news, but it’s the innovation around how it’s procured, delivered and sustained that will be the difference. If I have a provider that works to understand the information I need, I’m much more apt to pay for that value exchange. Show me how content can move beyond regurgitated syndication and impact me and my network. We’ll reciprocate.

"Free is not a pricing strategy, a marketing strategy, or the inevitable consequence of a market with low variable costs. It’s a symptom of a much more fundamental economic shift. Until we agree on what resources are scarce and have a framework for how they will be allocated in the future we are not just talking past each other, we are talking about the wrong things."

Image via CrunchBase

• Twitter Slammed by Summer Doldrums [Gawker]
  Valleywag has an unscientific look at Twitter volume.
  (tags: twitter media gawker microblogging)

• Etaoin Shrdlu: A prejudice (and a prayer) for the power of the newsroom
  "I don’t believe untrained or unpaid volunteers alone can produce the kind of journalism on which democracy depends. I believe most people want and value good filters to separate signal from noise – and the best way we’ve ever found to do that is with professional journalists." – Howard Weaver
  (tags: newspapers journalism opinion future media)

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• Managing Your Small Business’s Online Reputation – NYTimes.com
  "Know who the influencers are,” said Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Service and an expert on consumer-generated media. “There are going to be some megaphones that matter more than others.”
  (tags: socialmedia brand+monitoring customer+service new+media online+marketing online+strategy)

• The Nichepaper and the Failure of the Fourth Estate – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org
  I’m really enjoying Umair Haque’s Nichepaper series..a bit more controversial in this post.
  (tags: media business newspapers journalism newmedia nichepaper umairhaque newspaper)

  

• It’s Google’s World, We Just Live in It – AdAge – Digital
  "Google has a 60% share of search queries in the U.S., but that number is 67% worldwide, according to ComScore. In many top and growing internet countries, including Germany, Canada, Brazil, Turkey and Italy, Google has more than 80% of the search market."
  (tags: search google microsoft statistics research comScore)

Image via CrunchBase

• Q&A: Dan Lyons Talks to Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg [Newsweek]
  "Facebook will be less about Facebook.com and more about this underlying system and platform that we’re building. What we’re trying to do is be more about letting people use their information on any site or platform they want. We launched Facebook Connect last year, and we now have more than 15,000 sites using it, and that’s just a start. Within five years we hope to have hundreds of millions of [more] people using Facebook. But it’s more about using the system to make other sites more social." ~ Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook in 5 years
  (tags: facebook newsweek social+networking social+computing facebook+connect)

  

• Fair Syndication Consortium Gets Its First Ad Network: AdBrite [paidContent]
  "AdBrite is the first ad network to join the Consortium—and it’s a crucial first partnership—since working directly with the ad networks that are keeping content aggregators (and scrapers) afloat, is the cornerstone of the Consortium’s business model. Even with this milestone, though, the group still faces challenges, including defining what constitutes fair use vs. content aggregation and tracking specific ad impressions across multiple networks."
  (tags: fair+syndication+consortium paid+content micro-transactions advertising content+distribution)

  

• Send a One Line Press Release on Muck Rack [Twitter style]
  Sawhorse Media is letting companies submit press releases at $1 a character to its journalist community.
  (tags: sawhorse+media muckrack journalists aggregator press+release twitter pr pr20)

  

• Online Community Interview: Dawn Lacallade, SolarWinds [Online Community Report]
  Good chat with Dawn Lacallade at SolarWinds. They’re using the Telligent platform to integrate much of their online activity.
  (tags: solarwinds telligent online+communities community+management)

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• Barnes & Noble unveils store for digital books [Reuters]
  More details on Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore launch. Big shot across the bow here: "Eschewing Amazon’s Kindle-only approach, the bookseller said its digital books could be read on the iPhone or iPod touch, Research in Motion Ltd’s Blackberry and most Mac and Microsoft Corp Windows laptops or desktop computers."
  (tags: barnes+noble amazon kindle plastic+logic digital+distribution downloads ebooks ereaders)

  

• Announcing the NYT API Tool [Open Blog - NYTimes]
  Good to see publishers thinking about this kind of content portability. content.
  (tags: NYT APIs web nytimes newspapers media developers code mashups)

  

• Hub using Twitter, Facebook in hunt for stolen bikes [BostonHerald.com]
  "Stolen Bikes Boston" using Twitter and Facebook for theft alerts.
  (tags: social+media socialnetworking boston+herald community online internet)

• Hey Newspaper Guys: Google’s Not Making Money From News | Techdirt
  "So if you built a news aggregator, powered by journalists, this would somehow unlock the value and get to $1.5B in annual revenues?
  NO…startups would be actually making a ton of money and chewing up the pop charts. Or Digg for that matter, or the Huffington Post." – [Chris Tolles,Topix]
  (tags: newspapers topix aggregator publishing google online+content content+distribution)

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• What The Future Will Look Like For Journalists [paidContent]
  “It will also be important to present raw data well. “Give me your thoughts,” say the readers, but let me see the data as well. Give me a chance to disagree with your theories and commentary. For this to happen, the institution supporting and paying the journalist will have to collect or buy the appropriate data and present it in a way that is both easy to understand and work with.”
  (tags: newspapers media journalism analysis news online newmedia)
• Breakdown: The Five Ways Companies Let Employees Participate in the Social Web « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing
  (tags: socialmedia business media social socialnetworking 2.0 culture adoption corporate policies guidelines communication)

  

• Advertising will change forever
  “More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, television, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.
  The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets will decline.”
  (tags: forrester interactive digital+strategy media statistics research analysts new+media)

  

• Incorporating social media: There’s no magic bullet [VentureBeat]
  You need to start with a clear understanding of your goals, then learn which tools and services can help you achieve those through sustained participation and utilization.
  (tags: social+media strategy tools web2.0 digital+strategy online+marketing)