Monthly Archives: May 2007

Danny explains the new feature here. Cool, uh? Continue reading →

Ryan Sholin introduces me to the word “freemium.”

It means, it seems, giving stuff away for free and then taking on up sells.

His example is his recent decision to upgrade his Flickr account.

Up sells are easy in classifieds, as Ryan notes, but not so easy in content.

But I’d take the lesson of Flickr and Feedburner and WordPress and apply them not to content, but to services. What services can newspaper companies create that have free uses but paid upgrades can be bolted on?

Or, how can the relationship a newspaper.com has with members of its community be leveraged to entice the most loyal users to buy services from the paper? What would those services be? What jobs-to-be-done can we help our readers solve?

Free content isn’t just about generating page views to boost advertising revenue. It’s also about building relationships with the people who are attracted to that content. Continue reading →

From Rob Curley, I learn that Facebook has an API.

That’s pretty cool.

The Washington Post, of course, has a new Facebook API app, and since it came from Curley an his team, it is of course well thought out and executed. Except … I’m not sure I want to map my politics against my friends. My politics, these days, are my own.
But then, I’m long past young and hip.  Maybe the Facebook crowd will go for it.

I do have a Facebook account, finely. Continue reading →

Remember the paid vs. free debate? My blog wasn’t the only place at the time I was writing about it.

There was also a very lively discussion going on in the Digital Media Federation’s e-mail discussion list.

The NAA has made the entire thread available to members (You need an NAA member ID to access). It’s well worth the time to read if you missed the original debate. Several people made excellent points. (Via Beth Lawton).

(In case the disclosure is needed, I’m on the DMF’s board.)

UPDATE: Do you need more proof that pay for content won’t work.  CNN is giving up on its SECOND try at the model.

I still can’t believe that there are people who argue in favor of paid content. It just boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Continue reading →

Broadband makes a big difference in how people use the internet. In other words, they use it more.

Video didn’t really start to take off until broadband started getting serious in-home penetration.

To me, the net doesn’t even feel like the same environment as it did in pre-broadband days.

Clearly, advertising still lags way behind audience habits.

When you do the math, broadband users spend 48% of their spare time online in a typical weekday. “Currently, the proportion of advertising resources devoted to the Internet (about seven percent according to ZenithOptimedia) is nominal relative to the value it generates,” says Josh Crandall, managing director of Media-Screen.

We should expect advertising revenue for all media to increase, both in actual dollars and the amount spent per ad. Online advertising is going to get more expensive.

That’s good news for newspaper web sites.

But there are still a ton of disruptive threats out there, so it’s not all good news.  Lot’s of startups will come a long that will erode newspaper.com oppertunity, especially for media companies that are not already aggressive online.
Meanwhile, online TV news is gaining on us.

Why is that a concern? Because in some markets (all?), there will be a limited revenue pie for the near- to mid-term in local online advertising. It remains to be seen how well users will traverse across multiple local news site sources. Newspaper sites should be striving to be the local dominate news source online.

We should assume we are still early in the digital revolution and online audiences will continue to grow, and consumption habits will change, especially as broadband rolls into more homes and the infrastructure improves (and it will). In five years, broadband technology could be very different. More so for mobile. Continue reading →

I’ve said it many times, many ways, including in this blog: Every journalist should blog.

I’ve said it for completely selfish reasons. I want print journalists to GET the web. I want them to understand how the web is different. I want to cure them of their tone deafness to the conversation going on around them.

If you blog in the way blogging is meant to be done, you’ll realize these benefits.

The more journalists who get the web, the better our chance, as an industry, at survival.

So, my reasons, you see, are really selfish, because I want to survive.

Scott Karp makes a very good case for another reason you should blog: To save your own skin. He also offers some good tips on getting started.

UPDATE: In comments, Angela Grant points us to an opposing view.

While journalists have lots to gain from blogging, there’s also the fact that a lot of them suck without an editor bringing out the best.

Well, yes. But blogging is a very sink-or-swim ocean. Either you make it or you get drowned with the rest of the guppies, and journalists need to learn that lesson, too. In a distributed media world, you can’t afford to hide behind your editor.

I’m sure I’ve never been as popular of a blogger as I might because A) I’m not a very good copy editor and I make too many mistakes I don’t catch; B) I’m sure I’ve put up a few too many lame posts that could have been improved or trashed by an editor. That said, I’ve learned far more about the new media world because of blogging. These are lessons available in no a book nor taught by any teacher. Whatever embarrassment I may have caused myself has been a relatively small price to pay for all I’ve gained. Continue reading →

Much to the dismay of some people, I’m regularly pushing the value of low end video for newspapers.

While I’m a firm believer in the strategy, it’s not my idea originally. That credit should go to Jack Lail at Knoxnews.com. His site’s Random This feature gave me the idea (the feature won a Digital Edgie this year).

Knoxnews.com continues to find success with low end cameras. In his blog, Jack tells the tale of the site’s popular video interview with a Knoxville-based porn star who got pulled over for speeding and wound up giving a state trooper an “oral favor.”

The sound quality is a little scratchy, but not at all irritating. Picturewise, you’d be hard pressed to do better with a high end camera. Certainly, the picture is good enough.

This video is pretty good evidence is what matters most is the content, the news value or interest value of the video itself, not the price of the camera. Continue reading →

In an article on newspaper.com redesigns, WashingtonPost.com editor Jim Brady says an important consideration his site’s redesign was how to play video.

“Video is going to continue to become a bigger and bigger deal,” Brady says, “and so we’re trying to generate more video to put up. Some is shooting our own stuff or using stuff from partners. We’ve done some in jobs and real estate, as well as feature stuff around local music.”

Continue reading →

Every newspaper web site should do this: Start a blog about local blogs.

In Bakersfield, we started Bakosphere. After I left, it died (though, I see by a note, it’s been resurrected here … inexplicably, it still doesn’t reside under the wonderful bakosphere.com domain).

If newspaper sites don’t start such blogs, the local TV stations will, as Cory Bergman is proving in Seattle.

Cory’s doing a great job with this blog. Continue reading →