I’m woefully behind in my blogging thanks to doing things like organizing my networked journalism conference at CUNY — so I’m doubly behind blogging about the conference. But I wanted to point to Dave Winer’s post with a suggestion I, too, have been talking about for sometime: opening up a newsroom to bloggers. I’ve talked about the need to turn newsrooms into classrooms (where both tribes learn). Looking forward to exploring that.
By the way, the conference is way oversubscribed already (and I was nervous we wouldn’t get enough people with experience and interest in the field).
: While I’m linking to Dave, he argues that the social network is the same as the social graph and so we should keep calling it a network because it’s a much clearer description and less geeky and annoying. I agree.
Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee has a great post summarizing where network TV shows are available this fall . . . besides the TV. Here’s their very handy chart:
I just downloaded the new Kelsey Grammer/Patty Heaton sitcom — for free on iTunes — because I missed it the other night and didn’t think to TiVo it. If this were old-time TV, I’d have been out of luck until rerun season, of course — if the show get to reruns. Now I can watch it when and where I want. How long will it be before the venues above add up to more than broadcast TV for some series? Not as long as you think.
So I come across the brand new blog about the new newsroom with only three posts yet it already imparts some wisdom about the new architecture of news, for example:
The Web is your Web site; search is your navigation.
* Every piece of content should function as an independent business that can be embedded in whatever Web site wishes to host it;
* Advertising needs to integrate with every piece of content and go wherever it goes;
* Journalism organizations should think of themselves as wire services providing content for any interested Web site; let people who intimately know their audience aggregate and present the content (after finding it with search) . . .
I couldn’t figure out at first who was writing this (a pet peeve of mine — put up ‘about’ pages, people) and then found, to my surprise, that it is one of the students with whom I worked on the GoSkokie hyperlocal project at Northwestern. And it turns out he’s working for a paper that might fold, so he’s job-hunting. So take a look at the guy.
Here are the 889th through 893rd Mac v PC commercial parodies but give them a chance. They’re about the New York Times v the Wall Street Journal, made by a high-school girl (head of her conservative club, so you can guess which paper she is):
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve received a $100,000, two-year grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation to provide seed funding to news start-ups developed by students in my course in entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. A jury of industry leaders from the media community in New York – experts in content, revenue, marketing, venture capital and startups – are speaking with the class, helping guide students through creating their proposals, and at the end they will select the projects (if any) likely of success as sustainable journalistic enterprises and deserving of investment from the fund. The full announcement is here.
How’s that for cool?
We’re teaching the class for a few reasons. First, it’s more likely than ever that journalism students today will need to work independently — and not just as freelancers banging down the door of major media but also possibly as the proprietors of new enterprises of their own; we’re seeing more and more of that. Second, journalism needs more such sustainable enterprises; this is how it will expand rather than shrink. Third, journalism needs more innovation; I think it will most likely continue to come from without rather than from within the incumbent companies. Fourth, journalists need to better understand the business of media — which they long ignored, because they could afford to — and they must take responsibility for sustaining journalism.
What’s so wonderful about this grant is that it makes all this real. The students are now competing not for a grade but for a chance to create a new product, a business, and a career. They won’t just be producing prototypes that sit on a classroom shelf. And as I told the wonderful folks at McCormick Tribune when we started discussing the idea, this sends a strong and needed message to the industry — that we must invest in innovation and the future, we have to put our money where our mouth is. Well, make that McCormick Tribune’s generously granted money.
I’m having an absolute ball teaching the course, working with the students on their good — possibly great — ideas. It’s as if I’m on the board of 15 startups. They need to create a proposal that covers everything any startup must cover: the need in the marketplace, the content/product/service plan, market research, competitive analysis, a revenue (read: advertising) plan, a marketing (read: viral) plan, an operating plan, a launch plan. We’re digging into each of these, pressing individually and as a group and with our guests to make the ideas better, find and answer the challenges. I’m not trying to turn them into MBAs, but they all must answer the question: why does the market need this and how will sustain itself. Journalistic sustainability is our rallying cry.
I am also privileged to assemble what is essentially a first-class board for the businesses in the form of the experts who are now speaking with the class. First, I had in Steven Johnson, founder of Feedmag, Plastic.com, and Outside.in — one of the first journalists to make his career on the internet, a true entrepreneurial journalist. Next, Jim Kennedy, head of strategy for the Associated Press and thus the chief strategist of the newspaper industry. I just love that Jim pushed the students farther than they or I had, telling them after he heard their ideas they they had good ideas for sites but they were still just sites. What’s coming next? he asked. And some students came up with inspired answers. Yesterday, I had in Joan Feeney, my partner in the development and launch of Entertainment Weekly; creator of CondeNet’s Epicurious, Style, Concierge and other sites, and a genius at other launches. She generously spent three hours giving the students her distilled experience from launching new editorial products and they soaked it up. I’m bringing in more experts in venture capital, revenue/advertising, marketing, design, and such. And I’m sharing my experience, good and bad. The first week, I gave them my original memo proposing Entertainment Weekly from 1984, then the memo from on high rejecting the idea (because, said Henry Grunwald, then editor in chief of Time Inc., one magazine cannot possibly serve TV and books because people who watch TV do not read), and the business plan that led to the magazine’s launch in 1990. But what’s also great is that the students are helping each other; yesterday’s class ended with a great dialogue that helped focus and advance one student’s idea and that’s what we’re going to do again next week.
The students’ ideas are impressive but I’m not going to tell you what they are, not yet, in case one of them turns out to be the next Google. (In which case, I’ve told them, I hope they remember their school and donate a fortune.) We’ll share more when we can.
[Note: Some folks in the comments say the disclosure at the bottom of this post would be better at the top, so scroll down and take a look at that first.]
Dan Rather is proves himself once again to be such a egotistical fool. He’s crying — puffy red eyes and all — and suing CBS because they eased him aside (when they should have dumped him long before). He still refuses to take responsibility for muffing a story and harming his own credibility and that of the network and, for that matter, the profession — the Times said he doesn’t think there was anything to apologize for and, indeed, says the apology he did give was “coerced.” And he has such an oversized ego that he can’ t see how egotistical it is for him to sue for not getting enough attention and airtime. The bottom line remains that he reported to the world a story that relied on documents that turned out to be fake but by refusing to seek the truth on them or acknowledge the issue for days — or even until now — he pulled the rug out from under his own story and his own reliability. He shows that as many charged, he does have a grudge with George Bush; says The Times: “…Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him ‘a scapegoat’ in an attempt placate the Bush administration, though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect.” We should be glad to be rid of him.
The Times makes the complaint against CBS available here and it has its amusing moments.
It starts off like a blurb not a suit: “Plaintiff, Dan Rather, one of the foremost broadcast journalists of our time. . . .” Heh.
Later on, he lays out not a resume but a damned monument: “In the course of his career as a broadcast journalist, he has received every major honor in his field, including literally dozens of Emmy Awards. . . Over the more than four decades he spent at CBS, he has been involved in virtually all the world’s major news stories. . . During his long tenure at CBS, he has interviews nearly all the major world leaders. . .” He says his biography is “too lengthy to include here.” He larger than life, that Dan.
He says that CBS et al “have cost him significant financial loss and seriously damaged his reputation.” He needed no coconspirators for the latter.
At the time of his screwup, Rather refused to acknowledge the bloggers who corrected him and when he did, he dismissed them as political operatives. He still holds that paranoid vision: “A broad and, in many instances, well-organized attack on the authenticity of the Documents immediately followed the Broadcast, led by conservative political elements supportive of the Bush administration. The purpose of this attack was to deter CBS News from reporting news in a manner unfavorable to the Bush Administration, and in the process, to diminish the credibility and careers of Mr. Rather, Ms. Mapes and others at CBS News whom they considered to be opponents of the Bush Administration.” Could the goal have been to get the facts right?
Dan paints himself as SuperJournalist: “Thoughout his career, Mr. Rather has promoted, championed, and been emplamatic of journalistic independence and journalist freedom from extraneous intereference such as governmental, political, corporate or personal interests.” No delusions of grandeur there.
While claiming to be a paragon of journalistic principles, he blames everyone else for not properly vetting the story he says he only read — putting his not inconsiderable personal reputation behind it — and then he blames everyone else for him not speaking out and dealing with the accusations of inaccuracy and bias made against him. He doesn’t see the contradiction there.
He whines about criticism: “During the same period, other well-known CBS News figures, including Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite . . . made derogatory public statements concerning Mr. Rather, which CBS allowed to go unanswered.” You can’t do that to me — I’m Dan Rather; I’m above criticism, apology, and fact-checking.
He complains that he was assigned to cover a hurricane when he should have been checking his own story and then he complains that after his fall, he wasn’t allowed to cover a hurricane — Katrina — despite being “the most experienced reporter in the United States covering hurricanes.” Which is to say he did more cliched hair-blowing stand-ups than anybody.
He says that as compensation he didn’t just receive millions of dollars but “extensive ‘exposure’ on television. . . It is well known in the television industry that ‘air time’ is the life blood for television news personalities. . . ” The poor man can’t see the pathetic irony of that. Air time was, indeed, his life blood. And he was a personality.
And right there is the problem with all this: the elevation of the reporter, the presenter, the hack — to use the better British terms — into overexposed, overpaid, undermanaged, self-important personality. And as the Times story notes, the new overpaid, overexposed personality in Rather’s chair isn’t helping the network either. The anchor model is not only broken, it’s dangerous. It produces Dan Rathers.
And at the end of all this, what does Dan want? More money: $70 million more than he was already overpaid in his career. It might have been classier to sue for $1 and principle. Or he could have sought some of that beloved airtime and exposure, his life-blood, remember. But he goes for the bucks. Because that’s what broadcast TV is about, isn’t it, that’s the validator: big bucks.
Poor, pathetic Dan. He still doesn’t know the frequency.
(Disclosures: PrezVid, my other blog, has just been syndicated by CBSNews.com and after Rathergate, I became friends with one of Rather’s defendants, former CBS News President Andrew Heyward. And here’s my NY Post op-ed on Rather during Rathergate. )
The New York Times director of acceptable advertising (a job title that sounds rather than being the minister of silly walks) gives a good explanation of policies that led to the pricing of the now notorious MoveOn Patreus ad — far better than the company spokesmen last week.
The MoveOn.org ad was published because it complied with our standards. This ad was also accepted because it is our ongoing desire to keep our advertising columns as open as possible to the public, which we believe is a First Amendment responsibility. I would also point out that this ad was similar to other ads that criticized President Bush, former President Bill Clinton, and countless other public officials.
Within the category of political or advocacy advertising it is common practice throughout the newspaper industry to offer a standby rate in addition to open rate advertising. When a group buys a standby ad, it can request a particular date for it to be run, but receives no guarantee that it can appear that day. The lower cost of such ads reflects the flexibility that gives us. Any political or advocacy group calling up today to request a standby ad would be quoted the same rate that MoveOn.org paid.
I realized this morning — as the Times heavily promoted the death of TimesSelect as a new feature (’Free columnists!’ . . . or is that ‘Columnists freed!’?) — that I could link to and quote their opinion purveyors again. But I’m unlikely to, because TimesSelect broke the habit of reading the Times op-ed page. I lived quite well without it, thank you. Maureen Dowd had long since become a self-parody. I came to think that’d I’d already read every column Tom Friedman could write, a few times over. And when I stopped reading them — because, what was the point, I couldn’t link to them — I quickly found that I didn’t miss them. Newspapers are, in great measure, habit and once broken, it’s hard to reestablish that behavior. So bye-bye, guys.
TimesSelect is dead. It was a cynical act doomed from the start. With it goes any hope of charging for content online. Content is now and forever free.
No one with sufficient experience ever thought that TimesSelect made good business sense. Oh, they talked a good game: It was another revenue stream to balance dependence on advertising, said the spin, . . . It was a tribute to the great value of the Times brand and its unique content ,. . . It was an opportunity to create added value worth added revenue. . . . It was a way to give print subscribers new benefits. Yada-yada-ka-ching.
Bull. TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media, the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news and — more important — even as the internet revealed that the real value in media is not owning and controlling content or distribution but enabling conversation.
I remember Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, giving a speech in which he ridiculed the revenue TimesSelect brought in. In his beloved PowerPoint, Rusbridger showed a picture of the new Times headquarters and said that the revenue from TimesSelect wouldn’t even pay the gas bill for the place.
The financial analyses of TimesSelect were always too simplistic — as if revenue were profit. The Times obituary for its service said that the service collected $49.95 per year or $7.95 per month from 227,000 paying customers at the end — 787,000 total customers, including print subscribers and, recently, academic readers given a free ride. The Times said it brought in $10 million revenue after two years, which sounds damned respectable. But no one ever mentioned the marketing cost to get that revenue. A magazine that costs $50 a year will spend almost that much acquiring subscribers. No one mentioned the extra editorial costs of creating more content to try to make the damned thing special enough to pay for. I never heard any calculation of the customer-service cost of maintaining that many customers, most of whom brought in no revenue. And then there was the question of how much revenue was lost in the Times archives, included in the deal. So though TimesSelect may have brought in revenue at a rate of $10 million at the end, it didn’t earn that much profit. I wonder whether it was profitable at all.
And TimesSelect cost the paper much more in the internet age: It took the Times columnists out of the conversation and reduced their influence in America and worldwide. Worse, it diluted the paper’s Googlejuice. Even as the Times acquired About.com, a grand demonstration of the economic power of search-engine optimization (where, full disclosure, I consulted for a year and a half), the company shut off some of its content from Google’s search and bloggers’ links. That was its greatest harm.
TimesSelect’s brilliant cynicism was that, when forced to find something to put behind a pay wall, they came up with content that was, indeed, uniquely valuable — the columnists and archives. But this was also content for which there was no significant ad revenue at the time (advertisers buy ads in food and travel but not opinion sections; there is essentially no endemic advertising for blather). Thus they made the good college try to prove whether or not a pay news service could work without harming the ad revenue of the business. Even so, TimesSelect hurt the larger brand and its position in the marketplace, in the conversation, and in Google. It was a short-sighted strategy.
I should add that this is apparently why the company just decided to make some of its archives free — great news for readers and for the paper, for it will bring in more traffic, more Googlejuice, and more revenue (and, besides, it’d be hard to charge for archives once they were perceived as free for most TimesSelect users). Oddly, the Times story says that archives from 1987 to present and from 1851 to 1922 will be free but there will be charges for reading articles from 1923 to 1986 (I smell a committee decision).
The bottom line is that the staff of the Times online did the best it could with TimesSelect, creating the richest service they could and probably garnering the largest paying clientèle possible — but still, it was a bad idea from the start. It turned out to be one expensive experiment, one bad investment.
But now everyone else in the content business can learn from the Times’ mistake. Rupert Murdoch has publicly toyed with the idea of taking down the pay wall around the Wall Street Journal online; I’d bet the odds of that just increased. If the Times and the Journal stop charging — and the Economist just took down its wall — then I’d have to imagine that the Financial Times will have to follow suit.
So much for the idea of charging for content — news content especially — online. Too much of it is commodified. There’s no end of free competition. The value is fleeting in time. The cost of charging is too high.
Whether or not content wants to be free, it is free.
Don’t let anyone tell you that this is bad for the content business. It’s only good sense. Having worked in the magazine business, I saw this even at the dawn of the internet: As I said above, a magazine has to pay up to $30-40 in marketing costs to acquire subscribers; it can pay up to $5-7 to print and distribute a copy of a glossy magazine; it has high editorial costs. Add that up, and a magazine can find itself in the hole $60 or more per subscriber in the first year of a subscription. And they get as little as $1 per issue in subscription revenue. Yet clearly, a magazine can make money because that subscriber’s value to advertisers is much greater.
It’s the relationship that is valuable. It’s the relationship that is profitable, not the control of the content or the distribution. That is the essential media moral of the internet story. It has taken 13 years of internet history for media companies to learn that, to give up the idea that they control something scarce they can charge consumers for, but they’ve finally learned it. That is the lesson of the death of TimesSelect.
: Here’s the Times’ announcement. Note that they sold American Express as a sponsor of the now-public opinion section. They are good at sales.
Here’s Staci Kramer’s report in PaidContent (hmmm, a name that has never been great but is now less-great than ever). She interviewed NYTimes.com GM Vivian Schiller:
The change is because of what’s happened in the internet in the past two years—particularly the power of search.†She added later: “Think about this recipe—millions and millions of new documents, all seo’d, double-digit advertising growth.†The Times expects “the scale and the power of the revenue that would come from that over time†to replace the subscriptions revenue and then some.
Here, at last, is a full description of the Networked Journalism Summit we’ve been organizing at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. I’m really excited about the event: a great list of people participating, many best practices and lessons to share, lots of possibility for new efforts to come out of the meeting:
This is a day about action: next steps, new projects, new partnerships, new experiments. The first two-thirds of the day will be devoted to sharing lessons, ideas, and plans with a representative sample of different kinds of efforts, hyperlocal to national to international, with participants from big and small media, from editorial and business, from the U.S., Canada, the U.K, Germany, and France. The last third of the day will be devoted to what’s next, with participants meeting to come up with new collaborations.
What makes this meeting different? We hope this does:
* It’s about action and next steps, not talk.
* The panel discussions will be discussions, not presentations. Every session will start with very brief introductions and then go immediately to discussion from the entire room.
* This is made possible by write-ups of the work being done by everyone in the room that will be distributed before the meeting. David Cohn is reporting some of these (and they are beginning to appear on this blog); the participants will submit more. This give everyone a headstart and lets them get right to their questions. You can read these starting now at the summit blog.
* We will followup on the actions pledged by the participants with reports on progress that will be shared on this blog.
* No MSM-bashing or blog-bashing allowed. We’ll gong it off. This is about working together. The snarking is over.
We hope people leave with a lot of new information and inspiration, with new partners, and with new steps to take to spread journalism in their communities.
The premise of all this is that even as journalistic organizations may shrink, along with their revenue bases, journalism itself can and must expand and it will do that through collaborative work. The internet makes that collaboration possible and we’ve barely begun to explore the opportunities it affords. A year or two ago, the point of such a meeting might have been evangelizing this idea. But in that time, a number of great projects in collaborative, networked journalism have taken off. So now is the time to share the lessons — success and failures — from these efforts and to determine what’s needed to move on to the next goals. By bringing together about 150 practitioners from all sides, we hope that the meeting itself can spark new partnerships and projects.
Among the sessions planned:
* Sharing experience from hyperlocal projects.
* Early efforts to make money at this: ad networks, print publications (ironically), independent businesses.
* International efforts from the UK and Germany.
* Reports from visible projects, including Gannett’s reorganization of its newsrooms around citizen participation, Jay Rosen’s experience with NewAssignment.net, and Now Public.
* Video and broadcast projects.
* Projects built around data as news.
* New tools.
* Political efforts.
In the afternoon, the participants will split into groups — local east or west, national, business, multimedia, revenue, tools, and other groups that form at the meeting — to pledge next steps. After reporting back to the meeting as a whole on these promised efforts, all will be rewarded with wine.
We have a great cross-section of different kinds of efforts, different models, and different locales. There is room for a few more. If you are interested in attending, please email David Cohn, who has been doing a great job organizing the conference and the information around it: dcohn1@gmail.com.
The meeting will begin at the auditorium in the new New York Times headquarters on 40th Street and 8th Avenue in New York. It will then move next door to the new CUNY Graduate School of Journalism at 219 W. 40th Street, New York.
This meeting is made possible entirely through a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The summit is organized by Jeff Jarvis, who heads the interactive journalism program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and blogs on journalism and media at Buzzmachine.com. The school has just begun its second year as the only publicly supported school of journalism in the Northeast.
The next meeting at CUNY, early next year, will focus on new business models for news.
Joan Rivers is back covering the red carpet, but this time for her own site: Emmys with Joan. It starts Sunday at 5p. Who needs a network when you have a blog? She and Melissa will be home live-blogging, live-vlogging, and all that, giving us the alternate soundtrack the awards show scene needs. No holds barred, my friend Fred Graver promises. She’s already blogging and its’ funny:
Hello, my darlings! Joan Rivers here, blogging for the first time in my short adult life.
I know what you’re thinking. “Why is Joan Rivers blogging?†Good question. My doctor told me blogging was what happened after eating too many bananas. But blogging is so much more — it’s sitting alone in a dark room, eating raw cookie dough out of the package while my dogs lick my bare feet, and wondering where my life has gone. Melissa, my daughter, love her to death, but the bitch never calls unless I threaten to update my will.
