Jack Shafer has a great story in Slate describing the many high-tech experiments by newspapers over the years. They haven’t ignored the web, by any means. But in the end, they’re failing. Why? Schafer writes:
“From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper website is instantly identifiable as a newspaper website. By succeeding, they failed to invent the web.”
I can’t help but draw the obvious connection here: every local TV website is instantly identifiable as a local TV website. And local TV has failed to invent online video. Or even come close.
Sling Media says it will debut an iPhone app sometime in the first quarter that will let you watch whatever is on your TV at home, even controlling your DVR remotely. Assuming you have a Slingbox, of course. This isn’t their first mobile product, but the iPhone’s large screen and exploding user base makes this a very compelling application for Slingbox users.
More, from Don: Here’s a video demo from earlier this year
The first time you visit ESPN.com today, you’ll see a large auto-play video ad that introduces you to both the redesigned site and Ford’s new F-150, which kicks up mud on the sports anchor.
Certainly cuts through the clutter from an ad perspective, but some folks, like VentureBeat, were a little annoyed. “With this redesign, they have crossed a line which I expect other sites may try to cross as advertising revenues dip in the weak economy,” writes MG Siegler, who disliked the start screen as well as the ad positions on the home page. (My own opinion: ad integration in sports comes the territory.) Advertising aside, the new ESPN.com features a big 16×9 content area that also converts into a video player, a customizable scoreboard across the top of the site and the ability to personalize your headlines in a tab on the home page. So in other words, you can customize ESPN.com to emphasize your local teams. (Full dislosure: I work for msnbc.com which is partnered with NBCSports.com.)
Who loses? Viewers of course. Both sides in these disagreements are wrangling over cash - but they show disregard for the people who are using there product - either by subscribing to cable or satellite, or watching the stations. Both sides launch PR campaigns that are heavy on spin and low on reality. The MSOs tell viewers that the evil local TV station/program provider took the network from them. The stations say the MSOs are being unreasonable. Of course, the truth lies somewhere in the middle - but meanwhile the viewer ends up on the losing end of a sharp stick… without their Spongebob or NFL football or local news. Worse, the two sides try to turn the audience into a weapon against the other side by encouraging phone campaigns. Does it accomplish a goal? Sure… but it’s the nuclear option… and it seems like the players here are often cutting off their noses to spite their face.
Beet.tv says the most-watched video on MSNBC.com in 2008 was this clip of two men being reunited with a lion. It garnered 2.4 million views for the site. The video’s source? YouTube. The Today Show ran the clip as part of a segment and MSNBC.com posted the item on its site.
Put this in the file of things not to do. KRON news director Aaron Pero drop-kicked a scheduled TV interview with the authors of “No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle.” Apparently the book is critical of TV news - and when Pero found out, he canned the interview and blamed it on a “format change.” Here’s the shock… there was no such format change.
To his credit, Pero admitted that was a fib. To his discredit… he said this: “I am not all that interested in a book that is going to be critical of what we do as a business.”
The authors let him have it with a strongly worded note - which you can read here. This is the highlight:
Do you really think their trust in your station will crumble if they listen to some critical comments about the television news industry? If so, I would suggest strongly that the foundation upon which your station is built is a weak one.
Adds Cory: This is precisely why local television news is becoming less relevant and has done an absolutely miserable job of creating community online. Everything about local TV (not just KRON, folks) is focused on controlling the brand and the message, and years of consultants, narrowly-focused research and closed loop hiring (the same news directors bounce from station to station) perpetuates this control mentality. Need examples? When was the last time you heard a correction on the air? (The story will just magically change before the next newscast.) Or a critical viewer email? Or an admission that a weather forecast was off? Or story attribution to a competitor? Allowing people to thoughtfully criticize you in a public forum actually strengthens brand loyalty. Transparency and openness, even when it’s occasionally ugly, is an asset, not a threat. And technology enables it.
Dianne Mermigas is one of the smartest, most pragmatic media columnists I’ve ever read. She never resorts to hyperbole. So it gets your attention when she predicts that “advertisers will spend even less than the worst-case decline forecast” for 2009. She continues:
“Major advertisers such as automotive, financial services, retail and real estate will not return any time soon; they will be diminished and different when they rebound a year from now. That is a disaster for local media, which could easily see more than half their ad revenue base wiped out in 2009.”
Half?!! And there’s this:
“Many individual and group TV and newspaper properties will collapse under the weight of an advertising recession and legacy costs. Their online and other digital revenues will fail to offset double-digit ad losses. Loan covenants and debt payments will be missed. Some will shut down; a few will sell off in a dismal deal market.”
Yikes. 2009 is not cyclical, folks. It’s game-changing.
With Boise State’s football team traveling to San Diego for a bowl showdown with TCU, we looked for a way to combine our interactive capability with video - and capture the mid-day traffic spike. The solution was a live video web chat for two days leading up to the game at 12:15pm - featuring three of our sports talent. KTVB Assistant News Director Xanti Alcelay and I devised a system to “broadcast” live from San Diego - and pair the video with a Pluck comment interface. The result was nearly 200 questions during our two shows - and several thousand video views.
We loaded Xanti’s plain-Jane PC laptop with Windows Media Encoder, and hooked up a USB video/audio capture card. We brought along three lavaliere microphones and a Mackay mixer. The mics went into the mixer and out to the capture card. Instead of a Beta SX cam (which we tested), we settled on Xanti’s pro-sumer digital video camera. The entire webcast-in-a-box fit within a backpack - key for the trip from Boise to San Diego. We did hook up the sat. truck’s HMI light - but could have done without it if we had too.
Once we arrived, we set up in an area by the pool on day one, and inside our hotel room on day two (the hotel tried to charge us $500 for Internet access, which necessitated the move to the hotel room… which ended up being a better shot anyway).
We put the whole thing together in less than an hour and we were able to engage our audience in a slightly different way - and put together a lively discussion show with viewers asking questions about the game. We promoted on the air of course (using the “spend your lunch hour with us” approach), and also spread the word on Boise State message boards and via Twitter. The entire production didn’t cost us anything, and since Xanti was running the sat. truck and I was field producing, we already had the key staff in place.
No, I’m not referring to the obvious connection, especially for folks who work the overnight shifts. I’m reading a book (that has yet to be released) called “Wired to Care” by Dev Patnaik, and it has a fascinating story about the coffee business with some surprising parallels to local TV news, young people and declining ratings (especially in light of the story below).
Back in the late 1950s and early 60s, Maxwell House began slowly substituting tasty but expensive “Arabica” beans with bitter but inexpensive “Robusta” beans in its coffee, Patnaik writes. After all, customers were complaining about the increasingly high prices. Maxwell House made the transition slowly, conducting consumer research along the way, and the vast majority of its coffee drinkers were unable to detect the difference. This kept prices under control, customers happy, and the business continued to run at a respectable profit. Other coffee makers did the same.
By 1964, coffee sales declined for the first time in the history of the U.S. Younger people weren’t becoming coffee drinkers. Why? To a first-time coffee drinker, it tasted horrible. Coke and Pepsi sales began to skyrocket. Coffee continued its decline. Then a man named Howard Schultz took note of the espresso bars in Italy and launched a little company called “Starbucks,” bringing back Arabica beans with a new way of doing business. Young people began to drink coffee again. The industry had been reinvented.
You can roughly equate “taste” in the sense of coffee to “relevancy” for local TV news. With the demand to produce more and more daily newscasts — while keeping costs under control and fighting new competitors — local TV has become more breathless and plastic and less substantive and real. Consultants helped pave the way to commoditization with “best practices” culled from other markets, which are really just the same old ways of doing things. Local TV news slowly switched to Robusta beans, losing its relevancy, and just like the coffee companies of old, existing viewers don’t really detect much of a difference. But younger viewers — ages 18-34 — are watching less and less, or not starting to watch at all. It doesn’t speak to them anymore. It’s not relevant.
You might argue this decline is due entirely to the internet. But TV stations have websites, too. And that lack of on-air relevancy is translated online, where they’re reflections of their on-air editorial product, handcuffed by old thinking and cost structures. You’ll often hear local TV execs talk about on-air’s tremendous reach — that even with declining ratings, it’s still a terrific vehicle to reach large audiences. Yes, that’s true, but that reach isn’t translating online. And that’s a very big problem.
So what’s the “Starbucks” model of local TV news? Good question. It stands to reason it will be delivered in a non-linear form with vibrant community participation. It will be relevant again, switching back to Arabica beans with an entirely new business model and value proposition. And like Starbucks, it may sound preposterous to begin with.
Pew has released a new study with the headline, “Internet overtakes newspapers as news source.” Not surprising one bit, but there’s TV data, too. Quoting Terry Heaton now:
“According to Pew, as many people aged 18-29 cite the Internet as their main source of news as they do television. This is the canary in the coal mine for broadcasters, who, like newspapers, have been struggling with an aging mass audience for years.”
It won’t happen overnight, but this trend will only continue in the next few years, expanding beyond 18-29 year-olds to 25-54, TV’s core demographic.
At 7 p.m. on Saturday night, with one of Seattle’s biggest snowstorms in recent memory underway, NorthWest Cable News, the 24/7 news channel run by Belo (my former employer), is running a gardening show. The broadcast channels are in syndicated programming. The TV and newspaper sites were covering the story, but from a city-wide and regional perspective, updating every few hours. If you wanted to know what’s going on in your neighborhood right now — which streets are closed, which streets are being plowed, where the accidents are — you had only one place to go: your neighborhood blog. In fact, the City of Seattle not only emailed neighborhood news sites frequent updates — and monitored the coverage to watch the storm evolve — but they also prominently linked the blogs from its home page.
Of course, I’m a little biased, because my wife and I run MyBallard.com, where we posted dozens of updates on the storm, from photos to text. Our readers provided more reporting than we did, sending us photos of sideways buses, odd accidents and fallen trees. They “crowdsourced’ the traffic conditions, posting road conditions on their block and reporting back after they managed to drive to work. We were stunned by the community response. But that was nothing compared to the WestSeattleBlog: they posted 24/7, seemingly without sleep, incorporating user photos, video clips, Twitter posts, and a user-updated Google map, generating hundreds of comments, which were nearly entirely user reports. Traffic skyrocketed way beyond previous records.
It’s this combination — providing a layer of journalism over a vibrant community of people posting news in their neighborhood — that allows neighborhood news sites to drive increasingly larger audiences with a fraction of the costs a community newspaper requires. Think of them as local cable news channels, updated by both publishers and users around the clock, providing unmatched coverage where it matters most: right in your neighborhood.
Oh, now this is a whole lot of audio only green-screen kind of fun. NPR has an API that allows you to mix up your own podcast using their content.
With today’s launch, however, the API now allows users to slice through the NPR.org archive to create custom podcast feeds based on virtually any aggregation (or combination of aggregations) in the API. To learn more about this, go to the NPR Podcast Directory.
Now that is pretty cool. Hat tip to @andycarvin via twitter.
Both Detroit daily papers, the Free Press and The Detroit News, say they’re making a big change come March. They’ll only throw the hard copy to the doorstep on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. They’ll still sell copies at newsstands every day, but if you want the dead tree version on a Tuesday you’ll have to go get it. ”I don’t think we’re ever going back,” said David Hunke, who is publisher of the Free Press and also heads the JOA which manages the business sides of both papers. They also say they’re going to put more focus on their sites.
On Freep.com they’re calling it a “groundbreaking move for newspapers.” It’s a big move, but I don’t know that it qualifies as groundbreaking. The Christian Science Monitor recently said it will kill its print edition in April and the Capital Times in Madison dumped its print edition earlier this year. The real question for the Detroit papers–which both lost subscribers over the past year–is whether this will keep them in business long-term.
This morning, we received an email from Google News accepting our neighborhood news blog, MyBallard.com, into the index. Whew, turns out we are journalists! If any of you had something to do with this — we didn’t re-apply and their email came less than a week after rejecting us the last time around — we thank you for your help.
Idaho legislator Steve Hartgen doesn’t like some of what he sees on the Internet. Anonymous bloggers and commentors who can say whatever they want, while hiding behind a mask of secrecy. So he’s working an a law that would require people to use their real name when posting online
Here’s the bias up front: I’ve written about this before and you know that I’m cautious about comments on news stories. What I’m not cautious about is comments in general. I write for two different blogs and don’t mind a made up name — in fact, I started my radio blog anonymously before revealing my name about a year into the project.
As I wrote on that radio blog this morning - Hartgen has two problems: one practical and one philosophical. First, how on Earth do you police such a nutty idea? Do we have teams of Internet SWAT teams roaming around looking for violators? Do you subpoena every blog and website with an anonymous comment on it?
Second, philosophical. I think you’d quickly see this law challenged - and it would likely go round and round on first amendment grounds. Hartgen used to edit the editorial pages of the Twin Falls Times-News… and probably enjoyed the control of that process. The Internet is uncontrolled - and as with so many other things, this is a genie you can’t stuff back in the bottle.
I’ll have to admit, there’s a part of me that hopes Hartgen tries to introduce his legislation - just to hear the debate. I doubt this will ever go anywhere - but the idea is already stirring up debate… much of it online… and much of it anonymous.
Gannett’s WUSA-TV in Washington D.C. is replacing its crews with one-man-bands, or videojournalists, who will shoot, edit, write and report. And that’s not all: VJs will be paid 30 to 50 percent less than traditional reporters. “We believe strongly that this will raise both the quality and quantity of the product we’re putting out” on TV and on the internet, said Allan Horlick, the president and GM. WUSA is the first network-affiliated major market station to make the switch, and as you can imagine, it will be watched very closely by the industry, which is under unprecedented financial pressure. Meanwhile, as the Washington Post story points out, the VJ experiment at KRON and WKRN weren’t exactly glowing success stories. So stay tuned…
Update on 12/15: Google News sent us a new email this morning and accepted My Ballard into the index (without having to re-apply). If any of you had something to do with this, we thank you!
Original post: For the past several months, Google News has denied repeated requests to index MyBallard.com, the Seattle neighborhood news site run by my wife and me. At first they ignored our emails, but recently we’ve been emailing back and forth in an odd exchange that ended with another rejection.
For background, MyBallard.com publishes straight news. Both my wife and I are longtime journalists, and I have several national and regional journalism awards. Approximately 80-90 percent of our coverage is original (the rest is aggregation). We publish multiple stories and photos a day, and our coverage routinely beats every Seattle news organization to Ballard news. We have 23,000 monthly unique users in a neighborhood of 40,000 people — one of the most successful neighborhood news sites in the country.
What’s incredibly frustrating is breaking a story and watching a local TV station or newspaper duplicate it in a matter of hours. The local media version appears on Google News. Ours does not. This happens every few days.
So why does Google refuse to list us? I wish I knew. In our last exchange, they asked that we display “organizational information, including evidence of multiple writers and editors, and accessible contact information.” We adjusted our “about” page to ensure we clearly listed our organization, Next Door Media LLC, as well as our names and our email address. They then asked where they could find this information, so we told them, um, to click “about” in the main navigation. Then they denied our request yet again with this note:
Thank you for your reply and for providing us with information about your site. Although we’re still unable to include your site in Google News at this time, please be assured that we’ll log your site for future consideration.
We did not include our physical address, which may be the catch. We don’t want an angry reader to Google our house and show up at our front door as I’m standing there holding our new baby in my arms. Or perhaps, they don’t consider my wife and me to be “multiple writers and editors.”
But this is the new model of community journalism: neighborhood reporters working out of their homes, providing a layer of journalism over a vibrant community (something, I might add, does not always require “multiple writers and editors.”) This is the future of low-cost, high-relevancy, community-powered local coverage. But oddly, Google News enforces the old definition of a news organization, discouraging journalism entrepreneurs in a time when newspapers are in a free fall. It’s discriminatory, narrow-minded and exclusive.
And certainly evil.
(Full disclosure: I use about every Google service on the planet for MyBallard.com, from AdWords to AdSense to Analytics to AdManager to Checkout. And I work for msnbc.com, a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft.)
Diane Mermigas this morning on the Tribune bankruptcy:
Tribune is a classic textbook case on how not to take a media company private, especially in hard times. But the real tragedy will be if Zell adds insult to injury by failing to use Chapter 11 restructuring to give it a new lease on life. Undertaking a dramatic digital reinvention of its diverse operations would provide a template to other media companies that desperately need to transition into new infrastructures to survive.
But as Clayton Christensen told us over a decade ago, such dramatic reinventions of established companies — public or private — rarely succeed. The more I think about the plight of newspapers, the more I fear many of them will have to start over: file for bankruptcy, sell off the assets and a small group of the newspaper’s best former employees (and a few others) regroup in a startup, designed from the ground up as a low-cost digital operation with a small print extension. This is much more likely to succeed than a newspaper completely reinventing itself from the inside.
From a MarketWatch story today about CBS CEO Les Moonves:
The executive also said that in 10 years, CBS may no longer have traditional affiliated TV stations, but could offer its feed straight to cable and satellite operators. For now, however, the network has contracts with local stations that are binding for several years.
This shift is inevitable for all the networks, if you ask me, but it’s interesting that Moonves said it in public. So the writing is on the wall: in the next few years, local TV stations must aggressively expand beyond straightforward local-TV-style news to create new multiplatform content businesses that set them apart from their competitors. This content must be produced at a significantly lower cost and enable advertising that helps connect an audience to local businesses in new meaningful ways. Or else.
Put this in the file of things not to do. KRON news director Aaron Pero drop-kicked a scheduled TV interview with the authors of “No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle.” Apparently the book is critical of TV news - and when Pero found out, he canned the interview and blamed it on a “format change.” Here’s the shock… there was no such format change. 
No, I’m not referring to the obvious connection, especially for folks who work the overnight shifts. I’m reading a book (that has yet to be released) called “
At 7 p.m. on Saturday night, with one of Seattle’s biggest snowstorms in recent memory underway, NorthWest Cable News, the 24/7 news channel run by Belo (my former employer), is running a gardening show. The broadcast channels are in syndicated programming. The TV and newspaper sites were covering the story, but from a city-wide and regional perspective, updating every few hours. If you wanted to know what’s going on in your neighborhood right now — which streets are closed, which streets are being plowed, where the accidents are — you had only one place to go: your neighborhood blog. In fact, the City of Seattle not only emailed neighborhood news sites frequent updates — and monitored the coverage to watch the storm evolve — but they also prominently linked the blogs from its home page. 
Original post: For the past several months, Google News has denied repeated requests to index 
Tribune is a classic textbook case on how not to take a media company private, especially in hard times. But the real tragedy will be if Zell adds insult to injury by failing to use Chapter 11 restructuring to give it a new lease on life. Undertaking a dramatic digital reinvention of its diverse operations would provide a template to other media companies that desperately need to transition into new infrastructures to survive.
