Media Consultant

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Message from Michael - The Information Deluge - December 16, 2009

Message From Michael

December 16, 2009

THE INFORMATION DELUGE

TO PAY OR NOT TO PAY

THE NEWS CHALLENGE CHALLENGE

COCKTAIL CHATTER -- ONE COMPANY, ONE COUNTRY

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THE INFORMATION DELUGE: Or, put another way, we need a modern-day Noah to help us survive the information flood. According to the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California/ San Diego, “Americans consumed information for about 1.3 Trillion hours (which totaled) 3.6 Zettabytes and 10,845 Trillion words.” Or, put another way, Americans spent 12 hours a day consuming information which translates to 100,500 words and 34 Gigabytes of information “for an average person on an average day.” Now, this idea may be a little hard to grasp, but the study authors say the actual consumption of information in bytes increased by only 5.4% per year, but the capacity to process data rose by at least 30% per year. Okay, while you’re trying to process that, here are some other points made in the study. Traditional media (radio and TV) still dominate our information consumption pattern, accounting for 60% of the hours spent. Despite the rise in computers, more than three-quarters of U.S. households’ information is spent with non-computer sources. Yet, because of computers, the amount of information “received interactively” is a full third of all words and more than half of all bytes received. The authors make the point that information consumption was passive in the past with the telephone being the only ‘interactive’ medium. Americans spent 16% of their “information hours” using the Internet versus 41% using Television. And reading, which had declined because of television, has actually tripled from 1980 to 2008 because it is the “overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet.”

Esoteric but interesting is a point made by the authors that they are only measuring “artificial” forms of information. If they were to include “personal conversation” as a source of information, “it is possible that we receive fewer bytes Info/c than our ancestors did 100 years ago.” Info/c, by their definition, is ‘compressed bytes’ information, and personal conversation is “very high bandwidth” with “stereo vision and sound.” So, three hours of personal conversation at this bandwidth would translate into 135 Gigabytes of Info/c – about four times the average daily consumption today. As to the future… well, the authors admit they’re not so sure. Television represents the biggest shift. Mobile television and video over the Internet may cause the greatest ‘dislocation’ in information, but mobile television is still a ‘niche product’ and Internet video is a complement rather than a supplement to television because the bandwidth challenges means most Internet video is grainy and slow to load. When bandwidths increase, that could result in a dramatic change. The fastest future growth will probably come from computer gaming, according to the report.

Some Caveats: The authors distinguish between data and information, with information being considered a sub-set of data. Also as hard as it may be to believe, the study authors say their numbers are only for home and out-of-home information consumption and NOT work times. The authors also note that their reports are only estimates because “in some cases, behavior is changing so fast that January 2008 and December 2008 may be quite different.” By the way, because I figure that some of my very smart readers would know this, but some (like me) wouldn’t, a Zetabyte is a Million Million Gigabytes.

TO PAY OR NOT TO PAY: That still is the question, and two recent reports did nothing to help resolve the question, according to an article from the Online Publishers Association. The Boston Consulting Group found that nearly half of Americans (48%) would be willing to pay for online news content, but only about $3 a month. More people are willing to pay for unique local news content (72%) or specialized coverage (73%). On the other hand, Forrester Research found that four out of five (80%) were NOT willing to pay with less than one in ten (8%) saying they would be willing to pay if it were one fee for ALL subscription content. A measly 3% liked, or accepted, the idea of micro-payments.

THE NEWS CHALLENGE CHALLENGE: No, that’s not a typo. It’s to say that now the challenge begins for the people behind the Knight News Challenge. The project which has funded such ideas as Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock and Sir Tim Berner-Lee’s Transparent Journalism had 788 applications by the closing date. This is the place to go, if you want to see what the future of journalism may be. As the site authors note, “nobody knows all the answers.” That’s why the funders, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, say they created their various funding programs – to seed experiments. Some of those seeds grow into oaks. The Everyblock project which provided some templated tools for people to create citizen journalism websites in cities around the world was recently sold to MSNBC for a figure reportedly in the Millions of dollars. The sale has been controversial because of the irony that a mammoth mainstream media operation now owns what was supposed to be a micro-journalism mechanism. But we’ve already talked about that in a previous Message about citizen journalism efforts. In any case, the point is you can visit the site to find several innovative and interesting ideas.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I have submitted an application to create a consultancy of news professionals turned news professors. As always I try to keep the Message objective and avoid self-serving statements, so I won’t go into what a great idea it is. However, I have to note that humorously (depending on one’s sense of humor), the Knight project which has a technology and new media focus obviously has a glitch in its technology. I have received more than two dozen emails saying the same thing – that the contest is closed.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: One company (Nokia) accounts for a tenth (9%) of all the corporate taxes paid in one country (Finland). A little factoid buried in an article in The New York Times about the company’s struggles. Even though Nokia dominates the smart phone market (16.2 million phones, compared to Apple’s 7 Million and Research in Motion’s 8.5 Million), Nokia has the lowest growth rate of any company. In fact, Nokia used to account for a fifth (19%) of all corporate taxes paid in Finland. Other factoids were that Nokia accounts for one third of Finland’s total research and spending and one quarter of its total stock exchange capitalization. Similar to the conflicting studies mentioned above about content payment, a report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, found that a quarter (26%) of teenagers of driving age admitted texting while driving, but half (48%) say they have been in a car while somebody else texted. As almost a footnote, or maybe additional perspective, to the Information report above, comScore reports 167 Million Web users watched 28 Billion online videos during the month of October.

FOOTNOTE: As several industry newsletters have noted, the Federal Communications Commission wasted no time in jumping on the question of using television spectrum for broadband bandwidth expansion. I only make this a footnote, because I have hit the subject so often in the last month. But the FCC action is worth noting because it is such quick movement on a controversial topic. First off, the commission issued a “public notice” soliciting comments by December 21^st. Then, it followed that with the hiring of a Duke University law professor who has written on the subject and whom TVNewsCheck editor Harry Jessel characterized as a “broadcast TV hitman.”

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Monday, December 07, 2009

Message from Michael - Journalism and the Internet- December 7 2009

Message From Michael

December 7, 2009

JOURNALISM AND THE INTERNET – A SPECIAL REPORT

THE FACTOID THAT SAYS IT ALL: In the third quarter of this year, Google had $1.65 Billion in PROFITS. In the same quarter, Gannett, the largest news company in the U.S., and the second largest in the world, had TOTAL REVENUE of $1.3 Billion. Let me re-state that – Google made more money in profits than Gannett made in total revenue. Gannett’s actual profits for the third quarter amounted to a ‘measly’ (by comparison) $73 Million. This was, in my view, the Holy Cow (or whatever term you use) factoid from the Federal Trade Commission workshop on “how will Journalism survive the Internet age.” The figures came from a presentation by Ken Doctor of digital marketing research firm Outsell (and which I confirmed through research online). Doctor, and several other speakers, made the point that Gannett made its money creating content while Google made its money aggregating content. And that is the question the FTC needs to wrestle with, when four of the top five news websites are search aggregators, not content creators AND they make more money.

MORE NOT-SO-FUN FACTOIDS: Further exacerbating the problem, at least for the content creators, according to a presentation by media company E.W. Scripps’ Senior Vice President for Newspapers, Mark Contreras, the print business generates $500 “per year pet set of eyeballs” while the online business generates less than one-fifth that amount -- $75 “per year per set of eyeballs.” Contreras cited an analysis by FTI Consulting showing that not only is the Internet taking market share from traditional media, it’s actually causing the overall advertising market to shrink. For every $1 of NEW spending on the Internet, ‘traditional’ media loses $3. And there’s a pretty basic reason for that, according to a presentation by Dave Evans of the University of Chicago Law School. And that is what he calls a “deluge of ad space” not only on the Internet but on Internet-connected mobile phones. Further exacerbating the problem (if I can use that phrase again) is the fact that Online Readers spend much less time reading – 68 Seconds versus 16 Minutes, for example, reading the New York Times.

SOME LESS DEPRESSING FACTOIDS: So, before any of my traditional media friends curl up in the fetal position under their desk, there were some ‘good’ or at least heartening factoids to come out of the workshop. The folks at Ball State University’s Center for Media Design presented an observational study that showed Live TV was far and away the most popular medium, with a greater daily reach than any other medium and with people spending more time with it than any other medium. In the total scheme of the media ecosystem, newspapers and magazines scored the lowest in terms of research and time spent. But, in what Insight and Research Director Mike Bloxham called the “news footprint (of the) media ecosystem, “any” print had the same reach as “any” Internet, although people did spend more time on the Internet. Also somewhat heartening (and interesting) for my newspaper brethren was a study by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business which showed that reading a newspaper ‘causes’ 13% of non-voters to vote.

DEVIL OR ANGEL: If you’ll remember the next line in the old rock and roll song, singer Bobby Vee couldn’t make up his mind which one his girlfriend was. Well, apparently, the federal government along with major search engines Google and Yahoo have the same problem with behavioral advertising. Executives with the two companies argued the virtues of behavioral targeting, as it is often called, at the FTC Workshop. The ‘angel’ part of such an approach is that it allows companies to collect the web-browsing behavior of their users to define what their interests are so they can target advertising specifically addressing those interests to them. The ‘devil’ part is that it raises all kinds of questions about privacy rights. It’s the old saying that you leave lots of little crumbs as you travel the Internet trail. Yahoo’s VP of Channel Sales, Lem Lloyd, argued that this “customized advertising (provided) relevant ads (in an) uncluttered ad environment (which resulted in a) superb consumer experience.” He pointed out the measures Yahoo takes to protect privacy which (commentary by me) was almost humorous because the ‘protection’ was the fine print at the bottom of the web page allowing people to opt out. Not too coincidentally, the FTC is holding a ‘privacy roundtable’ session to discuss the “privacy challenges” posed by technology such as behavioral targeting. Several other speakers, including Scripps Contreras, talked about the behavioral targeting-privacy issue. So, watch for this issue to grow in importance.

Google’s Senior Business Product Manager, Josh Cohen, went to equally great lengths to explain in minute detail how news organizations can opt out of its aggregating process, while at the same time arguing that Google “sends billions of visits to publishers around the world.” In an obvious nod to the debate over aggregating versus creating, one of the slides in its presentation was headlined Google and Publishers: A Partnership. Yahoo also talked about its Newspaper Consortium partnership which, they say, has created 18,000 campaigns with more than 6 Billion impressions sold. Both men clearly (more editorial commentary by me) were trying to make the point that they are helping more than hurting their friends in traditional media.

In the area of interesting factoids, Yahoo exec Lloyd says it has 581 Million users, which translates into 3 out 5 Internet users worldwide and 3 out of 4 of the Internet users in the U.S. He put the local ad market estimate at $14 Billion in 2009. Not to be outdone, Google exec Cohen said Google operates in 30 languages with 50 domains worldwide as well as 22 languages and 30 domains on mobile, and has “archive content from over 200 years.”

WE’RE ON THE EVE OF: If you said ‘destruction’ you either listen to too much old rock and roll, or you were listening to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. The chairman, who acknowledged that his wife works for one of the traditional media outlets (The Washington Post) raised the question whether the changes in the media landscape are “creative destruction” in which something new and better comes about, or just plain “destruction” period. Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Henry Waxman argues, “we can not risk the loss of an informed public and all that means because of a… ‘market failure.’ But it’s a later point of his that I find even more interesting and which qualifies as a “thoughtoid.” Okay, I just made that word up. But it works… for me at least. It’s a little dense but think about this one – “the atomization of news sources of content has resulted in the fragmentation of audiences, so that the commercial basis to support a critical mass of authoritative and informed news and information is melting away.” Whew! The bottomline – both men say they are open to some form of journalism support whether it comes in the form of government tax considerations, to public funding, to foundation funding or to “universities operating news organizations.” Okay, I’ll admit it. I had to throw that last one in, since we at the University of Georgia operate a university supported television news operation.

YOU CAN QUOTE ME ON THAT: And we will. For example, Evans of Chicago’s law school argues that “journalism is the bait for securing viewers for advertisers.” He defines traditional journalism as the hiring of reporters, photographers, editors to collect and write news, and he argues, “it is this labor intensive process for generating content that is under challenge.” In a similar vein, Outsell’s Ken Doctor likens journalism to manufacturing which adds either much or little value. He refers to a ‘content gap’ and the growing “chasm between market-driven ‘newsy’ content and public service content.’ And from former FCC chairman Reed Hundt and the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (catchy little title, huh?) comes this: “information is as vital to the healthy function of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools and public health.”

THE TIMETABLE BATTLEFIELD: Television is the overall winner when it comes to over-use by consumers, but it’s an interesting see-saw battle. For example, television is the number one choice news viewing choice at 7 am and 6 pm, according to the observational study by Ball State University. But between roughly 9 am and 11am, as well as from roughly 1pm to 5pm, Online wins out. Not too surprisingly, newspapers are the number two choice at 7 am and just barely behind television at 8am. But at 8pm and 9pm, it’s almost a dead-head as to who is most popular – television, newspapers or online.

FOOTNOTE: It may be an interesting or telling point that the workshop did not seem to get a lot of mainstream media coverage, at least as far as I could tell. Aside from a little blurb or two about the conflict between Rupert Murdoch and Ariana Huffington about whether content can be paid for, or will have to be free… not much. Actually the best coverage in this humble reporter’s opinion came from Danny Sullivan’s SearchEngineLand blog. Also, as a further footnote, even though it’s repetitive of previous Messages, I should note that the Federal Communications Commission is also researching what can be done to “save journalism.”

Monday, November 30, 2009

Message from Michael - Journalism and Broadband - November 30, 2009

Message From Michael

November 30, 2009

MAKING A LIVING OFF THE EVENING NEWS

THE BROADBAND BATTLE

THE BROADBAND FACTS

COCKTAIL CHATTER -- COWS AND CHICKENS

MAKING A LIVING OFF THE EVENING NEWS: Or can you? The Federal Trade Commission wants to know. And so does the Federal Communication Commission. And so does the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Now, the first two I mentioned in a previous Message, but the last one is news to me, and just goes to show you how widespread the concern is. The Paris-based organization has also launched a study on the “future of news” but with a distinctly international approach. While the FTC hearing has such luminaries as Ariana Huffington and Rupert Murdoch, the OECD kick-off hearing had the Executive Editor of Agence France Presse and a researcher from INSEAD, the International School of Business. That’s not to disparage the FTC group. Far from it. About the only person missing from the FTC workshop is Don Henley, but everybody would agree with his admonition that the news is in need of something they can use and it isn’t dirty laundry. The FTC workshop runs tomorrow and Wednesday and includes remarks from leading luminaries along with presentations by various scholars along with panels on the state of journalism today and tomorrow, emerging business models for journalism and online advertising and consumer demand trends. Meanwhile, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities which also was cited in the previous Message echoes some of those same concerns, but also has an upbeat theme, saying – “there need be no second-class citizens in the democratic communities of the digital age.” While acknowledging that the present economic downturn is “like an earthquake shaking the global economy,” the commission also says the technology “is a journalistic and political opportunity… to create a more transparent and connected democracy.”

As a footnote, the FTC hearing will be webcast from the ftc.gov website, and there will be regular Twitter updates and RSS feeds if you want to follow the workshop online. Or, you can wait till I do a summary in my next Message.

THE BROADBAND BATTLE: As noted in the last Message, the idea of using part of the television digital spectrum as a way to provide broadband access is one of the proposals being considered by the Federal Communications Commission as a way to provide greater broadband Internet access. As Harry A. Jessel notes in his very popular TVNewsCheck website, the cash-for-spectrum deal “has stirred up broadcasters as little else has over the past several years.” Now the various sides have started lobbing hand grenades in each other’s foxholes using industry newsletters. Gary Shapiro, the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, says in a letter to the editor at TVNewsCheck that the country ‘desperately needs’ broadband spectrum and that broadcasters make little use of the spectrum they have, especially over the air. Gordon Smith, the newly installed president of the National Association of Broadcasters, says, also in a letter to the editor at TVNewsCheck, that there are ‘tremendous synergies’ in the use of broadband and broadcast ‘for the enrichment of the consumer.’ Somewhat humorously, both men initially offer a conciliatory stance, before attacking the other. The FCC is expected to provide some tentative solutions by December 16, with a final report to be presented to Congress February 17 of next year. To paraphrase the words of the legendary American revolutionary war hero, John Paul Jones, they have not yet begun to fight.

THE BROADBAND FACTS: Just by way of perspective, a survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project shows that two-thirds (63%) of Americans now have broadband Internet access. That survey in April of this year is a significant increase from the half (55%) of Americans who had broadband access a year earlier. The greatest growth came in groups which have had low broadband usage. Broadband usage among senior citizens grew from 19% last year to 30% in the latest survey. Among low income groups, usage grew from a quarter (25%) last year to a third (35%) this year, for those with incomes below $20,000 a year. Much of the national debate about broadband access focuses on rural areas. But even here, according to the Pew study, broadband usage has increased from just over a third (38%) last year to just under half (46%) this year. BUT (there’s always a but), the definition of what constitutes Broadband varies from as little as 256Kbts to as much as 50 Mbts, with the U.S. being criticized for using the lower speed in its definition. Given that, the U.S. still has the highest number of broadband subscribers (77.4M), followed by Japan (30M), Germany (22.5M), France (17.7M) and the U.K. (17.2M), according to figures compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperative and Development. BUT (there we go again), the U.S. ranks 15^th, according to the data from the same group, in terms of per capita broadband penetration (per 100 inhabitants) with a quarter (25.8 per 100) having broadband access. The top country for broadband penetration is Denmark (37.2), followed by the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland. Notice something similar in these countries? They’re all small, which is one of the criticisms U.S. Internet experts make about the OECD comparisons with the larger-land-mass U.S. Of course, it has to be said Canada comes in 10^th (with 29 users). Now, the smart ones amongst you, are saying – hey, how do you reconcile the OECD numbers with the Pew numbers? Well, I’m not sure I can except to note that one of the arguments is the difference in the size of the households between the U.S. and many other countries.

Footnote: It should be noted that an FCC-commissioned study by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society argues that other countries have better broadband capabilities because of their ‘open access’ rules which require provides to lease their networks to rivals at government-regulated rates. It should also be noted that the FCC estimates that it would cost anywhere from $20 Billion to $350 Billion to upgrade the broadband speed nationwide, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. To get broadband speed in the 5Mbts range would cost $20 Billion, but $50 Billion to get to 20Mbts and $350 Billion to get to 100Mbts rate.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: Those cows in the Chik Fil A commercials apparently don’t need to tell people to Eat Mor Chikin. They already are. According to an article in The New Yorker, Americans eat 36 Million cows and 115 Million pigs each year, but a whopping 9 Billion chickens and turkeys. In the same article writer Elizabeth Kolbert says 46 Million American families own at least one dog; 38 Million keep cats and 13 Million have freshwater aquariums with more than 170 Million fish. That racks up $40 Billion in bills. Writer Kolbert notes these facts in a review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Eating Animals” which looks at the dichotomy in how Americans view animals.

FOOTNOTE: In keeping with the holiday spirit, let me take a page from Miracle on 34^th Street and like the Macy’s Santa Claus, send you to the Gimbel’s of newsletters and blogs. Lawyer David Oxenford has a terrific blog site, broadcastlawblog.com which is a must-subscribe for anybody trying to keep current with the legal and governmental vicissitudes surrounding broadcast media machinations. Actually there are several “gimbels” which are used in my message and I will share them with you at various points.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Message from Michael - Politics and Media - November 16, 2009

Message From Michael

November 16, 2009

POLITICS MAKES FOR STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

TURN YOUR RADIO ON

THE BILLION DOLLAR BROADBAND BONANZA

RIGHT HAND AND LEFT HAND

TALES FROM THE CRYPT

POLITICS MAKES FOR STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: And none so strange as the media, as evidenced by a number of efforts by the federal government. The one generating the most heat, if not the most light, is the Performance Rights Act which would impose a ‘performer’ fee on local radio in addition to the royalties paid songwriters and publishers. While radio stations are fighting against that, many are fighting FOR another requirement – that would require cell phones to be able to receive FM signals. Evidence of the growing power of mobile. Even more evidence of that growing power is the fact that the Federal Communications Commission is looking at buying back some of the broadcast TV spectrum that the commission just auctioned off, for the digital transition. Meanwhile, as noted in a previous Message, the Federal Trade Commission will be holding a two-day workshop to study the future of journalism. Not to be outdone, the Federal Communication Commission has tapped the founder of BeliefNet to lead a study into the future of media. On top of which legislation has been introduced to allow newspapers to operate under the non-profit 501(c) (3) provision of the tax code. Considering the present economic climate, the original source for the quote in the headline might be more applicable. The quote from Shakespeare’s the Tempest said it was “misery” that made for strange bedfellows.

TURN YOUR RADIO ON: Singers from Roy Acuff to Randy Travis, Merle Haggard to Wanda Jackson and the Statler Brothers have sung this old Gospel favorite which urges you to “get in touch with God” by just listening to “the music in the air.” But it was an Oklahoma born shape note gospel music composer that you probably never heard of, named Albert E. Brumley who actually wrote the song. And it is Brumley who is supposed to get paid when the song is played on radio, not the singers. But some federal legislators working with the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA) want to change that. They want to charge a performance royalty fee on terrestrial radio, similar to what is charged satellite radio and which would go to the artists. But that is the question. Who does get the money? The National Association of Broadcasters and others say it will go to the recording companies, many of which are located overseas. Joining in the fight are college radio stations from Harvard and Rice to Kansas and Virginia Tech who say the fees will make their operations cost prohibitive. Former client and KFVS/ Cape Girardeau General Manager Mike Smythe has become the hero of the radio world with his editorial arguing that free over-the-air radio provides not only music but support of local events such as the United Way. Opponents argue that artists get the publicity in exchange for their music being played. Not good enough, says an array of musicians ranging from Alanis Morissette to Barry Manilow, Chaka Kahn to Dionne Warwick listed by musicfirstcoalition.org website – one of several that have popped up to fight for (and against) the measure. They argue that it is a matter of “fair play for air play” and that it is corporate radio that has gotten a free ride. As it now stands, the Performance Rights Act has 46 sponsors in the House and 6 sponsors in the Senate, according to the Library of Congress’s Thomas website, while the Local Radio Freedom Act has 251 sponsors in the House and 26 sponsors in the Senate.

THE BILLION DOLLAR BROADBAND BONANZA: Here are some numbers for you -- $7.2 Billion…. $12 Billion…$62 Billion. The first number represents the amount the Obama Administration has set aside out of the $782 Billion stimulus package, to ‘stimulate’ broadband Internet development. The second figure is how much a report by the Consumer Electronics Association estimates the television spectrum available for broadband use is valued, based on broadcast use. The third figure represents how much the CEA estimates the spectrum would actually be worth if it were made available for mobile broadband use. The National Association of Broadcasters and a group known as the Association for Maximum Service Television say those numbers don’t accurately reflect broadcasters’ use or value. That may be understandable when you look at the actual report (which took forever for me to find and which I still haven’t fully digested.) The report was based on figures calculated from ten broadcast groups. Excluded from the study were ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox along with Gannett, Cox, Scripps, Meredith, Tribune and Media General because they had too much “non-broadcast business” as well as Ion Media, Raycom Media, Trinity Broadcasting and Local TV Holdings because they are privately held and their financial data is not revealed. However, it is interesting to note that in his blog about the broadcast spectrum buy-back idea, Blair Levin, the Executive Director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative, says the conversation originated from some broadcasters who “recognized they had more spectrum than they needed to deliver an economically efficient bitstream.” As noted in a previous Message, much of the conversation originates from the fact that mobile broadband use is growing exponentially and there are legitimate fears that America will run out of spectrum. One last number: The CEA report says the “consumer surplus” – defined as the value derived by consumers from a good or service beyond what they actually pay for it – which would be derived from the buy-back is between $500 Million and $1.2 Billion.

SIDENOTE: Almost needless to say, this is only a prelude discussion of the broadband initiative. There will be more in future Messages. Also, more mature (that sounds so much better than ‘older’) Message readers will remember a quote that comes to mind after going through these numbers. Former Senator Everett Dirksen is credited with saying during a federal budget hearing, “A Billion here, a Billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.”

FOOTNOTE: As a sometime consultant myself, I can possibly get away with noting this. The “Senior Policy Advisor” to the Obama “broadband team”, Carol Mattey, joins the FCC group after four years with the consulting firm of Deloitte Touche. Actually she is ‘re-joining’ the FCC because before she became a consultant, she was a deputy bureau chief for the FCC for 10 years. Also, part of the controversy surrounding the broadband stimulus grants is that the FCC is asking for ‘volunteers’ to review the applications. But, just as interesting (to me, at least) is that after that review, the applications will be reviewed by agency staff AND the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton. And as long as I’m being semi-snippy, the Omnibus Broadband Initiative has both an executive director, noted above, and a general manager, to say nothing of the general counsels, associate general counsels and policy advisors.

RIGHT HAND AND LEFT HAND: As noted above, and in previous Messages, the FTC and the FCC are both launching investigations into the news media business. The FTC workshop is titled “From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age.” Cute, hey? The workshops on December 1 and 2 will “bring competition, consumer protection and First Amendment perspectives to bear on the financial, technological and other challenges facing the news industry.” The FCC’s ‘agency-wide initiative’ is designed “to assess the state of media in these challenging economic times and make recommendations designed to ensure a vibrant media landscape.” Finally, I would be remiss in not noting the Knight Commission report “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age” which notes in a very similar vein to what the FCC and FTC say, that “the current financial challenges facing private news media could pose a crisis for democracy.” Again, probably needless to say, there is a lot more to these reports that we will be exploring in a near-future Message.

TALES FROM THE CRYPT: Remember that old television series. Well, the 21^st Century version has a digital twist to it. A website called The Digital Beyond has been created to deal with the digital assets of people who die. An article in The New York Times, for example, talked about a film producer from Michigan and an accountant from England who ‘married’ online and ‘bought’ a home on an island where they ‘lived’ for three years. When the man died, the island home was dissolved by the Second Life folks leaving the woman with nothing to show for their three years together. As the website put it, not so facetiously, it’s a matter of “till deletion do you part.”

Before you dismiss all this, keep in mind that, according to analytical firm Inside Virtual Goods, the virtual goods market is expected to pass $1 Billion this year in the U.S. and five to six times that amount worldwide. And if that isn’t enough to make you think twice about it, think about your email accounts, blog sites, websites and passwords. How about all your social networking contacts and links on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace? What happens to them when you die? The creators of the website, John Romano and Evan Carrol, two Internet professionals from Raleigh, North Carolina, put it in real basic terms when they titled their SXSW Interactive Festival presentation – Who Will Check my Email after I die?

Not only that, the website creators as well as the reporter in the New York Times article make a very interesting point about preservation of the past. We have all manner of archaeological and sociological efforts to discover our history. Well, the history of the future is being created in the digital world of today.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Message from Michael - Net Neutrality - November 2, 2009

Message From Michael

November 2, 2009

THE PROCLAMATION OF NEUTRALITY

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW

THEY SAY IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY:

COCKTAIL CHATTER – BLOGGING FOR DOLLARS AND LENO LOSING DOLLARS

THE PROCLAMATION OF NEUTRALITY: More than 200 years later, the U.S. is again embroiled in controversy over what constitutes neutrality. In 1793, first president George Washington, with the somewhat mixed support of the Cabinet, issued a proclamation of neutrality in the war between Britain and France. In 2009, Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski, with the somewhat mixed support of the Commission, issued a sort of proclamation of neutrality between the Internet Service Providers (ISP’s such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon) and Internet Application companies (Google, Facebook, and Twitter). In both cases, politicians on both sides of the aisle agreed with the underlying concept. In Washington’s day, it was the belief that the U.S. did not need to become embroiled in a European war; today it is the belief that government should not become embroiled in a ‘free and open Internet.’ But in both cases there is disagreement about what constitutes the ‘facts.’ In Washington’s time there was a war of words, pitting Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and James Madison against Secretary of the Treasury James Hamilton. Today it’s Republican Senator John McCain (and others) who introduced the Internet Freedom Act against Democratic Representative Edward Markey (and others) who introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act. In both cases there were/are questions about whether Washington or Genachowski have the authority to issue such a decree. It was nearly a year later before Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1794. It may be equally long before the neutrality rules are passed. Public comments on the FCC rule continue through January with counter responses allowed till March. Finally, interestingly (at least to me), nowhere in either document – Washington’s or Genachowski’s – is the word neutrality or neutral used. Okay, enough with the history lesson. Here’s the issue:

In 2005 the FCC adopted four ‘rules’ that consumers can access lawful Internet content of their choice (using) applications and services of their choice (subject to the needs of law enforcement), connecting with legal devices of their choice (because) they are entitled to competition among network, service and content providers. To that the FCC has added two new principles – forbidding providers from favoring or ‘disfavoring’ any other services or content and requiring providers to disclose their network management policies before the customer signs up. The two words you will hear when you hear about the new principles are – non-discrimination and transparency. Now the agency wants to codify those rules. Sounds simple enough, right? Especially when you consider it’s a government agency using the language. But of course that’s not the way it works in politics, and especially politics mixed in with technology. The key issues (as I understand it, from my various readings) are the interpretation of the phrase “reasonable network management” and the definition of ‘managed’ or ‘specialized’ services. What is reasonable network management? What is a managed or specialized service? There is some indication that the FCC includes voice and subscription video services, ‘certain businesses provided to enterprise customers,’ telemedicine and eLearning in those specialized services. Opponents say the net neutrality rules will throttle innovation and investment; proponents say if the net neutrality rules are not adopted, what will be throttled is the free flow of information and ideas on the Internet. Oh, another thing, the FCC wants to apply the rules to the growing mobile wireless broadband.

As a FOOTNOTE, a study recently released by Canadian broadband network company Sandvine says one percent of subscribers account for 25% of total Internet traffic. The report says the ‘typical’ heavy Internet user can be responsible for 200 times the total bytes of an average subscriber. Another report by the Pew Internet and American Life project says the percentage of people using Twitter and other social networking sites used to share updates about themselves has nearly doubled in six months from 11% in April to 19% in the report just released. Bottomline: As noted in previous messages, the amount of bandwidth being consumed is growing exponentially and the prime culprit – video demand. Now, what do you do about it?

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW: Lies a spectrum of colors well beyond Sir Isaac Newton’s seven colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. And the federal government, aka the FCC, wants them. The new chief of the FCC’s broadband division, Blair Levin, reportedly met with some broadcasters to discuss the idea of paying broadcasters cash for their spectrum as a way of adverting what FCC chief Genachowski calls the ‘looming spectrum crisis’ which he says threatens the future of mobile in America. However, to paraphrase the broadcasters quoted in a TVNewsCheck and continue the song analogy, the dreams that you dream of are becoming nightmares for broadcasters who question why they have to give up their spectrum, especially after spending Millions on digital conversion. Meanwhile, the future of mobile broadband may be written in the tiny community of Claudville, Virginia (population 913) where a high-speed wireless network has been built using the ‘white spaces’ or unused portions of TV spectrum. Starting last month the tiny town known more for its Civil War re-enactments and a goldfish farm is the test site for the ‘white space network.’ The FCC last November okayed the use of the spectrum between 512 megahertz and 698 megahertz, originally allotted to analog TV channels 21 to 51. The advantage is not just that it’s wireless but that it can cover the same area as ‘traditional’ Wi-Fi using only one tenth the number of ‘nodes’ because of the strength of the signal. With the switch from analog to digital, this area of spectrum is becoming more available. (If I’ve lost you at this point, I apologize. I’m not sure I fully understand it either, if that makes you feel better.) The service is being put together by a small company, Spectrum Bridge, located in another small town – Lake Mary, Florida, which is about 18 miles north of Orlando. Meanwhile, giant spectrum company ClearWire has announced that it is now in 56 cities, using the even more powerful Wi-Max band of spectrum for wireless transmission.

THEY SAY IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY: And the Internet sure has shown us a good time in the 40 years since its birth. On October 29, 1969, the Internet was born with, what PC World noted, was appropriately a crash. On that day, a professor at UCLA’s School of Engineering sent a message to a compatriot at Stanford Research Institute. It was two letters – L-O. It was supposed to be LOGIN, but the computer crashed with the G. Even so, as National Public Radio cutely put it, it was a “lo and behold” moment. Just as appropriately, the 40^th anniversary is marked with a decision by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), to allow ‘non-Latin’ languages to have domain extensions. That means Russian, Chinese, Korean and Arabic, just for starters. And the reason why it’s appropriate? Here’s why. In a search by yours truly of the three major Internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), for ‘internet 40^th anniversary’, several of the top stories on the front page were from non-American, foreign sources. For example: On Google, it was a story by Chinese news agency Xinhua on website Chinaview.cn; On Yahoo, it was CIOL.com which is the website for Cybermedia India Online Limited as well as SIFY, which is “India’s leading integrated information communications technology” firm; On Bing, it was Yienjee.com which is an Asian journal created by a ‘blogger’ in Kuala Lumpur, and CCTV.com which is the website of Central China Television. Now, admittedly, several of the search results were ‘appropriate’ (to use that word again), with UCLA’s Engineer School leading the pack, but the number of foreign sites says something. – You decide what.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: The minority of bloggers who make money blogging (only about a quarter) makes an average of $42,548. Three quarters of bloggers (72%) are ‘hobbyists’ who don’t make money, according to Technorati’s annual state of the blogosphere. An article in Business Week citing figures from Nielsen and Amazon says nearly three quarters (70%) of Americans consult product ratings or reviews before making a purchase; four out of five (84%) say they’re more likely to read reviews before making a purchase than they were a year ago. A 30-second spot in the 10 p.m. Jay Leno Show costs between $48,000 and $65,000, according to Advertising Age. Last season, a 30-second spot in programs in that same time slot on NBC cost between $78,000 and $146,000. Or put another way, the cheaper-to-produce Leno show is getting between $30,000 and $81,000 less per spot. Several station executives say they have been affected by the drop in ratings. Website TampaBay.com reports that Leno’s ratings drop may be responsible (at least in part) for long time number one WFLA-TV in Tampa/ St. Petersburg losing its top position. It’s now number two after WTSP-TV. Finally, kids aged 2 to 5 spend more than a full day each week watching television – 32 hours a week; their older brothers and sisters aged 6 to 11 spend slightly less – 28 hours, according to Nielsen.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Message from Michael - Online Video - October 26, 2009

Message From Michael

October 26, 2009

BONO AND CNN AND NATO

WASTING AWAY AGAIN IN VIDEO-VILLE

CELEBRITY CULTURE COSMOS

TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE

WHICH SITE IS SMARTER

COCKTAIL CHATTER – DOGS AND DAWGS

BONO AND CNN AND NATO: What happens when you put the three of them together? Well, nothing actually, but it gave me a good headline for this week’s MfM about online video. First, it’s Bono and band mates U2 taking part in a live streaming event Sunday night, with their concert from the Rose Bowl live on YouTube. It’s not exactly a ‘first’ for YouTube, but it is a milestone. The concert played live in 16 countries from Australia to Brazil, India to Ireland, Israel to Italy, and is being rebroadcast continuously, with running comments from people around the world. At 4 o’clock in the morning, (yes, that’s when I got up to watch), there were 109,000 people still online commenting, often times, interestingly, in languages other than English. Then comes CNN which Monday morning unveiled its already popular but newly re-designed hyper-video website. Except for one little problem -- I’m sure it will be fixed by the time you read this, but in a test run by yours truly, every video linked to the same one interview with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. A story headlined One Soldier’s Tale – Hamid Karzai. Photographer Falls in Love – Hamid Karzai. Not Your Average Lowriders – Hamid Karzai. Whoops! Of course, CNN isn’t the only website incorporating more video. Time recently revamped its website to add more video; Ditto USAToday, Newsweek, BusinessWeek; even the somewhat staid Wall Street Journal now provides twice-daily video news updates. And proof that online video is moving beyond entertainment and snackable viral videos, the Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is posting his messages to member countries online. Not exactly riveting stuff but interesting as a development. NATO is using a video and mobile platform known as Kyte, but it is only one of dozens and more video delivery systems. What I wonder, as we look at various video delivery systems for our station website, is how do you choose? Kyte versus vimeo versus veoh versus joost versus whatever.

WASTING AWAY AGAIN IN VIDEO-VILLE: If you’re looking for your lost shaker of salt, go to website ovguide.com. It lists everything from Anime to Adult, Food to Fitness, Games to Guns, and Music to Military videos. Of course there are the ‘usual suspects’ in the line-up of video sources, but there are other unusual ones. The War Profiteers which shows video shot by soldiers in Iraq; PressTV which provides an Iranian view of the world and Iran itself, including such topics as “health tourism in Iran”; Or LifeinItaly which, well, that’s obvious; Rawfoodhowto which provides guidance for a vegan lifestyle; Japander which shows A-List American celebrities doing commercials in Japan, like Charlize Theron doing a spot with a puppet for Honda; Sumo.tv which has nothing to do with Japan but is instead the “UK’s leading video sharing community.” Under the “general/viral” category, there were some 300 websites listed; under education/ instruction, some 150; another 100 under the Anime category. Anyway, you get the point. Interestingly, many of the videos from the States as well as overseas, were hosted on YouTube despite the various video platforms available. As a side note, I found it interesting that increasingly popular video website Hulu specifically notes that it can not be accessed outside of the U.S. because of rights issues.

CELEBRITY CULTURE COSMOS: It lives on Twitter where seven of the top ten Twitterers being followed are celebrities with Ashton Kucher (roughly 3.9 Million followers) topping the list with his blahgirls.com website in tow, followed by Britney Spears (3.618 Million), and Ellen DeGeneres only two thousand behind (3.616 Million). Then comes CNN’s breaking news twitter (2.8 Million and Twitter itself (2.5 Million). Then it’s back to celebrity row with Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest, Barack Obama, John C. Mayer and Oprah rounding out the top ten; and all of them hovering around the 2.5 Million number. I don’t know what it says about Twitterdom metrics, but number one Kucher had 3,779 tweets while number two Spears only had 299; But, Spears was following 431,270 while Kucher was only following 255. President Obama only had 390 tweets but was following an enormous 752,552 others. Actually if you count the President and English alternative rock band Coldplay, 17 of the top 20 Twitters are celebrity twitters. Besides CNN and Twitter itself, only the New York Times made the top 20 list, according to website TwitterCounter.

TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE: The folks at Microsoft have come out with an updated Windows 7 operating system. Despite the controversy surrounding the Vista system, the new OS is getting good reviews, including the New York Times influential technology writer David Pogue. The folks at the Federal Trade Commission have proposed a new set of rules governing bloggers who are “influencers” getting free products to review or getting paid to review the products. The rules have stirred up a controversy in the online and word of mouth marketing groups. Meanwhile, the folks at that ‘other’ governmental agency, better known as the Federal Communication Commission are proposing a set of rules to govern Net Neutrality. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but as the headline says, it’s too important not to note.

WHICH SITE IS SMARTER: Is it iTunes or YouTube? Both of them are now offering hundreds of online lessons, and from some very prestigious universities. For example, iTunes has the University of Cambridge Judge Business School along with Yale School of Management and even HEC Paris, a leading French business school. As website MarketingVox put it, get ready for an iMBA. The iTunes folks have added a software update now that allows you to download these lessons to your iPhone and iPod Touch. The folks at YouTube can also lay claim to Cambridge as well as Nottingham, Harvard, along with the University of California and San Diego State University just to name a few. But they don’t have the field sewn up by any means. Website AcademicEarth.org which was named by Time, magazine as one of the top websites of 2009, offers an impressive array of Ivy League courses. The top course when we visited was Stanford University’s one on string processing which is an introductory computer programming course. Although it’s pretty funny when you visit the actual on-line course, the top question – when is the mid-term?

COCKTAIL CHATTER: On the flip side of the educational spectrum, you may have heard this, because the list came out in late Spring, but the top “party school” in the United States, according to Playboy.com, is the University of Miami. My own University of Georgia came in at seventh behind arch-rival University of Florida at fourth. Others making the list are University of Texas/ Austin (2); San Diego State University which the list makers say has consistently made the top ten list every year since they started (3); University of Arizona (5); University of Wisconsin/ Madison (6); Louisiana State University (8); University of Iowa (9) and West Virginia University (10). According to MoneyWatch and CNN.com, the ten least stressful jobs are civil engineer, occupational therapist, software architect, speech language pathologist, telecommunications network engineer, technical writer, software developer. The top three or least three, depending on how you look at it, were college professor, physical therapist and in number one – education/ training consultant. One of the consistent points in nearly every one of the jobs on the list was one word – flexibility. Finally from the book Inside of a Dog, a Beagle nose has 300 Million receptor sites compared with a human being’s six million. Better yet, or even stranger, the book says researchers studying the temporal patterns of dogs interacting with people found the patterns to be “similar to the timing patterns among mixed-sex strangers flirting.”

Monday, October 19, 2009

Message from Michael - Media Bias - October 19, 2009

Message From Michael

October 19, 2009

BIAS IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

AN OXYMORON – PRESS PRESTIGE

RIDDLE ME THIS, MEDIA-MAN

THE MURROW FOR CITIZEN JOURNALISM

WISDOM OF THE CROWDS

BIAS IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: Or maybe not. Not when four different surveys say the same thing. A whopping four out of five people (83.6%) surveyed by Sacred Heart University in its annual poll believe the national (important distinction – versus local) media are very or somewhat biased. The numbers are less dramatic but no less significant in a poll by the Pew Research Center which found three out of five people (60%) believe the media (no distinctions) are politically biased. The First Amendment Center based at Vanderbilt University survey was even less dramatic but, again, no less significant with half (49%) of those surveyed saying the media is biased. In the Sacred Heart poll only one in seven (14.1%) view the media as unbiased while in the Pew poll, it was nearly double that, with one in four (26%) saying the media tries to be politically unbiased. Similarly, the Pew poll found that only a quarter of those surveyed (29%) believe news media generally get the facts straight. Almost double that (63%) say media reports are often inaccurate. All three polls were released in the last month. Despite that, interestingly enough, two of the polls found that the public believe in the news media’s “watchdog” role. In the First Amendment Center survey, nearly three quarters (71%) see a free press as a necessary watchdog on government. A separate poll by the Pew Center for People and the Press found a similar response with only slightly fewer (62%) citing the watchdog role for the press to keep political leaders “from doing things that should not be done.”

AN OXYMORON – PRESS PRESTIGE: Okay, the smart ones amongst you (and that includes virtually all Message readers) will note that I said four surveys but only cited three. Well, the fourth is one done last year by Harris Interactive which found that more than half (54%) of Americans “tend not to trust” the press with less than a third (30%) trusting the pressing. All right, the figures are a little old, but they comport with the previous figures cited by the other three surveys. Better yet, the Harris folks did release a survey of a different sort in August of this year which looked at the public’s view of which professions are most prestigious. Yep, you guessed it. Journalists are at the bottom of the heap (with 17% calling their work one of “very great prestige.”) That’s in line with union leaders and entertainers (17%), bankers (16%), actors (15%), stockbrokers (13%), accountants (11%) but well above the lowest rated profession of all – real estate brokers (5%). And you can understand journalists scoring lower than scientists (57%), doctors (56%), nurses (54%) and teachers (51%). But Congressmen (28%), lawyers (26%) and business executives (23%)? I have to admit I don’t understand how, in this celebrity culture, actors scored so low; and I found it interesting but odd that firefighters (the top profession cited) scored so significantly higher (62%) than police officers (44%).

RIDDLE ME THIS, MEDIA-MAN: There were several points in the different surveys that made you (well, me anyway) do a double-take. The most surprising came from the Sacred Heart survey in which the director of the Polling Institute says little more than half (55.9%) expect the media to tell the truth. Even more surprising, bordering on shocking, nearly half (45.9%) say they “have permanently stopped watching a news media organization, print or electronic, because of perceived bias.” That’s a little hard to swallow, on several levels. Even harder to swallow, the poll found that by a six-to-one margin, Americans would have preferred national media to cover the death of Lt. Brian Bradshaw who was killed fighting in Afghanistan than Michael Jackson. Both men died on the same day.

Some consolation for you die-hard journalists was that the First Amendment Foundation survey found that more than half (55%) cited “freedom of the press” as one of the five freedoms in the First Amendment. On the flip side of that, only one in five (20%) cited freedom of religion, freedom of press and freedom of assembly. Now, a quick test for you. What’s the fifth freedom cited in the First Amendment? Tick, tick, tick, tick. Time’s up. It’s the freedom to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” If you didn’t get it, don’t feel too bad. Only four percent of those surveyed remembered it.

A PERSONAL MESSAGE TO POLLSTERS: Stop asking questions about whether more Republicans than Democrats like Fox, or whether more Democrats than Republicans like CNN. Everybody with a kindergarten education or above has figured out that media viewing reflects political partisanship. The Sacred Heart poll, the Pew Poll, the Harris Interactive poll and several others continue to ask the same question and get the same answer. Get over it. Move on. Let’s actually ask something interesting. Yeesh. Okay, okay, commentary on my part.

THE MURROW FOR CITIZEN JOURNALISM: The newly renamed Radio Television Digital News Association (formerly the Radio Television News Directors Association) awarded a special Edward R. Murrow award to British Columbia website thetyee.ca., “an independent and not owned by any big corporation (website) dedicated to publishing lively, informative news and views, not dumbed down fluff.” Although it may not be ‘citizen journalism’ in its truest sense, it is citizen journalism in its best sense. If you want to see what good citizen media can look like, visit the site. Other website winners are CNN.com (as usual and well deserved) for television networks; NPR.com (as usual and well deserved) for Radio Networks; Raleigh’s WRAL-TV (not only as usual, but as always) for large market television; Washington’s WTOP.com in large market radio; Providence’s WJAR-TV (turnto10.com) for small market television; and WAKR-AM (AkronNewsNow.com) in the small market radio category. Tyee, by the way, refers to a salmon and, the website says, embodies their belief in swimming against the current.

And if you want to have your faith restored in broadcast journalism (especially after reading the articles above) visit the RTDNA’s Murrow website which this year allows you to view all the winning entries. Some incredible pieces. Congratulations to all the winners, but I have to make special note of my former station KWTV in Oklahoma City which won in the category of breaking news/ larger market for (what else) tornado coverage; former client KWWL for news documentary/ small market for its rising waters flood coverage; and KOMU at the University of Missouri where I once hung my news hat, for feature reporting/ small market for its beautifully shot “magic tree.” All of these are available at: http://www.rtdna.org/pages/media_items/2009-edward-r.-murrow-national-winners1799.php.

WISDOM OF THE CROWDS: Or maybe not. After last week’s Message about citizen journalism and the growth of interactive of consumer generated media, an article in Technology Review is worth noting. It found that a small percentage of online reviewers accounted for a larger proportion of the actual reviews being done. The result is that the all-powerful Word of Mouth advertising associated with personal reviews may be significantly skewed by a few people. Also, as a further footnote to last week’s Message, it would be a misunderstanding to think that the report indicated any bias against citizen journalism or citizen media, depending on which term you prefer. The point is that user generated content is part of the media future. The only question is how and to what extent.

PROOF OF PERFORMANCE: Or, as we prefer to say, in consultant-ese, proof of benefit. We consultants often tell clients that some of the best marketing they can do is to provide proof of the value of your product. Well, in keeping with that self-promotion advice, I have to note that several newsletters have now picked up on the lead story from a Message two weeks ago, that Internet advertising in the United Kingdom has overtaken Television advertising for the first time. While the difference is small (23.5% for Internet versus 21.9% for Television), the message is clear, Online Advertising is growing while others are shrinking.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Message From Michael - Citizen Media - October 12, 2009

Message From Michael

October 12, 2009

CITIZEN MEDIA TURNING INTO CORPORATE MEDIA

YOUR OWN SECRET DECODER RING

THE EPICENTER OF THE CITIZEN MEDIA EARTHQUAKE

EVERYBODY’S TRYING TO BE MY BABY

EVERYBODY’S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE EXCEPT ME AND MY MEDIA

COCKTAIL CHATTER – PLAYBOY AND JOURNALISM

We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.

CITIZEN MEDIA TURNING INTO CORPORATE MEDIA: That appears to be the end result of a series of acquisitions. Media big fish MSNBC.com has swallowed up citizen media little fish Everyblock.com. Meanwhile, the already whale-sized Examiner.com citizen media group which operates in 109 cities has moved from Beluga whale size to Killer whale size, by swallowing up the NowPublic.com citizen media operation. As a point of clarification, Examiner is owned by the Clarity Digital Group which in turn is owned by the Anschutz Corporation which is best known for its Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), which is “one of the leading sports and entertainment presenters in the world” with operations in the U.S., England, Germany and Australia, just to name a few. The two other ‘major’ citizen media sites, as indicated by the Knight Citizen News Network, are YourHub.com and BlognetNews.com. The Knight site lists nearly 800 citizen media sites.

Not to read too much into things, but it probably says something that the MSNBC news release refers to the “growing hyper-local news industry.” Except that it isn’t – hyper-local. Or at least it’s not citizen media, although it appears to be rapidly changing into an industry. For example, the Everyblock website for Atlanta had three stories on its front page – one from WXIA-TV, one from WSB-TV and one from alternative newsweekly Creative Loafing. In the same way, when I went to the Examiner.com website for Atlanta, Savannah and Augusta, the lead story was about The Twilight Saga.

SideNote: As a further addendum, a visit to the revised NBC O&O websites which have been ballyhooed as the latest thing in hyper-local news, shows that they, too are not what they seem to be. They are, admittedly, pretty cool, but it is hipness based on a formula. For example, San Francisco is sad… Los Angeles is happy… Chicago is angry… These were the headlines and the different cities were all ‘sad, happy, angry’ about some national news story that had some limited local connection. I found the same repetitiveness between the sites that I noted in the Everyblock websites.

Footnote: What is interesting (to me, at least) is that any time you sign on to one of these websites, it automatically reads your ISP address and directs you to the appropriate city. For example, when I signed on to Everyblock.com, it automatically pulled up the Atlanta version. Of course it’s not always right. When I sign on to yourhub.com, I am almost invariably directed to the Denver home site.

YOUR OWN SECRET DECODER RING: It’s not Ovaltine which is offering this, as happened in the movie Christmas Story, but a former minister and newspaper reporter. They have created the National Association of Citizen Journalists where you have to complete four ‘comprehensive webinars’ along with homework assignments and you get a certificate “suitable for framing” along with a Press sticker for your car and a NACJ press ID badge. The backers of this ‘movement’, which citizen media site YourHub.com/ Denver actually advertises as an added benefit, are Ron Ross who has a master of divinity degree and a doctor of theology degree and who published an entertainment weekly in Colorado; and Susan Carson Cormier who worked as a reporter and stringer for various newspapers in Arizona and now runs a business in Denver offering ‘writing, editing and marketing services’ to small businesses.

THE EPICENTER OF THE CITIZEN MEDIA EARTHQUAKE: It may well be Seattle where three different citizen media operations will soon be battling for hyper-local hegemony. First there was seattlepostglobe.com created by reporters and (it seems, mostly) photographers who lost their jobs when the Seattle Post Intelligencer shut down. Now, Fisher Communications a/k/a KOMO-TV has launched a series of ‘hyper-local’ websites focused on ‘community news.” There are 28 in Portland and 10 in Eugene “complemented by user-generated content” and supported by a local Real Estate company. Then, it was announced that the Knight Foundation is funding a one year experiment in ‘hyper-local news’ through its J-Lab project. And what are the five news organizations joining in? The Miami Herald, The Charlotte Observer, the Asheville Citizen-Times, the Tucson-Citizen.com and…. Drum roll, please… The Seattle Times. The folks at the times say in their announcement that the neighborhood blogs are “staffed by staffed by professionals who share the Times’ journalistic values.” The idea behind the Networked Journalism Project is to develop a template for future collaborative projects.

On The Flip Side of all this citizen media growth is an announcement that The Washington Post group is shutting down its Loudon Extra website with its ‘hyper-local’ focus. However, I add this in, noting that I have not been able to verify it. The initial report was carried by competing news group, Loudon Independent, but when I checked on the Washington Post site, it is still operational. And I have not been able to get official confirmation from the folks at the Post… who, by the way, (full disclosure) are my long-ago former employers.

EVERYBODY’S TRYING TO BE MY BABY: Or so it seems, when a worldwide survey by your semi-good friends at Nielsen shows that nine out of every ten consumers (that’s 90% for those of you statistically inclined) trust recommendations from people they know. Seven out of ten people trust consumer opinions posted ONLINE (an important difference). Nielsen says it is now tracking more than 100 Million Consumer Generated Media pieces. And with that information, they can say semi-unequivocally that consumers’ reliance on Word of Mouth recommendations has increased significantly.

The survey, called Trust in Advertising, was actually done worldwide and found that the Vietnamese were the most trusting of opinions posted online (81%), followed by the Italians (80%), Chinese and French (77%), with the U.S. consumer at #12 (72%). And in a comment that echoes previous Message reports, Nielsen officials note that online advertising has yet to attract advertising commensurate with online media consumption.

On a semi-related note, the Federal Trade Commission has issued guidelines about blogging that require bloggers doing reviews to indicate clearly when they have received either financial considerations OR been provided free samples of the product being reviewed. As Public Relations website badpitch so nicely notes, the point is that there is a difference between journalists who do it because they are PAID and bloggers who do it because they are PASSIONATE.

A Side Note: The same FTC is in the process of examining behavioral targeting advertising. I don’t know that I can do this in one or two lines, but the point is that behavioral advertising tailors its approach, based on a consumer’s past preferences which raises questions about garnering personal information for advertising use.

EVERYBODY’S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE EXCEPT ME AND MY MEDIA: Seriously, you have to wonder about whether the issue of mainstream media credibility is fueling the growth of citizen media when several surveys have come out recently, raising questions about the public’s view of journalists. BUT – and it’s a Big But – the same studies raise questions about the role or influence of the Internet as well. Possibly the most interesting comes from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. It found, just like the others, that television leads the pack as the primary source of news as well as the most credible source of news. For example, three quarters (71%) cite television as their primary source for national and international news and two thirds (64%) cite television as their primary source for local news. BUT (there’s that word again), while the Internet (at 42%) beat out newspapers (at 33%) for second place when it comes to national and international news, newspapers (at 41%) more than doubled the preference numbers of the Internet (at 17%) when it comes to LOCAL news. Similarly when it comes to “uncovering” local news, television scores with slightly less than half (44%) while newspapers account for a quarter (25%) which is still double ‘local, independent online organizations’ (11%).

In a very much similar vein, a survey sponsored by ARAnet, which distributes content and advertising to both print and online, found that Online sources came in 4^th place as a source for news and information as well as for credibility. A third of those surveyed (31%) by Opinion Research Corporation cited television as their news and information source, well ahead of newspapers and radio (both came in at 19.4%) and way, way ahead of Online (14.6%). Television also was the leader in terms of credibility (at 6.5 on a scale of one to ten) but only slightly ahead of newspapers and radio (both at 6.3) but fairly well ahead of Online news sources (5.7 on that scale). BUT (my third time), the survey notes that higher income people are significantly more likely to turn to Online sources (23.1% of those with incomes over $100,000 versus 14.6% for the general population.) Those same higher income people are also more likely to give Online sources higher marks for credibility (6.3 versus the 5.7 cited by the general population.) The same survey found college graduates more likely to go Online for news and information (20% versus 14.6% for the general population) and to give Online sources higher marks (6.5 versus 5.7 for the general population.)

Lastly, a third survey by Sacred Heart University which focused on trust and satisfaction factors found that nearly half of its survey pool (45%) agreed (their word, I should point out) that the Internet “is adequately covering for failing newspapers” while a third (35.6%) disagreed. This same survey found that four-fifths (85.3%) of those surveyed were familiar with the term “mainstream media.” Then, when asked who were the ‘members’ of the mainstream media, more than a third cited NBC (37.6%); less than a third cited CBS (32.6%); and even less cited ABC (29.5%). Somewhat humorously (depending on your sense of humor), a quarter (27.8%) cited CNN as mainstream while a fifth (19.9%) cited Fox and a tenth (12.6%) cited MSNBC.

IT’S SO EASY, MRS. ALPERT: Part of the reason for the growth of the alternative citizen media cites (I would argue) are the tools available for any would-be citizen media maven. The latest example is FWIX which uses a variety of technologies to filter and select local news content which you can then share with people, becoming your own mini-media-mogul. More on that in a later Message.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: The former CEO of Playboy Enterprises, Christie Hefner, was offered but turned down the position as publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, according to an article in the Styles section in the New York Times. However, Hefner has agreed to help create a for-profit arm for CJR modeled on the Harvard Business Review with Victor S. Navasky, the publisher of CJR, who offered her the publisher position.

DISCLAIMERS: I admit it; the above material sounds more like commentary than reportage, but… Well, there is no but. It does border on commentary. And, yes, I also need to do more (possibly next week’s Message) on the studies about media credibility. And, yes, I also need to do more about the various tools that make online news gathering easier and easier for garage geeks.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Message from Michael -- October 5, 2009

Message From Michael

October 5, 2009

LEAD STORY

THE FREEMIUM DEBATE CONTINUES

DIRT IS GOOD

CHRONOSYNCLASTIC INFUNDIBULUM

FACTOID OF THE WEEK

COCKTAIL CHATTER -- RICH AND RETIRED

LEAD STORY: That’s not much of a headline, but it seems appropriate in this instance, because I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why the fact that Internet advertising has overtaken TV advertising in the UK wasn’t the lead story for all the media newsletters I get. As reported by The Guardian newspaper, the UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on the Internet than on TV. Actually Denmark was the first country where Internet advertising spending overtook Television advertising spending, but Denmark doesn’t quite make it as a ‘major economy.’ The article cited a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and Pricewaterhouse Coopers that showed in the first half of this year, Internet advertising accounted for 23.5% (or $1.75 Billion Pounds) of all advertising money spent in the UK compared to 21.9% (or $1.6 Billion Pounds) spent on Television in the first half of this year. The UK equivalent of the TVB (Television Bureau of Advertising) is called Thinkbox (isn’t that a cool name?). Officials there make the point that the IAB report lumps everything into Internet advertising including email, classified ads, display ads and search marketing.

THE FREEMIUM DEBATE CONTINUES: And if you continue with the idea that what happens in the UK could be a harbinger of things to come in the USA, a Harris Interactive poll in the UK found that just five percent of the Britons surveyed would pay for news online. Half (53%) said they would pay for online news if it was bundled with a free or discounted print edition while three-quarters (72%) said the most they would pay is “less than 10 British pounds.” Also from the British side of the pond, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a group of British broadcasting executives that publishers of general news will have a hard time charging for their online content because there is so much free content available and “the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity.” As reported by Reuters, Schmidt did say that niche content providers, such as business publications, might succeed. Schmidt’s statement came in response to an announcement by News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch that he could start charging for online content as early as next year.

DIRT IS GOOD: So proclaims an ad for laundry detergent which reportedly convinced officials in Singapore to ‘increase recess time at its academics-heavy, stress-inducing schools.’ The Unilever product which is sold as Omo in Asia and Skip in France did this by emphasizing the theme that every child has a right to play and explore. The Wharton School of Business called it a “customer-engaging social message” that combined Old Media and New Media. The school’s recently launched project looking into the Future of Advertising says the winning marketing plan is more likely to be a hybrid model that builds on each media format’s strengths. For example, not only is dirt good, the project says television is good. A look at TV advertising’s ‘efficacy’ found that there was no erosion of TV’s impact in recent years, despite DVR’s and ad-skipping. Part of the secret to success is running a “two-way dialog with consumers.” But to find out the rest of the secrets, the school’s Center for Advanced Studies in Management plans a years-long study, including The Fast.Forward project with Google to expand the discussion to a wider audience.

CHRONOSYNCLASTIC INFUNDIBULUM: Somewhere out there is a Message reader who probably actually knows what this is. Not me. It comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s Sci-Fi novel, The Sirens of Titan and refers to places “where all the different kinds of truths fit together (and) ways to be right coexist.” At this point, you are all saying, what the heck does this have to do with media? It is part of the description that the Time magazine editors use for one of their top 50 Websites of 2009 – Get High Now. No, the website has nothing to do with the illegal high too many of you are familiar with. It is a high from ‘mind expansion’ illusions or hallucinations shown on the science site and is indicative of the kind of wondrous weirdness that the Internet is capable of. In keeping with that science fiction theme, the editors also name Wolfram/Alpha as one of the top 50 websites, arguing that the unusual (and challenging) search engine site may actually fulfill the science fiction writers prophesy that at some point the Internet may gain a consciousness of its own (sort of like the computer HAL.) Most of the websites on the list are much more mundane, with a full complement of the usual suspects – Hulu, YouTube, Google, Flickr, Delicious, and Twitter. Skip them. Visit the off-beat websites to see what’s going on. Sites like Know Your Meme which attempts to explain what is funny on the Web, such as Geddan which is the Japanese version of “Get Down” and is a video dance created by inserting a video game cartridge only part way into the holder. Or Etsy which the editors describe as “the long-haired Birkenstocked love child of Amazon and eBay.” And, instead of visiting those sites for bargains, go to Shop Goodwill which really does have some bargains. Instead of Flickr, go to Photosynth which allows you to mash up a 3D version of multiple pictures. Instead of Craigslist go to CraigLook, which provides a better GUI interface based on the original site. Instead of Time magazine’s website, go to Issuu which has an enormously diverse set of individual and corporate magazines. Looking for an alternative to the rants and raves of the blogosphere, go to Fora TV which features well known and insightful authors and speakers, or Academic Earth which leads the “edupunk” movement to move academia into the ‘real world.’

If you don’t have the time or energy (as if I do), two sites made the Time list of top 50 websites and the magazine’s list of top 25 blog sites: Boing Boing and Metafilter which provide an eclectic look at what’s going on in the “Hal-sian” world of the Internet. If you do have the time or energy, here are the links:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1918031,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1879276,00.html

FACTOID OF THE WEEK: Traffic on 3G Networks will increase 20 times over in just the next five years, according to a forecast by wireless experts Unwired Insight. Based on the graph provided by the company, the average traffic per 3G network is about 100 Megabits a month now, but that by 2014 it will top 2,000 Megabits a month. And, considering this is coming from people with a vested interest in wireless, the report offers the unusually candid assessment that some networks won’t be able to cope with the growth.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: It’s not likely to break your heart to learn this, but it took a ‘mere’ $930 Million to make it to the Forbes List of the 400 Richest Americans this year. Last year you had to have $1.3 Billion to make the list. The list has the usual suspects – Bill Gates at the top, followed by Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Lawrence Ellison. But it’s the other factoids associated with the list that are most interesting. Such as the fact that three quarters (314) of those on the list lost money this year compared to a quarter (126) last year. Buffett lost a whopping $10 Billion, dropping his fortune to $40 Billion. There was a slight increase in the number of people who made their own wealth (276 compared to 270 the year before) as opposed to being born into wealth. Despite the presence of 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg as the youngest Billionaire on the list, the average age is 65.8. Maybe because Zuckerberg is offset by the oldest Billionaire, 95 year old television mogul John Kluge. And just because it’s hard not to do a message without mentioning social media any more, websiteUberCEO.com reports that only two of the top 100 CEO’s have Twitter accounts and only 13 have LinkedIn accounts. And not one has a blog. One of those with a Twitter account – Warren Buffett whom UberCEO reports has 7,441 followers but doesn’t follow anyone.

On the flip side of this economic coin, the Pew Research Center reports that only about half (51%) of all retirees say they retired because they wanted to. A third (32%) retired because of health or other reasons while one in ten (9%) say their employer forced them to retire. Despite that, more than half (57%) found retirement ‘very satisfying’ while a quarter (23%) found it ‘fairly satisfying.’ And as you would expect, the voluntary retirees were twice as likely as the reluctant retirees to find life in the slow lane ‘very satisfying’ (75% vs. 37%).

Monday, September 28, 2009

Message from Michael - September 28, 2009

Message From Michael

September 28, 2009

AN ONLINE VIDEO FLOOD WATCH

I DON’T WANT TO BE ALONE

AND THE AWARD GOES

COCKTAIL CHATTER - DEATH

AN ONLINE VIDEO FLOOD WATCH: At least that’s what appears to be happening, according to figures from Internet backbone provider Cisco. In four years time (2013) the company says 90% of all IP traffic will be video. Going even further, the company’s VP of ‘video product strategy,’ Malachy Moynihan says 60% of all video will be ‘consumed by consumers’ over IP networks. Computer chip maker Intel says that in six years time (2015), more than 12 Billion devices will be capable of connecting to 500 Billion hours of TV and video content. The company’s CTO, Justin Ratner, says that translates into more than one TV-cable device for every man and woman on the planet. By the end of next year, analyst firm Screen Digest says there will be 1.2 Million 3D capable TV sets in American homes and in four years time (yes, 2013), that figure is expected to rise to 9.7 Million or 8% of all households. This all came out of Intel’s Developer Forum held in San Francisco and reported by the BBC online. A separate report, the Consumer Internet Barometer, says that one in four U.S. households (25%) watch TV online. That’s up from one in five (20%) last year, according to the report put together by The Conference Board and TNS. And, of course, leading the pack is Hulu which has shown a fourfold increase (from 8% to 32%) over the past year. The report says two-thirds of ‘online TV viewers’ (an important distinction) access television through the ‘official TV channel’ home page while less than half do it through YouTube. All that would explain why Nielsen Media Research says its “TV Everywhere” which monitors shows online could be counted in the overall TV ratings system in less than two years (2011). Nielsen officials say they are moving cautiously since ‘$70 Billion of television advertising is bought and sold using Nielsen ratings.’

Of course the real proof that online video is taking off comes from Emmy Awards where sitcom star Julia Louis-Dreyfus joked that she was honored to be presenting the awards “on the last official year of network broadcast television.” The CEO of Tremor Media says the reports of TV’s death, as personified by Louis-Dreyfus’ comment, are greatly exaggerated. But CEO Jason Glickman does say that this period of 2009 and 2010 will be remembered as the turning point for online video advertising. The reason for saying that is that large brand advertisings are planning seven figure online video buys on a regular basis, and he says this period will mark the beginning of “online video’s aggressive five-year climb to the highest level of the food chain in the media mix.”

Just to add a little more perspective to this, keep in mind that even Nielsen’s Three Screen Report notes that the average American watches more than 141 hours of TV per month, an all-time high; while that ‘average American’ watches only about three hours of video online on the Internet each month and mobile device users are also watching only about three hours of video on their mobile phones and other devices. The so-called A2/M2 (Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement) report says that a third of the time that people (with Internet access – an important distinction) spend online is spent online in front of the television. And, no, I haven’t quite reconciled the Cisco projection that nearly two thirds of video ‘consumed by consumers’ will be over IP networks, with the fact that Americans watch 141 hours of video on television and ‘only’ six hours of video online or on mobile devices.

I DON’T WANT TO BE ALONE: Similar to my semi-joking point about the Emmy Awards, you know that social networking has become real when Hollywood decides to make a movie about it. Entertainment newspaper Variety reports that actor Jesse Eisenberg will play Facebook founder Mark Zuckenberg while Justin Timberlake will play Napster founder Sean Parker. (No, I don’t know Eisenberg either, although I am semi-familiar with the movies The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland.) All right, all right, that may not be the big news in social media news. The big news is that consumer activity on social networking and blogging sites has tripled in the last year from six percent last year at this to 17% now. Spending on such sites has more than doubled in the same time (from $49 Million to $108 Million) and that, as a percentage of total U.S. Online (emphasis – only online) ad spending, it also doubled from 7% to 15%. And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention (although it’s been reported extensively) that Facebook is claiming to have topped the 300 Million mark in worldwide users -- tripling its numbers from a year ago. Although Facebook doesn’t break out the figures worldwide, Nielsen reports the number of U.S. Facebook users at 103.8 Million – meaning that two thirds of its users are in other countries. A separate report by Middleberg Communications and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) found more than two-thirds of journalists (70%) use social networks to aid in their reporting. That’s up from just under half (41%) in last year’s study titled “survey of media in the wired world.” As reported in PRWeek, two thirds go to company websites (69%) or blogs (66%) while half use Wikipedia (51%) or Twitter (47%) or go to… score another one for online video (48%). An interesting side note to this last item. Usually I go to the originating site to verify information contained in articles, but I didn’t in this case because my web browser warned that the SNCR site was unsafe, with infections and malware. How ironic that a media site would carry such a warning. H

AND THE AWARD GOES: And goes. And goes. To 96 different categories to be precise. The Web Marketing Association announced the winners of its Web Award which, you will note, is singular; which may be true because there is only one winner in each category but which would seem to indicate a lack of thought. (Sort of like me when I bought and built the website MediaConsultant.tv, singular, instead of MediaConsultants.tv, plural.) Anyway, as part of my never-ending service to readers, visiting such places looking for nuggets that you will find useful, I can honestly say – don’t bother. Unlike the Webby Awards noted in a previous MfM and which really did have some cool sites, only one site on the Web Marketing Association’s list elicited even the slightest ooh and aah – SciFi.com’s Warehouse 13 which won the TV category. Okay, semi-cool was the Zimbio.com site which won the E-Zine category and which does have some interesting citizen reporting. All right, the Leo Burnett Big Black Pencil website which won for marketing was pretty cool. And the Charlotte Observer’s website which won in the Newspaper category wasn’t bad. The winner of the broadcasting category, USANetwork.com, was just so-so. The Business Week’s Business Exchange website won both in News and in Social Networking, which is pretty amazing for a site that is in Beta and looks like it’s a long way from going Alpha. In Media, the winner was Website Magazine which isn’t half bad, while in the Magazine category the winner was DockWalk – billed as “the essential site for captains and crews.” Actually last year’s winner in the Magazine category, Saudi Aramco World, was even more interesting. So, I guess in the end, there were some interesting points.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: With all the BS about ‘government death panels,’ you might find it interesting to know there is a death panel… sort of. It’s a website put together by researchers and students at Carnegie Mellon University. Called deathriskrankings.com, it gives you the odds of your dying next year, or whenever, based on publicly available data. It ranks up to 66 different possible causes of death. Just for the record, I didn’t check on my situation. And as someone who goes to an enormous number of websites, a cocktail chatter warning. Avoid online surveys and do not accept offers of free ‘white papers.’ Several articles recently have warned that social networking sites have an incredible amount of surveys, with come on’s about how you can find out something about yourself or your friends. Most, if not all, of them gather a lot of personal information in the process. As to the ‘white paper’ offers that will show you how to Twitter, or increase your website traffic, or the results of the latest online survey or other ‘great’ pieces of information… well, be prepared. The sales people will be a-calling.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Message from Michael - Social Networking - September 21, 2009

Message From Michael

September 21, 2009

CHASING THE BRIGHT ELUSIVE BUTTERFLY

SOCIAL NETWORKING’S SWINE FLU

TV’S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

IT’S A SMALL WORLD

CHASING THE BRIGHT ELUSIVE BUTTERFLY: Of What? Well, despite the song, it’s not exactly love, but sort of, according to research by Harvard University professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski. As in the song, men apparently are trying to ‘catch a fleeting glimpse of someone’s fading shadow.” By studying the weblogs on such sites, he found the ‘biggest usage category’ is men looking at women they don’t know, followed by – what else – men looking at women they do know. Next is women looking at women they know. The result – women receive two thirds of all page views. Piskorski says the ‘killer app’ on social networking sites is pictures. He found that 70% of the time spent is either looking at pictures or looking at personal profiles. It’s a sort of ‘voyeurism,’ he says. While all that may be true of individuals, businesses are chasing the bright elusive butterfly of marketing through social networks, and going about it all wrong, according to Piskorski. They’re so interested in ‘selling’ their product that they have lost track of why social networks started – to fulfill ‘offline’ social needs. He uses a great analogy of people sitting at a table when a stranger comes up and tries to sell them something. Not going to happen. Instead they should be trying to help the socializing process. Interestingly that is very similar to a point made in Entrepreneur Magazine in an interview with Jason Sadler. Who, you say? Sadler is the guy who started a whole business, wearing company T-Shirts, uploading video of him wearing the T-Shirts to Facebook and Flickr and becoming, in essence, a human billboard. Before you dismiss him, he made $70,000 doing this and his appointment book is almost filled for next year. Anyway, Sadler makes a similar point that people and businesses slap content on a social networking site and think they’ve done something. He says the point is to share with people, don’t just shout at them, get involved in conversations and “be yourself.”

As noted before, several businesses, consultancies, websites and publications are offering seminars or advice on how to do social networking effectively. Heck, there’s now a Social Media Business Council created to “discuss, share and collaborate on best practices.” Multi-channel retail consultants The E-Tailing Group along with consumer review platform PowerReviews found that more than four out of five businesses (86%) of brand and merchants surveyed now have a Facebook ‘fan page’ and more than half (55%) are using consumer reviews on their websites. What’s particularly interesting about this survey is that many of the groups adopted social networking not because of advantages but because they were afraid either a) they would be trashed online and not know it or b) that they would appear “less competent” if they didn’t have a social networking presence. It tells you something that the bastion of conservative businesses, Forbes, has issued a corporate guide book which says ‘social technologies turn many corporate policies upside down.’ Interestingly, even Forbes has similar warnings to the ones noted above, warning that social networking is a communication tool but one in which you join the conversation, not direct it. But my favorite article on social networking has to be Advertising Age’s article on How To Spot Social Media Snake Oil which notes that there are a lot of ‘hucksters’ out there trying to ride the social media bandwagon to financial success.

ON THE FLIP SIDE of that is a video on YouTube titled the Social Media Revolution. It is built on the Now You Know theme used so often and says, for example, that social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web – something we’ve mentioned in previous Messages. One I didn’t know (and haven’t verified) is that one in eight couples married in the U.S. met via social media. The video also makes the point that social media is a conversation to be joined, not directed. Anyway, it’s well worth the 4 ½ minutes to watch. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8&feature=youtube_gdata

SOCIAL NETWORKING’S SWINE FLU: Trying to be topical here, but this is probably a bad headline. Regardless, a fascinating article in The New York Times Magazine may have implications for social networking users. Two social scientists have found that clusters of friends (a la social networking) can “infect” each other either positively or negatively. Scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler found that if your friends are fat, you are more likely to be fat; if your friends smoke, you are more likely to smoke; if your friends are happy or unhappy, same thing. They call it “social contagion.” Using data from a study originated by the National Heart Institute in Framingham, Massachusetts, they found, for example, that when a resident became obese, his or her friends were 57% more likely to become obese, too. Oddly, if a friend of a friend became obese, that person was 20% more likely to become obese. If a friend took up smoking, you’re 36% more likely to light up, and again, oddly, if a friend of a friend started smoking, you were 11% more likely to do the same. It is, in a way, the three degrees of connection versus the six degrees of separation. The reasons, in most cases, are “commonsensical” as the article points out. Peer pressure. What is different is that the study hypothesizes a clustering effect. If everybody in your group is obese, it is more acceptable for you to be obese. If everybody in your social circle drinks heavily, then it is okay for you to do so. Interestingly this example was more noticeable amongst women because women tend to drink less. On a more positive note, the scientists say that we are all connected to more than 1,000 people within three degrees. So, theoretically, we can make these people healthier, fitter and happier “just by our contagious example.”

TV’S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH: According to a report by marketing research firm Magna Global, it’s the DVR. In a report carried by Variety, the firm said the median age of broadcast network viewers has climbed yet again while the median age of cable network viewers has actually held steady or even dropped in some cases. Now, here’s where it gets a little tricky. As you sort through the numbers, you have to keep in mind there are three sets of them. LIVE broadcast viewing where the median viewing age is now 51, up from 50 last year and 43 eight years ago. If you throw in Live AND Time Shifted viewing, (which I should note is the new parlance of ratings) the median age drops – very slightly. The oldest skewing network, CBS, goes from a median age of 55 to 54 for both, and the same slight dip holds true for the others: ABC (51 live, 50 combined), NBC (49 and 47), Fox (46 and 44), CW (34 and 33). BUT if you count those watching programs ONLY on DVR, the media age drops a whopping ten years for ABC, CBS and NBC, a significant seven years for Fox and two years for the lower-aged and lower rated CW.

Of course, all you smart Message readers will say – the population as a whole is getting older. True. So, out of curiosity I did look up age on the Census Bureau website which says the median age in America is 36.7 years, up slightly from 36.4 a year ago, and that the over 65-population is expected to double in the U.S. and the World at large, from 8% of the world population now to 16% by the year 2050.

For a little more perspective, the quarterly report issued by Magna predicts that the percentage of TV Households with DVR’s will go from a quarter (27% or 31 Million households) this year to just under a half (42% or 51.1 Million HH’s) in five years. Video On Demand is already in 42% of the U.S. TV Households now, but will be in two-thirds of them (66%) by 2014. Meanwhile broadband access will reach 87.4 Million TV households by 2014, according to the Magna predictions, compared to 71 Million this year.

IT’S A SMALL WORLD: The latest ranking of TV Households from Nielsen shows the smallest increase in growth in a decade – less than half a million (400,000 to be exact) year to year, bringing the total to 114.9 Million HH’s. Household growth has averaged more than a Million every year for the past ten years, including the biggest leap in 2001 to 2002 when it grew by 3.3 Million. Nielsen estimates the number of person two and up (P2+) at 292 Million, which is a little odd since the Census Bureau puts the total U.S. population at 307,500,180. Does that mean there are 15 Million toddlers rug-ratting their way around homes? The Nielsen report notes that four Florida DMA’s (Tampa/ St. Pete, Miami, Fort Myers and Tallahassee) all dropped because of “domestic migration.” Orlando, Jacksonville and West Palm remained flat. Number one ranked New York added the most people (59,710) while little Waco only increased by 9,980, but that was enough to move it up five spots to number 89.

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Message from Michael - September 8, 2009

Message From Michael

September 8, 2009

ROGER RABBIT AND BRER RABBIT IN THE 21^st CENTURY

HARRY POTTER’S PAPER COMES TO LIFE

TODAY’S WORD IS SIMULTANEOUS

TALKING ABOUT MOBILE DEVICES

THE ADVERTISING BATTLE FIELD

SERGEANT PEPPER ISN’T LONELY

ROGER RABBIT AND BRER RABBIT IN THE 21^ST CENTURY. The live action/ animated film concept of yesterday has become the reality of today. It’s something called Augmented Reality which is sort of a half-way point between the real world and the virtual world. You or your children may never sing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah with a bluebird on your shoulder, or run amok in Toontown, but you will be seeing and doing things in a whole different light… and soon. Augmented reality is defined (by Wikipedia) as a view of the physical real world whose elements are merged with, or augmented by, virtual computer-generated imagery. The Augmented Environments Laboratory at Georgia Tech says it’s a matter of building Interactive computing environments that “augment a user’s senses with computer generated material.” AR (as it is referred to) runs the gamut. From iPhone applications that allow you to point your phone at a restaurant and get a menu along with reviews, to retail stores allowing you to step into an environment in which you can pick your furniture virtually. Electronics store Best Buy recently put out a Sunday newspaper circular that allowed users to ‘see’ a computer in action by simply holding the circular in front of their computer webcam. The user appeared on their computer screen with the device apparently in front of them. ABC meanwhile has created a 3-D ‘augmented reality’ ad for its show Flash Forward. The network is putting ‘bizarre’ codes into its print ads, according to Variety magazine, which features photos from the series and even plays clips from the show when you hold the codes in front of your webcam. To see what the Flash Forward video is like, go to website jointhemosaic.com to get a taste of the Web and TV experience.

Want to see AR for yourself? First go to video.google.com and put ‘augmented reality’ in the search bar. Ignore the first one that comes up, called augmented reality magic 1.0. Instead, click on Total immersions Augmented Reality Demo. It runs 6 minutes and after seeing it, you will probably agree with the cut line that says, “quite simply, this is the future.” But if you really, really want to be WOW’d, (or at least, say ‘way cool’) go to plugintothesmartgrid.com. It’s an eco-imagination development by GE that will soon have you holding a wind turbine in your hand. And while the live action/ animated films cost millions to make, augmented reality is becoming less and less expensive. One of the M.I.T. Technology Review’s innovators under 35 has developed a device that you can wear around the neck and which merges “the real world with digital information” for under $350.

HARRY POTTER’S PAPER COMES TO LIFE. Kindle better beware, and I’m not talking about the new Wi-Fi enhanced Sony Reader. In an even more interesting twist on ABC’s augmented reality ploy, CBS is embedding a video chip into a print ad that will be running in Entertainment Weekly in mid-September. The mini-battery-powered ads can run up to 40 minutes of video, according to maker Americhip, making it look somewhat like the video newspapers you see in the Harry Potter movie series. The paper-thin ads will promote CBS’s Monday Night prime time line-up and Pepsi. Unfortunately you have to be in Los Angeles or New York to see the limited distribution ads… but not for long. Meanwhile, I should note that Esquire magazine tried something similar using the same kind of E-ink technology used by Kindle. Critics dubbed that effort a flop with Wired calling it ‘little more than ink mashed up with some underutilized circuitry’ -- sort of like those singing birthday cards friends used to give you.

TODAY’S WORD IS SIMULTANEOUS. And more and more, it is being used to describe Television and Internet use. The latest study by Nielsen says more than half (57%) of TV viewers in the use WITH Internet access (an important point) use both mediums at the same time at least once a month. The Nielsen study found that TV viewers using the Internet average 2 hours and 40 minutes a month; and that a quarter of the time (28%) they are on the Web, they are also watching television. This is similar to last year’s report by Nielsen. Astute readers of The Message will recall the original study on concurrent viewing titled the Middletown Media Studies that showed simultaneous use among ALL media, and the on-going studies by BigResearch on simultaneous use. Also as noted before, the Nielsen report confirmed that TV consumption continues to grow along with video use on the Internet and on mobile devices. Nielsen spokesman Gary Holmes makes the point that while Americans still prefer to watch video on their television, “the rule of thumb is that you watch it on the best screen.”

TALKING ABOUT MOBILE DEVICES. Yeah, I know that is a lousy headline transition, but you can only be so creative. In any case, research by Knowledge Networks shows that two-thirds of Americans use mobile devices that are video-enabled. Cell phones with video service have nearly doubled in ownership since 2006 while video iPods have grown ‘by a factor of nearly five’ (from 5% in 2006 to 23% this year). Add laptops to the equation and the use of mobile technologies to view video has more than doubled in two years (21% to 43%). Online marketing site Marketing Vox also notes a study by the Gartner group which says mobile advertising has jumped 74% this year to $913.5 Million and will reach $13 Billion in four years, by 2013.

THE ADVERTISING BATTLE FIELD: Several articles have been written recently about the advertising war being waged between Apple and Microsoft with both sides trying to be ‘cool’ while attacking the other. Let me add an observation. The August 30^th edition of The New York Times business section contained a graph, citing TNS Media Intelligence that showed Apple spent about $300 Million in 2008 while Microsoft spent about $340 Million. That’s not what’s interesting. What’s interesting is that when you look at the graph -- both spent far, far more on television than they did on their home turf – the Internet. Apple spent about $280 Million on Television and only $10 Million on the Internet, roughly the same as what it spent on Print advertising. Microsoft spent about $150 Million on Television, almost the same on Print but ‘only’ about $40 Million on the Internet. What does that say?

As a side note to this, I tried to research the TNS figures so I could verify the Times graph. (I do this with all the stories I report.) I found about 30-plus articles citing the Apple-Microsoft ad war and virtually every one of them was just a re-hash of the Times article. What does that say?

SERGEANT PEPPER ISN’T LONELY: According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, The Beatles are the most popular musical performers, and that popularity cuts across all generations. Half of those surveyed (49%) say they like The Beatles not just a little but A LOT. Another third (32%) liked them ‘a little.” Not so coincidentally that survey came out just as two new major developments in Beatle Mania are about to hit. As noted in previous Messages, the newly remastered CD’s of the group’s original albums are being released this Wednesday. The digital remastering took four years. Interestingly there is a stereo and a mono set of releases. Even more interesting, reviewer Allan Kozinn indicates in his New York Times article on the release that the mono version is in some ways better than the stereo version. Maybe that’s why the mono set costs $300 while the stereo set costs $260. Even more noteworthy is the release of the video game, The Beatles: Rock Band. It also was reviewed in the Sunday edition of the New York Times and to say the review was ‘gushing’ would be like saying Niagara Falls is a water fountain. Reviewer Seth Schiesel calls it “a cultural watershed… a transformative entertainment experience… the most important video game yet made.”

In case you’re wondering, the second most popular ‘musical performers’ after the Beatles was The Eagles whose ‘lot popularity’ (42%) was not that far behind the Beatles. Johnny Cash and Michael Jackson basically tied for the next spot in the popularity contest with more than a third (39%) liking them a lot, while another third (37%) liked them a little. After that, but just slightly was Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin (38%). Rounding out the top ten list after that was Frank Sinatra and Carrie Underwood (34%), Garth Brooks (33%) and then Jimi Hendrix (32%).

As a further footnote, the Pew Study which looked at the Generation Gap says Rock is the most listened to music genre (35%), followed by Country (27%), Rhythm and Blues (22%), Rap or hip-hop (16%), Classical (15%), Jazz (12%) and Salsa (6%).

Monday, August 10, 2009

Message From Michael - August 10, 2009

Message From Michael

August 10, 2009

VIDEO VIDEO EVERYWHERE

THE GOVERNMENTAL DOUBLE WHAMMY

ONE SINGULAR SENSATION

MISTAKES THEY’VE MADE A FEW

VIDEO VIDEO EVERYWHERE: It seems like every other week there is another report about the growth in online video usage and, yes, here are some more. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that the percentage of ONLINE Americans visiting video sharing sites has nearly doubled in the past three years from 33% in December 2006 to 62% in April of this year. Research firm eMarketer says 70% of the U.S. Internet population will watch videos online this year and that percentage will jump to 85% by 2013. A coalition of media groups including Yahoo, Warner Brothers and Media Lab among others found that a third of online videos (34%) are shared in some way – through emails, social networking or IM’ing. Researchers Ipsos/ Media CT say online video viewing accounts for a greater percentage of Americans’ ‘entertainment time” than ever.

What is different in these reports is that the amount of longer form online video viewing is also increasing dramatically. Ipsos says a quarter (26%) of online Americans have streamed a TV show while one in seven (14%) have streamed a full-length movie. Although the percentages are slightly different, Pew came back with the same finding, that longer form video viewing has doubled in two years. A third of Internet users (35%) watched either a full length TV show or movie online in the latest survey, compared to half that (16%) in 2007. What is also different is that the reports indicate that the online viewing is becoming an alternative (albeit a small one) to traditional TV viewing. For example, the Pew report says that a fifth of Americans (22%) have cut back on either cable or television services over the past year while only a tenth (9%) say they have cut back on Internet service. Partially that is because of other features of Internet service, such as search and surfing but part of it is because more of them are connecting their computer to their TV. Research site ChangeWave which says its goal is “helping you profit from change” says Baby Boomers in particular are watching less traditional TV, by a five to one margin. It’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but the researchers say boomers now spend less time watching TV (11.8 hours a week) than they do online (12.9 hours per week) although that time is all Internet activity and not just video watching.

What is even more different (and a little scary for broadcasters) is a report by CBS’s head of research, David Poltrack, that online video ads could become more attractive than traditional TV ads because online video ads in the longer form videos ‘capture a more attentive audience that can be more easily targeted.’ Readers will remember a previous Message report about the growing demand for online video ads. Polatrack says the audience for premium web content is up a third (36%) year to year. That attentive audience is why that coalition mentioned earlier (Yahoo, et al) says that video sharing has become so prevalent that businesses should target their ads at these ‘most active sharers.’

Disclaimers: Although Hulu is leading the charge in the growth of online video usage, at least one person isn’t buying it. NATPE CEO Rick Feldman says that’s because advertisers and consumers aren’t buying it. The reasoning goes back to the issue raised in last week’s Message about the battle over “free” on the Internet. Feldman says unless Hulu changes its business model (to include more ads and probably subscription fees as well), Hulu will be history in three years. And although ChangeWave and others indicate online video poses a threat to traditional TV, Ipsos and others say it’s way too early to say that. The researchers at Ipsos note that the average American WITH Internet access still watches 15 hours of Television a week compared to only two hours of video on their PC. Their survey showed that even among digital users, two thirds (64%) would rather watch hour long dramas and half hour long comedies on their TV, rather than renting, buying or watching on their PC.

THE GOVERNMENTAL DOUBLE WHAMMY: The new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has announced his agency, too, will start an inquiry into the state of journalism in the digital age. You will recall from a previous Message that the Federal Trade Commission has announced that it will be holding a series of workshops starting in September asking the question – Can News Media Survive the Internet Age. Now, new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski in an interview with Broadcasting and Cable says he has “real concerns, as many Americans do, about what is going on in America with respect to newspapers, local news and information.” Genachowski is following the lead set by Commissioner and former acting chairman Michael J. Copps who has circulated a memorandum amongst the commissioners outlining his concerns and issues to address. Ironically, the memo has not been made public but some indication of Copps’ stance can seen from a speech at a conference in Minneapolis where he said it was time “to put a cop back on the beat” when it comes to FCC oversight of broadcasters. He called it a “down payment on Media Democracy” and promised ‘meaningful review’ of licenses. FCC Chairman Genachowski said there is no timetable for the review which -- considering the agenda set by the chairman -- may be some time. Topping his agenda is, of course, the broadband stimulus effort, followed by review of the Children’s Television Act, the wrap-up of the DTV transition, indecency cases and so on and so on.

As a side note, although it has been reported, some of Genachowski’s views may be seen from his background as a senior executive at IAC as well as being on the board of directors of Expedia, Hotels.com, The Motley Fool and Web.com. In case you haven’t heard of IAC, it is an Internet company whose “mission is to harness the power of interactivity to make daily life easier and more productive for people all over the world.” Specifically, it has 50 sub-companies, including The Daily Beast, Ask.com, Dictionary.com, CollegeHumor.com, Vimeo as well as a plethora of dating sites – Match.com, loveandseek.com, BBpeople.com, Singleparent.com as well as just odd sites. New commissioner Mignon Clyburn is a member of the South Carolina Public Service Commission, former publisher of a weekly newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, and daughter of House majority whip James Clyburn. New Commissioner Meredith Atwell Baker was with the NTIA overseeing the digital coupon program and is the daughter of former Senator Majority Leader Howard Baker.

ONE SINGULAR SENSATION: It may be that, but not everybody believes, to use the next lyric from A Chorus Line, that it’s going to be “a thrilling combination.” “IT” is The Singularity – the creation of a ‘super intelligence’ using Artificial Intelligence (AI) from advanced computers and robots. Yes, it sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but there is a Singularity Institute and a Singularity University that have been created to further this concept and in October there will be a Singularity Summit held in New York City, drawing scientists, futurists and ‘transhumanists’ from around the world. And, yes, you’re wondering what this has to do with media. Well, much of the language in AI is from programming language systems like Perl, Java, and C++. Plus, the AI computers/robots are developing the ability to ‘breed’ in the sense that they can create new, more advanced computers/robots, which, in turn, will create new, more advanced devices which, in turn, will create new, more advanced devices and so on and so on. Suddenly ‘new media’ takes on a whole new twist. Anyway, more on this in later MfM’s.

MISTAKES THEY’VE MADE A FEW: But then again, a few too many. And the “they” in this case are the reporters for The New York Times. According to a column by the Times’ public editor, the story about Walter Cronkite’s death by reporter Allesandra Stanley had seven factual errors in it. I know this falls into commentary, which I try to avoid, but the irony that a story about a journalist would have so many journalistic errors is hard not to comment on. It gets worse. Public editor Hoyt Clark says that “Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts.” Amazing. She apparently got better after the special attention, but after the Cronkite article, she’s going to get “special attention” again. Even though Hoyt says Stanley is “a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television,” I have to say that I can never read any of her material again with any sense of comfort.

As a foot note, when I was a semi-young newspaper reporter still suffering under the delusion that editors actually edited, I wrote a story about a city council meeting that had a lead line something like this: “More than a thousand city employees, including my father, got a three percent raise thanks to the city council.” My father did work for the city in a minor position at the time, and I assumed the editors would catch the humor and edit it out. After it made it to the first edition of the newspaper, I had to explain my little attempt at humor to a furious Managing Editor, before it made it to the final edition.

And as a foot note that will say something about my readers: I wonder how many of you thought of Frank Sinatra’s My Way versus Queen’s We Are The Champions versus Smokey Robinson’s Ooo Baby Baby when you read the headline.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Message From Michael - The Cost of Free - August 5, 2009

Message From Michael

August 5, 2009

BORN FREE, AS FREE AS THE NEWS FLOWS

NEWS NEAR YOU - MAYBE

FREEDOM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD

THE REBELLION CONTINUES

CRONKITE-JOURNALISM FOLLOW UP

BORN FREE, AS FREE AS THE NEWS FLOWS: That has been true practically since the Internet started. News and so much else has been free. But to steal another line from the 1960’s film and song, several major players in the news business are saying it will no longer ‘stay free, where no walls divide you.’ The wall is a subscription-based entrée into some sites. That is the pragmatic response to a declining advertising environment. The philosophical argument against this centers around a new book by Chris Andrews, editor for Wired and author of the book The Long Tail. In his latest book (Free, the Future of a Radical Price) he argues that ‘free’ is a basic expectation in the new digital online environment. In very, very simplistic terms, the argument goes something like this. In the old media world, price was determined by shelf space. You had only so much shelf space to store your books and it cost more to store more. No longer. For example, in 1961 a transistor cost $10; two years later it had dropped to $5; by 1968 it was a dollar; today with billions and billions of transistors flooding the market, a single transistor costs about .000055 cents. Therefore that cost is reduced. Then, he argues, if you don’t provide it free – someone else will. And, of course, people prefer free.

As a SIDE NOTE to all this, if you don’t want to pay for Andrews’ book, you can watch his presentation at the Disruption By Design conference on the Wired website (http://www.wired.com/wiredbizprogram). Or you can read an interesting analysis by The Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell on The New Yorker website (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all) .

NEWS NEAR YOU – MAYBE: The prime example of ‘free’ in the digital (emphasis on that word) online world is YouTube which is incredibly successful when judged in terms of users and brand recognition with its 20 hours of video being uploaded every minute. But it’s less successful, critics point out, when you consider that -- in financial ‘speakese’ -- YouTube has not been able to establish a successful business model; Or, in blunt non-speakese, YouTube is bleeding red ink. However, that hasn’t stopped YouTube which now has a new model which (depending on your perspective) enhances or threatens the news equation – News Near You. As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, YouTube is asking news outlets to partner with the video giant in supplying news videos for use on their News Near You site. Supporters say it extends the brand and reach of news outlets while critics say it will end up being another example of the “frenemy” development some associate with the Google partnerships. The website will provide you all the videos produced within 100 miles of your location which makes this both scary and interesting (again, depending on your perspective). I say that because of the tracking capability of the Internet. For example, you know how you can sign on to a website and, even though you haven’t indicated anything, it automatically detects that you’re in the Atlanta area or the Chicago area just based on your ISP provider and IP provider. The New York Times article goes on to say that a new ‘breed’ of local news broadcasters is emerging – ones who don’t need a broadcast license – like schools, churches, advocacy groups and individuals – and that in the future, much of the News Near You content will come from “people who do not report the news for a living.”

As a SIDE NOTE to this, you will recall from previous Messages that YouTube has established a reporter training system. After some recent scratching around the YouTube site, I found the Reporters’ Center again, but I have not found the News Near You site. I did find World News with Charlie Gibson, Good Morning America, PrimeTime and 20/20 under the Shows tab in the News category; Under the Channels tab in the news/politics category, you’ll find CBS, Associated Press and Al Jazeera. And all of the sites right next to ones whose news credentials are… well, questionable.

FREEDOM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD: Despite what Janis Joplin says, News Corporation poobah Rupert Murdoch doesn’t believe there’s nothing left to lose. He says news organizations stand to lose money and that’s why he plans to start charging for access to his newspapers’ various websites within a year to fix what he (and others) call the ‘malfunctioning’ news business model. Murdoch, of course, has the model of the News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal to build on. Lionel Barber, The editor of the Financial Times (which also has a successful online subscription model), goes even further, predicting all newspapers will go to a subscription model in the next 12 months. And both The New York Times and USA Today have indicated they are looking at online subscription models. And for good reason. If you look back at The State of the News Media report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, online advertising only accounted for $3 Billion of the $38 Billion in advertising revenue in 2008 for newspapers – and that $38 Billion was a fourth lower than the $49 Billion the industry made two years earlier. The PEJ report says though that online advertising alone will not sustain the newsgathering operations at the level the print operations had supported. Of course that hasn’t stopped several newspapers from making the switch. The latest is the 174-year-old Ann Arbor News which is transitioning to an online only model similar to that adopted by the Detroit Free Press/ Detroit News with a twice-a-week print edition.

THE REBELLION CONTINUES: This time it’s the Associated Press leading the charge with an announcement that it is creating a “news registry” which will digitally track how the AP and, later, member organizations material is used to make sure it is ‘not misappropriated’ and “potentially create new ways for the 163-year-old news cooperative and other media to make more money on the Internet.” The AP says it is just another way to protect the journalism. However, the rebellion has spawned a counter-rebellion from bloggers and news sites. The question revolves around what is legitimate use of news material. Meanwhile several major publishing companies have joined forces with a company in California called Attributor to create what it calls the Fair Syndication Consortium. Some of the companies include The New York Times, Washington Post, Conde Nast, Hearst, Reuters, McClatchy and Conde Nast. The problem is the major aggregators (aka Google and Yahoo) have reacted “coolly to the proposal” as the Times says in an understatement in its report on the proposal. Very simply, the plan is for publishers to share in the revenue generated from any site that copies their news stories. In very much a similar vein, European publishers called on the European Commission to provide more copyright protection for news operations.

As a SIDE NOTE to all this, a quick search by yours truly found numerous sites offering to provide free news content to websites – freshcontent.net, freecontent.net, freenewsfeed.newsfactor.com, freenewsarticles.com, rssfeedreader.com, freenewswebsite.com. And the list goes on. Interestingly many of the websites cite traditional news organizations like Reuters and the BBC as source material.

CRONKITE-JOURNALISM FOLLOW UP: Many of the leading journalism and ‘citizen journalism’ sites have joined forces to create a inter/national non-profit Investigative News Network. Some of the luminaries involved include Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), Huffington Post, NPR, Stateline.org, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, USC Annenberg School, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the list goes on and on. By my count, thirty prestigious organizations have signed what they call The Pocantico Declaration “to nourish and sustain the emerging investigative journalism ecosystem.” Even with all the journalism do-gooders and save our soul sites coming out, watch out for this one.

It seems likely a weekly occurrence – I send out an email and immediately find several sources or notes that I missed and/or that my really, really smart Message readers have caught. That is true, yet again. I didn’t mention the founding of the INN in the previous MfM about Cronkite and Journalism. Thank you to Rebecca Coates-Nee of San Diego State University for pointing this out.

Media Consultant

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Message from Michael - The Information Deluge - December 16, 2009

Monday, December 07, 2009

Message from Michael - Journalism and the Internet- December 7 2009

Monday, November 30, 2009

Message from Michael - Journalism and Broadband - November 30, 2009

Monday, November 16, 2009

Message from Michael - Politics and Media - November 16, 2009

Monday, November 02, 2009

Message from Michael - Net Neutrality - November 2, 2009

Monday, October 26, 2009

Message from Michael - Online Video - October 26, 2009

Monday, October 19, 2009

Message from Michael - Media Bias - October 19, 2009

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Message From Michael - Citizen Media - October 12, 2009

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Message from Michael -- October 5, 2009

Monday, September 28, 2009

Message from Michael - September 28, 2009

Monday, September 21, 2009

Message from Michael - Social Networking - September 21, 2009

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Message from Michael - September 8, 2009

Monday, August 10, 2009

Message From Michael - August 10, 2009

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Message From Michael - The Cost of Free - August 5, 2009

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