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  • Available for public speaking around media transformation and opportunity. Please inquire for schedule and rates.

Content Bridges Services

Press Mentions

  • Ad Age/Nat Ives: It's Back: 25 MORE Media People You Should Follow on Twitter
    25 media types worth following on Twitter.
  • Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble Globally
    The few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"
  • NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price?
    “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.” He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”
  • Economist: It isn’t just newspapers: much of the established news industry is being blown away. Yet news is thriving
    Ken Doctor of Outsell, a research firm, reckons that the Kindle appeals to baby-boomers who would otherwise read a paper magazine or newspaper. The young prefer their iPhones and their aggregators. Indeed, the top four magazines on Kindle, according to Amazon’s website, are the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time and Reader’s Digest. Not much of a youth market there.
  • Forbes: San Diego News Shoot-Out
    "The Union-Tribune is cratering. That opens a hole in the market and the opportunity for some unconventional business models."
  • BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices
    “There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”
  • AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is saf
    The threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."
  • Guardian: Seattle mourns the last day of its venerable Post Intelligencer
    "There's a lot less reporting happening, on a national scale. For the 1,500 or so daily newspapers, it's just a matter of getting smaller and smaller."
  • Seattle Times: Seattle's oldest newspaper goes to press for the final time
    "They're bringing the full force of their national relationships and content to bear on Seattle. They [Hearst] could sustain this experiment indefinitely. If it makes a million or loses a million, that's nothing to a company like Hearst."
  • AP: Hearst hopes Web-only Seattle P-I will turn profit
    "It [online-only PI] definitely can make money. They have a head start in terms of the brand and (Web) traffic. They have to run like hell to create a new identity."

What's On My Netvibes

  • Steve Goldstein
    Fellow KR alumnus Steve Goldstein understands the research/info needs of end-use enterprise customers, and he's built a company that is helping satisfy them.
  • Peter Krasilovsky
    Centered on e-commerce of all kinds from Yellow Pages through classifieds and new ad models.
  • Mark Potts
    Mark Potts is an experienced journalist, observer of Internet journalism and an alumnus of the Backfence experiment.
  • John Blossom
    Thoughtful views on a wide-ranging mix of media change.
  • Jay Rosen
    Jay Rosen is a provocateur in the best sense, an NYU journalism professor deeply committed to keeping the press accountable and vibrant in the digital age.
  • David Meerman Scott
    David Scott understands web marketing of digital content. Check out his site and his new book, "Cashing In With Content"

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BlogBurst

« 10 Questions for Ron Burkle and Yucaipa | Main | Welcome Backfence to the Bay Area »

April 17, 2006

Stuff In, Stuff Out (SI-SO), on Steroids

We in the news industry like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient, do-it-yourselfers. We gather the news, sell the ads, put all the pieces together in production, print the package and distribute ourselves, thank you, to subscribers and coinboxes throughout the lands.  It's Andrew CarnegieAndrewcarnegieportraitpd (below), turn-of-the-last century vertically integrated enterprise.

That of course us has caused us all kinds of problems in trying to get our Web acts together, since the web is all about time to market,  and strategically and quickly partnering with others to get stuff done that your own company and people can't.

Our DIY self-image is particularly strong in newsrooms. We have this image of intrepid journalists wandering in, some time in the a.m. and then pursuing all the news that counts and bringing it back alive. We think of the paper as being local and staff-written.

Local and staff-written has always been a key to our success, but never more than now do we see that model busting up. (Actually news orgs have also brought in lots of content: TV and movie listings, syndicated columns, comics, sports data, stock listings, etc.)

Just in the last week, we've seen announcements by Mochila, Pluck, Newstex and Your Hub, among numerous others, that point to the rapid changes in the works.

You could call it Stuff In, Stuff Out (SI-SO). We're seeing a lot more stuff moving into news pages in print and especially news pages online. We're seeing the ability to move news company-produced stuff out of  news companies more easily.

Take the Stuff In. Pluck's new BlogBurst* product is a new provider of content to digital newsrooms, topical content produced by bloggers. Why pay a travel writer when you can pick up some travel content more cheaply? How about health? Cricket? Antiquing? And on and on.
Already, the Washington Post (which just whacked 80 newsroom jobs recently), the San Francisco Chronicle and a spate of Texas papers near Pluck's Austin base, the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News and the hometown Austin American-Statesman ( & Austin 360).  As BlogBurst builds up its 700+ blog suppliers and its categories (first out are "Travel, Women's Issues, Technology & Gadgets, Food & Entertainment and Local Metros".)

Also, on Stuff In. Consider Your Hub. Your_hub_denver_southI visited the Your Hub booth at NEXPO a couple of weeks ago. Your Hub reports that in Denver, its launch site, it is now receiving 1400 community posts and 800 calendar items a week. Those, if they hold, are impressive numbers. They will create a vibrant, newspaper-company-hosted community, which is both able to be monetized and exposed to more content on the Denver newspapers sites of  the Denver Post  and Rocky Mountain News.  (Of course, what they may be exposed to is BlogBurst-supplied content, so you can see how this circle is working.) And the best of Your Hub community content is being put into weekly, hyper-local tabs (90% community written) with more, and presumably, new advertisers.

Stuff Out. Newstex* is now making a business of licensing full-text blog content to among others LexisNexis. Larry Schwartz, Newstex's CEO, is on to something here, just as Pluck is with BlogBurst. It's simple: some blog content has more value than other blog content and can be licensed or monetized through advertsing. How about all those thousands of blogs now being produced by newspaper staffers? No longer are they just nice additions to one paper's destination website; they are grist for syndication, sliced by topic and locale, and, eeks, talent!

Stuff In and Out, In and Out.  Then there's the recent Mochila announcement, unveiled after months of secrecy in the Times.  Given an exclusive, the Times provided a sunny piece, reporting that “Mochila Mochilawill be a place where newspapers, magazines, websites, and broadcasters sell content to each other." You know, dance on the graves of ISyndicate and Screaming Media, and have exquisite timing: offering a state-of-the-art content exchange that can work seamlessly and with greater transparency than current, largely opaque deal-making affords.

Well, maybe. I wish CEO Keith McAllister good luck and hope his timing is better than others. The admin set looks great, and as a veteran licensor of content, I wish I had it a half-decade ago.

To our SI-SO point here, though, the metaphor is right (and write.)  Stuff just wants to get out and in. Stuff In, Stuff Out. SI-SO. It's the age we're moving into.

Addendum (4/19):  Good piece by Kevin Maney in USAT interviewing Mark Cuban on the fast-changing media landscape. Well worth a read.


*Content Bridges BLOG dislosure:  Content Bridges can be found in both the Newstex and BlogBurst feeds. Not a penny received.

 

 

April 17, 2006 |

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