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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"

My Work as an Outsell Analyst

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« "Stinker of an Industry" | Main | Career Builder: After the Dominoes Fall »

May 28, 2006

In Digg Nation

The august Westin St. Francis, of pretentious chandeliers and over-priced shrimp, hosted this year's West Coast Content Forum. That's the annual event of SIIA, for those in and around the growing content part of its work, distinct (largely) from its roots in software.

My favorite panel this year offered a bunch of 20-to-30-something technologist/visionary/entrepreneurs talking to an "older" mainstream media and aggregator crowd.  (You know who you are.)

 These publishers and those who serve them often talk about difficulty of releasing content potential, given print-based publishing system. That of course is not a concern of entrepreneurs.

Google's Bret Taylor,   WetPaint's (and WikiFido proud father) Ben Elowitz, Six Apart's Marissa Levinson, del.icio.us's Joshua Schachter all stirred up the crowd, egged on by the spirited moderation of Forrester's Charlene Li.

As publishers struggle with their own content management systems, these young technologists said that the power in people’s fingertips to put their categories (tags) on content of all kinds and share those tags is the emerging story of our time. Yahoo of course has struggled in making clear all the wonders of its multi-branded social revolution, Flickr, Yahoo 360, My Web, del.icio.us (which it bought), etc.. Still the changing power dynamics in the content world are clear. Content may be something between a commodity and king, but clearly as proud citizens of the Internet age, we're the new rulers.

The rap of another panel member, Digg founder Kevin RoseKevin_rose_diggnation_1, said it all.  Kevin reached back to  Beat philosophizing in describing (and pushing the brand of course) of his tagging site, which  he says is pulling about 9 million page views a day, as tech-inflected readers dissect the news of the day:

" You find a story you dig…..A friend has dug it….There are five people who are digging this story."

Digg is a site that allows its users to tag stories with their own categories, highlighting those stories for the wider "community" and themselves. While mainly oriented to tech content, Digg soon will be branching out more widely to news in general. You can see the power of the site as members take apart the recent Associated Press/Topix deal, finding synergy, conspiracy and all kinds of other real and imagined happenings. 18 comments on it, probably more than you'd find anywhere else.

Among the coming innovations are spatial charts that show what stories friends are tagging...make new friends (Publishing + tagging=social networking.)  And Digg Spy 2.0 has just been released, if you want to check on what's hottest of Digg every few seconds, in a real-time view: "Ever wonder what other users are digging, submitting, commenting on, or reporting? Now with Digg Spy v2 you can spy (in real-time) on all site-wide activity."

Two final comments from Kevin:

   On the market value of Digg (think advertising and the NSA): "It’s fun stuff to play with... There’s a lot of data coming in."

   On partnering with the 1.0 dinosaurs: "MSNBC comes to us and says, ‘we know we ought to be talking with you, but we don’t know why." 

May 28, 2006 |

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