Content Bridges

The Trouble with Paper: Warmed-Over Oscar News is Wanting

Look no farther than the Oscars to see how daily newspapers have lost their way in this digital world.

My friend Kathy Greenler-Sexton just wanted to leisurely peruse the Oscars coverage with her morning coffee. A savvy marketer in new media, she relates her experience with trying to use print:

The Boston Globe did NOT have the list.  They had a few pics and early winners but they had to go to press – so their coverage was incomplete at best.  The “list” was not there.  I am sure it was in later editions – but not mine.  The “list” was at the paper’s online site but I wasn’t online at that point.  I wanted the list of winners with my morning coffee!   I hardly ever read the paper version of the Globe anymore and the one time I wanted to – they failed me by not having the information I wanted.

Google, After Brussels: "Let's Make a Deal! (Privately)"

Okay, how many Google attorneys can you fit on the head of a pixel? The growth in Google's Legal Department may soon be paralleling the hockey stick growth of its ad business.

Just last week, Google lost one court case, as a Belgian court decided that, non!, it couldn't take headlines and briefs from news sites, put them up on Google and share no revenue. The Belgian case brought by Copiepresse gives further mojo to Agence France Presse's case against Google, to be played out in a D.C. courtroom. In addition, the work of European consortium in putting together a more trackable news content tracking system -- ACAP -- all lead to the same set-to. 

News publishers want a better deal from Google.

Why is this important? Sources in and around Google News will tell you that of all those visitors coming to Google News --   8 million uniques in December -- only about 5% of them click through from the headlines/briefs to the originating news site. That would mean 95% stay in and around Google, satisfied with their news briefing -- just give me the top of it in one place, thank you.

In the U.S., there's been less litigation, though talk of it pervaded U.S. news company law offices on and off for years. Can they do that? Could we stop them? The grayness of the legal area has largely led news companies away from the courts and, haltingly, into the business of business development. There have been many discussion between news publishers and Google, Yahoo, MSN and other players. Certainly, the newspaper consortium deal with Yahoo on recruitment ads is a step toward a wider agreement on news content as well. And Google has already agreed to license AP content for a still-unspecified new product.

Heavens, Google wouldn't acknowledge that it can't take heads and briefs without paying for them.

"We have always explained that any licensing agreements Google does with content providers is for use that goes beyond indexing or referencing," Paris-based Google attorney, told the Times.

Mais, bien sur. As in the AP agreement, which has been shrouded in public grayness, it's clear that Google plainly saw it was side-stepping that legal indexing question by finding a way to push some money in the direction of AP.

Let's parse Googlespeak. What Google is really saying is, "Let's Make a Deal! (Privately)".

Bulbs Light Up NPR's "User-Gen" Journalism

Okay, forget all the pontification, the bloviation, the hand-wringing and the business modeling of "user-generated content" for a few moments.

Consider one case of great user-gen and its connection to journalism, and, dare we say it, democracy.

Last week, All Things Considered's Robert Siegel did a good, little piece about compact fluorescent light bulbs. They are now starting to sell, as fickle Americans turn a bit green. They save lots of energy and last a while, even if they are more costly than the familiar incandescent. Yesterday, Siegel recounted some listener reaction to the story. One writer bemoaned the fact that Americans take to such new phenomena -- smaller cars, compact fluorescent lights -- decades after people in other countries and then are self-satisfied at their innovation.

The writer though that was really interesting was one Karen Ellis of Mapleton, Georgia. She wrote to say [you can hear her letter here, at 3:00 minute mark] that she wanted to be as green as her neighbor, but was troubled by the fine print on the flourescent bulb packaging. The fine print said: mercury. You know, the stuff that limits our fish intake and plays havoc with that resource called the human nervous system.

She wondered what she was supposed to do with these mercury-laden bulbs when they inevitably burnt out; could she recycle them?

That's user-gen. Sure, you can call it an old-fashioned, letter-to-the-editor, but in web talk it's user-gen. A "comment" maybe.

Here's where it gets interesting -- and promising.

After reading the note, Siegel said that it was indeed a great question and one that NPR had referred it to its environmental reporter, Elizabeth Shogren. She came on air and described how she'd missed the mercury angle in her initial reporting, but how she had then taken Ms. Ellis' observation and done additional reporting.

Paid Circ That Seems.....Free

Paid print circulation still pays the bills. I keep coming back to the numbers recently laid out by Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Each Sports Illustrated paid reader is worth $118 a year, mainly in advertising, while each SI.com visitor fetches a measly $5. That differential explains why prestigious, long-standing, paid circ vehicles like Time Magazine are just about giving away their product......while calling it paid. Anything to keep those print readers and that print rate base as high as possible, 'til that $5 zooms into double digits and beyond.

The offer I got today:

• 56 weeks of Time at the "Welcome Back" rate of $19. (Yes, given my overflowing NetVibes RSS reader, it's hard to find time to read Time.) 19 bucks against a cover price of $252.45 for the same 56 issues! That's a 92.5% discount.

But that's not all:

• FREE GIFT: The ULTRASONIC Laser Level
• BONUS: 6 Additional Months of TIME (when you pay now)
• TIME  Archive at www.Timearchive.com, featuring 80 years of coverage, for free.

I suppose I can use the level to measure the tectonic changes shaking the publishing industry.

I should note the offer is labeled: "For Senior Citizen Use Only."  Like an AARP pitch. I'm flattered but the MSN Life Expectancy calculator gives me another 42 years of life expectancy.

It's an offer that's hard to resist, and I won't. That archive can come in mighty handy for research.

Are Editors Giving Way to "Curators"?

When you hear the word "curator", what do you think? Perhaps a museum. Something a bit dated, holding archives. Maybe the contents and their keepers may be somewhat musty. Important stuff, to be sure, is curated, but it's not stuff you're enthused about running to see.

So it's curious that curator term is now finding new life on the Web. Curator as in assembler of news, coordinator of blogs, rounder-up of diverse viewpoints and content types. You know, what we used to call: editor.

Son of HotJobs: Yahoo and Newspapers Move on to Autos

Both Yahoo and the growing number of newspaper company amigos -- those formerly shut out or junior partnered by the former Tribune-Gannett-McClatchy (which took Knight Ridder's stake) partnership -- got a lot of ink out of their announced HotJobs alliance. You can see the results all over the country, on printed front pages of recruitment sections and on the HotJobs site itself. You may soon be seeing Yahoo! Autos splashed across a lot of newsprint as well.

Now, we're moving on to round two of the partnership dance: auto ads. Word is that a number of the amigos will be meeting in Sunnyvale as early as this week or next around doing a new partnership with Yahoo. The aim: a new push around used cars, harnessing Yahoo's search and lead generation powers, as the auto marketplace heats up.

That development would have a number of strategic ramifications -- further pushing the great middle of America's newspaper companies into the Yahoo fold and further complicating things for Cars.com (owned by Classified Ventures and dominated by Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy, with Belo and the Washington Post holding smaller equity), just as Tribune board meets to decide its very future.

Sure, Yahoo is reeling in the public markets. It is sandwiched somewhere in between the Peanut Butter Manifesto and the growing sense that Google's bullet train to the future has passed it by. Still, it  is vociferously making a full-court press to be The Partner to the News Industry. Yahoo has always considered itself more of a content company than Google, through the much-ballyhooed Lloyd Braun era and given its employ of such pedigreed journalists as Neil Budde. But this push is more about who's in charge at Yahoo.

From White Knight to Dark Prince....

Worth reading:

----From White Knight to Dark Prince in a year. That's the half-life of the Web. The Rise and Fall of Gary Pruitt has been breathtaking. It's well-recorded here (and yes, even without my own quote) in Kit Seelye's New York Times piece.

---Couldn't we be a bit more elegant? Yes, we know that community-created content is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying ink-stained professional wretches. But aren't you supposed to RIF the wretches and then separately announce your warm embrace of user-generated stuff. One Santa Rosa TV station apparently didn't get that memo.

----Want to understands why real estate ad dollars are migrating out of newspapers? Check out this great little piece on Edina Realty -- #1 in the Twin Cities -- which details how and why one big broker is moving money to where the action is, online.

Shrink-Wrapped Ads? Behavioral Tracking May Soon Look So Yesterday

Behavioral tracking -- BT to adnoscenti -- has looked like the next newer thing in advertising. Get 2-3X in revenue by targeting readers not by simple search terms or contextual content, but by following what they do on the web. You know, the Lexus wannahave may be looking at lots of sports and tech pages, but she's in the market for a new car, and that's a valuable lead for the local Lexus dealer. And just recently Tacoda, one of the leaders in the trade (with Revenue Science, Direct Revenue and Claria) announced a new tie-up with comScore to mix its data with Tacoda's, adding to the intelligence marketers have about would-be customers.

But the new can look so old so quickly on the web. Take this nugget found among all the coverage of the Super Bowl ads.

“It looked like they pushed to get attention by jolting people,” said Joshua Freedman, a co-founder of FKF Applied Research, which uses brain images to measure reactions to commercials,
quoted in a recent New York Times story.

The story went on to say:

A study from FKF showed that the many Super Bowl commercials with violent imagery generated reactions in regions of the brain associated with anxiety, Mr. Freedman said, including the amygdala, which he characterized as the “threat detector,” and as a result they generated “no connection, engagement or appeal” with viewers.

By comparison, only a few spots fired the brain regions associated with positive emotions, Mr. Freedman said, which he termed unusual in that advertisers typically seek to stimulate responses in those areas.

“They pushed too hard; there was not enough humanity in the ads,” said Mr. Freedman, who is also a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles.

So you see a future here, and it is doesn't yet have the word Google in it. Why venerate the holy search box, or even piece together well-guessed-at wants through behavioral tracking, when you can actually track human wants and needs, including those they'll pay for.

Pinch Played for Pugnacious Prognostication

You gotta love the headlines --  "Arthur Sulzberger's End Times" (Gawker) and "HELL FREEZES OVER AT THE NEW YORK TIMES" (The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid).

The publisher of the New York Times sure woke up lots of people in an otherwise sleepy week in the news publishing world (waiting for the second, or is it the fifth (?) Tribune shoe to drop). What did he say? The obvious, many of us think (other than his five-year-timeline), but he sounded like he had a bit of fight in him.

"I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either," he told Israel daily Haaretz at Davos in January. "Internet is a wonderful place to be and we’re leading there."

Some of the numbers seem positive. 1.1 million print subscribers and 1.5 million readers online each day. Average age in print: 42. Average age online: 37. It's great to hear the optimism. Read the interview though and you'll see it's short on any specifics of how a company that still has about 90% of its revenue coming from print is going to make the transformation to mainly digital revenue-driven operation.

Taking a Snickers Moment to Consider "Content"

Out of all the nonsense about the Super Bowl ads, a few pearls have surfaced.

One of my faves is this quote in the Sunday Times:

"Super Bowl advertising started as buying ads in the game. Then it became advertising as public relations, and then it became advertising as marketing. Now it's advertising as content, which can be reviewed as good or bad, tasteful or not tasteful, appropriate or inappropriate."

That came from Ed Erhardt, who's president of ESPN/ABC consumer marketing and sales, explaining the recent reluctance of some marketers to enter the fray.

Content indeed, we can all agree as we take a Snickers Moment to contemplate.

Of course, it's content as everything our brains consume is.

And once again, we see these once-solid lines blurring. Content used to mean above-the-commercial fray serious stuff, like books, magazines, and you know, journalism. Now we're starting to recognize that there's a lot of content in the non-serious stuff, including the trivial $2.6 million, 30-second ad. Once again, to those in the journalistic trade, it's going to be a matter of distinguishing the stuff that's meant to edify (interesting verb, isn't it) from stuff that's mean to sell something. Fundamental difference, no matter what anyone tries to tell you.

That fundamental difference is getting damaged in two major ways.