Entries Tagged 'Technology and media' ↓

I’m doing this, well, just because I can.

(People who make up asinine policies first need to understand the underlying technology.)

Hat tip @JeffJarvis – who will not seek damages for me linking to him.

My favorite ballclub opens their brand-new stadium today, so forgive me if I seem a bit preoccupied.

Watching all the hoopla – on multiple media platforms at once – gives us all another lesson on the folly of the paid-content argument from some traditionalists. Continue reading →

Matt Mullenweg is at it again.

He’s the creator of WordPress, one of the free tools that’s reinventing the world of media and the very definition of what it means to be a “journalist.”

How does Mullenweg justify giving away the results of years of work? Then working more untold hours on upgrades (helllll-ooooo Version 3!)? Then giving it away, too?

Simple: He builds complementary businesses that play in the WordPress eco-system.

You can set up your blog at WordPress.com for free. Want extra features – like truly massive amounts of storage for video, or a custom domain name? Pay a few bucks a year.

His company, Automattic, does other things, too. It provides hosting services for high-volume blogs. It builds paid add-ons for sites, like poll/ratings widgets. His latest is a service that makes it easy to create backups for WordPress sites – especially people who run large blog networks – for less than $20 a month.

None of these fees are large themselves, but they add up.

There’s a lesson there for journopreneurs:  Don’t get embroiled in the endless, economically unviable wishful thinking about paid content on the web. Relent and give the content away – then figure out how to make money elsewhere in the ecosystem.

That could be slick, intuitive and innovative delivery mechanisms – especially on tablets and mobile devices.

It could be building real communities around topic pages, comments and local blog networks, and serving as a sales-and-servicing agent for them. Or banding that community together for group-buying experiences.

Or – and this is the fun, scary part – it could be an idea that no one has figured out yet. One of just might.

(This is why one of my icons at Gravatar – another of Mullenweb’s companies – is a mad scientist. A small prize, and an AARP card, to the commenter who first identifies him. ;-) ).

Over at the GrowthSpur blog, Mark Potts and I have posted about a bunch of free tools we like that are highly useful for entrepreneurial journalists.

(Oh – and that jokey lead about hardware stores? Not a joke. I’m so bad that the Fabulous Sue Corbett (trademark pending) jabbed me in a one-act play about Noah’s Ark she wrote for a youth group.

Scene: Noah’s sons talking after God commands their father to build an ark:

Son 1:  You know what this means?

Son 2: Dad has to make a trip to the hardware store.

Offered with no comment, and minimal context: The writer, Eileen Spiegler, is a longtime colleague, and a gifted copy editor.

From her online musings on a random Wednesday:

“Sometimes I wish the newspaper was as interesting as my Twitter stream.”

Discuss, please.

OK, I know that I rant about Moore’s Law continually. It’s the key driver of the digital age. It’s why things that seem incomprehensible get invented, and it’s why things that flopped spectacularly just a few years ago are common and successful today.

But many people – traditional journalists especially – struggle to get Moore’s Law. “Half as expensive per unit of computing power every 24 months … wha?!?”

This analogy struck me today (and, thanks, Florida, for blowing my bracket on the very first afternoon): The NCAA tournament is an example of a Moore’s Law function in action. How do you get from 64 teams to the Sweet Sixteen in just four days? Simple: The number of teams drops by half every round.

The tournament grinds down 64 teams to the final four in just eight game days.

Moore’s Law grinds down a $500,000 server to under $10,000 in a decade.

Don’t let the math equations freak you. Just know that whatever kind of entrepreneurial journalism you want to try, the hardware is cheap. And it will only get cheaper. (The software, too.)

Fear the Turtle.

Dave Morgan

I’ve written before about how Moore’s Law  and its corrolaries in the software world inexorably make web tech cheaper and simpler by the year. But don’t take my word for it. A comment and a software release last week make the point better than I can.

Serial entrepreneur Dave Morgan dropped an offhand comment during his talk at the Borrell Local Online Advertising Conference  in New York last week.

His first startup, Real Media, needed tens of millions in capital when it was started in 1995 just to cover technology costs.  His next, Tacoda Systems, needed single-digit millions to get launched in 2001.

His latest, Simulmedia, founded last year? About a million.

There’s a lesson in there for journalist/entrepreneurs – and it isn’t that you need a million bucks to do something.

“The cost of  building out a massive data storage capacity for ad targeting has dropped enormously because of much cheaper, much more powerful hardware, cheap data centers, open source software (Hadoop & MySQL) v. classic DB (Oracle, etc.),” Dave wrote in a follow-up email.

Moore’s Law in action: The cost of a major tech startup has dropped by almost 100x in 15 years.

 (For those of you who don’t follow ad-tech startups as closely as the Mets, a couple bits of data: Real Media merged with a couple others to form 24/7 Real Media, which was eventually bought by ad-agency conglomerate WPP for $649 million. Tacoda was bought by AOL for $275 million. Dave knows how to make this stuff work.)

Let’s take those forces out of the realm of VC-backed startups, and instead look at the world of independent journalism sites. Their technology needs are merely a fraction of massive advertising analysis companies – and so are the start-up costs.

The radical downward trend of those startup costs follows the same downward spiral, however. A few years ago, you needed a million bucks to get solid, automated content management. Today? Close to free.

I’m an unabashed fan of the blog platform WordPress, and of the easily customized themes produced by many different developers. Even a year ago, getting WordPress to do what you wanted it often required some code tweaks – simpler than building from scratch, but still not for the uninitiated.

Now? One of my favorite development houses, WooThemes, launched a highly customizable theme, appropriately named Canvas, this week. Want to change your site’s look and feel, dramatically? Punch size and color changes into simple menus. Beats opening the underlying PHP code.

One more reason journopreneurs should stop pondering and just launch. So a question, and a challenge, for those still pondering:

What’s stopping you?

Pete Townshend – yes, that greybeard who played at the Super Bowl the other night – has always been one of my favorite pithy writers. Don’t Get Fooled Again’s best line may be its last – “Meet the new boss/ Same as the old boss.”

In this decade of unparalleled tumult at American newspapers, that cynical line could have been the motto for publishers. Sure, there’s been lots of talk about “dealing with change” and “transforming for a digital age.” But when it came time to hire their top editors, the new bosses have looked a lot like the old ones.

That’s why Thursday’s hiring of Jeff Light at the San Diego Union-Tribune was so refreshing.

I’ve never met Light, but I’m in serious envy of his resume: Most recently the VP of interactive at the Orange County Register. An MBA from Cal-Irvine. Impeccable Capital-J credentials as a member of the Register’s I-team (Pulitzer in ’96 for fertility-clinic fraud, a couple finalists as editor).

On paper, he’s the exemplar for the sort of digital journalists who are needed to rescue what’s left of the traditional industry. I wish him enormous success in a difficult job, and applaud the new owners of the U-T for moving boldly.

Sadly, there are still too few such bold appointments.  Let’s look at the top 40 U.S. newspapers by circulation. Since the beginning of 2008 – a time by which it was clear that the Good Old Days were gone, 10 of those shops have named a new top editor.

How many of those 10 came from digital roots?

By strict definition, precisely one – my former colleague, Debby Krenek, at Newsday. Debby’s previous role was managing editor – but she ran Newsday.com as well (and for all intents and purposes controlled big chunks of Newsday.com’s business operations too).

I’ve probably just offended any number of friends, so let me add quickly: Several more of the new editors have good digital instincts. Both Gerry Kern (Chicago Tribune) and Russ Stanton (L.A. Times) were closely involved with their shops’ digital initiatives (Russ even had the cool-but-inscrutable title of “innovation editor”). And my friend Monty Cook at Baltimore out-Twitters me exponentially.  

But there’s still a difference between understanding it as part of your job and living it day to day as your entire job. Even if we give those three a mulligan, far too many of the other appointments smack of “stay the course.”

Two of the “new 10” had previously been editors in chief at other newspapers, for example. Three others had been in a variety of editing roles at the shops they took over for 15 years or more (one for 27).

 They may be terrific editors and decent people. But, symbolically, it’s hard to convince a newsroom that it must change dramatically when the top leaders haven’t been part of the digital groups that have to lead the change.

Don’t try, either, to argue that there just aren’t enough Jeff Lights out there. There’s been a significant brain drain in U.S. newspaper newsrooms in the past two years – and I’m not just talking about the layoffs of senior writers and editors.

You could populate a terrific news organizations with the digital editors who’ve left newspapers. In fact, that’s exactly what plenty of terrific news organizations have done.

There’s Kinsey Wilson, online editor at USAToday.com (and co-editor of the whole shop), who bailed to take over as senior VP and digital GM at NPR. Or Jim Brady, who banged his head against walls at the Washington Post for so long it’s a wonder he isn’t brain-dead (hmmm – might explain the Jets fixation) – and now is running Politico’s digital efforts (including their coming Washington local startup). Or Christine Montgomery, who left the St. Pete Times to become managing editor at PBS.org.

 They’re among nearly a dozen high-ranking digital journalists who have left critical leadership roles inside U.S. newspapers in the past 18 months. Their landing spots? Start-ups, major portals, the reviving digital arms of public broadcasters.

So congratulations to Jeff, and kudos to his boss, Ed Moss.

 To every other publisher, a question: Who is the best digital leader in your shop – and are you sure they were “out sick”  that Friday a couple weeks ago?

Note: My friend and former colleague Bill Day is one of the sharpest sales-side guys I ever worked with. He’s adept at dealing with traditional, agency-driven advertisers and their massive buys – and maybe even better at bundling together innovative ideas like events, direct marketing and promotions to tap revenue from people who rarely advertise with local media. Bill has sold and serviced tens of millions of dollars in print ads – and quite a bit of online revenue for me, too.

He offers this guest post, from his seller’s perspective, on the publishing-industry frenzy over Apple’s iPad.

By Bill Day

Much is being made of the iPad as a vote of confidence from Apple for traditional publishers like The New York Times.  Boosters point to the resurrection of the music industry on the backs of iTunes and the iPod.  They predict a similar resurrection for publishers with the pending release of the iPad. 

Poynter has an interesting take on the potential impact of the iPad on publisher subscription models here.  It’s  kind of like the cell phone loss-leader model – giving away flashy tech toys for long-term subscription revenue.  It’s not a terrible idea.  It just misses the point. 

What’s lost in these discussions is a firm grasp of the mechanics of revenue generation for old-line media. As in “what’s the advertising model?” Continue reading →

While I’m obsessed with digital media, the smarter part of my household focuses on the world of book publishing.

That world is agog this morning, because The World’s Largest Bookstore (registered trademark, etc.) yanked all the books published by the conglomerate MacMillan overnight.

The reason: MacMillan wants its ebooks to appear first on Apple’s iPad, not Kindle. Fine, said Amazon: We’re taking everything down then – hardcovers, paperbacks, Kindle editions.

The NYT and LAT has more details. This one will be fun to watch.

Unless, of course, you’re a MacMillan author. Ya think those screams you’re hearing from MacMillan’s authors were the intended outcome from Amazon? Why, I do too!