The irrational imitation of the online news industry
All across Europe, journalistic online startups are launching, aiming to produce and disseminate news in new ways. In our brave new world, the nimble startups of tomorrow were supposed to be overtaking the lumbering dinosaurs of yesterday online. But nearly all of these startups, even the most impressive and innovative sites, are struggling to survive because they face structural and strategic challenges that are not always recognized upfront. To succeed, European journalistic startups need to recognize these challenges, move beyond simply imitating others and find their own paths ahead.
The structural challenges for European journalistic startups have to do with the competition they face in content and advertising.
Startups are trying to establish themselves in a market for online news that is dominated by legacy media like newspapers and broadcasters. New journalistic ventures, such as Netzeitung, Rue89 and Il Post, are competing not only with other startups but also with the popular online offerings of news organizations like Spiegel, Le Monde and La Reppublica. These incumbents, and others like them, have built their digital strategy around their well-known brands and content from their existing newsrooms. They fund them with profits from their (generally declining) offline operations. Together with a handful of aggregators and portals, such legacy players dominate online news provision in most European countries.
As European news startups compete with established news media on the content side, they are also trying to carve out a position in a market for online advertising. That market is already dominated by U.S.-based giants like Google (and increasingly Facebook). A few large players attract most of the advertising, while innumerable smaller websites with display advertising keep down rates (so-called CPMs, cost per thousand impressions), eroding the value of the audience that each journalistic venture manages to attract.
Those are the structural challenges. The strategic challenges, meanwhile, concern the tendency toward irrational imitation. Startups across Europe need to break with two kinds of imitation in particular to develop sustainable funding models for the future.
On the one hand, many startups imitate what has been the dominant model for online news for the last 20 years. They produce content, make it available to users for free and try to cover costs by placing advertisements on their site. This doesn’t work. News that is free at the point of consumption has worked for broadcast television, radio and for-free newspapers for decades. But because of the structural challenges of online advertising outlined above, the model is not working on the Internet. Most sites operating on this basis are operating at a loss, and have done so for years. It is not clear that the dynamics of online news and online advertising are likely to change anytime soon, so to launch a site based on this model expecting to break even is a clear case of irrational imitation – doing the same thing, hoping for a different outcome.
Legendary Cosmo editor gives $30 million to Columbia, Stanford
Helen Gurley Brown, the 89-year-old former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and author of “Sex and the Single Girl” is donating $30 million to Columbia University and Stanford to fund a media and technology institute.
Columbia will pocket $18 million while Stanford’s Engineering School will net $12 million. Columbia will use $6 million to build a “highly visible signature space” at the journalism school’s building in New York. This marks a record donation for the journalism school.
Apple board-member Bill Campbell will advise the new center along with Hearst Corp CEO Frank A. Bennack, Jr. The donation is in honor of Gurley Brown’s late husband David, the famous producer of classic movies such as ”Jaws” and attended both schools. Gurley Brown, who was dubbed “the original Carrie Bradshaw” by the New York Times. edited Cosmo for more than three decades.
(Helen Gurley Brown and David Brown, photo courtesy of Marketwire)
from UK News:
Constitution in crisis as tyrannical journalists devour cowed politicians
A sordid tale of excess and brutality, of a world dominated by journalists with their ears to the keyhole, of tyrannical newspapers wielding remarkable power and of a political class not only cowed, but consumed, by that power.
Sound familiar? With two of Britain's most senior policemen out of a job, the prime minister under pressure for his serenading of News Corp and one of the world's most powerful press barons, in the form of Rupert Murdoch, summoned to testify to parliament, it would be one way of describing the current state of affairs.
In fact, it is how Irish writer and wit Oscar Wilde saw the state of Britain 120 years ago.
"In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising," Wilde wrote in 1891, several years before a court case in which intimate details of his own private life became the centre of a media storm.
Wilde believed that in America "the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever" but that its power there had been diminished in the eyes of the public having "carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme".
In England, having not been pushed to "such excesses of brutality", the press remained a really remarkable force: "The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people's private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary," he wrote in his 1891 essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism".
Then, as many are doing now, he debated whether newspapers had the power to mould peoples' minds or whether they merely held up a mirror to the public mood.
Aretha Franklin is alive, and Twitter is growing up.
First Charlie Sheen died a tragic if imaginary death in a snowboarding accident. Now poor Aretha Franklin is being mourned on Twitter for a demise that has yet to happen.
It’s all such sad news – not so much for the celebrities in question (after all, no publicity is bad publicity, even if it’s a press release announcing you are alive). But for Twitter and its credibility as a 21st Century news platform.
Twitter, like any web technology, is a double-edged blade. Early on, it drew praise by allowing people to jointly cover breaking news such as the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008 and violent protests in Iran in the summer of 2009.
But crowdsourced coverage of fresh news can also lead to the dissemination of misinformation. The false reports of celebrity deaths may be the result of hoaxes (as the Sheen tweets seemed to be) or of the garbling of a legitimate news (Franklin’s sobriquet “The Queen of Soul” is similar to that of Teena Marie, the “Ivory Queen of Soul” who passed away Sunday). But they show the dangers of crowdsourcing news.
These kinds of mishaps seem to be a rite of passage for emerging news platforms. When online news sites set up shop in the mid-90s, they had to fight to win credibility, just as many early bloggers did when they broke news. The fake-celebrity-death meme will probably continue until Twitter posters learn to become more wary of hoaxes and apply a lesson from Reporting 101 – there is no substitute for old-fashioned reporting.
Greeting! World sure Is A blessing that God”Isn”t like Man Woman God! Is love,kind,compassionate,long suffering,slow 2 anger’plentiful In grace And mercy,How could twitter allow something of that magnitude to come 2 the forefront of this Media Forum,for the wholeworld 2 see And make a Mockery of A famous Woman like that what? has she done 2 warrant so harsh! and ill treatment this is A down right disgace,not only 2 her and her family,but also her fans,and well wishers, like myself,2 put her in the grave and rack coal’s over her before checking with her agent or news outlets is A dis-service 2 those of us that love her not of her Singing ability,but because she be-longs 2 God first and foremost she not ,Going anywhere-unless the Master of the Universe,say so he is First Commander and Chief and the keeper of her destiny(soul)Life she not going any place unless God allow’s Many have been praying! Including my self I have been praying ever since the New hit the Air-waves And I have been on A 5day fast ever since December 13,2010 and Counting,the prayers of the righteous One availeth Much. stay encourage Ms.Aretha Franklin your Siser-n-Christ Jesus” God Is able 2 do anything but fell. Pastor,j.Ward
Selling the news: Reuters, the AP and Tribune
We and others reported Monday night that our parent company Thomson Reuters Corp is starting a U.S. general news service for U.S. publishers and broadcasters. Though my employer, Reuters News, has been providing general and business/financial/economic news for more than a century, we didn’t have a service before that would rely on a big group of hired journalists and stringers to get busy covering U.S. news in a large way.
You can see our story here, as well as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and paidContent.org stories, for more information. One of the interesting aspects that we didn’t get into in our story is one of the reasons that Tribune Co, Reuters America’s first client, decided to work with our parent company.
Here’s Russell Adams’s explanation, taken from The Wall Street Journal:
In a cost-cutting move this past spring, Tribune began producing modules, or ready-made pages, that are filled with news from wires services and its various properties, and printed in multiple papers. Gerould Kern, editor of the Chicago Tribune, said Tribune expects to begin selling the pages to other publishing companies—something Reuters was open to.
“Clients want to be a syndicator of our content,” said Chris Ahearn, president of media for Thomson Reuters.
The AP doesn’t let papers repackage its content for sale. In a statement, the AP said, “The Tribune newspapers remain valued members of the AP.” The cooperative added: “Our members have rights to use our content in various ways. However, there are ancillary uses of AP content that we cannot allow because they wouldn’t be fair to other members,” the AP said.
I’m curious to hear from our media readers how creative a move they think this is for news outlets like Reuters as well as the customers that my company is trying to enlist. We don’t know the size of the investment in this news service, other than that it’s part of a “multimillion dollar” commitment. We also don’t know the eventual size of the reporting staff (including the freelancers). Still, it’s an interesting move on a number of levels.
from Summit Notebook:
Daily Beast staff ‘happy as clams,’ says Barry Diller
The journalists and staff who work at The Daily Beast don't look at life like you other sad-sack scribes out there who are watching your job market wash out to sea with the ebb tide. In fact, they are happy in a particularly mollusk-like way.
"They're as happy as clams," said Barry Diller, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which is financing the online news outlet with its editor, Tina Brown. "They wake up every morning filled with possibility."
That's because they are not working at sinking-ship news outlets like most of the rest of their colleagues in mainstream U.S. journalism.
Hear Diller on this, speaking at the Reuters Global Media Summit:
"Look at what's going on in publishing. The talk about the destruction that's taking place there. It's the perfect time to start something that's an original product. The Daily Beast is a daily newspaper or magazine. It's primarily original and is there every day. It's got real staff, making real money, paying a lot of them -- journalists -- to make things for us, make stories... They're covering books, art, the daily features and national and international stories. And it's incredibly ambitious. It's gotten a real audience. It is absolutely an original product."
Who wouldn't like that? Even better, Diller seems OK with the whole "it doesn't make money" aspect of the Beast. He declined to say what the targets are, like, when he expects it to make a profit, when he expects it to make some revenue and how it will do those things. "We're going to know at a rational point," he said.
The best part is, I don't even end this blog with: "And then I woke up." Now the question is whether we can find some more sugar-moguls to sweeten our journalistic career paths.
from Global News Journal:
Dream job or snake pit? UN appoints new spokesman
By Patrick Worsnip
It's not uncommon for journalists at some point in their careers to cross the barricades and become the people who dish out the news as spokespersons for an organization or firm, rather than being on the receiving end. It requires a different set of skills that can make the transition tough, and a stern test confronts former Reuters correspondent Martin Nesirky, who has just been appointed spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. After a high-flying career at Reuters that saw him fill senior editorial positions in London, Berlin, Moscow and Seoul, Nesirky has had some time to acclimatize to his new role by working for more than three years as spokesman for the 56-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), based in Vienna. But the move to New York brings much more formidable challenges.
Like any U.N. spokesperson, Nesirky, a Briton, will have to take into account the concerns of the 192 nations that belong to the world body. That's 192 different governments that can get upset by something he might say. But his chief problem may be his boss Ban, whose public image, to put it mildly, could take a little burnishing. Aside from his awkward use of English, which has television producers tearing their hair, Ban has had a rough ride from hostile media that have accused him of failing to use his position to end the world's conflicts and right its wrongs. (Defenders say he is more effective than he appears, works tirelessly behind closed doors, and has made at least some progress on such intractable issues as climate change, global poverty and the crisis in Darfur.) Then there is the sprawling and ill-defined nature of the U.N. press and public relations operation, with different officials and factions competing for the secretary-general's attention and waiting to pounce on any mis-step by one of the others. The outgoing spokeswoman, Michele Montas of Haiti, stuck to the job for less than three years. In trying to stay close to the South Korean secretary-general, Nesirky could benefit from his knowledge of the Korean language from his time in Seoul. He is also married to a South Korean. But these advantages too could be a double-edged sword. U.N. diplomats have long complained that Ban is happiest in a Korean comfort zone and relies too much on a compatriot who serves as his deputy chief-of-staff, Kim Won-soo.
As a white male from a Western permanent member of the Security Council, Nesirky could also face suspicion from diversity lobbies and from the developing world, which already sees Ban as too much in thrall to the United States. (Ban's U.S. critics make the opposite accusation.)
In the world of spokespeople, the U.N. post may look from the outside like a dream job. But insiders were not so envious. Nesirky joins the world body as Ban is getting ready to try to persuade the great powers who decide these things that he has done well enough in his first five-year term of office, which ends in December 2011, that he deserves a second one. Most analysts give him a good chance, saying he has done nothing to offend key players in Washington and Beijing. But if they are wrong, Nesirky's job could turn out to be one of his shorter assignments.
from Reuters Editors:
Giant shoulders and the chain of knowledge
The new world is not so different from the old world – it just moves faster and in different ways.
As early as the 12th century, the image of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants came into discourse to mean that all knowledge advances based on the discoveries of the past.
In academia and in journalism that notion has been coupled with the doctrine of attribution – you need to acknowledge the shoulders you’re standing on, to give due credit but also to allow others to search out that perch and see if their view from it is any different.
To me, the current debate about the “Link Economy” in content terms is about:
Are you part of the conversation? Are you adding to the debate or just playing postman and passing others’ views on? Are you adding value and … Are you getting rewarded for adding the value you do?
As head of a journalistic army of 2,700 professionals I obviously have an intense vested interest in ensuring that their work is valuable to readers and valued by them.
Part of that involves ensuring that they are in the centre of the action and that they fill their reports with their expertise and experience. Part of that involves ensuring that they are part of the debate, that their reports inform the debate and that the debate, in turn, informs their future reporting.
Friday media highlights
Here are some of the day’s stories on the media industry:
Movie studios try to harness “Twitter effect” (Reuters) “Audiences are voicing snap judgments on movies faster and to more people than ever before on Twitter, and their ability to create a box office hit or a flop is forcing major studios to revamp marketing campaigns. The stakes are especially high this summer season when big budget movies like “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” which opened on Wednesday, play to a core audience of young, plugged-in moviegoers,” writes Alex Dobuzinskis.
Sun-Times chief optimistic about sale of company (Chicago Tribune) But, Michael Oneal writes: “In a court filing last week, creditors in the Sun-Times’ bankruptcy case raised concerns about the sale efforts, noting that the company has “limited time” before it “can no longer sustain the losses being incurred from operations.” They warned that unless a buyer is found soon, “time could run out, or a buyer could be located that would only pay a fire-sale price.”
Goldman makes peace with blogger in trademark case (Reuters) “The agreement required blogger Michael Morgan to post a disclaimer on his goldmansachs666.com website, saying it has no affiliation with the financial firm. Morgan, a Florida investment adviser, uses his blog — whose name combines Goldman’s name with numbers used to evoke connotations with the devil — to criticize the bank and its large profits,” writes Martha Graybow.
Reuters Opens its Kimono (CJR) “Wright, Reuters’s global editor of ethics, innovation, and news standards, brandished the thick stack of paper to drive home the point that “we’ve moved beyond the time when people were carrying around books with style guides.” We’re also apparently beyond the time when all journalism organizations charge people for said style books,” writes Craig Silverman
from Sean Maguire:
The raw and the crafted
The Media Standards Trust has begun a lecture series on 'Why Journalism Matters'. It is disconcerting that it feels we have to ask the question. The argument put forward by the British group's director Martin Moore is that news organisations are so preoccupied with business survival that discussion of the broader social, political and cultural function of journalism gets forgotten. It is a pertinent review then, given the icy economic blasts hitting most Anglo-Saxon media groups, and notwithstanding the recent examples of self-evidently broader journalistic 'value' produced by London's Daily Telegraph in its politican-shaming investigations into parliamentarians' expenses.
First up in the series was Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, who cantered through the justifications for a vibrant, independent press. Watchdog, informer, explainer, campaigner, community builder and debater - those are the roles that journalism plays. The value that it brings is most evident by comparison with the unhealthiness of states where the press is not free, noted Barber, citing the struggles of the citizenry in China and Russia to hold their leaders to account.
The FT's USP as a media group, according to Barber, is as an explainer and analyser of complicated events that play out across a global stage. But analytical reporting of global stories costs serious cash, he noted, in a question-begging aside. That you get the quality of journalism you are prepared to pay for, ultimately, is his response to the challenge posed to mainstream media by Internet-enabled communicators. For free you can have the rawness of a blog. For crafted journalism that is properly sourced, reviewed for taste and style and checked for accuracy, you must find ways to charge. At your peril do you blur the edges between the crafted and the raw world of easy comment, hasty opinion and rumour billed as fact, argues the FT editor. (There was a hat tip, however, to the bloggers that have broken news, such as Guido Fawkes who forced the resignation of an advisor to Gordon Brown by revealing his plans for a smear email campaign.)
So a sharp distinction was drawn between the value proposition of professional journalism and its unruly blogging and twittering cousin. No such clarity yet, though, on the funding model for the former when the Internet has made audiences expect to read most general interest news and a lot of specialised niche content for free. No secret that each and every news group is daunted by this obstacle, even the FT, which has not been immune to the downturn in advertising revenue.
We were left with a couple of clues on the way forward. Barber predicted that within a year all news organisations will be charging for online content in some way. (The FT's model is to allow readers access to a few articles for free and then charge for further use.) Will Google ever pay for content - unlikely says Barber. But at least they might be prepared to talk about linking via searches to articles requiring subscription, which they do not do currently.
And his flippant response to the demographic challenge posed to a print-based news organisation by the emergence of a generation of youngsters who get all their information from screens? People are living longer - they will still buy newspapers.
