May 16th, 2006

...now browsing by day

 

Poynter, day one: Bundling and portals

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

The biggest question I have about the local news business is the extent to which we can preserve the bundles that have worked so well with our print product. For example: Jane buys the Longview newspaper for its real estate ads. Jim for its movie times. Julia for its op-ed page.

Between them, Jane and Jim subsidize Julia’s op-ed page, and vice versa, keeping the quality on all three high even when one goes through a slack period. This has always been the case. See what I mean?

Offering and promoting RSS will surely accelerate the destruction of our portal. But can unbundling be slowed? Stopped? Nope, says Jay Small, one of Poynter’s teachers this week:

“The new newspaper.com should therefore be maybe 50 different products, instead of one bundle. And even if you lump all 50 together, they shouldn’t combine and bake up into what we know as a newspaper.

“Which 50 products make sense? Ah, if I knew that, I’d have them out there already. The one thing I know is the same 50 won’t work in every newspaper market. And we better get started figuring out which 50 we need, one or two at a time.”

I’m sure we’ll return to this issue soon.

~~~

In related news, Jupiter Research found that most young folks start looking for news from portals like Yahoo. (Tx Will Sullivan.)

Posted in bundling, conference, portal | No Responses »

Poynter, day one: The dangers of print-bashing

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

It’s too easy, at geeky powows like this one, to merely nod solemnly to each other about the death of print. I don’t mean to say we should be blindly optimistic — just that over-the-top pessimism breeds complacency. We online news folks can’t afford to get all The Day After Tomorrow with our Cassandra duties. Two such cases:

1) For all their faults, today’s print newspapers remain the most successful business model the industry has ever produced. It’s nothing to be abandoned wholesale. (More on this in the next post.)

2) Even more importantly, we should never say “Look, the Web, unlike print, shows high approval ratings among youngsters! Let us therefore expect future profit from our Web site!” Platform isn’t the issue — features are. The next generation of readers is not lured to their desktops by the glow of the cathode rays or the comfort of the chairs involved. They’re going to the Internet for its features: timeliness, personalization and interaction. If newspapers want to reap the benefits of young folks’ love for the Web, they need to start delivering content in Webby ways, not print ones.

It’s not a long list: hyperlinks, multimedia, social interaction, customization, searchability. (Right around the corner: portability.) Online news people absolutely need to push tbese basic Web concepts onto their sites. If they don’t, newspaper Web sites aren’t going to last a day longer than their parent papers.

As the New York Times reminded us last month, reproducing your full print product on the Web is pointless if it’s the same as paper. I’d rather have the newsprint between my fingers, thanks.

Posted in conference, things we should do better | No Responses »

Tips from Poynter: Day One

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

Three short things I learned in my first evening at Poynter’s seminar for Online News Managers.

1) Boston.com’s forum moderators have a “bozo button” at their disposal. Once they hit it, a forum troll who they’ve marked as a “bozo” continues to see his posts appearing on the site — but nobody else sees them. Mitigates the threat of re-registration by banned users. Dirty. Genius.

2) Local TV sites get a big traffic jump at lunchtime, because people at work can get away with (or justify) watching video over the lunch hour.

3) Generally, the percentage breakdown of technology adopters is as follows (not cumulative): 2.5 percent innovators (e.g. RSS); 13.5 percent early adopters (e.g. blog readers); 34 percent early majority (i.e. broadband subscribers); 34 percent late majority (i.e. Internet users); 16 percent laggards (i.e. your aunt Susan). But: let’s not forget the wealth that drives all these differences, eh? Nobody who cares about universal access to technology drives onward on the assumption that everybody will eventually follow.

Posted in conference, tips | No Responses »

New: subscribe by email

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

If you haven’t yet jumped on the RSS train (see the right column for details), the good folks at FeedBurner are now powering an email subscription to The Medium Run (again, right column). Here’s their privacy policy, and here’s mine: I will never give your information to anybody, or send anything other than requested blog content to any subscriber’s address.

(That felt nice.)

Posted in metablogging, syndication | No Responses »