Wow…absolutely hysterical…
Via Suzeanne Yada on Twitter…her description is better than any I could come up with:
A 1940s short film on journalism. Watch as men in fedoras call editors with visors and completely shaft women!
Paul Gillin posted on a topic 
I’ve been mulling over for the past few days: Branded Communities. I’ve said it in the past and I will say it again here and now: why would you buy a build a branded community when you can rent one instead?
From Gillin’s post:
Pssst… is intended to bring fans of General Mills products closer to the company by inviting them into a members-only space where they can receive inside information, get coupons and samples and share their opinions about the company’s products. This is all the stuff that I preach organizations should do with branded communities. The site is produced in collaboration withGlobalPark, a company that manages online panels.
Pssst… is good in concept but bad in execution.
David Churbuck posted on the issue and asked one very pointed question:
Begs the question of who does a decent job with a branded community — aside from the usual product support forums, etc. — I can see some reasons for stumbling, but begs the question: who joins a community about bad yogurt?
The classic example would be Nike+ – where they’ve built a fairly successful brand community. However, I think a yogurt community might be a tough sell.
That said, building a branded community is a daunting task. Potential issues:
At NameMedia, I work with Niche Community Sites, and we’ve been coming up with interesting ways to put companies and their brands in touch with the customers they want to reach, and we’ve got some compelling stories about new and innovative ways in which we’re doing this. A couple brief examples:
It took Nike over 2 years to build their community. We were able to get the Brother campaign up and running over night on Craftster.org.
Okay, this isn’t meant to end up sounding like an ad. My point is that you can get real results fast working with Niche Communities and Niche Social Media. While I’d love to tell you that NameMedia has the market cornered on creative sponsorship, there are a lot of other creative folks out there.
Or course, we’ve got 20 million visits a month, over 30,000 conversations a day across our sites, in niches like outdoors, photography, technology, gardening, crafting, and astrology. Our list of sites.
If you’d like to hear more about the creative campaigns we’re doing, get in touch with me or leave a comment here. I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg and there are probably better folks than me to tell the story.
Newspaper insiders for the most part weren’t all that surprised to see the Tribune Company file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday. The Trib has been in trouble for some time, and it hasn’t been helped by high profile fights of the past two years by owner Sam Zell, who purchased the company in April of 2007, which saw him take the company private. Since then his fights with the leadership of the Los Angeles Times have achieved near legendary status.
The problem is that bankruptcy isn’t a complete answer for the Tribune Company. Perhaps they’d do best to do as Sam Zell suggested just a short time ago when the mortgage crisis was at the top of the news:
“…this country needs a cleansing. We need to clean out all those people who never should have been in houses in the first place.”
Perhaps indeed the newspaper industry also needs a cleansing, and all those who should never have owned newspapers should be cleaned out. For example, Sam Zell. Continue reading
Layoffs at Random House, Simon & Schuster
Random House, etc. layoff…Yahoo is attributing it to the economy, but I wonder how much is do to people not reading in paper as much.
The economy has crashed down on an industry once believed immune from the worst — book publishing — with consolidation at Random House Inc., and layoffs at Simon & Schusterand Thomas Nelson Publishers.
At Random House, the country’s largest general trade publisher, the man who helped give the world “The Da Vinci Code” is in talks for a new position, while the publisher of Danielle Steel and other brand-name authors is leaving altogether.
“Yes, Virginia, book publishing is NOT recession proof,” said Patricia Schroeder, president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers. “It’s sad day.”
David Churbuck has found that which we are losing in this digital age. It reminds me of the discussion I had with my 9 year old yesterday when she asked me if I’d read every book in my library.
I like the Kindle. Indeed I love it. But I can’t indulge my penchant for giving away books thanks to this selfish device. I can tell people to read “Moneyball” but I can’t back that up by emphasizing my desire to share that experience by giving them my copy. The Kindle, ultimately, is a selfish device that cannot be loaned. Last week, while driving my son home from college, I sang the praises of “Shadow Country,” this year’s National Book Award in fiction. But I can’t lend it to him and indeed, tragically, I don’t have a physical copy to park on my favorite shelf next to the previous three books in the Watson series.
Indeed I suspect in some ways we may end up as a “Lost Generation” having committed so much to digital formats that most likely will be arcane and unreadable 50 or a 100 years in the future. And in the here and now, the ‘community of the book’ is dying.
For now, I continue to buy my books in print. The problem is in this new economy, I have precious little time to read.
Read David’s full post…really
No time to write today, but I picked this none-to-delectible tidbit up from Alan D. Mutter at Newsosaur while surfing during lunch and had to share:
In one of the most startling of the potential initiatives, an amazing number of publishers of all sizes are giving serious consideration to eliminating print editions on certain days of the week, according to private conversations with operators who requested anonymity.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday editions, which typically carry the least amount of advertising, appear to be at the most risk.
With demand for newspaper advertising this year plummeting in every category (including online since March), industry ad revenues in 2008 are likely to be no better than $38 billion, or nearly 25% less than they were when sales hit an all-time peak of $49.4 billion in 2005.
An interesting notion, and one I hadn’t trully considered until just now. I suspect in the end, publishing only a few days a week will be unworkable for most publications due to union contracts, etc. Additionally, many of the hard costs endemic to print publishing and delivery will remain, ie, the presses, the trucks, etc.
The big point to keep in mind is that no one would have ever mentioned such a notion out loud in the hallowed walls of a newspaper even a year ago. How far we have fallen…
PC Magazine announced last week that their January issue would be the last issue they actually print, from then on, they’re a web-only publication.
From The New York Times:
It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises.
“The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.
While most magazines make their money mainly from print advertising, PC Magazine derives most of its profit from its Web site. More than 80 percent of the profit and about 70 percent of the revenue come from the digital business, Mr. Young said, and all of the writers and editors have been counted as part of the digital budget for two years.
There are only two surprises here, first that it took them so long to realize that online was the only viable medium for them, and that they continued to call themselves “news” got so little play to begin with.
I’ll leave the inevitable “if it’s online only, can you still have ‘magazine’ in the title” snark alone for the day. The real news here is that some news is best delivered over the web, and Tech News is one of those things. The long print cycle lead times ensured that by the time the magazine would turn up on your doorstep, the news content would be old and moldy, having been macerated to death by various blogs, news sites and forums. The key factors for moving Tech News online:
In the end, doing tech in print now means deep analysis and rigourous testing (both of which PC Magazine has always excelled at). Yet, those can be offered online, and with a richer presentation. Back when I started editing Reel-Time.com I remember new writers would always ask “How many words do I have?” when we talked about their weekly columns. I always had to laugh, the notion of specific column length being so “print-centric.” On the web, we are free to throw as many pixels as we need at an issue.
I believe we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg. Those that can make the jump will start to make that jump quickly. Notably, I expect to see trade journals become a relatively rare beast. Ivory towered experts lecturing professionals about their profession is a thing of the past. Instead, users will gravitate to profession-based niche social media. The journals will slowly cease to exist, and the magazines that remain will be serving the less technical of the professions.
For all the talk, er, converstation, going on about Social Media, we really haven’t got there yet. I think the next year will the telling time, when we see more application of the prime tenets towards the professional space. Where as we may have proposed a network for surfers last year, which we might monetize someday, this year, we’ll be proposing a network of plumbers, which we’ll be monetizing starting day one.
Once again, we’ve had a “Genie is out of the bottle” moment, and things have again changed for print. There’s a digital diaspora going on, and we’ve seen a steady wave of carpetbagging print journalists, so it only makes sense that the institutions themselves attempt to make the move. It’s the publishing equivailent of breaking down the presses and moving them where the money is.
So, if you’re in print, think about this: how can you better leverage social media online now to allow you to make a transition later?
And one bit of information to remember: in the 1970s print still used Linotype machines for typesetting. There were tons of highly skilled linotype operators out there setting type for everyone. When the first Atex systems came along, they started to put those guys (my grandfather was a life-time linotype operator by the way) out of a job. About a decade later, the job no longer existed anywhere.
Are you a potential digital carpetbagger, or will you go the way of the linotype operator?
One of the big complaints that the anti-Wordpress chorus croons is that the vaunted blogging platform doesn’t scale. Certainly we’ve all seen sites brought low by the “Slashdot Effect” or the “Digg Effect” but my experience tells me that WordPress is getting a bad rap for poor server setup, poor plugin choice, etc.
How do I know? Well, one of the sites I work with last week experienced the “China Syndrome” or potentially “The Great Fire Hose”. The site, TheTruthAboutCars.com posted a story that the Chinese might buy GM, and that opened the flood gates for traffic. The problem is, while we watch for excess traffic from Digg, or Slashdot, we don’t watch the Chinese sites that offer similar service. In a matter of a couple hours, the traffic surged to 10 or 15 times its normal levels(and that’s conservative, once we max out server connections, we have no way of knowing how much is actually refused). Our system administrator alerted me and I quickly through the SuperCache plugin into lockdown mode, ensuring that the site rendered virtually all its content as flat html, rather than going to the database every time. Continue reading
Perhaps the problem is that the UI stays with you like a bad burrito...
Yesterday morning I sat at the counter at Puffins Restraurant in Millbury having a wonderful plate of Eggs Latin, and as I struggled to read The Worcester Telegram while eating, I realized the problem with newspapers in print: the User Interface is pathetic.
Here are just a few of the UI problems:
I’m pretty much done with newspapers and newspaper technology, at least for a while. I grow tired of chronicling the demise of an industry and instead choose to look forward. ‘Tis a sad day when a boy whose dreams were of newsrooms, deadlines and worldly old copy editors walks away in disgust.
As my grandfather watched the death of his trade (he was a linotype operatator), I watch the entire industry crumble. But fear not, in time it will be reinvented…
Sometimes you really need to kiss a pig, and yes, that indeed, is me...on the right
Yes, sometimes it’s in our best interest to do something we don’t really want to do, to literally kiss the pig. Nothing could better typify this than the great ad debate, that age old fight that occurs in media wherein the editorial staff seeks to maintain their supposed journalistic credibility by running a publication that is utterly advertising free, while the ad staff is running around trying to turn your hallowed publication into The Want Advertiser.
When I worked in print, the editorial staff barely deigned to acknowledge the existentence of the advertising (in fact, most editorial content management systems in print media do not show the ads, only the blocked out holes where ads will go) while the advertising team referred derisively to the actual content of the paper as the “News Hole” (making the purveryors of such “newsholes”).
In some ways, things have been worse for online media, especially niche media. Online, many of us were able to build out our sites without the benefit of advertising, channeling the Field of Dreams mantra “build it and they will come.”
Unfortunately, many of us found that we were simply too small to attract the advertisers we wanted. We found the endemic advertisers with in our niches were generally too small to foot the bill for what we wanted. In the end, many of us found we either had to sell or buy, that owning a single site wasn’t enough.
In the past few days I’ve seen a miraculous transformation on Reel-time, the site that I started with. The site finally hit the radar of the NameMedia sales team, and all of a sudden, I’m finding there’s a lot of interest in what turns out to be a huge reservior of potential page views.
The funny thing is that they’re now talking with people who would never have returned a phone call from Reel-Time a year ago. If we’d even bothered to make the call.
So, in the long run I’ve learned the big secret of publishing: you’ve got to love advertising, and in particular your ad sales guys.