by Dan
In the Old Media model, writers would submit articles to a magazine, get them rejected, stick them in a drawer and move on. In the New Media model, the articles are still rejected, but now writers can whine about it publicly and post them online.
Why the hell not? I mean, it’s not like the writers are getting paid for the piece, anyway…
by Dan
I love Molly Ivins, but I wouldn’t go to her for business advice. Still, her column today reminds anyone who’s interested of a very good point about the recent sale of Knight-Ridder newspapers: that far from being failing businesses, the papers had a 20 percent profit margin.
Lots of business would kill for that kind of margin. Then why did the KR board bail? Because newspapers are seen as a "failing" business, one "in decline." It’s true that they’re losing circulation, but that could be perfectly good thing: why spend oodles of money reaching the N+1th reader who doesn’t see the value in your product? (Propping up circulation, by the way, is what killed Life magazine; circ acquisition and retention was costing more than the marginal rate increase the ad sales people could charge per reader.)
Of course, seeing a newspaper as a local branded information resource rather than a bunch of pulped pine trees might extend profitability. But that would require looking at a financial enterprise as more than a quarter-to-quarter business. As Molly says:
by Dan
Maybe it’s that good PR for oil companies is so rare that they don’t know what to do when they get some. That appears to be the case for Shell Oil, which looks like it’ll get a billion people looking at its logo during the World Cup soccer tournament — more or less for free.
The Trinidad team will be accompanied by 10,000 steel drum players, according to Bloomberg News. (And you thought they were noisy in the subway…) Steel drums, you may not realize, are made from discarded or otherwise liberated 55-gallon oil drums.
"For many of the world’s estimated 35,000 panmen, the sweetest-sounding music comes from the 55-gallon, 20-gauge red steel oil barrels made in Shell’s lubricant mixing plant on Barracones Bay in Trinidad."
This means that the billion people tuning in to the World Cup have an excellent chance of seeing the Shell logo in a fun upbeat setting. Great product placement.
The trouble is, there are Rules about reusing oil drums. If Shell says Yup, those are ours and isn’t it great, they’re polluters. If they say, Nope, we have no idea how our logo got on those instruments, they look Dumb. Which is why you get quotes like this in the same story:
" `It’s officially against corporate policy for us to hand out oil barrels,” the 37-year-old [Gerard] Mitchell [country head of shell Trinidad Ltd.] frets. “We really don’t know what to do about all this.”’
and
"Suppressing a grin, Rosales, Shell’s barrel superintendent, says, “I know we make the best musical oil drums in the world.’"
The story’s great fun, with lots of detail you didn’t know you cared about. Check it out.
by Dan
You don’t want to laugh at the dead, and you don’t want to make fun of the disabled. But it just strikes me that if you’re deaf and walking along active train tracks, you really ought to make sure that you’re
a) walking against traffic
b) walking far enough from the tracks that a passing train won’t hit you, and
c) paying attention to your surroundings.
Text messaging when you can’t hear what’s going on around you (whether being deaf or listening to your iPod — a pre-deafness condition for many) is not being aware of your surroundings. If it was in New York, it probably would have been a cab or a bike messenger instead of a train. But the lesson’s the same.
by Dan
I don’t know any of the players so I don’t know the inside baseball, but the Dow Jones reorganization announced today feels like most of a right move. It puts the online and print versions of the WSJ under the same management, so all those horses have at least a chance of pulling in the same direction. The NYTimes has the same idea, combining print and online into a common newsroom. (The NYT’s locution of its "Continuous News Desk" has always bugged me though; isn’t the very nature of news continuous?)
Sticking the DJ wire in a different group, along with the stock averages and other market services, first struck me as a little odd but has a strong logic. The wire and market services are, essentially, reseller services and are available to be repackaged. Not so much the Journal or Barrons. The client bases for the newspapers and the information services are just different.
The Ottaway newspapers are an entirely different business and need their own separate management.
by Dan
This is entirely skippable, but the hed on UnBeige appealed to the print geek in me.
732, by the way, is a deep shade of brown.
by Dan
A long Salon article that starts out unpromisingly by repeating old news about the dumbed down free tabloids aimed at young adults gets suddenly exciting at the end of the third take. (You’ll have to watch an ad to get that far, but it’s worth it.) That’s when Farhad Manjoo introduces us to Rob Curley, the new media editor of the Naples (Fla.) Daily News.
Curley gets it — completely and profoundly:
The Curley method is to convert small regional newspapers into powerhouses on the Web and make them indispensable to their communities — as indispensable as print newspapers once were, or should have been, to the regions they served. He counsels newsrooms to focus their resources on gathering local news. With the Web, national news has been "commoditized"; you can get national news anywhere, and local newspapers aren’t going to beat out bigger papers — or other news sites, such as Yahoo — that provide national coverage.
and…
When papers embrace their mission to provide local news thoroughly, efficiently and in any manner people choose — in print, online or whatever other device people may want to start using tomorrow — audiences will flock to them, Curley says. He points to his efforts in Lawrence, Kan., where the three Web sites he created for the Lawrence Journal-World became the center of that college town’s daily life.
Can this business model stand on its own? No one’s proven it yet. But this is where newspapers win — by divorcing themselves from the medium and focusing on the information and the audience.
Ten years ago, when I was editing NetGuide, we’d review hundreds of Web sites a month. My publisher once asked me what our criteria were. We ask ourselves, "Is it useful?" I told her. Does the site have good information presented in a way that its readers want? The publisher, expecting a detailed and weighted punch list of features, was puzzled by the response, which may be one reason NetGuide ultimately failed.
Ten years later, the answer’s still good. Own your market. Be useful. People will come.
Let me be clear: I want to either work for Rob Curley or be Rob Curley. This is a guy who knows the answer.
by Dan
Slate’s Daniel Gross gets all meta today with a fin de siecle article claiming that blogging is dead because Big Media is noticing it and wants to play. Like an good trend piece, he picks four data points and extrapolates:
A close reading, however, shows that the four points are really just two: The Sports Illustrated Curse, and Money Changes Everything.
Is all the corporate money spent on blogging being spent wisely? Of course not; that’s why it’s called venture money. Money in media goes where the audience is and it’s insanely valuable to find an audience that already exists, as opposed to one that you have to try to create.
The problem isn’t that online media valuations are out of line. The problem, which Gross never quite gets to, is that big valuations expect big returns. Ad money is flowing out of print and out of mass media and into online media. The returns will be there, at least for a while, because the technical investment — servers and bandwidth and whatnot — is long since sunk.
The trick, as it always is, is to find a way to converse with this audience in ways it finds appropriate. And what’s different in 2006 than it was in 2001 is that the audience is much bigger now and that it grew by itself. The other difference: marketers have five years’ experience in figuring out how to converse with an online audience — Slate’s own valuation notwithstanding.
And if they blow it? The audience will stop listening and find some other place to congregate and talk amongst itself. At which point the cycle will begin again.
by Dan
All the posts from my old Radio blog at www.danrosenbaum.com have, by some miracle, made it here intact. Thanks go to Bill Kearney’s script. But, dude, would it have killed you to include some end-user instructions like “Step 1: Face the computer and put your hands on the keyboard”?
Next step is to pretty up the environment — hang some pictures on the wall, put up the curtains, hook up the stereo, move the furniture around. Things like that.
If you’re looking for something to read in the meantime, take a look at that Newspapers and the Net link over there by the “Recent Posts” link down on the right. It got kind of buried in the transition.
by Dan
I’m migrating away from the increasingly abandoned Radio Userland toward the better-supported Movable Type. Getting content from the old blog to the new one is going to be a little bit of a process, I’m afraid.
Until I get everything straightened out here, you can still see my historical content at the old Over the Edge site. Update: Move completed. Everything over there is now over here, and clicks to the old site will be redirected here. The root URL — www.danrosenbaum.com — remains active and links to this blog.
Sorry for the extra clicks. I’ll get it cleared up (and make this place look a little more lived-in) as soon as I climb the learning curve here.