DISQUS

If it costs in the hundredths of a penny per user per day, how is it that sites can't run up huge margins selling every page view for a penny? That may lead to smaller streams of actual revenue, or it may lead to more, depending on how large the site's traffic. Either way, you're talking massive margins.

I think this is a sales issue within traditional media organizations.

Newspapers try to bring a limited display advertising model to the Web when they should be reaching out to thousands or hundreds of thousands of businesses to offer incredibly cheap advertising options.

They should be selling highly targeted segments of users, not mass, as they would sell the paper. I guess I just described Google, but newspapers, especially in America, have a geographic advantage Google can't easily approach.

I agree with this for the most part, but have issues with a couple of premises.

First is that sources are not journalism, they are sources of information. They may be great for providing deeper knowledge and information to a subject, but without a check, they are free to say what they wish. Taken at the surface that's not good.

Second, I understand that many people talking about the same issue can put checks on one another, but more often than not, the noise and volume of the lie or half-truth overwhelms the signal of truth and reason. The voice of reason tends to be a whisper anyway. Group think isn't a bad thing, but it does represent a failure in filtering information. As it currently stands, one can only burrow deeper into a piece of information through searching and tagging and the link economy, not necessarily understand a piece of information in its greater context.

I do not think people (i.e. newspaper journalists) absolutely need to be the filter any longer. We have technology in Association Rule Learning and other more efficient uses of leveraging data, the semantic Web, social tech and lots of other information that can help provide a greater context of information. All we need to do is create the information and store it in its context.

If that makes programmers the new gatekeepers and the public the new correspondents, so be it.

Got that right! But the link is making the rounds and there's a debate brewing.

I don't really see many ways to make money here, though.

"Saving the Industry" isn't a matter of redefining journalism, per se, it's a matter of recapturing advertising dollars. Posting links to twitter and the New York Times' APIs don't do so much to get ads, so much as they're designed for increasing traffic.

Traffic is a great thing when you're trying to sell convince an advertiser, but it's worthless without a useful advertising platform. Most news sites have a horrible business strategy (lots of banner ads!). We need a better model than simply applying the display ad mentality to the Web.

I'd suggest a much different approach to "save the industry."

Instead of building all these highly targeted social networks that don't scale well, news companies need to look at leveraging existing networks.

Much in the same way twitter headline rolls increase traffic, Facebook Connect gives news developers tons of user information to better segment audience for potential advertisers. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, why not tap into the larger network from an ad standpoint as well?

And it goes further: Look at newspaper RSS feeds. Usually they're without ads, despite the fact that every newspaper site has them. They're missing a big opportunity there.

Classifieds has been destroyed by craigslist and eBay, but newspapers haven't done much to counteract that. They should be aggregating classifieds and upselling their audience and reach to people willing to pay.

They should be providing contextual ads that are site agnostic, among many other things.

Very little of that kind of business innovation is actually happening in the industry, to its detriment.

Here's another good piece on the subject for your list:

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/impressions...

Weird. I was just thinking about sending a follow up email to see where you were at on the project when I came across this post.

Great job. I'm going to play with it more this long weekend.

Oops on the timezones.

I'm not sure if a simple keyword search is the best way to go. It's a start, but a search for 'Denver' or 'DIA' wouldn't have provided William's and others' tweets from the airport right away.

If I were to build something, I'd think more in terms of lots of keywords, with a weighted system behind them (higher priority given to local people using particular words, for example).

Here's a possible case:

On the article level, a module that pulls 1) possibly related local tweets based on the tags of a story, 2) tweets of people linking to the story, and 3) anyone on twitter talking about related tags to a story.

On the section level, it would be the same types of information, but get more complex, pulling based on tags of all stories in the section, etc.

I'd also think about breaking it out as a constant standalone feature of the site. Maybe map based? Pull from geotagged photos and video through various APIs out there (flickr, google, brightkite, youtube, lots of others).

You could get a little bit more advanced in the API, too. Williams did mention Denver in an earlier tweet before the crash. You could search all of twitter for certain general keywords and then follow up on those people for more specific keywords for a particular amount of time.

This stuff is all possible with the twitter API and some thoughtful server-side work and an elegant UI for users to filter the noise.

It's not the greatest API out there, but it's certainly good enough to pull off something more sophisticated and useful for a news organization.

I don't know. I'm mostly thinking aloud here.

Joe, I'm not trying to be a dick. And it's not just the Post I'm coming down on.

But it's a constant failure of media in breaking news situations. Locally, I heard about a business fire 10 blocks from my house through facebook, brightkite and twitter Sunday morning. The paper didn't post anything until today.

As for this particular incident:

Mike Williams tweeted the crash at 5:25 p.m. Central.

BreakingNewsOn had a post on twitter at 6:02 p.m. CST.

Ryan Sholin, and many others by at least 6:45 p.m. CST reported there still wasn't anything on the Post's site.

By 8:18 p.m. one person commented on the Denver story: "Three hours after this plane crash occurred, and you've got a total of five sentences posted, and some of it is grammatically suspect."

In the meantime, people on twitter, including Rob Scoble and others, had snuffed out people at the airport and people on other planes who were reporting to twitter about it.

One has to assume that anyone on the metro desk at any Denver media would have been listening to a scanner and would have heard the calls made to the fire department located right near the site.

I have a friend, a producer in San Francisco who heard about the accident through a producer in Vegas but couldn't find anything on the wires about it either.

There's some good conversation at friendfeed.

I'm not arguing that all the information on twitter was totally accurate. It wasn't. But there's when interest in a story swells up like this, there's got to be a better way to handle it than sitting on your hands.

@Kristin While that's very true, the point is that you can pretty easily get trapped into grossly overpaying for many--if not most--magazines.

I've seen some crazy, asinine videos, but I'm not going to make any judgment calls on the quality vs. quantity argument (I think both are valid strategies depending on your goals).

I tend to prefer a mix of regularly produced videos, well-produced standalone videos and many short, quickly created illustrative clips. They serve different audiences differently.

Rex Sorgatz (of fimoculous.com fame) destroys most of the column in the comments at Gawker, so much so that I didn't feel there was anything to add.

First, I'm only suggesting that news organizations adapt to a linked form of content creation, rather than ignore it or do it half-assed.

Secondly, does there need to be a specific role?

I'm not asking to be flip. I think that the assumption that every creator fill a new and unique need is unnecessary. A Starbucks opening across the street from the local coffee shop tends to increase the awareness of both businesses and both generally see increases in sales.

The same goes for creating these types of networks. If you build a community around a topic, the net result is usually that all parties share and overlap audience. They grow together.

Sure these things tend to be self organizing, but if media businesses already ingrained in a community don't build or at least actively participate these networks, they're missing out.

Beyond that I don't know what else to say about the matter.

@Suzanne - Check your Web history. Chances are you visit thousands of sites per day. Links just teleport you from one site to the next. There's hardly any bother.

I do think that editors and reporters should take ownership of their sites. They are the content creators and they should be the ones figuring out how they can get their information in front of the right people. To have marketers market the news to other sites, to me, sounds dirty.

@Tim - That's the point. Blogs, and specifically blog networks, are Web native entities. Newspaper.coms are not. Web native groups will do what works best on the Web, because that's the environment they came of age; Newspapers online have consistently tried to be just that--Newspapers online. The linked network is a better fit for the Web, I think.

Also, there's also something to be said about company wide aggregation, too.

Most of the newspaper properties in Forum Communications are in towns well under 10,000 people. But sites like Northland Outdoors and Northland Ag (which aren't necessarily the best implementations of the ideas I've outlined above, I know) work very well by benefiting the individual properties and the company as a whole.

I think it still applies to small markets. You just have fewer areas to write about usually. One person working several beats can also maintain multiple blogs with fewer posts. That's reasonable.

The niche component may not be feasible for super small weeklies, but the blogging part certainly applies.

I'm not sure there's anything the readership needs to understand, either. I think we sometimes don't give individuals enough credit. Most people can discern the differences of a blog post from a matter of fact news story. We also shouldn't expect the vast majority of people to compare notes across sites.

@Kurt - The latest build of Treader seems to be acting up for me, too. I'm going to leave a note for the developer.

@Kurt - Map Channels will take any KML file you can feed to it, so if you can create one on the fly with whatever back end you're using, it's certainly possible.

The only downside is that you have to manually refresh the KML for the Map Channel to update.

If I wanted to not code anything I'd look at using Zeemaps. If I had time to develop it, I'd just use the Google Maps API.

The royalty question is a good one, I think, but I can't see the FCC pinning this one down as easily as they can force webcasters to pay license fees. There, the business determines the music inventory, in the case of MySpace and Bebo, the users determine the inventory.

So, if I'm a popular artist and Bebo/MySpace must pay me royalties for each "spin" I'm in complete control here. It would behoove me to put a lot of my work on their sites, because for each stream, I'd get a fee from the distributor (the site where I put my music).

If you're a start up with no set monetization strategy, you're looking at a very high overhead right from the get-go.

Ultimately it comes down to pure value exchange. More artists get distribution/promotion with almost no barriers to entry. I think Carr and Bragg ignore this element in their discussions.

Bragg is way off base here regarding work. I agree with you on that. The Marxist philosophy on workers doesn't really apply here because the workers choose to use the service for free. They agree to the terms. They choose to externalize the cost of creation for Bebo. In exchange they get a distribution pipe. It's not much different than the terrestrial radio models.

However, I have a few points to correct.

Payola is the other way around: Radio stations can't accept money from artists or labels in exchange for playing their music.

ASCAP/BMI/SESAC do monitor radio stations and collect royalty fees from broadcasters. However the money that makes it's way back to artists is negligible. Radio is largely seen by the industry as a promotional tool for CD sales and concert promotion.

@alexandre - MapChannels only lets you do so much. Since the picture is already in the sidebar, I figure the zoom on the location is fine in the bubble.

If you want to do more with MapChannels, you can modify the javascripts that they give out if you'd like to host the code yourself.

Nice tip. I didn't know about that and I'm obsessive about greasemonkey scripts.

Thanks, Shawn!

I miss the days when Barkley and Jordan would just do televised charity golf tournaments and then Barkley would usually destroy Jordan. But then on the courts Jordan clearly dominated.

This "Governor" stuff... ugh. Also I really hate CNN for running this trite. I'm mean I agree with Charles on everything, but he's a basketball color commentator not a pundit...you know?

Copy my stuff all you want. I'm just throwing out ideas. Credit or not, I just hope to get people thinking.

As for Super Mario Galaxy, if you're a fan of platform games, this might be the best Mario game ever. Starts off way too easy, but then picks up.

On The Road is one of my faves. I thought about the Russian masters, but I have always had great difficulty getting into Dostoevesky, etc. Tolstoy's short stories are amazing though.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I've run into that problem too. Seems random for me. I just try a second time later on and it usually works.