If the Internet distributes information more efficiently and eliminates the middlemen, then why do so many owners and operators of traditional media — who are the middlemen — believe that they will make as much, if not more, money as the Internet becomes the primary means for distributing information?
Congratulations to Rafat Ali!
Belden Associates’ research shows that the average age of online newspaper website users is aging as fast as the average printer newspaper reader and has been each years since 2001. The only difference is that the average age of the online edition user is 42 and the average age of the printed edition user is 55. If the newspaper industry is to reverse its declines in usership, it instead needs to have users whose average age is dcreasing, or at least increases more slowly than the calendar.
At the root of most publishing and broadcasting companies problems understanding and adapting to the New Medium is they actually misunderstand what a medium is. I’ve long been reluctant to explain this misunderstanding because I’ll need a long post to do so. This is it, a new version of my 1998 essay What is New Media?. It’s long, but I consider it the most important thing I have ever written except for the original essay, and hope you’ll forebear its length. I need to have this new version online because I plan to refer to it in future postings, specifically those about what radical changes that media companies need to implement.
Excerpts from Bob Cauthorn’s speech to the Publish Asia 2006 conference yesterday in Kuala Lumpur.
Why the American newspaper industry is doomed unless it makes radical changes, including in its new-media efforts.
Today’s Goodies: A webcast of Bob ‘Thorn in the Side of the Newspaper Industry’ Cauthorn; a Gordon Parks retrospective in The Digital Journalist; brilliant coverage by the Houston Chronicle and El País; Miami Herald Miami Herald Executive Editor Tom Fiedler’s memo to his staff; Heidi Cohen on what advertisers should do now that publishers of printed periodicals are finally getting serious about shifting their business online; The Tyndall Report on ABC, CBS, and NBC news; Eight Diagram’s interviews with photographers & writers; and my beta test of Google Content Blocker.
My favorite news site designer this side of the Atlantic is Jay Small, He is director of online audience and operations for the newspaper division of E.W. Scripps Co. and also runs his own consulting firm. Jay today reviews NYTimes.com‘s new redesign.…
According to Time Warner Vice Chairman Don Logan, the number one problem for the magazine industry is the massive profileration of publications on newsstands.
The text of my speech last week to the World Association of Newspapers’ Advertising Conference in Paris.
The World Association of Newspaper’s attempts to charge the search engines for indexing their news content is merely newspaper publishers searching for legal ways to stop the railroad because the gravy train has left them behind.
Why Identity 2.0 is the probable solution to today’s concerns about online privacy, anonymity, pseudonymity, tracking, and registration.
I’m one of 23 Americans with a speech chosen for publication in the reference book ‘Representative American Speeches 2004-2005’. Its publishers chose my remarks from the ‘Reinventing the Local TV Station: Ground-Breaking Ideas from Innovative Thinkers’ panel during the Broadcast Education Association’s session at the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference last year.
An editorial entitled Meltdown to the Core in the current issue of Editor & Publisher magazines, the trade journal of the newspaper industry, laments how that declining industry’s cost-cutting guts attempts to serve growing niches of readership and is focuses instead on…
Readers’ responses to WSJ.com column indicate that the best downloadable music price is under a dollar.
‘Our audience is fragmenting!’ I hear that again and again from traditional publishers and broadcasters. They lament their ‘fragmenting’ readership, listenership, or viewership. But it’s untrue, merely a figment of their traditional perspective. Viewership, readership, and listenership, have always been fragmented. Each…
You can manage decline only so far before your company crumbles. Case in point: Knight-Ridder, Inc, the second largest newspaper chain in the U.S. Is Knight Ridder crumbling? Look how the crumbs are starting to fall. The crumb was today’s announcement by…
In his keynote address Friday at the Online News Association’s annual conference in New York City, New York Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.
What obstacles exist for online journalism? That topic will be on the minds of attendees at the Online News Association‘s annual conference next week in Manhattan. Unfortunately, the major obstacle for online journalism is the people who practice it — the best…
That’s the subject of Mark Glaser‘s report yesterday in Online Journalism Review. Read reactions to Yahoo! New’s decision to offer original reporting. Here’s my own from Glaser’s story: Media consultant Vin Crosbie, president of Digital Deliverance, said it’s true that Yahoo doesn’t…
Editor & Publisher magazines interviews Adrian Holovaty, the editor of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, who last month won the $10,000 grand prize in the University of Maryland’s Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. Also, Interactive Narratives has a podcast interview with…
I never thought I’d call a daily newspaper beautiful. I’ve always considered daily news periodicals to be grubby Industrial Era products — cheap paper products fabricate by clanking contraptions that melted lead into hardened cylinders faced with typeset characters and that inked…
Speaking of The Guardian, it’s online wing is beta-testing a new service called Been There. Lloyd Shepherd. the deputy director of digital publishing, blogs that, ” Essentially, it’s a platform for people to recommend things they like to do in places they…
As some readers of this site know, I’m contributing (and founded) a Corante group weblog entitled Rebuilding Media. Among its contributors is Bob Cauthorn. Online Journalism Review Journalist David LaFontaine wrote that a Cauthorn speech inspired him to write an article (Old-school…
The New York Times will merge its print and online newsrooms in 2007.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the UK and Ireland reports that it and the members of JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards) yesterday agreed to exclude RSS User-Agents from member websites’ user traffic statistics, thus excluding RSS from the…
Thoughts before appearing on a radio show about ‘citizen journalism’
Danny Meadows-Klue on how CraigsList is savaging newspapers’ revenues.
Critical Mention Licenses Associated Press Video Clips Online TV search solution expands international content for business intelligence users NEW YORK, July 25 /PRNewswire/ — Critical Mention, Inc., the leading Web-based television news search and monitoring service, today announced a video-licensing agreement with…
Work for our clients took precedence over posting here during the past month, creating a backlog of issues to blog. Now that I’ve got some free time again, I’m working on that backlog. One backlogged item involves The Newspaper of the Future,…
Cocktails during Cinco de Mayo at the offices of Critical Mention above New York City’s 57th Street canyon I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been traveling most of the past few months — half that time to develop the video news…
Connecticut is the third smallest of the United States. One hundred miles wide, 50 miles high, and home to 3.3 million people, its largest cities are Bridgeport (population 138,000) and Hartford (pop. 133,000). A Connecticut city of 22,931 people was lost last…
[A subscriber to the Poynter Institute‘s Online News discussion list this week asked for any research or experience about whether putting a story on a newspaper’s Web site the day before print publication has an affect on newsstand sales on the day…
Using the Online News Association’s discussion list, Jon Garfunkel of Civilities.net noted how the Ventura County Star has temporarily had to shutdown its online forums because (The Los Angeles Times reported[note: registration site]) of uncivil postings. Garfunkel asked: “Wouldn’t it be handy…
(The original was released on PR Newswire this morning.) TV Search Provider Critical Mention Inks Marketing Partnership with MacNeil/Lehrer Productions MacNeil/Lehrer Expands Paid Distribution Opportunities and Extends Brand Through Partnership With Critical Mention New York – April 26, 2005 – Critical Mention,…
What’s more important to a media company nowadays: A CMS (Content Management System) or a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system? Publishers will tell you that CMS is. But they will be wrong. Legacy media companies (newspapers, magazines, and TV and radio stations)…
Congratulations to David Talbott, who weathered the storm of the dot.com bust and guided his baby Salon.com to profitability. The New York Times today reports (registration site) that he’s now stepping down as its editor-in-chief but retaining the title of chairman. He’ll…
Finally, a report (PDF format)) from the Online Publishers Association about which I agree! Its study of 27,841 Internet users on 25 of its members sites found that watching video online is becoming increasingly popular and that news videos were the most…
If your news website requires registration or you’re thinking of converting it to requiring registration, Dave Daniels, research director for Jupiter Research’s Customer Relationship Management and Marketing Operations practice areas, offers some simply suggestions for optimizing registration pages.
I’m generally skeptical that any new year will bring mark changes. However, for the first time in many years, I foresee six marked changes in the online publishing will occur this year: (1). The most obvious will that verbal bloodshed will erupt…
Earlier this month, Wes Jackson was promoted vice president and general manager of Belo Interactive, replacing Eric Christensen who at the end of this year will leave the company for another venture. Jackson had been vice president of sales for Belo Interactive.…
Hey, Tony Ridder! Yes, and you, Doug McCorkindale! Don Newhouse! And the rest of you guys who run large chains of U.S. newspapers! I know that each day you read The Wall Street Journal because you think that its stock market coverage…
[UPDATE: Some blogs which have linked to this item call it my vision of the newspaper of 2010. Calling it that is inaccurate. I believe that e-paper devices will be in common use by 2010 and that consumers will use these device…
A month ago, I’d mentioned Nigel Pocklington‘s appointment to the newly created role of director of online publishing for the Financial Times. From London, Kieren McCarthy points me to an article he wrote today in The Independent about Pocklington’s role at FT.com…
This past weekend, most of the stories about the online news industry focused on Associated Press President & CEO Tom Curley‘s keynote speech at the annual conference of the Online News Association. Though it was good to hear that the AP has…
I’ve more thoughts about the accelerating declines in circulations of major U.S. newspaper: Many newspaper executives are blaming the new Do-Not-Call anti-telemarketing lists for a large portion of their newspapers’ recent circulation declines. That is disingenous. In reality, the blame should be…
There is more and more evidence that U.S. newspaper circulation has begun a possibly fatal free fall. Beginning around 1964, daily newspapers’ print circulations in the U.S. began steadily to decline at a compound rate of approximately half a percent per year.…
I spoke Saturday as the final speaker at the Associated Press Managing Editors annual conference, in Louisville, Kentucky. The conference’s subject that day’s was Newsrooms of the Future: Blueprints for Editors and Readers. Among the nine other speakers, Belden Associated President Sammy…
ClickZ yesterday paraphrases me as saying the argument for growing audience through RSS is dubious. It’s an accurate paraphrase and the ClickZ article does report what I think. I want to fortify it. There is nothing wrong with RSS. Look, I publish…
Congratulations for the Gannett corporate staff for selecting — after more than three years of deliberations— an e-mail publishing vendor for USA Today and for all Gannett newspapers and TV stations in North America. Gannett’s ‘quick’ selection is significant for two reasons:…