Expertise About Why Individuated Media are already superseding Mass Media
All traditional media companies now publish online and many of them are casting warry eyes at Google News, which is rising in the online ratings. Meanwhile, Google’s introduction of its GMail service this month has shaken up the e-mail application world and…
Google, the de facto search engine of the Internet, indexes the most popular Web sites for a keyword, not the most authoritative. Meanwhile, I believe that Clay Shirky has accurately applied the Power Curve to the phenomenon known as blogging. And blogging…
Jupiter Research analyst Niki Scevak, who covers advertising and media forecasting, seems perplex at how expenditures on newspaper advertising can grow while newspaper readership declines: A post by fellow Jup blogger David Card got me thinking more about advertising’s supposed axiom: the…
Many people (recently, Editor & Publisher Magazine columnist Steve Outing) have written about how news Web sites need better graphical layouts. Most of those layouts date back to the early days of the Web, when designers were attempting to replicate printed page…
The Guardian in the UK and The New York Times were among many English-language newspapers today publishing obituaries of Alistair Cooke. A cultural bridge across the Atlantic, he lucidly wrote for one and perceptively read the other. The Guardian‘s Media section today…
Fortunately, the Swiss also manufacture another version that a traveler can carry onto airliners.
Editor & Publisher features a story about Pulitzer Prize juror and Philadelphia Daily News Editor Zack Stalberg and how he was so impressed with the post-9/11 coverage of The Onion satirical week that he almost made it a Pulitzer Prize finalist. I’d…
Azeem Azhar pointed me to Terry Eagleton‘s essay about the importance of theory, which the Guardian published on Tuesday. Azhar writes: “… it’s a brilliant criticism of the critics of thinking, reason and principle. During my time working for large organisations there…
The other thing that I learned at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Assocation’s Wireless 2004 conference> in Atlanta is that when 70,000 members of the mobile telecommunications industry congregate at one place, it is awfully hard to get a mobile dial-tone.
Many Many North American media companies plans to deliver news via mobile phones, yet none are exhibiting or on the presentations program at CTIA Wireless 2004> in Atlanta, which with more than 70,000 attendees claims to be ‘the world’s largest conference of…
Here is a bad way in which the news media industry is different than other industries: It rejects innovations from a sector that so ably aids other major industries and moreover has conditioned that sector to be reticent to it. This ignored…
Ross Castle, Killarney, Ireland (Click to enlarge) © Vin Crosbie, 2002. I’ll be lecturing to — conversing with, is more accurate — a New Media masters class at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on Friday and then be at…
Many techies have told me that media companies would be wasting their time to produce a customized edition for each reader, that search engines or RSS already make this unnecessary. That amuses me. What they’re saying is ‘There’s no market for pre-built…
Although it doesn’t have a direct bearing upon online publishing, here is a revolutionary technology worth noting by media companies that use imagery or that report about technology: Philips Research has developed lenses that focus without mechanical moving parts. These lenses operate…
Camera phonesare revolutionizing is public adoption of Multimedia Message Systems (MMS) in the U.K. The Enpocket Mobile Media Monitor found that during the the past 3 months the number of consumers using MMS surged by 40%. That surge was driven by 18…
Afer studying long-term declines in newspaper circulation, Philip Meyer, the eminent professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a few years ago calculated that the last American newspaper will be read in September 2043. Using that type…
My report and analysis about the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s State of the News Media 2004 study is now available at Online Journalism Review. Also, Earl Wilkinson, executive director of the International Newspaper Marketing Association and one of the few visionaries…
Steve Outing has a good story today about most online newspapers’ woefully rigid and cluttered graphical user interfaces, the design equivalent of shovelware. He quotes Howard Finberg of the Poynter Institute (as is Outing) and the Digital Futurist consultancy and Nik Wilets…
Last week, I wrote about Topix.net, which spiders more than 3,000 other local news sites, then lets users enter their local ZIP codes and see a page showing all local news from all local media. The San Jose Mercury News quoted me:…
I’m having a busy Monday because the previous day one of the journalism reviews commissioned me to report about the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s The State of the News Media 2004 study, specifically the section about US online journalism. The study,…
This week, I’ve been hearing a lot of traditional media executives say that if you allow consumers to customize their own media, then ‘each consumer will become isolated in his own world.’ Wake up! Each consumer has always been isolated in his…
There’s been some demand on this site today for my Publishing: Free to Fee columns about charging for online content. These 32 columns are at ClickZ.com, where they are chronologically organized in a roughly stratal order (i.e., the earliest ones primarily cover…
Last week, I said that I’d become radically dissident inside the newspaper industry. My friend, Steve Outing, commented about this in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits: But “radically dissident”? Given the hype to this, I was expecting a far more radical view. I mostly…
Although we last week mentioned that some Knight Ridder newspaper executives told us that Knight Ridder Digital planned to to charge for site access once it had finished implementing consumer registration, KRD spokesperson Amy Dalton tell us this isn’t true, that KRD…
Aside my article this week at Online Journalism Review, someone has posted a comment that amuses me: Shameless Plug I find it more than a little coincidental that Vin’s prescription for online success involves using products quite similar to his PublishMail product,…
I’m now writing this blog solo, a change from the past two years when I’ve written perhaps two of every three postings. So, blame just me from now on. — Vin Crosbie
We’re watching the launch of Topix.net, news site whose robots scrape thousands of American news media sites and aggregate and categorize the content for easy browsing by locality. We were initially skeptical of the venture, but have been impressed by what we’ve…
He’s returned from across the pond, but this time continued across flyover country. Rafat Ali, editor & publisher of PaidContent.org, MocoNews.net, and European Digital Media Weekly, the commercial überblogger whose efforts makes Jason Calacanis’ look like a mom & pop shop, has…
E-mail publishing applications service provider CheetahMail has been purchased by credit reporting and business information corporation Experian. CheetahMail started in 1997 as a private spinoff of the newspaper industry’s failed New Century Network (NCN) consortium. CheetahMail initially specialized in providing e-mail publishing…
Time Warner’s Sports Illustrated Magazine will offer American and Canadian mobile phone users their choices of phone ‘wallpaper’ from the magazines annual Swimsuit edition. SI signed the deal with Summus of Raleigh, North Carolina, a mobile phone technologies applications service provider.
The San Diego band XFYA has produced what apparently is the world’s first music video shot entirely on a camera phone (right). Entitled Haber Get Down from the band’s upcoming album Late Night at Denny’s, the video is of the greatest quality,…
We’re hearing from executives at Knight Ridder newspapers that once Knight Ridder Digital has finished implementing consumer registration at their Web sites, KRD next plans to charge for site access. The newspaper executives we’ve spoken with say this is what they are…
“If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.” — Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903) “All faults may be forgiven of him who has…
“I prefer visions of the future to the entire history of the past.”— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana (1863-1952)
In my ClickZ.com column 11 months ago, I wrote: At the center of any market is the price mechanism competition creates. There’s always some difference between buyers’ and sellers’ desired prices. In a functioning market that difference is minimal, or at least…
“It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and communications facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and…
EditorandPublisher.com features an article headlined Tony Ridder Still Having Fun. We’ll presume that Rupert Murdoch, the Cox family, and the Newhouse brothers are also having fun.* The real question is whether their employees are enjoying themselves, too. * We should note that…
If you are an American who has submitted your e-mail address to a ‘National Do Not E-mail Registry’ that promises to reduce the amount of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) you receive, then you may be the victim of a scam, said the…
Speaking of advertising (see below), the marketing chief of one of the largest consumer products companies in the world today told the Advertising Agency Association of America’s annual conference that: “All marketing should be permission marketing,” he said. “When we think of…
Less isn’t more. Forcing people to register to read newspaper Web sites that simply shovel online generic content from printed editions will only diminish the number of people who will use those sites in an era when diminishing readership should be the…
Yes, the Newspaper Association of America setup a group weblog for attendees of its Connections online publishing conference and none of them used it. So what? Did anyone really expect it to be used? Last November, a group weblog that the Online…
When publishers wants more data about online consumers but many consumers don’t want to disclose data, a technological arms race results. Now that many online publications are requiring that consumers register before reading, it shouldn’t be surprising that some online consumers are…
We’re receiving a relatively large amount of Web traffic from the University of Missouri this month, most of it visiting an article we wrote for the November 2001 edition of IDEAS magazine (the journal of the International Newspaper Marketing Association).The subject of…
News Site(source: Nielsen//Netratings) Unique Audience (000) Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss) CNN 19,970 0:32:17 MSNBC 19,629 0:18:10 Yahoo! News 18,134 0:27:30 AOL News 15,027 0:40:09 Gannett 9,685 0:13:24 NYTimes.com 9,549 0:37:21 Knight Ridder Digital 8,171 0:13:29 IBS 8,124 0:13:34 Tribune Newspapers 7,755 0:14:54…
Next week in London, Anne Ridyard (top left), the associate publisher at IDG magazines in the UK, and Richard Withey (right), global director of interactive media for Independent News & Media Plc, and managing director of Independent Digital (UK) Limited, will give…
eMarketer today has a good, short article about which countries have the highest percentages of their adult populations online.
We’re big fans of Jim Chisholm who is the strategy advisor to the World Association of Newspapers and the director of its Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project. But only today did we discover online his presentation (1.5-megabyte PowerPoint download) to…
In today’s Internet Advertising Report, Rebecca Lieb tells of how AOL’s sales staff tape recorded the amazing tirades of their now departed boss Lisa Brown because Brown would later deny making such tirades. Lieb reports: In them, she repeatedly launches into obscenity-laced…
Are keywords trademarkable? Add another case to that fray. The 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals has reinstated Playboy Enterprise‘s lawsuit against America Online’s Netscape subsidiary. The lawsuit, first brought in 1999, claims that Netscape infringed and diluted Playboy’s trademark…
On the front page of The New York Times (registration site) today, there is an excellent report about how average people in China are beginning to use the Internet as a means to demand — and sometimes get — justice from their…