Google Wave and news
Posted on 01. Jun, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
From Jeff Jarvis, via Buzzmachine.
Never underestimate Google. That should have been my 41st WWGD? rule. Just as I was thinking they were behind the curve on the live web – and argued they should buy Twitter – Google attacked it from the left flank with Wave.
In Wave, I see more than a new generation of email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware. Because it can feed blog and web pages and Twitter, I see a new way to create content, collaborative and live. I see a new way to make news.
Imagine a team of reporters – together with witnesses on the scene – able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address – a permalink for the story – that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.
Here, I speculated about the topic becoming the new atomic unit of news, supplanting the article with wikis that contained a snapshot of what we know now, blogs that treat news as the process it is, links (do what you do best, link to the rest), discussion, and media of all types, some even live (Twitter, Qik.com). Marissa Mayer also gave journalists advice on the new form of news, telling them they needed to maintain updates under a permalink for the story so it could be searched and found.
Wave takes this to the next level. It combines the notions of a process as people add and subtract and update; it has the benefit of a wiki – a snapshot of current knowledge; it can be live; it can feed a blog page with the latest; it can feed Twitter with updates; it is itself the collaborative tool that lets participants question each other.
Wave isn’t just the email we’d invent if email were invented today, as was Google’s goal. Wave is what news can be if we invent it today, as we must.
Wave is the new news.
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Forcing Your Own Paper Out of Business
Posted on 01. Jun, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
From Jeff Jarvis, via Buzzmachine.
Drivers at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune are threatening a strike.
I could see a few interesting unintended consequences for the drivers: (A) This forces the paper out of business. They lose their jobs. (B) This forces the paper to go online only and the company takes advantage of bankruptcy to kill contracts with not only drivers but also pressmen and everyone except journalists needed for online (not just fewer of the print staff but new jobs: blogging reporters and community organizers) and sales (not just the sales people you used to have, but people who can support networks of community sales). I’d also try to get out of my leases and every other cost burden and come out of the strike and bankruptcy as a newer and smaller but now profitable new kind of news organization.
If I were a manager at the Strib and had Plan B ready, I’d darned near hope the Teamsters go out on strike. Buh-bye now. Hello future.
: LATER: I just spoke with a media attorney to make sure I wasn’t nuts. It also occurs to me that The New York Times Company should force the Boston Globe – assuming they were smart enough to set it up as a separate entity – into bankruptcy. It’s losing $85 million a year. They saved only $20 with recent concessions. It could bring The New York Times down. Time for radical surgery.
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Happy Birthday, Baristanet
Posted on 01. Jun, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
From Jeff Jarvis, via Buzzmachine.
Baristanet, the queen of hyperlocal blogs, is five years old today.
I remember well the NJ.com Meetup we held back then to try to encourage locals to blog on our site. I learned an important lesson there. Debbie Galant, the original Barista, said starting a town blog was a good idea but she sure as hell wasn’t going to do it for my site. She wanted to own and build her own site and value and brand.
And she did. Bariastanet is a phenomenon. It has not just survived but succeeded. It is profitable. It is expanding, adding another blog to its stable recently. It has developed a strong reputation inside Montclair and outside. Congratulations to Deb and Liz and company for that. They have inspired others to start hyperlocal blogs not only across the country but in their own backyard, as The New York Times creates The Local and AOL president Tim Armstrong funds Patch in the nabe. Five years ago, they knew they were onto something and they’re being proved right.
I think the next frontier will be creating networks across blogs of geography and interest so they can reach critical mass to sell to larger advertisers and to share content and effort and perhaps cost. I believe blogs such as this will be a – not the but a – building block in the new ecosystem of news that will begin to replace in fits and starts failing newspapers. (In that ecosystem, I think there will also be newfangled news organizations that help organize the news in this diverse network.) I also hope that we’ll find many new ways for the Baristanets of the world to serve local businesses and make more money so they can sustain their work.
Great work, Baristas.
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Tick, Tick, Tick
Posted on 01. Jun, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
From Jeff Jarvis, via Buzzmachine.
The Observer’s John Koblin reports that the NY Times is considering putting a meter on usage of its site and charging once you’ve read too much.
Incredible.
They’ve spent the last 15 years trying to get people to stay longer and read more on their site and now they’re going to penalize their best customers? Readers’ inner dialogue is not hard to imagine: ‘Uh-oh, should I read that next story – and see that ad and maybe find something worth linking to and bring in other readers? It might start costing me. I’d better conserve my Times characters; they’re adding up; already read 20,000 of them. I think it’s time to go elsewhere now.’
This emotional rush to charging for charging’s sake is not only getting dumb and dumber but it’s also going to be destructive.
I fear The Times has been lunching with cable people. They should instead take Tom Evslin out for drinks. I’ve told his story here and in my book. Tom is the unsung hero of the internet who, when he ran AT&T Worldnet, was the first major ISP to go to flat-rate pricing of $19.95 a month for all you can browse. Tom took the clock off the internet. What happened when he did? We no longer worried about that tick, tick, tick. Usage exploded. The internet became part of our lives. Now The Times is thinking about turning the clock back on? If it does, that clock is ticking down its own lifespan.
Koblin says The Times is also considering creating some sort of club: give money (here’s the tin cup) and get a tote bag and a chance to watch an editorial meeting. (Having sat through too many editorial meetings elsewhere in my day, I’d say you’d have to pay me to sit in any more.)
The rush to charging is also getting sadder and sadder. It’s like watching a grandmother who has run out of money and so, to afford the drugs she needs to save her life, is looking around the attic for any heirloom she can sell on the corner.
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News Innovation Camp in Portland – Entrepreneurs Away!!
Posted on 26. Mar, 2009 by David Cohn.
It has been some time since we’ve posted at NewsInnovation. This isn’t for lack of want – simple because we are are all busy.
- Jeff has a book out.
- David is working furiously on Spot.Us.
- CUNY continues to expand as a J-school.
It appears that 2009 is turning into a watershed year for newspapers. Since the Atlantic Magazine article “End Times” profiling the NY Times’ financial woes we have seen the Rocky Mountain News close, the Seattle PI go online only, the SF Chronicle threatened with closure (and still on shaky ground) among other things.
So why the post? Not to repeat all this news – which you undoubabtly already know. It is to repeat the notion that journalism has a future beyond newspapers. We aren’t sure what it looks like – but there is the potential that it is networked, contains nodes of collaboration and can be built by former newspaper professionals.
From Daniel Bachhuber and the Portland News Innovation camp.
News Innovation in Portland: Interview with Steve Woodward from Daniel Bachhuber on Vimeo.
I sat down with Steve Woodward this evening (@oregoniansteve on Twitter) at Bailey’s Taproom in Portland to discuss a whole myriad of topics, including the supposed “death of journalism,” how and why the internet is disrupting other industries, and why now is a great time to be alive. In the interview I did at the end of our conversation, I ask him what he thinks journalism is and about the project he’s currently working on, a mashup between InfoLiberator and OpenMicroBlogging. Their goal is to build a “Costco for data,” aggregating local information from a number of sources and then feeding it to you based on keywords, location, and other meta criteria.
Is this THE ANSWER – probably not. But it is an example. We can all be examples.
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Interview – Bill Mitchell from Poynter
Posted on 27. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
Bill Mitchell has been at the Poynter Institute for ten years. As one of the premier institutions of traditional journalism I’m curious what the internal happenings are there.
How does an organization that trains professional journalists handle on one hand the radical disintegration of the professionalized class and on the other hand embrace the larger swing of online, openness, etc.
I think the semi-recent makover of their site late last year was a start. I’m also intrigued by Bill’s new blog that covers the business side of things.
Listen in…
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Ten Point Plan to (Re)Building a Successful Local Media Salesforce
Posted on 26. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
A guest post written by Dave Chase as a follow up to his “Five Fatal Flaws that are Killing Local Internet Plays.”
For publishers in the local Internet media marketplace, what can be learned from the dotcom bust that can be applied today? In an earlier piece, Five Fatal Flaws that are killing local Internet plays, I laid out the common flaws in local media. As a publisher, it helps to apply lessons from the last downturn that have already been applied with success in today’s environment with other digital media sellers. At the end of this, you can complete a Sales Readiness Scorecard to get an assessment of your sales process and whether your Sales organization is adequately applying the aforementioned lessons learned.
Those of us “old-timers” who were in the business in the aftermath of the dotcom bust remember it was a trying time, especially for emerging businesses whether they were new lines of business for traditional companies or a startup. With startups, it was a matter of life and death to get sales acquisition costs as low as possible. For established companies, it was the difference between mere survival and using the downturn to gain competitive advantage. Nationally, interactive media is much more proven as a business model today than it was earlier this decade. However, on a local basis, it is still new for many prospective customers of local Internet media so plenty of challenges remain.
On a bright note, companies such as Procter & Gamble have proven time and again that companies can gain market share in a recession. Pop quiz: What do GE, Disney, HP, and Microsoft all have in common? They were all startups that got off the ground during steep declines in the U.S. economy. GE started during the panic of 1873, Disney started during the recession of 1923-24, HP began during the tail end of the Great Depression, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft during the recession of 1975. During those same periods, well-established companies shut their doors and startups never got off the ground. On a less grand scale, my consulting firm emerged in the shadow of the dotcom bust with one simple mission — help emerging businesses gain revenue traction while minimizing cash burn which was particularly apropos in those lean times. The lesson from all of these examples is that forced discipline in a downturn prepares one to thrive after things turn around.
How can you ensure that your business is a success story like HP, Disney, and Microsoft? Naturally, having a some cash reserves and a compelling product are absolutes. However, many digital media companies had both of those and didn’t thrive in the aftermath of the dotcom bust otherwise known as the Digital Nuclear Winter. When access to capital is tight, the cheapest form of capital is sales revenue, thus it’s critical to ensure your end-to-end sales and marketing process is operating with maximum efficiency. In addition to the issues outlined in the “Five Fatal Flaws” post, here’s a list of problems and bad management practices that we frequently encounter when working with emerging businesses:
- Planning and execution in the Sales and Marketing departments are dramatically out of sync.
- Too often, companies have significant deficiencies in their end-to-end sales process which decreases the potential yield from their sales and marketing investments. Such process defects often result in wasted precious resources; lead generations methods are too expensive and sales reps are hired to qualify leads when they should be with customers selling.
- Lack of sales and marketing focus on the most profitable “lifetime” customers.
- Superior products are being disqualified as “too risky” due to poor confidence building with the right prospects.
- Real customer input and market trends are not being communicated or addressed by the company.
- Chief executives have poor visibility into the sales pipeline and don’t understand how to optimize the end-to-end process for increased revenues.
It’s worth noting that consumers and businesses don’t completely stop spending money during a recession, and that truth runs back through the Great Depression as well. They just want better deals. To enable “deals” on your products, it is vital that your sales process is efficient so that the “deal” can be structured, delivered and profitable. Even before this downturn, there has been price pressure for quite awhile. A byproduct of the price pressure is that traditional lead generation methods and expensive shoe-leather sales people aren’t penciling out the way they once did. In their place, web-driven leads coupled with much heavier use of telesales resources and better sales and marketing processes are enabling businesses to operate with fewer costs while generating strong revenue on the backs of emerging products. We’ve developed what we affectionately call “Sales in a Box” that captures the myriad lessons learned, best practices and templates we’ve gathered over the last 10 years optimizing sales organizations that I’ve highlighted below.
Unfortunately, very few senior executives have experience in these telesales-heavy models. To their surprise, businesses often learn that telesales models will drive deals well into six figures. The following 10 elements are what publishers need to put in place to run sales efficiently:
- Understand your customers and the market landscape: Take a step back and do qualitative research in your market to talk with customers and non-customers alike. The focus is understanding their underlying needs as opposed to whether they like your Product A or Product B. This is also an opportunity to understand your competition.
- Develop a H.O.T. (High Odds Target) Opportunity Profile that defines your most profitable lifetime value customers. Profile elements can include vertical markets and sub-segments, psychographic elements (such as risk aversion) and specific company and contact criteria. This will drive how you articulate your value proposition.
- Set up the optimal Sales Organization Model that determines whether it is optimal to organize around industries, geographies, stage of the sales process (i.e., lead gen reps, acquisition reps, development reps and retention reps).
- Tightly define each step of the sales process with the corresponding likelihood of closing the deal. Here’s an example of the stages in the sales pipeline — notice that each should have a corresponding set of questions answered or work completed to promote them to the next stage of the pipeline:
- Lead qualify
- Lead promoted to opportunity
- Develop solution
- Remove roadblocks
- Negotiation
- Ask for the order
- Present end close
- Deal closed
- Sell case study
- Optimize lead generation efforts by starting with your own in-house list. We find these lists are surprisingly under-utilized and can rapidly become stale if there isn’t a “drip-irrigation” program (i.e., regular email communications that provide valuable information to your marketplace) for staying in contact with these prospects. This is set against a backdrop of understanding the attributes of the highest value Lifetime Customers.
- As you might imagine, having a CRM system like Salesforce.com is vital to properly manage all of the moving parts. Used properly, it’s a vital tool for the reps and management alike. Proper use of a CRM tool is something an entire book can be written about. In short, it’s vital that the tool is customized to map to your sales process.
- Organizational assessment and building ensures that all of the steps above aren’t in vein. It’s extremely common to find Farming Hunters and Hunting Farmers. In other words, there’s a mismatch of talents. Having the proper job descriptions and corresponding compensation models and success metrics is paramount.
- Since it is likely that you’ll have to bring on new talent, having a structured hiring and on-boarding process greatly increases the likelihood of success. This includes a training regimen that starts from Day One until the individual leaves the organization. As I like to say “it’s a journey, not a destination”. This includes everything from group training to brownbag sessions to individual role playing.
- Another “it’s a journey, not a destination” item is refinement of call and email scripts. This is an ever-evolving landscape and media sales and marketing teams need to think like a direct mail expert. That is, they are constantly doing A/B testing to determine what works best.
- We are big believers in establishing what is referred to as a “Rhythm of the Business”. This takes into account both external and internal dynamics. Customers have seasonal cycles in their business when they are more or less receptive to being contacted. Internally, we also establish weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual processes that establish a natural rhythm
There’s much more to it but the companies taking the ten steps outlined (above) have consistently reduced their cost of customer acquisition by 50 percent or more. In many cases, we work with organizations that have an expensive field-heavy sales model that will transition to a hybrid field-inside sales model or even pure telesales models. Over the course of several months, their sales process can be overhauled while seeing the benefits just a couple months into it. For publishers, not only can they expand their customer base, but it also means selling a higher percentage of inventory at their premium CPM levels as opposed to putting that inventory into lower CPM ad networks and exchanges. One of the lessons of the last Nuclear Winter was that those who acted decisively were able to thrive while those who didn’t contracted or shuttered their doors.
History has shown that recessions are a great time to launch new products or gain market advantage for existing products. In fact, 16 of the 30 companies whose stocks make up the Dow started during recessions. Smart companies can thrive even during steep declines if they have the right strategy in place. Better yet, they slingshot out of the recession when it is over as they are well-positioned for long-term success.
Fill out this Sale Readiness Scorecard if you’d like to find out how ready your sales organization is to capitalize on the opportunity.
Dave Chase is a partner at Altus Alliance, a Seattle-based venture consulting firm, Publisher of SunValleyOnline.com and co-founder of NextNewsNet. Altus has worked with more than 60 companies to help improve their sales and marketing efforts. Chase may be reached at [email protected].
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Coeds Create CoPress – Innovation from the Ground Up
Posted on 22. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
If you are ever worried about the fate of our the journalism industry take a moment to check out and appreciate CoPress – building a better ecosystem for college publications.
This is a fantastic case of young journalists scratching their own itch. The group recently formed their own nonprofit and are discussing what they need to do to get to the next step.
Next step? They are already getting college publications off College Publisher and onto WordPress. They are being the change they want to see in the world. They are already making waves, their next step is simply iteration and scaling.
Meet Greg Linch one of the forces behind CoPress who gives more details.
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Aggregation is Creation – Adrian Holovaty
Posted on 21. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
Last week I had the unique pleasure of spending some time at the Poynter Institute to discuss the future of journalism.
I also had the chance to catch up with Adrian Holovaty who, for many, needs no introduction. He is most known for pioneering Django, a model/view/controller framework to deploy web applications and then using that framework to create EveryBlock.com – a news feed for your block.
I asked Adrian only two questions. First – to explain a little known aspect of EveryBlock whereby the editors help explain some of the obscure aspects of city infrastructure. My take away: If you still have any doubt that aggregation is creation or that filtering is an editorial service that journalists can hone and use to make money….. you are missing a VERY lucrative bus.
The second was Adrian’s advice to a young journalist/programmer. Scratch your own itch.
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News Innovation – Barcamp!!!!
Posted on 12. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
I have been meaning to get in touch with Jason Kristufek (a participant in the first Networked Journalism Summit) since he first proposed the idea of a journalism barcamp late last year. I was an instant fan of his proposal and I’m tickled pink that it appears to be catching on.
I went to my first barcamp in October of 2006 and it changed the way I thought about in person collaboration. My friend Noel Hidalgo (who I met at that barcamp) and I eventually talked about an open space for journalism we called CopyCamp. The idea never took off for us, but for Jason it appears to have reached a groundswell. And the timing couldn’t be more right.
For those who aren’t familiar with Barcamps: Think open source conference. The agenda for the day is determined that morning by those who are participating (notice I didn’t say “attending”). This setup may sound chaotic – but using tested methods these “unconferneces” are usually incredibly positive and productive.
The discussion below does assume a bit of knowledge about Barcamps in general. If you aren’t already familiar – check out Barcamp.org co-founded by brillant web-thinker Chris Messina. Better yet – just attend one! This is not a club – anyone can attend, from a young cub-reporter to the CEO of a the NY Times. In a Barcamp setting – both these indvidiuals have something to contribute and gain.
p.s. It’ll be tough – but I may try and sneak up to Portland for the January 24th News Innovation Barcamp. That’s a six-hour drive from SF, but it would be great to meet like-minded folks up north.
