10:45AM Outside.in's Mark Josephson Gets Hyperlocal
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
“You can’t put a reporter on a pothole in the current market,” says Mark Josephson. But Outside.in is there.
Consumer demand is not being met because coverage stops on the zip code level. The “new local” has to get to the personal experience: The house, the school, the church, and that pesky pothole that needs to be fixed on your street.
Now that anyone can become a local reporter on the web, coverage has become both personal and portable. Thank God for Google maps. Although Josephson is big on the new GeoTag. Get ths: the GeoTag is attached to a story, so you get the story, the location and every other location that matters to you.
Now news not only goes with you, in some ways, the stories become a part of you. And it’s free.
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10:39AM – A Moment with Charlie Sennot
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
GlobalPost.com is taking the stringer model and applying it to international reporting. Thank God.
“We think that the American public is underserved by international news,” said Charlie Sennot. “We need an American voice in international news.”
Sennot wants to make GlobalPost the go-to site for info-starved Americans. The question is how to pay for it.
Right now, GlobalPost has a three-tiered revenue model. And, one segment depends upon bringing top-performers into a premium channel. Time will tell.
In the meantime, check out the Reporter’s Notebook on every country page and get unfiltered content that usually wouldn’t end up on CNN.
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10:31AM – Everybody Hates Johnathan Rosenblum, But That's Just Fine for Him
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
Don’t blame Johnathan Rosenblum for newsroom cuts. Granted, some folks at old-fashioned news organizations may have been put out to pasture, but he’s done more good for news and news organizations than most think.
“You don’t need sound men. You don’t need cameramen. And any 9-year-old kin can edit broadcast-quality video,” he says. What Rosenblum has done is trained journalists so that they can expand on their own work in different media.
What’s even better: Some newspapers, such as the Star-Ledger, are still around, just in a different form.
What’s a tv guy doing in a newsroom? It sounds like he’s saving them. The question is whether or not the news organizations are ready to listen.
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10:23AM IDG's David Cohn Takes the Stage with a Little Bit of Hope!
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
Cohn and IDG made the split for one of their brands.
“Print was sucking the energy out of the organization,” Cohn said. “But in 12 months, Infoworld became profitable.”
The people working at Infoworld didn’t do too badly either. Now they’re “aggressively innovative,” and thinking of how the audience engages with content rather than just providing content.
It’s worked beautifully. But even the digital world is transitory.
Cohn suggests that the future is in phones.
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10:16AM – Did Craigslist Destroy Newspapers?
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
Newspapers don’t have a news problem: They have a marketing and distribution problem.
Purcell says that they’ve been gouging readers for decades. And now, when faced with a cheaper and more direct tool like Craigslist, they’re bailing.
Newspapers have split off from a marketing-centric model or “disaggregate.”
So, what are we hearing:
Spin off local news and editing
Make cuts in distribution
Make cuts in printing
Focus on the new. Focus on digital offerings.
The notion of the package is gone. Give it up.
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10:09AM – Introducing Dave Morgan
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
McClatchy CEO, Gary Pruitt, says that the current decline in newspaper revenue is “cyclical.” And that’s not true at all.
Big news organizations made the sausage pretty well. They were well-organized and successful: That’s why they have not been able to innovate.
William Dean Singleton, former president and chief executive of Consolidated Newspapers rationalized his sale of the Houston Post: “The moment we start declining, it’s a death model.”
He got out. But, does this mean that the major news organizations shoud follow?
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10:05AM – Work Smarter, Not Harder
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
CEOs of online news services want to raise revenues on their offerings. But, in order to get to the same levels as most major news organizations they’ve got to grow at 30 percent every 10 years.
Not going to happen.
Instead, invest in your premium content. Invest in your people. And focus on profit not revenue.
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10:00AM – Moving from Monopoly to Network
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
There’s three characteristics of a network: Clarity of purpose, the ability to fulfill a need and, of course, how to be cost effective.
Percell’s monopoly model includes working stiffs who repurpose stories. But, in a network, you eliminate the repurposing class.
They’re dinosaurs.
Outsourcing to, in the case of Telegraph.co.uk, ITN, Google, Digg and Brightcove. New players bring new blood into a newsroom. And they’re going to care more than the guy who shows up from 9-5 to repurpose stories.
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9:56AM – New Structures for News Innovation
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
Ed Percell, editor of Telegraph.co.uk, has taken the stage, championing the “Do what you do best and outsource the rest” model.
Percell and Telegraph.co.uk made the decision to focus on content alone some time ago. The rest they left up to Google. Sounds great, but there’s a bigger issue behind this philosophy, such as where to put your money in the midst of a recession.
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9:53AM – "What Would Google Do?"
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Carl Winfield.
Jarvis: We’ve got to think “distributive.”
Meaning that we have to innovate. Now, there are a lot of very pertinent questions to figure out first, such as, “What kind of company are we?”
Yahoo thought it was a communications company. It wasn’t and it paid the price. Of course, this also means opening ourselves up to mistakes and abandoning the “perfection” we sought in the old model.
