Here are my recent appearances last week on Sky and Channel 4 News talking about the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. It was a crazy Friday involving getting across London twice in one evening. Kinda fun though. (Thanks to Paul Walsh for the videos).
On Sky News: http://qik.com/video/14393
On Channel 4: http://qik.com/video/14385
People in the TV business are some of the most creative people you will ever meet. So why is it that the body set up to market the major broadcasters to advertisers (Thinkbox) allows you, via their site, to watch some of the most creative, clever adverts you will ever see… but you can’t embed the ads in a blog post or share them on a MySpace on Facebook profile.
Like, er, duh.
This would be obvious to anyone working in the ‘digital media’ business, but to the TV guys? Computer says no.
When Twitter started out it seemed like a cool new web application to update your ’status’ (what you are up to) for friends and, well, the world in general. Like Facebook status updates, but out on the Wild Web. But when people started having conversations via their Twitter status updates using the “@” symbol (e.g. “@mike Yeah, I thought that”)I was initially quite annoyed. I even direct-messaged some people to tell them to stop it! Go get a chat room! This was not the proper use of Twitter, I told them.
How wrong I was.
It quickly became apparent that this was turning into the best use of Twitter of all. Not for long, winding conversations you might have on instant messaging, but short, to the point wise-cracks between people interspersed with a little status update here, a small observation on life there. Twitter was no longer about ’status’ or ‘what are you doing’. It was about conversation, ‘what are you thinking’, ‘what are we talking about’.
The key difference is that people who say “take this conversation over into IM” don’t get it. IM can’t do what Twitter does. You can’t instant message into “the cloud”. With Twitter you can. You can shout or whisper whatever you want to say out into the ether and anyone online can hear you. And anyone following you, even if you don;t follow them, can reply – then you may well become connected.
Of course, the problem comes when people abuse this. They Twitter constantly. The worst are those who Twitter their status all the time (making tea, reading paper etc). According to one statistics site I saw, I Twitter roughly every 2 hours. Too much for a status update but about right for an ongoing conversation.
Status updates – unless they are funny – now seem irrelevant and boring. Status updates are dead for me. It’s all about conversation now. I’m on Twitter here.
As I was reading the free daily Metro on a train the other day I was daydreaming about a different kind of newspaper but similar in form to the Metro. Instead of giving me a brief run-down of the news which lasted 20 mins, my “New Metro” would have similar stories, but also print lots of URLs so I could go and find out more information. And I don’t mean URLs which pointed to the paper’s web site. I mean real links to both the paper online and other reading. The Guardian’s printed Technology Section is already doing this a lot (using TinyURL.com)and it really helps the experience.
But what my idea about a New Metro also suggested to me was that this, ultimately, would be a newspaper in reverse. Instead of printing stories on paper and having further material to view online, my New Metro would actually be the online product slowed down and freeze-framed for print. Because the chances are I would have seen a few of the stories online already – but I’d still consume plenty more in print because it’s a different medium. I can see a time when a device like the iPhone will just replace most of my currently printed reading, but a ‘freeze-framed’ print version could still offer me more in terms of quick scanning and… well, just a different, more tactile experience. It would probably be a smaller paper and different in terms of story selection, but there would be no reason for print to die out. It would just adapt. (In fact in the early 1990s I wrote about a Guardian project to have an A4 newspaper printed by your home printer, along these lines).
I was reminded of this daydream today as I caught up on the battle currently raging between the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade and the National Union of Journalists (I came to it via MessyMedia). Greenslade argues here and here that the NUJ now stands in the way of journalists taking up their digital tools and running with them. He says the survival of an organised media and journalistic business depends on the Union coming to terms with the fact that newspapers must now invest in online and get journalists to keep the web site updated every day including weekends – you name it. If they don’t then other players who aren’t tied down by lots of rules and regulations will just do it, and win the audience and the advertising.
It seems particularly appropriate to read and blog about this subject now since, in the last week or so I have felt like hell due a heavy cold, but still kept posting to TechCrunch UK, even breaking the odd exclusive and even (horror!) posting on the weekend and at night. If it was that sort of blog I might have uploaded photos and video too. I even went to Barcelona and back this week, using WiFi at the airports and hotel to keep the blog going. I know that is a no-brainer for the average blogger but it’s a world away from the average journalist, who has to wait to submit copy when other people are in the office to edit it.
Maybe I’m odd. Maybe I do it because I am passionate about the subject. Maybe also I could take advantage of the flexibility of a blog to post, especially this last two weeks, when I felt physically up to it, not when I was ‘in the office’. To me, ‘the office’ is when I am online, so the office is the nearest WiFi, regardless of where I am physically. But I am still, at heart, a journalist/blogger/storyteller/whatever who gets a kick out of the scent of a good story. So in that respect the same rules would apply to a journo on a local paper who felt like cracking out a story in the middle of the night rather than waiting for ‘the office’ to open in the morning.
When I wrote for a US-owned magazine (The Industry Standard), the house style on almost any story, for example about a company closing, was like this: “John Smith looked at his watch. As the seconds slowly passed, he knew it was time to step up to the plate and tell the board what was going to happen in the next six months. But something stopped him… yada yada.”
This was totally different to the British style which was basically: “CEO John Smith today told employees they would be out of a job inside 6 months.” Now I notice a great letter to The Washington Post, which basically suggests that in the age of the Internet, mobile phones and a plethora of digital media we now no longer have time to sit down and read what in journalism we call a ‘drop intro’. To quote:
“Newspaper circulation in the United States has been sliding for about 20 years. I have an idea that might help these papers get back on track. If the average paper has about 200 stories and the average reader has about 20 minutes to read it, he can spend only about six seconds on each story. But stories are often written in the meandering style of William Faulkner. If the headline reads, “Bridge Set to Close Down for Repairs” the story might begin with: “Bob Wilson gazed down at his empty coffee cup and listened to the patter of rain falling gently against his window pane.” Then, after reading about two paragraphs of fluff like this, the reader is told to “See BRIDGE, C21, Col. 1″ to learn when the bridge will be closed. We clearly need a newspaper digest that will get to the point more quickly. I’m sure that it would be a huge hit for any publisher smart enough to offer it.”
There’s no doubt that blogs now offer that fast filter, which is perhaps why they took off so well in the US – where readers became tired of the Faulkner style, and have not been so dramatically big in the UK, where…. ahem… the media tends to get to the point a lot faster. As in the The Sun’s “Gotcha”…. I rest my case…
Last May, at the PSFK Conference London 2007 I gave a talk on how media owners are on a race for survival against technology companies that put the power to publish in the hands of the ‘audience.’ Here it is, including my embarrassing stall half way through where I need to go get some water:
Brands buying advertising space inside virtual worlds are free to do so in the UK, since the Advertising Standards Authority state that only ads in the 'public realm' – for example, those placed on a virtual billboard – would fall within its remit. In other words there are basically no restrictions.
I just need to blog this while it’s still in my head. I’m sure others have come to the same conclusion in a more erudite manner, and posted longer pieces. But I’m starting to wonder if the “User Generated Content” revolution, which was supposed to be taking over the world somewhere around about now, may not hit the heights it was predicted to. Why? Because social networking could well take over from where content creation left off. Ok, that is a massive generalisation. Of course that won’t happen for all demographics all of the time. But think about it. Even the biggest bloggers of the last 2 years – Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur etc – are now producing almost as much content and getting possibly more interaction inside social networks than they did out on the wild-web or blogosphere. Of course, I’m referring in large part to the enormous pull of Facebook right now. But I’m also thinking that it’s specifically proprietary social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, which are not open platforms in the way blogs were, that will have this effect. We all have a limited amount of time. If the former Live Journal member or Blogspot Blogger switches to Facebook, then they are going to spend a lot of the time which they used to create content now socially networking (writing on walls, checking mini-feeds, staling people’s statuses etc). I’ll try and add more to this later…
UPDATE: I added more in my comment below.
Newser is a news search engine finessed by human editors. The site has been launched by Patrick Spain, the CEO of Highbeam (cofounder and former CEO of Hoover’s) and journalist Michael Wolff. The mission of the site: “quickly learn more about the most important and most talked about news stories each day, as well as to dig a bit deeper on news topics that interest you.� This is not unlike other sites like Newsvine, Digg, Netscape etc. Editors summarise breaking stories.
Newser looks nice but it is like shoe-horning a portal play onto a web which is increasingly focused on niche and application/function, not on telling me which story is “big� right now. The point is, I already know that. I don’t see this working…
Head of digital for the Guardian Media Group Simon Waldman hits back with both barrels today at John Duncan and his assertion in a previous issue of Press Gazette that online teams have ‘conned’ unsuspecting newspaper boards into making investments in online publishing.
Here are some key quotes from his piece in today’s Press Gazette:
“The current forecasts for growth in the UK market indicate that, on average, digital spending in the UK will grow from a £2bn market to approximately £4bn over the next two years. In other words, there is likely to be some £2bn of new money coming online. But isn’t much of this going to search engines (particularly, Google)? Well, even if 50 per cent of it is, that still leaves £1bn of new money left for us to fight for….”
“…Last month PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast that we will move from 50 per cent of households having broadband this year to 80 per cent by 2011. All the evidence shows that the longer people have a connection, the more time they spend doing things online. So internet use in the UK is set to grow for many years yet…”
Waldman’s conclusion is that while “print has many healthy decades ahead.. those will be about gentle, and sometimes not so gentle, decline.” Waldman has also been blogging recently about whether the Dialy Express will simply close as a result of the change in the media landscape.
The online world, meanwhile, “offers smart media owners potential for growth – in reach, reputation and revenue. That’s not a con. It’s a fact. And it’s time to learn to deal with it.”
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