A week or so ago the Philadelphia Inquirer provided news industry observers the opportunity to beat their breasts and exclaim, “We get it, you don’t!” This is a popular thing to do, but in this case it was a tempest in a teapot.

The much quoted Inquirer memo said in part:

Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our
signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news
features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t
post those stories online until they’re in print. We’ll cooperate with
philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to
accompany our enterprising work. But we’ll make the decision to press
the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up
The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.

[...]

This does not mean that we will put the brakes on the immediate posting
of breaking news that puts us first in a competitive Web marketplace.
On the contrary.

The devil is in the details, of course, and time will tell if the Inquirer goes overboard with this policy, but in holding back non-time sensitive news until print publication the organization is simply making explicit what news organizations everywhere already do. Many commentators saw things differently, but is the Inquirer really being excoriated for waiting 15 minutes, half a day, or even a few days to publish an enterprise type of story that isn’t time sensitive? You have to pick a time to push the publish button and, without time sensitivity, along with the print publication is probably as good as any. Getting that story online about the Rittenhouse Square Renaissance on Saturday at noon is really that much more valuable than Sunday at 7am? Why aren’t these same people wailing about television news organizations waiting to publish video to the Web until after their investigative pieces air?

Again, we’ll see how this is actually implemented, but this gnashing of teeth is more about people falling over themselves to establish their “Web centric” credentials then the identification of a real problem. A Ryan Sholin interview with Chris Krewson of the Inquirer further suggests this is the case.

Meanwhile, Howard Owens has a different take.

More troubling, however, is a point made by Steve Yelvington who focuses on the memo’s instruction to, “cooperate with philly.com, as we do now ….” Doesn’t exactly sound like an integrated organization.

Share this post:

David Brooks has a great op-ed in Today’s New York Times titled, “Lord of the Memes.” It’s ostensibly a guide to pseudo-intellectualism, but hits on what may be the key to media companies’ travails. The money quote:

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American
Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the
content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the
marker of social status.

I think the date of this change is too late, but the idea is right on. There’s no point in complaining about this, mainly because it won’t help; we just need to think about how to use it to our own advantage…

Share this post:

In another sky is falling article in MediaWeek, Anne Gordon, former managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and now with Dubilier & Co., makes the interesting assertion that,

the strategy of large regional papers to serve the whole of their sprawling markets with local news sections has been a bust. Instead, papers should leverage their depth of coverage by, for example, publishing e-newsletters on single topics like business or the arts.

Certainly papers have been cutting out local print sections,but it’s not clear if this is for cost reasons (fewer reporters and fewer pages) or because they don’t seem to be engaging readers. The industry has for years taken as axiomatic the idea that the more local the news the more desired it is by readers. Could this be wrong? For many years a key competitor for the Philadelphia Inquirer was the Journal Register Company, as it surrounded Philadelphia with small local papers offering local news. Today JRC is nearly bankrupt.

It seems covering local news isn’t scalable. If you get really local there often just isn’t enough happening to cover it regularly from the main office, and a full out effort to dig out the news requires a news bureau in each locality. How can you make money that way?

Gordon’s topic focus notion raises an interesting idea. Perhaps the right mix is high profile local (regional and city) news, a local topic focus, and a platform for readers to provide hyper-local context along with aggregating the best of hyper-local information elsewhere on the Web. Instead of spending time thinking about how to produce hyper-local geographically focused content, maybe media companies should think about how to produce topic specific information in areas of high interest to their local and regional communities. Could it be that in the rush to focus on geographic communities they’ve missed the real opportunity offered by communities of interest?

Share this post:

Last Spring the Havas Media Lab published a paper on user generated content. Actually, the firm rejected that term and determined that “consumers aren’t creating content:
they’re creating context for goods.”

First, what connected consumers create isn’t junk elongating an
already Long Tail of content. Rather, from an economic point of view,
user generated context is an entirely different good from content: a
complement. Demand for one amplifies demand for the other. The tail
of content is lengthening – but that supply curve is made up of new
content players like PaidContent and RocketBoom. By conflating the
content and context, we mistakenly assume that what connected
consumers create is inherently worthless –when, in fact, it’s by letting connected consumers contextualize content that tsunamis of new value
can be unlocked (just ask Google).

Second, context isn’t created by users, but collectively, by
markets, networks, and communities.

[...]

Third, context isn’t truly “generated” – a term which implies
something algorithmic, substitutable, mass-produced. Rather, it’s often
deeply culturally specific and socially bound…

Havas goes on to outline how it believes this idea of context affects different industry players:

For content players and publishers, user generated context means
that connected consumers aren’t their competitors – but are vital, essential complementors, who create very real value for them. The
more context there is, the greater demand for their content is likely
to be. That means that it’s vital for content players to explode the
amount of context connected consumers create about them.

This discussion brings to mind some of established media’s old complaint about bloggers – they’re a parasitic medium. Havas’ notion of user generated context shows how the relationship is really symbiotic, not parasitic. Intellectually, at least, I think established media has now largely rejected this idea of “parasitic bloggers.” The difficulty is overcoming emotional reactions and figuring out how to use blogs and other commentary to increase the value of original news stories.

Share this post: