There are days when I don’t post a blog entry or otherwise update my site because I’m too immersed in housekeeping chores.
Those chores fall into two categories: scouring the Web for more articles, data and commentary that are the lifeblood of what goes into this site, and then sorting through and filing all of those articles, data and commentary to make sure they’re accessible when I get back to writing.
I just did a check of my resource data: I’ve got over 3,400 files in 180 folders comprising over a gigabyte of data. Please forgive me if I sometimes fall behind.
One article that I uncovered this evening was from a very interesting (and free) annual report issued by the Deloitte consultancy, called “Media Predictions: TMT Trends 2008” (“TMT” stands for Technology, Media and Telecommunications). I’ve got versions of this report going back to 2006; I’m not certain if that was the year when the report was first issued.
The 2008 version covers a range of topics, from music to offshoring to piracy issues. What caught my attention tonight was the section covering online advertising. It starts off with a brief history of the growth of online advertising, but halfway through the article comes the showstopper: a key barrier to the continued ascendancy of online advertising “may be growing antipathy to the online advertisement itself. One 2007 survey of US consumers found that over three-quarters of respondents considered Internet advertisements more intrusive than those in print. Nearly two-thirds claimed that they paid more attention to print advertising than to that on the Web. Over a quarter stated that they would pay for advertisement-free online content.”
That data, we learn from the footnotes, derives from a “Survey of 2200 US consumers undertaken in 2007, commissioned by Deloitte Development LLC.”
Over the last month we’ve seen that the voracious ongoing interest focused by all sectors of the Internet marketplace is based on the assumption that online advertising is the key factor (if not the only factor) that will determine the level of success of the most successful websites in the years to come (c.f. Microsoft vs. Yahoo).
Over the last few months I’ve been asking friends and colleagues whether or not they pay attention to ads on the Web, and/or click through to them. Without exception their response is that they’ve trained themselves not to even see the ads, be they banner ads or Google-style ads. They skim the content; the ads are just noise.
Obviously Google’s recent financial results indicate that my friends and colleagues may currently not be representative of the public at large. But I wonder how long it will take the general public to see Web ads as adding noise rather than value.
An article appeared on May 5th in the New York Times called “Publisher Tested the Waters Online, Then Dove In.” In glowing terms, it recounts the apparently amazing transformation of media giant IDG from primarily a print-based magazine publisher to an online publisher.
The article moved quickly onto the Times’ most-read and most-blogged list (today it’s still #5 on the most-blogged list), and I figured that I’d just let that one go, particularly as my blog has been focusing quite a bit on magazines for the last week.
But I couldn’t resist getting a comment on the record, and so posted a remark on Jeff Jarvis’ excellent Buzz Machine blog. I wrote:
“I read this article with some incredulity. It reads more like a corporate brochure than a carefully-researched piece of journalism. First of all, IDG is privately held, so there’s no way to check into what’s been happening to the overall sales and profitability of the company in its transition to digital.
“Mr. McGovern states ‘The excellent thing, and good news, for publishers is that there is life after print — in fact, a better life after print,’ and the major evidence offered is that ‘today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.’
“OK on that…but what about before the dotcom bust? I’d be surprised if the profitability of the publication was not significantly higher.
“I applaud IDG on its bold moves, but wonder if Mr. McGovern doesn’t sometimes wish for the good old days before the Web.”
I’d have let it go at that if I’d not today stumbled upon an entry on Rex Hammock’s also excellent rexblog.com. The blog entry, titled, “Print is not a burden. Useless drivel is the burden. So ignore this post,” is for me the final word on the affair, although it’s really more about content than the IDG story, per se.
Just one quote: “Unfortunately, saying “print is a burden” implies that there are other options out there that are not burdens. Frankly, the web is a burden. Traveling to events IDG puts on is a burden. Trying to synch my phone and computer is a burden.…If you publish a beautiful magazine with articles that really matter to me — that instruct, inform or celebrate something I feel strongly about, it is no burden on me. If you help me get to the information and insight I need to live a fuller life or conduct business in a more flexible and productive way, your blogging and tweeting and bookmarking does not burden me. Useless, redundant, meaningless, re-shuffled drivel is the burden. It can be delivered via print or on a weblog or a mobile device. Crap is a burden no matter what the medium used to deliver it.”
A powerful reminder that the medium is not necessarily the message.
This blog entry complements my last entry on magazines (May 2nd). The information came to me by a circuitous route.
Bob Sacks, aka “BoSacks” “a veteran of the printing/publishing industry since 1970” (primarily the magazine industry), issues an iconoclastic email newsletter, and does so thrice daily (!), most of which focuses on the magazine industry, some of which reaches out to the broader publishing business. (You can subscribe and read back issues here.)
In his first issue today he quotes an entry by Michael Truro from his “[in plain sight]” blog. That entry, also posted today, says in part:
“While I hate to sound like chicken little – and though the print is dead meme is way overplayed – I had to post this quote from Steve Frye [a publishing and printing industry consultant]. In a sidebar in the current issue of Publishing Executive titled “The State of the Printing Industry,” Frye drops this bomb:
“‘I think we need to change our philosophy of what a magazine is. We are no longer a cheap means of dispensing information, and that’s what we were until the Internet came along. Now we are an inefficient and expensive means of distributing information.…We need to reinvent ourselves as a luxury item that people want and are willing to pay for. And until we change our own image of who we are, we’re going to find out that our vendors are going to change it for us. Because, right now, postage is a premium. Paper is a premium. Soon printing will be a premium. How long can we buy at a premium and sell at a discount? We can’t.’”
Frye’s is the strongest statement I’ve yet encountered on the future of magazines. I’m not sure I agree – it doesn’t really matter if I do. I think it’s a well-thought-out comment, worthy of consideration and debate.
I somehow missed this interesting development last October, but it’s well worth getting it on the record here.
The annual American Magazine Conference was held October 28-30, 2007. As stated on the Magazine Publishers Association (MPA) site promoting the conference:
“Our theme this year is ‘The MagaBrand Revolution: How Media Brands are Finding Success on the Printed Page—And Beyond.’ What is a MagaBrand? It’s a magazine that’s found a way to extend the power of its brand beyond the printed periodical—into realms like ‘old’ media (books, newsstand specials, television, radio); ‘new’ media (podcasts, webcasts, cellcasts, e-newsletters); even non-media (nightclubs, restaurants, tour operations, fashion lines, retail products, conventions, big-cause crusades, hotels and casinos).
“The MagaBrand Revolution will detail how magazines can—and must—expand their brands into all corners of the target audience’s consciousness, and how your magazine will live or die on the inventiveness and daring you bring to your brand. From bricks and mortar to burgeoning new technologies, you’ll learn what works (and what doesn’t) in the new media environment.”
Jason Fell, in a February 2008 Folio blog called “Print No Longer ‘Heart and Soul’ of Magazine Brands,” adds a commentary to the topic. “Here’s an idea that has been kicked around ad nauseum (see: ‘MagaBrands,’ Dave Zinczenko et al.) but perhaps never expressed so bluntly. According to Computerworld and Infoworld editorial director Don Tenant, the print magazine no longer should be the “heart and soul” of a brand. Instead, as his team did at IDG, publishers should think of their brand as an online media company with ancillary print and event products,” Fell wrote.
“‘Advertising is shifting from print to online in droves. So, what do you do?’ Tenant said this morning during a session at the FOLIO: Publishing Summit. ‘Content should be going online first. Our strategy is to think of print as being a compilation of the content online.’
“Like a growing number of companies, Tenant’s group merged its print and online editorial teams four months ago. On the surface, at least, this seems to be an easy, efficient content management strategy.
“‘I can’t tell you how much this was a morale boost for everyone,’ he said. ‘ We should have had a plan in place all along to unite the two teams.’” End of blog entry.
While Mr. Fell may think the idea has been kicked around ad nauseum, I’d argue that while getting kicked around, the concept has failed to be put into practice by most print publishers (book publishers being the #1 offender, followed by newspaper and then magazine publishers).
The time to stop kicking and start acting is overdue.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little weary of all the Amazon-generated hype about the Kindle, its proprietary eBook reader (described by Amazon as a “revolutionary wireless reading device [emphasis mine]). We’re told incessantly how “visionary,” “exceptional,” and, yes, “revolutionary” this little device is, but we’re not told why (with regard to features that differentiate it meaningfully from its nine competitors). The Amazon site states: “Revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper.” But all of its competitors use ePaper.
We’re told that it sold out 5-½ hours after release, but have never been told how many units had been produced. And now, when you go to Amazon’s home page, you’re greeted not by the usual smorgasbord of new product releases in various genres, but by a somber yet upbeat letter from C.E.O. Bezos himself, advising that this magical Kindle is once more in stock. Hallelujah!
The letter goes on to invite us to read president Bezos’ “just released” (April 14th) annual Letter to Shareholders. He goes on to explain that he doesn’t ordinarily link to this sort of communication from the Amazon home page (I’d hate to think what would happen to Amazon’s sales if he got in the habit of doing so), but, Bezos explains, “this letter is all about the Kindle,” as if that would help us form some sort of logical connection in our minds about the appearance of this missive.
On behalf of my readers, and in the interest of Kindle-lovers everywhere, I clicked on the link and a 5-page PDF file slowly overwhelmed my browser window. The last three pages are the shareholder letter; the first page-and-a-half contain Bezos’ verbose paean to the Kindle.
It takes until page 2, paragraph 2 to get a sense of why the Kindle has turned Bezos into a born again eBooker. Here are his insights:
1. “We change our tools, and then our tools change us.” (A widely-accepted view of the impact of technology.)
2. Writing “changed us dramatically.” (Well, yes…)
3. Gutenberg made books cheaper, and “physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning.” (Amongst many, many other things, Jeff. See Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, available on Amazon at an 11% discount – or for 25 cents less at Barnes and Noble.)
4. “Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too.” (No problem there.)
5. “(Networked tools have) shifted us more toward information snacking (sic), and I would argue toward shorter attention spans.” (I recommend reading Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s famous and prescient 1997 column “How Users Read on the Web,” which begins with the memorable line: “They don’t.” Nielsen continues: “People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.” So is the issue really shorter attention spans, or new techniques for coping with the vastly increased amount of textual information we’re asked to consume each day?)
6. “Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.”
OK, I’ve got it. Without quoting any evidence, Bezos warns that new digital tools are inducing a form of ADD in the public at large. I’ll look into the research for you, Mr. Bezos, and report my findings shortly on this site in the Literacy section. In the meantime please peruse my updated section on eBooks: I am not without bias towards the supposed wonders of eBook technology.
Though the letter is evangelical in tone, Bezos forgets the apocryphal preacher’s advice on a successful sermon: “First, I tell them what I’m going to tell them, then I tell them, then I tell them what I just told them.” Perhaps he was information snacking when he wrote the letter.
Given its stuffy name, The Economist, and its stuffy image as a turgid journal featuring dry analysis of economics and politics, I find this publication a remarkable source of data for many of the entries on this site. Being The Economist it is generally authoritative without being windy. Economist writers (never identified with a byline to an article) are the cream of the crop, and it soon becomes obvious that they combine the right balance of education, knowledge and judgment with well-researched facts and figures to produce timely articles often as short as a page, and sometimes as long as several. (I should mention that they can also surprise the reader with a very dry wit.)
Part of what makes The Economist seem standoffish is the price: the cheapest online-only one-year subscription is $80; print and online jumps the price past $100/year.
Apparently an excellent magazine, one that knows its audience and delivers consistently, can still be a roaring success. The latest figures I can find are for the six months ended September 30, 2007. Circulation increased 11% to over 1.2 million copies (and remember, this is a weekly!). Electronic advertising revenue increased 15%, as monthly users increased 39% (reaching 2.6 million), contributing to a 25% increase in operating profits.
How do you like them apples, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report (each hit recently by troubling circulation and/or financial news)?
Today I stumbled on an online-only article (available to non-subscribers) called “Finding the right picture: Engineers are making progress with the old problem of getting computers to recognize what they are looking at.” In the lede the problem is explained: “To a microprocessor, a photograph of James Bond might as well depict a cat in a tree.” The article goes on to explain recent research underway designed to overcome this challenge.
Why I love The Economist is made clear in part from the accompanying illustration and caption:
Image and caption copyright 2008, The Economist.
I bet you didn’t observe it with a special ceremony at your company (nor, privately, at home), but April 23rd was UNESCO’s annual World Book Day (coinciding with Shakespeare’s birthday). I learned about this on the website of German media giant Bertelsmann. With sales approaching $30 billion annually, it is easily one of the largest publishers in the world (including in the U.S., through its Random House subsidiary).
It seems appropriate that April 23rd is also the day that the press got wind of Bertelsmann’s plan to issue a book version of Wikipedia. According to the New York Times report, the book will be published in September in German only, based on the German version of Wikipedia, with a list price of 19.95 euros. While the online German Wikipedia has nearly three-quarters of a million entries, the book will contain only 20,000 of these, each verified by Bertelsmann’s editors.
Meanwhile, over at another encyclopedia company, Encyclopedia Britannica, a very different kind of announcement was making the rounds this week (although actually first announced on April 13): free access to the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica through a new program called Britannica Webshare.
The Wired Campus blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that “Encyclopaedia Britannica…apparently fears being nudged into irrelevance by the proliferation of free online reference sources…
“Comscore analysis, also reported on TechCrunch, found that '[f]or every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia,' or 3.8 billion v. 21 million page views per month…
“Under a new program entitled Britannica WebShare, the encyclopedia publisher is allowing ‘people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers,’ to read and link to the encyclopedia’s online articles. The company seems to hope that by offering its services free to Web publishers, links to Britannica articles will proliferate across the Internet and will persuade regular Web surfers to cough up $1,400 for the encyclopedia’s 32-volume set, or perhaps $70 for an annual online subscription.”
Hurry: Get your application in here.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 |
Category:
Blogs |
There are perhaps few readers of this blog who also read The New York Review of Books. That would be understandable, as the current issue features reviews of the first volume of a biography of Ezra Pound, then of a 615 page book that examines just the last year of the war in Japan (1944-1945), and also a review of a book called “Ten Tortured Words: How the Founding Fathers Tried to Protect Religion in America...and What’s Happened Since” by author Stephen Mansfield.
The February 14, 2008 issue, still online, has a wonderful feature just called “Blogs”, written by Sarah Mansfield, who confesses in the first sentence of her piece: “Two years ago, I was given a dreadful idea for a book: create an anthology of blogs.” As is often the case in The New York Review of Books, the reviewer covers multiple titles, in this case ten different books concerned with blogs and what they signify.
I’ve never read a more eloquent or revealing article about blogs: where they originated, what they signify, how they impact other media, and where they’re headed.
Her concluding paragraph gives a sense of the tone of the review: “Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ;-)”
A must read!
Friday, April 18, 2008 |
Category:
Blogs |
On April 15th the Wall Street Journal, in its own Buzzwatch blog, offered a report and a background interview on what’s really going on when people read blogs, and what keeps them doing so. (The Wall Street Journal online is offered by subscription only, but the blogs don’t require a subscription, so the URL attached above should work -- I'm having some trouble with it, but it will at least take you nearby.)
This blog was inspired by a learned journal article called “Exploring the Role of the Reader in the Activity of Blogging,” authored by three learned men at the University of California in Irvine, and presented the previous week “at a conference on human factors in computing.”
The intro to the WSJ blog states the author’s proposition on the importance of this research: “The question of what drives people to read blogs is a big one for traditional media losing time with their audiences to the Internet and companies looking to tap the Web for marketing,” author Tom Weber writes. Fair enough, although perhaps not very deep. The three authors of the article offer no more profound an explanation of the significance of their study. “Despite the medium’s interactive nature, most research on blogs focuses on either the blog itself or the blogger, rarely if at all focusing on the reader’s impact. In order to gain a better understanding of the social practice of blogging, we must take into account the role, contributions, and significance of the reader,” they write.
A quick proviso is in order: the study involved only fifteen participants, all under the age of 40, by all accounts a statistically-insignificant sample. At the same time Bill Tomlinson, one of the report’s authors, does not shy away from this question, and defends the decision. “In the early stages of research into a topic,” he states, “it’s often helpful to begin with small qualitative studies such as this one in order to figure out the key issues. Quantitative studies with larger sample sizes are then useful for refining the understanding of these issues and developing statistical analyses of specific phenomena,” he tells Tom Weber. I don’t disagree with the essential argument, but, come on, surely fifteen respondents falls far short of science. Oh well, let it be. What was discovered?
When I read a scientific paper as part of my research for this site, I often just skip to the conclusion, looking for the meat. I leave it to the reader of this blog to see if she or he can find any meat there. The Wall Street Journal interview is more pithy and direct.
The main points:
1. Blog reading is (or can be) habitual, somewhat akin to watching a TV series. However bloggers don’t seem to care if they miss an episode, and just move on to the next entry.
2. Nonetheless, the personal nature of blogs encourages a higher degree of interaction by the reader than does television.
3. The audience for a blog is highly varied (unlike television?), and this has some implications the bloggers should keep in mind.
4. The first comment to the Wall Street Journal blog is from someone named “Nicolas” who runs a site called “Managing IO: Ideas and Trends to Tackle Information Overload.” His site appears to offer both more ideas and better links than the whole WSJ blog and the referenced study.
Let scientists continue to study this thorny subject, perhaps applying a little more rigor than has been found here.
The ever-reliable New Yorker checked in late last month with a long analysis on the fate of the newspaper industry. Entitled “Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper,” author Eric Alterman sounds no more cheerful than the rest of us as to where newspapers are headed. Early in the article he states: “Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.” He continues: “Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have.”
Alterman, notes, as many have, to the changing newspaper readership demographic. He highlights the “ironic injustice…that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.”
At the same time, he also notes that “no Web site spends anything remotely like what the best newspapers do on reporting. Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times’ Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain. And while the Huffington Post shares the benefit of these investments, it shoulders none of the costs.”
And now Alterman’s true thesis begins to emerge, when he writes that “it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know…And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.”
He continues: “In ‘Imagined Communities’ (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: ‘Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.’ It is at least partially through the ‘imagined community’ of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.
Alterman’s conclusion: “Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice. ‘People do awful things to each other,’ the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in ‘Night and Day,’ Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about foreign correspondents. ‘But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.’ Ever since James Franklin’s New England Courant started coming off the presses[in 1721], the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of ‘the dark.’ Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of ‘light’ that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey’s tradition may not wish to see answered.”
Eric Alterman’s view of the role of the daily newspaper is a traditional one, certainly not much in vogue amongst today’s Web enthusiasts. Bloggers are now hailed for providing “the kind of ‘light’ that is necessary to prevent terrible things” and again the Web enthusiasts take great pride in pointing to important stories that were uncovered first in blogs, stories that the conventional news media had overlooked.
Are blogs and news aggregation Web sites truly going to supplant the role filled by newspapers for several centuries? The question may remain unanswered until the last newspaper shuts its doors.
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