I’ve noticed, as I’m sure you have, whenever a topic of international interest comes up, bloggers, twitterers, people from all over throw their opinions into the matter, share information and follow the topic intently. And then after a matter of days or even hours…nothing. After the initial cause célèbre peters out, we move onto the next shiny object.

Consider the following recent soupes du jour (to borrow another French phrase):

• The Iraq War
• Darfur
• Myanmar
• Mumbai
• South Ossetia

All of these had a tremendous spike in interest and then quickly died out. Why? Do the consequences of each event become less important through the passage of a short time? I’d posit they don’t. What happens, as we know through recent research (read this excellent CJR article for more), is that people reach information fatigue fairly quickly. As such, a river of news may not be the best approach to sustain attention.

In college, I studied American Studies, which is less the study of America, as you’d suspect, and more the study of cultural connectivity. “Connectivity Studies” doesn’t pass the academic naming litmus, I assume. Anyway, nature abhors a vacuum. For example, fog is created by cool air over warm water.  It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere to prove a point about the postmodern relationship between water and air, which can only be inferred from the actual fog event. The environmental conditions become favorable for the creation of fog. Variations in the composition of the air and water would return variations in the resulting fog, thus changing any inference you could make of the fog.  So, creation of the fog (and the variations of fog that could exist) begin to redefine and alter the environment, which in turn redefines how we understand the water and air. We’ll come back to this and more aquatic-themed analogies in a moment.

We can say the same of culture, which is purely defined by the environmental conditions in which it exists at a given moment in time. Something like the recent strikes in Gaza don’t necessarily happen randomly. There’s a complicated history involving knowledge of even more complicated socio-economic issues, more religious/cultural clashes, more geography, etc. Ad infinitum.

News updates about most recent policy decisions and military tactics don’t often enough recount that history. Too often when reports do try to give a back story, it gives insult to the phrase “scratching the surface.” History isn’t news, it’s olds. It’s like watching LOST in the middle of season three; You’d have no sense of place. It is exactly that sort of context that’s needed, what Jay Rosen describes as “explanatory journalism.” (Seriously, stop reading this and go read the CJR piece, if you haven’t yet).

Consider this piece about Salman Rushdie, fatwas, and the West’s undertanding of Muslim culture by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens takes the position that the ayatollah’s fatwa against Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses represents a point in time that helps define the wider cultural view of Islamic extremism we now understand. It carefully examines how one noteworthy piece of news in the literary world affects and was affected by the collapsing situation in Iran and how it relates to the West’s current dealings with Islam.

I’d like to think of news the same way I think of a Google map. Each news item we come across is a pinpoint fully zoomed in. Except we don’t have the best controls to see the relationships between news items. We can’t easily zoom out for a wider view. Explanatory journalism–that is, news items that step back to take a wider survey is a step in the right direction, giving news consumers one more control, allowing us to zoom out, but again, we’re stuck at the level of information provided in that individual explanatory piece. It is unreasonable to expect that one article fully explain every possible connection. I think we can do better. What if we could zoom around the map (metaphorically speaking, not necessarily graphically speaking)? A mind map, if you will, that allows us to start on the fog and zoom into the atomic structure of the air and out again to see how the fog interacts in greater weather patterns would be most useful.

Wikipedia works in a similar way. You can start on a page about fog and end up, through a series of links, on a page about the first World War. Explanatory journalism can only take us so far. There has to be a better solution that expands the reach of news items into other bisecting news items. If that can be accomplished through painfully complex meta-data, indexing algorithms, crowdsourced linking or what, I do not yet know the answer.

That might be the solution to stemming lost interest. When the next story breaks and the majority of people move on, they could keep that sense of place with them. They could understand how the new information relates to the previous information, even if on the surface the two items seem completely unrelated. And that’s how news becomes a bludgeoning device. The important information can wedge itself into the most recent popular information, where appropriate. Someone could easily drift from the latest celebrity rehab gossip to recent medical studies to recent policy.

I’m going to be blunt, so pardon my French (again): Yes, I’m suggesting we may be completely fucking wrong with the entire system of news. Right now, when a story breaks, it breaks like a wave. Over a period of time, it rises in interest and discussion, peaks and then drops down until the next break comes.  We do this over and over again, forcing readers to surf these waves, be they big national stories or be they hyperlocal news breaks, it doesn’t matter. The format is the same: A never ending flow of new information. Nobody questions its validity as a methodology. But it is, in fact, a staple of old media systems.

Traditional media, as I’ve explained before, are beholden to the limitations of their media. They have no sense of time. A newspaper is an individual physical product. Each issue is a stand alone product. Broadcast has it even worse off because they’re limited entirely to time itself, so if you miss a broadcast, it’s gone into the ether of history. Of course, these can also be advantages.

By focusing entirely on these waves of news, are we missing the entire ocean of information?

I don’t want to suggest that I think the waves are irrelevant. They’re not. We’re just missing out on a huge opportunity.

Note: If you’re reading this in your feed reader, this post is likely best read at my site, due to some formatting. Stray h4s here and there in the feed may occasionally chop up your reading experience. Sorry for the inconvenience. — Zac

For the past few weeks I’ve had a fairly angry post sitting in my drafts. I can’t bring myself to hit the publish button, no matter how hard I edit the damn thing. The gist of it is that I’ve become increasingly annoyed with the business strategies—or lack thereof—at most newspaper Web sites. There’s absolutely zero creativity going on at most companies, which is troubling as it feeds the myth that “online might not provide a reasonable solution for dwindling print revenue.” Staff reduction does little for the bottom line, rather it jukes the stats by driving the bottom further down.

That post is going to sit in the drafts queue forever. For the most part, it’s unnecessarily mean. And full of math. If you want to see my random angry outbursts, follow me on twitter, where I happen to explode occasionally.

However, amidst the rant, I think I had some useful points to be made.

“Lastly, our study shows that newspapers are trying to improve their web programs and experimenting with a variety of new features. However, having actually reviewed all these newspaper websites it is hard not to be left with the impression that the sites are being improved incrementally on the margins. Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side.” — The Blevins Report.

Media companies must sever the bindings that drag business in the long run. Market fluidity, the key to the successes of the few that weather the coming storm, will only come through agility and unyielding focus on the future. Mammals didn’t inherit the Earth because the dinosaurs died. The dinosaurs’ extinction was a product of an outside force that lead to a more hospitable environment for mammals. Yes the majority of revenue comes from the ‘core’ print product, the ‘core’ broadcast product. But we aren’t in the ‘newspaper’ business. We aren’t in the ‘broadcast’ business. We are, by definition through ownership of web domains, in the information business. We’re in the advertising business. The medium is just that—a medium for passing information and advertising, connecting audience in search of information to business in search of audience. The Web is best suited to show measurable results to advertisers looking for ways to not spend advertising during a recession.

Now, I know most of you understand this concept. I’m not trying to patronize. However, the gap between knowledge and action shows few signs of narrowing. I’d like to turn some of the issues that must be addressed (preferably months ago) on their heads:

“It is fair to surmise that newspaper stocks last year got trounced twice as badly as the broader market , because investors have not seen any plausible strategies from publishers to reverse the accelerating declines in readership, advertising and profitability that have been under way since 2006.” — Alan Mutter

• Media sites think too small with regard to scope.
• Media sites think too big with regard to advertising.
• Media companies don’t disrupt. They allow themselves to be disrupted.
• Vendors, ever the albatrosses, hang heavily around our necks.
• We place too many barriers in front of potential advertisers.
• Our advertising products stink when compared the competition despite our obvious advantages.
• We tend to think in terms of what the advertiser wants, when we should be thinking about what the advertiser needs: results.

Scope

“Major advertisers such as automotive, financial services, retail and real estate will not return any time soon; they will be diminished and different when they rebound a year from now. That is a disaster for local media, which could easily see more than half their ad revenue base wiped out in 2009.” — Dianne Mermigas

Dyed-in-the-wool newspaper folk think in terms of their geographical markets. In a time when geographical monopolies existed, this lead to sound business practices. Online, where geography is little more than a Google map and an entry on Wikipedia, media companies need to think bigger.

I’ve made the argument before that newspapers should create content for the Web that travels beyond the bounds of geography. It should scale to regional, national and international audiences. Hyperlocal can mean more than place. It can be ideas, too. Niche bloggers figured this out and quite a few have made a killing doing it.

The same philosophy should be applied to advertising. You can’t do that with banner ads and sponsorships alone. A business that manufactures widgets locally, but sells them online, sells them online with the expectation they can reach a wider customer base. Selling them a generic banner ad on the weather page of their local site probably doesn’t do much for their reach, to say nothing of a direct impact on sales.

Media companies with many properties tend to reserve networked advertising for the largest advertisers, which is absurd. An impression is an impression no matter how deep the pocket. Your job is to connect the advertiser to the potential customer, despite location. Well, not despite location, but despite your concept of location. Who does the advertiser want to reach and which audience segment is likeliest to buy?

This holds especially true for vertical classifieds. People are willing to travel for the right car, the right apartment, the right house. So why wouldn’t people travel, at the very least digitally, for the right widget? Who cares if the widget-maker is local? Everything is local in the right context. Again, when you’re online local doesn’t have to mean place.

Microscope

“Internet publishers have forced marketers into a straightjacket of standard ad units too small for brands to breathe. If the sector is to capture a larger share of brand advertising from magazines and television, the creative needs to have more impact.” — Nick Denton

At the same time media companies think too narrowly in terms of what money they can go after, they think too broadly.  Look at where building business models on the back of employement, auto sales and Realtors has left the newspaper business. It made sense even a couple years ago, and still makes sense in a few markets, but I wouldn’t want to hinge my business on toxic industries. We have to reevaluate our budget forecasting, and we have to accept the current fiasco for what it is. Continuing to view these industries as the backbone of your business model is akin to looking at a paraplegic and thinking he has scoliosis. Either way, it’s a shitty situation, not a silver lining.

Big retailers, tied just as tightly around the neck as the above industries look to be cutting back their advertising bugdets, too.  Despite what some people in our industry still think, the consumer market just won’t pay for content online; Let’s throw the transaction model out the window for now. Those who have tried it haven’t shown meaningful, sustainable revenue. Newspapers haven’t yet properly responded to craigslist and eBay with classifieds solutions that work (by generating much money or by being of any use to people). So where do you turn?

The first step may be to diversify your advertising offerings. Figure out your advantages with particular audiences and move on businesses that want to reach those people. Not just with those that already advertise in the paper on on air, but also go for the businesses that haven’t advertised in a newspaper or on television for years because the price point was too high. Fan out. One thousand dollar bills spends the same as a hundred $100 bills.

In order to fan out we need to become more sophisticated in tracking and segmenting audience. We need to become more sophisticated in putting the most effective ads in front of the right audiences. We need to better understand contextual advertising and demographics targeting, among other metrics.

Google, for example, likely already provides contextual advertising to your pages through the Adsense program. Google scans the content of your page and delivers ads in their inventory that match up well with the content. The first problem with Adsense, though, is that you have no idea what your cut of the profit is. Google just cuts you a check and you have to hope you’re getting a fair share. The second problem is that you already know what content is in your databases, so why do you need to farm out advertising placement to Google?

This is a technological issue. It can’t be done with manpower alone. It’s just not cost effective to send reps after lots of small potato advertisers. So, something needs to change technologically to make these sales more efficient. There isn’t a media company in existence that can do technology the way Google can, but isn’t providing a reasonably good contextual advertising solution, taking 100 percent of the profit better than an amazingly good contextual ad solution for a vague percentage?

And it’s not just ad placement that needs to become more sophisticated. Have you ever tried to buy an ad on a newspaper site? It’s a horrible, horrible experience! PDFs of unintelligible rate cards, or worse, simply a fax number for a rep would drive any new customer to Google, Yahoo and Facebook where they’d have a targeted campaign up, paid for and running within a half hour–without the BS jargon and with better metrics to track the effectiveness of a campaign.

Part of the problem, which I’ll get into in greater detail in a bit, is that newspapers buy into vendors that focus only on the print product. The Web interfaces are an afterthought. Don’t believe me? Try to buy a classified ad on any major newspaper site near you. Do it now. This post isn’t going anywhere.

At a time when potential advertisers want to hold onto their money as tightly as possible, we’re making making the process of buying into our systems convoluted and burying effectiveness in poor information architectures.  The cash flow must be as liquid as possible, not obfuscated in cryptic rate cards and piss-poor online buy solutions.

Getting back to contextual advertising with a simple example, start by thinking about how your advertisers could change their campaigns based real customer interest. If you sell a sponsorship on the weather page, why make it such a broad advertisement for a retailer that it becomes meaningless? The content of that retailer’s ad is their brand, just as your editorial content is your brand. If the forecast calls for rain, the advertiser should be able to sell their umbrellas. If the forecast calls for snow, the ad should be for their shovels. That’s something useful to everyone: Readers, advertisers and media companies (since it’s technically two different ads, and if you’re charging for click-throughs, you’ll probably see a spike).

Lastly, niche content abounds. Mommy sites, prep sports sites, etc. crop up everywhere. They’re a constant trend from media companies. Most of them kinda suck or at the very least fall prey to entropy through mismanagement, but you have a real opportunity with them to do something beyond sponsorships and run-of-site banner advertising. Editorial products like these prove perfect playgrounds for aggregating an entire arsenal of contextualized advertising you may already have but don’t yet realize; Niche classifieds, demographically-targeted email marketing, video ads, search advertising all work extremely effectively on these sites, especially when the scope of the site exceeds the bounds of the narrow print circulation market I mentioned in the previous section.

The rope to hang ourselves

When disruptors like craigslist take a chunk of classified sales from newspapers, newspapers have been slow to react. Throwing up your hands in defeat solves nothing. Not changing your product to match the competition’s offering does nothing. Yet we see it again and again. Craiglist moves into a market and the local papers don’t react appropriately.

“How do you compete with free?” “We’re not craigslist, so you can’t compare our product to theirs?” Both counts are simply ridiculous. You can compete with free. You can give away your classifieds and still make money from them.

Rather than selling the Web as an upsell, why not give away classifieds online and sell the paper as an upsell? You’ll garner more pageviews that way which can turn into ad dollars. You can sell premium placement for classified ads, the same way Facebook marketplace does. You can come up with solutions that contextually tie paid items from classifieds to content.

My wife sells discarded library books and other used books on Amazon. She makes a decent income doing it. When I asked her why she sells on Amazon, and not craigslist, Facebook or her own Web site, where she wouldn’t have to pay Amazon’s fees, she tells me it’s because Amazon does all the advertising for her. She simply has to manage inventory and Amazon will put her products in front of people likely to buy them, through their own search and recommendation engine, but also across the Web through their affiliate advertising program.

Yet classifieds pages on news sites tend to be tucked away, running lists of text and, if you’re extremely lucky, you have a search bar and a dropdown menu. Boring!

Over the past year we’ve seen some interesting experiements in how to disrupt on the editorial side. Reporter blogs are ever more present. Sites like The Batavian and Northfield.org have taken on the task of directly disrupting local media. Everyblock turned granular information gathering on it’s head, effectively proving that “the story” isn’t all there is to news. Where is that entrepreneurship on the business side?

When we ourselves don’t disrupt, we allow ourselves to be disrupted. There is nothing stopping the Batavians from moving into markets that already have established sites. Even a half-assed site will still pull in a certain percentage of marketshare. And marketshare means dollars. If done right, it could mean substanial revenue.

The rope goes beyond being disruption. It represents an unyielding reluctance to try anything new and untested. Denton is right about the IAB standards. They suck. Why follow a standard that sucks?

The noose

What I’m suggesting here requires development, taking a hard look at your assests and figuring out what you can build on or make better. The costs upfront will be expensive to develop, for sure. But in the long run you’ll be better positioned for any sudden changes.

Building it yourself means you have complete control over the final product. When we buy into vendor systems like Legacy, newsbank, print-focused classifieds vendors and more, we essentially give up that right to have complete control over the product. In the case of many vendors, you don’t even get to have their system running on your domain (in most cases, you can’t even fake it through a DNS mask). So when someone does a search on your site and that brings them to newsbank, you can say goodbye to any search advertising opportunity you may have had had you done it yourself. When someone goes to Legacy to view an obit, kiss massive pageview numbers goodbye.

Sure, you can advertise on these pages in some cases, but chances are you’re looking at another vendor or you’re further tying your future to your vendors success.

That isn’t to say all vendors are bad. A few give you complete customizability and even offer APIs your IS and Web teams can tap to further extend your product. But vendor contracts have to be chosen with care. Newspapers need to decompartmentalize their divisions so that a descision for, say, print classifieds, doesn’t tie the hands of the people on the Web–and vice versa.

A certain level of openness has to break through when it comes to vendors. No longer can you sit with vendor products that focus almost entirely on the print operation. No longer can vendors deny developers access to a companies own data via modern technological standards.

The Associated Press doesn’t divvy out a quarter as much shit as some vendors do, yet the AP is on the chopping block at many companies (I agree with dumping the AP for a better model, but that same business logic needs to be applied to every aspect of an operation).

I know not every paper can afford to hire developers and I know most programming talent doesn’t want to work for “old” media, but for those that do have the resources, you’re sitting on an opportunity to become that vendor that doesn’t completely suck.

When life gives you lemons…

Let’s face a few facts: Nothing a newspaper can do will stop the migration of readers (and ultimately money) from printed product to the Web. No redesign, no layoffs, no consultant will change the will of the information consumer. I’m not suggesting print will completely die. No medium has yet desimated another medium, only forced new technologies to deploy the old media. Video hardly killed the radio star, but the addition of new technology certainly changed the game–and with it, new business models were forged.

“Ads are the revenue but in all cases they are tag along with content. My wife likes to say that food is just a vehicle for the sauce. Content is the vehicle for the ads. If the content isn’t being consumed the ads aren’t being delivered, regardless of the media used.” — A commenter at Lost Remote

When I worked in television, I had a manager say to me upon the release of the iPod video, “Nobody will want to use that when HD becomes more prevalent.” He was flat wrong.

Now on the broadcast side, you’ll not only become more screwed over by consumer tendencies, but also the networks cutting you out of the loop to go directly to consumers through iTunes, Hulu, Netflix and other on-demand services. The technology for High Definition TV over IP is already here. It’s just a matter of waiting for the home broadband lines to catch up. To compound this, I can’t honestly see DTV lasting more than a decade (at most) before the earnest discussion of opening the spectrum to Internet services begins. 20 years (at most) until it actually happens and local TV is just a Web site nobody goes to.

Too many reps continue to sell the newspaper, adding the Web as an up-sell or worse, bundling the Web with a print buy. Move beyond that model. Sell your audience. Again, connect your advertiser to the people most likely to buy a product. A run-of-site display ad packaged with a print run makes sense for an advertiser looking to reach mass audience. But advertisers also want targetted results, which you can easily give them online.

That means unbundled your advertising. It means giving more advertisers easier access to your audience. It means creating pricing structures that allow for a wide spectrum of ways to interact with potential customers. Let your advertisers buy slices of that spectrum in increments.

…Make lemonade

“Sounding a more positive note, [Russ] Stanton said the [LA] Times’ Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.” — via David Westphal

When the Wright brothers sought to crack the problem of man-powered flight, they began by breaking the big problem (flight) into smaller problems they could digest and solve individually: Lifting surfaces (wings), a method of balancing and controlling the aircraft and propulsion. Each of those problems could be broken down into more solvable problems. But unlike other inventors, like Sir George Cayley, the brothers sought to solve each problem with consideration to the final design at the outset. When they made a change to the propulsion system, they took into account any redesigns needed for the wings and controls.

Product development works the same way. When a website manager decides to launch RSS feeds, as many newspapers did in the past couple years, the consequences of what that means for other products needs to be taken into account. A strategic change shouldn’t happen in a vaccuum. Adding RSS feeds means opportunity for advertising, but according to the Blivens Report it doesn’t look like many newspapers thought the entire strategy through. Adding those feeds would mean making changes to the advertising strategy. It would mean making changes in how managers calculate metrics.

The promised land: Building an elegant business application. Why make your advertisers sign into a separate account to manage their advertising, when you could give all your registered user accounts access to purchase an array of ads–or merely post free classifieds? When you create something like a marketplace database for businesses, allow paid businesses to manage their inventory through the same classifieds dashboard, giving them options to attach their ads to certain segments of audience. Allow them to purchase certain types of display and text advertising easily, as well. Give advertisers feedback through good reports (maybe paid classifieds users get data on how many people viewed their listing, for example).

The point here is that web forms don’t need a commission, they work on holidays and weekends and they don’t ever sleep. Obfuscating the various ways we can take money from advertisers is a horrible plan, all things considered. Keeping products clear and always available is key to any future success newspapers hope to expect online this year.

In order to compete you must cooperate

That statement seems counterintuitive, but hear me out.

Consider the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic study in game theory:

	I keep quiet	I snitch
You keep quiet	We both serve 1 year	I go free, you get 5 years
You snitch	You go free, I get 5 years	We both serve 3 years

Let’s say you and I rob a bank. We’re brought into separate interrogation rooms and the cops give us options: snitch on the other guy and go free or keep quiet and risk getting 3 years if we both snitch or 5 if only one of us snitches. Can you trust me? Can I trust you?

Obviously the matrix has arbitrary numbers. The worst case scenario for both of us is if we both snitch on each other, serving a total of 6 years, the best is if we both keep quiet, serving a total of 2 years.

What if we changed the matrix?

	I keep quiet	I snitch
You keep quiet	We both serve 3 years	I go free, you get 10 years
You snitch	You go free, I get 10 years	We both serve 4 years

Let’s assume we were terribly arrogant about our bank robbing prowess or just stupid like most criminals and didn’t come up with a contingency for this scenario. Since we don’t know what the other person will do, we have to base our decision on some simple logic.

It’s now most beneficial for both of us to take our chances and point the finger. At best we go free, at worst we serve only 8 years total. This disparity in this fictional legal system gives us a positive expectation value to snitch. By snitching we can expect to only spend 2 years prison or a total of 4 years divided by 2 outcomes. By not snitching, we expect 6.5 years in prison or a total of 13 years divided by two outcomes. Obviously, we have to assume these options would be given to us ad infinitum to beat variation to get these numbers, but in the short term it makes sense.

Mathematically it looks like this:

Snitching = 0 + 4 years / 2 possibilities = 2 years.

Not snitching = 10 + 3 years / 2 possibilities = 6.5 years.

Without worrying too much about silly math games, the point is that the matrix changed in our favor (insert obvious The Matrix reference here). Duh. Change happens. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. No matter which way it breaks, you have to adapt.

Change happened to our industry and now we can’t continue making the same decisions. If we continue to keep quiet, we’re making a bad decision in the long run. We have to adapt our way of thinking to a new world model. We shouldn’t ask how change happened or what we could have done to stop it–the world we live in is a much more mathematically complex place than these games–we should ask how we can leverage our situation now.

Now consider the Tragedy of the Commons.

I have a cow. You have a cow. We all have cows. And we all live in a community where we raise our cows on our own lawns. We drink their milk and what we don’t use, we turn into cheese and trade for other items like bread, meat, Wii consoles and Diaper Genies.

But one day, I get the bright idea that I can take my cow out to pasture in the common park. I do this at night, in secret, while the rest of you play Wii and raise babies. My cow does much better than your cows and starts producing more and more excess milk, which I sell to buy cooler Wii games and expensive meats. As long as I can keep this secret to myself, I’m going to do better than you.

But then one day someone I like, say, Howard Owens, comes over to my house. He asks, “Hey man, how do you afford all these delicious meats?” I decide to let Howard in on my secret and he starts producing more cheese and eventually buys some sweet gold chains. He tells Ryan Sholin and Ryan blogs about it, spilling the beans to everybody. The common park fills up with all kinds of people and their cows. It has been democratized and we’re back to where we started, except now we ruined the park. You ruined everything, Ryan…

That’s the old way to think of media. We had a few people hogging the park, dominating communication and most of us were stuck there watching from our homes. The park had certain barriers to entry (like broadcast licenses or high costs of production). That’s just not the case with the Web.

We live in a post scarcity economy (a.k.a. abundance economy) now. Now, grass that’s already been eaten by some cows still has value to cows, forever. The grass never goes away and grass grows every day. It’s always green for the cows that want it, so long as you don’t put up a fence (which is futile). But this new world gets crazier, your cows can now occupy more space faster. They can be two places at once. Your patch of grass can also be your neighbors’ patches at the same time. These cows can teleport, man. It’s nuts out there.

Ground Zero

The old investment edict “buy land because they’re not making it anymore” no longer applies to our community. All because of a little number: Zero.

Gone are the days of false scarcity (i.e. airwaves, static parks) and expensive resources (i.e. ink, paper and shipping) where the prices continue to rise. The falling costs of technology make distribution easier. Chris Anderson recently wrote about this phenomena in this Wired article and he’s been working through the problem for quite some time on his blog. As bandwidth, storage and processing power drop in price, they approach zero in cost and we’re free to waste it by giving away free email, free video hosting, free content, free software, free everything. Obviously the cost of bandwidth, storage and processors isn’t technically zero, but because of the shear volume of it there’s an economy of scale where it’s more valuable to give one product away in exchange for market share and (this is the tricky part) find something else of value to profit from.

If you want to learn more about how free economies work, Mike Masnick covers free in a fun series here.

Free works best in the aggregate for companies like Google who don’t need to worry about how to create content. They just sort data and make it easier to find. For those of us in the paragraph factories, we must find a way to make our content easier to find. But it goes beyond search engine optimization and findability once you’ve got people on your site. You must control a niche (i.e. local news, or regional farming, gadgets, anything). To do that, you must cull the best from others, be where you’re readers are and help your readers help you. That means being a part of a community.

Listen to your mother: share

I know I keep harping about this, but we have to get in front of the conversations going on out there. The whole damn point of the Internet is share media and to “create copies,” as Kevin Kelly puts it; Content can be two–or two million–places at once. Be where your readers are. Unbundle your media. Separate it from your site. Ignore copyright. It sounds like heresy. Creating and controlling information has always been our bread and butter. It still is, but the game has changed. Distribution pipes no longer work and any attempt to fake them on the Web only obfuscates our inevitable failure.

The number one thing you can do to increase readership on your Web site is to make all your content freely available. Get rid of the pay walls tomorrow and I’ll personally guarantee you double digit growth within 18 months. You don’t have to change any processes in your organization. You don’t need to rewrite for the Web. There’s no corporate philosophy shift that needs to happen. Keep posting items at midnight, don’t do video, do absolutely nothing more than open your archives to Google’s and your readers eyes. Just stop trying the transaction model. It worked for old situations, but now it harms your bottom line. Give your site away and they will come in droves. They will find you.

The second thing you need to do: Ignore copyright. No this doesn’t mean letting your competition post your stories without crediting you. Don’t let the local high school post your photos without crediting you. Don’t let Yahoo! News take your content unless they provide a link to you. Give it to them on the condition they provide links back to you. Free of any other charges. Links, in the eyes of search engines, are points. The more sites that link to you, the higher your points, the more relevant Google sees your page. When someone searches for content you can provide, you show up first or second or third and they will come.

The third thing you need to do: Give it away. Unbundle your media. Put it on other sites. Right now, take your content and feed it out to people. Let other sites syndicate your content. Let people find it where they are. Those that don’t find you in searches can find you other places. All links should lead to Rome. They will come.

Lastly, you need to take what others offer you. Pull in the headlines from your competition. Scrape craigslist for classifieds. Syndicate local bloggers. Pull event listings from Upcoming.org. Link to anything and everything you can. Every day. If you don’t have content, link to someone else’s content. If you only do original reporting, you’re doing your site and your community a disservice. Look at how popular blogs like BoingBoing and Kottke constantly link other sites. Hell, look at Drudge right now. What do you see? Links upon links upon links. Sending people away secures page views for yourself. You just have to curate links for your target community.

B-b-but that not journalism! Correct. Journalism isn’t dead, far from it, but the game has changed. We still need to produce content. But we are in the media business. Journalism is just a part of that. Sorry to break it to you. This is good in ways not many people can comprehend yet, though, and we’re on the cusp of some very interesting times in the years ahead.

If you want to really secure your future as a leader in whatever content you provide, start by being a good neighbor.

End game

When I reply to someone on twitter, in public view, the message is meant for the recipient, but others can listen in. One-to-one conversation can also be a one-to-many conversation at the same time. I haven’t read Clay Shirky’s new book yet, but from what I gather this is part of his thesis. This is what I mean when I say the game has changed. We don’t broadcast or have conversation over a few drinks. We do both at the same time. And boy does it sometimes lead to awkward social situations.

But fear of doing something wrong or fear of losing control of the conversation shouldn’t detract us. We’ve already done something wrong. We’ve already lost control. We’ve been trying to play a new game with an old set of rules.

Now, I know so much of this just sounds silly. We should curate conversations?! We talk a lot about attention economies and jostling for eyeballs because on the Web, every site potentially competes for the same people. True to a point. We need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Yes, people spend a certain amount of time on the Web per day/week/month and what they find is usually all they get. If they’ve found someone else’s content, then they probably aren’t looking at yours. I get that. But we should ask a different question than “How do I get the people looking at site A to look at my site, site B?” We should ask how site A and site B can complement each other, distribute the workload, maximize audience and share in the benefits.

Before we look at a couple examples, I want to get back to ground zero: Free. Giving your content away doesn’t mean you’re going to lose the value of that information. If an article is worth one dollar and you give it away for free, you have to make that dollar back somehow to break even. This is the trade-off. Market share has no business value if you can’t convert size and type of community into dollars.

In reality, a page view has a cost of only a tiny fraction of a cent. Thousands of eyes on an article costs basically nothing to distribute, so charging anything more than a micro-payment flies in the face of market wisdom. And micro-payments don’t work for most products. They create a psychological hangup many people can’t or won’t accept.

So then, who takes on the costs of production and distribution? Advertisers.

Because the cost of producing a page costs so little, you can sell ads for huge returns. But, unfortunately we’re hung up on an old model that involves selling banners or tile ads or large formats to larger companies in our communities. We put ad reps feet to pavement and we go looking for big dollars.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Well, not so dumb. Yes, do that for your high profile, network-wide advertising or vertical sales, but think smaller. Every Tom, Dick and Harry sells their stuff on eBay and craigslist. There’s about bajillion craft shows all over the Midwest in the summer. These people have things to sell and they can’t afford TV or newspaper spots. They have local goods they want to sell locally. So they go to Google. They go to Yahoo! They go to Facebook. They fill out a form and drop $5-$20. The simple, highly-targeted ads direct people to sites where these merchants sell their products using freely available Web tools and you get none of that money. Web forms don’t need a commission. Nearly pure profit slips out of your grasp every second you delay.

There’s a new game in town. Your advertising needs to be as granular and as unbundled as your content. It needs context. Impressions are great, but advertisers are catching on. They want click-throughs and conversions, so make it easier for them to tap your communities. If you target your ads right, your users might actually find advertising useful rather than a nuisance.

Once you have the hang of that, seriously consider sharing your business model. Let other sites handle your advertising. Google does it. Amazon does it. There’s no reason you shouldn’t figure out how to share advertising, too. Build a relationship with your community to keep it healthy. This one really flies in the face of common sense and may not even work for smaller communities. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Tying everything together

Ok, I think this has been the longest post I’ve written yet. So let’s take a second and breathe deep. In a nice digestible list, here’s what we’ve covered so far:

• Pick a community. It can be a geographical region, like North Dakota or it can be a theme like Tech news.
• Start creating content. Make it evergreen. Let people into your archives.
• Start curating content when it is relevant to your community.
• Give others in your chosen community opportunity to share what you’ve got. This is how you build a relationship within the network.
• Once you’ve built up a large enough community of readers, you need to fill space with advertising that favors the content.
• Keep your community healthy by creating advertising markets to stimulate its growth.

Does curating work? Compare Drudge to the NYTimes.com. Last July Drudge had one-third as many readers as New York Times. Love him or hate him, He’s Just One Man.

Does opening up your archives work? Hell yeah it does. See that bump in people on the graph linked above? I bet you can guess when they opened their archives.

I want to talk about some sites that embody many of these principles.

The Hype Machine aggregates music posted to music blogs. It does nothing more, really. Just hit play on a song on the main page and listen to music bloggers post. But the site does some awesome stuff. Firstly it links to every blog it culls music from. Giving exposure to some great music blogs in a very, very crowded niche. Secondly, it supports itself financially through music sales at iTunes, Amazon and eMusic, as part of their ad networks. Lots of songs have links to where you can buy the tune.

Exposure to music blogs, so they benefit with link juice and spill over from click throughs. Exposure to music merchants, so they benefit through sales which also have kickbacks to the They Hype Machine. The whole site is a sharing machine. Just turn it on and let it do magic.

Everyblock aggregates data on a local level, breaking it down to the street level. The site culls information from official government sources as well as craigslist, Upcoming.org, flickr and others to give you a picture of what’s going on in your neighborhood. Throw in some story-based news and locally targeted advertising and you have a whole new way to think about news Web sites.

Lastly, this one is small potatoes, but it’s worth noting, because we’re going to start seeing more of it. There’s a small group of papers in Minnesota that started Minnesota Reader. Using only Drupal and some freely available feeds from newspapers across the state (including papers from Forum Communications, my employer), they’ve started aggregating Minnesota news. It’s basically the Google Reader OPML file we’ve set up for our editors in the state turned to face the public. It’s a bit clunky right now, but I think the concept has some interesting potential.

Take a look at the page for Woodbury Bulletin, one of the Forum Comm papers. On some of the posts, our RSS ads show up. On their page, with links back to our marketplace product. Some people may feel very uneasy about something like this. I don’t. It’s our RSS feed, so we basically control our content on their site.

Go out and grow your audience. Expand your network. People will gather around your content. Some of those people will support you by clicking on ads, more will given the right ad in the right context (either on your product or from somewhere else in your network).

All links lead to Rome.

Note: This is cross-posted from my other blog, It’s Randomonium.

Best class ever. Get famous on the Internet, get a better grade.

Think this is a stupid waste of time? Think again. Having a good grip on how to manipulate their digital footprint will be key for these kids come time to get jobs.

People (prospective employers, prospective girlfriends/boyfriends, teachers and just about everybody who knows you in real life) will eventually Google you. Internet stalking is a reality. I’ve done it and so have you. Let’s just admit it already.

Ultimately, we all want Google to reflect the real us—or at least, the very best parts of the real us.

This is why I have a Linkedin resume, two blogs, twitter and a public-facing Facebook profile among other sites plastered with my name that I control. Ultimately, if you Google me I want you to see me as I want you to see me. Not as I was posting on forum boards and IRC years ago.

Online image literacy is going to be one of the most imporant things coming up as Gen Y hits college and the workforce. We’ve only scratched the surface at what Google can do to affect our personal lives.

From a professional/creative standpoint, you want to make a good impression while having as few barriers to entry as possible. The Internet is all about communication and lowering the barriers (and with it, many of the old guard standards) of obtaining audience share.

On the Web, we are all media entities.

Ryan Sholin posed an interesting question on twitter, and it will take me more than 140 characters to respond.

He says:

Hypothesis: Newspapers in blog form are more pleasant to read than blogs in newspaper form. Discuss.

It all goes back to the signal vs. noise issue. Newspapers write about a lot of stuff I don’t care about. At least I don’t care about anything more than just a general overview.

Scenario: Sometimes a court case will break in the morning and a paper (or a blog, for that matter) will write through the story several times through the day. This is a good thing to do, but if I’m subscribed to that papers feed, I really don’t want my feed reader cluttered with constant updates, when a single story will suffice. It’s just a personal preference. Noise is the number one reason I unsubscribe from blogs, too.

This is why it’s so important to explode categories of news. On a newspaper.com, I should be able to get granular news items. I don’t necessarily just want entertainment news, I want news relating to movies and TV. I don’t want local news, I want news about local crime or city hall. The sports section is a terribly boring section to me, but I love baseball, so I’d like to just follow baseball related stories. See where I’m going?

As for reading blogs in print form? I don’t know. I’d rather not. Unless it was a newspaper from boingboing or Silicon Alley Insider. Can you imagine how infuriating it would be to read kottke.org without the links?

I do have to say that blogs tend to have more readable designs than newspapers and most certainly better designs than newspaper Web sites.

First, I think Ryan Sholin and others have got me thinking quite a bit about unbundled media lately. So instead of talking about the serendipity and extensibility of new media landscape this weekend, as planned, I’m going to skip ahead to the final part in my series and talk about media distribution instead.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about doing is kinda wacky, and mostly for fun: I want to create an ideal newspaper.com using only free tools I didn’t make. Flickr for photos, youtube or brightcove or ooyala backlot for video, RSS for text. Distribute as much as possible. I don’t want to worry about building tools, just creating and aggregating content while efficiently spreading a wide net.

I want it to have mobile functionality for viewing and posting. Anybody can send info and there will be an editor (Me).

I have a few thoughts that I’d like to write down soon. Do you have any ideas?