The future of making money with news

New Business Models for News

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Will NYT be around in 10 years?

In print, that is? ... New York Times Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger addressed that question this week, as reported by paidContent.org; here is a key segment, as pointed out on Romenesko:

"The heart of the answer must be that we can't care," says Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. "We do care. I care very much, but we must be where people want us to be for their information. Print is going to be here, I believe, for a very long time." The Times is more comfortable than ever with experimentation and launching services in beta, he says. "The thought is that we have to get past the thought that it has to be perfect" on day one. "If you're not prepared to occasionally fail, you're not trying hard enough."

More from paidContent.org here.

Maghound: possibly new business model for magazines

Picard talks about how newspaper business model has been changing rapidly in his book. While I was reading the book, I kind of got tried on newspaper business model since we have read and talked about it a few times. Instead, I wanted to know a new business model for magazines. And I found this interesting new service based on a new business model called “Maghound.com.”

There are numerous magazines in this century and it is natural for people to want more personalized stuffs. Maghound allows people to select a number of magazines for monthly subscription, and people can change the list whenever they want to. I thought this idea was brilliant new business model for magazine industries. This was probably possible in magazine industries because most magazines are specialized in their specific areas such as sports, fashions and computers. Thus, people can select some magazines from various fields they are interestd in, and they don't have to worry about a number of sperate subscription for each magazine thanks to Maghound. This model, however, would not work with newspapers because most newspapers are not specialized in its unique fields compared to magaines.

Here is an interesting point of view about the Web site: "Why MagHound is Brilliant -- And Why It Won’t Work"

Since I just discoverd about this interesting service, I might do my presentation on this Web site. If that happens, I will talk more about the new business model for magazines and MagHound during my presentation.

business model for socialnetworking sites

An article on nytimes.com about business models: twitter and yammer. It's basically saying twitter is having problems and trying hard to find a business model after already gained popularity, while yammer is rather small but started with a business model, which is a paid one dollar per user model focusing on company users. 

It's argument is: under current economic environment, scale is might not be the most important thing because popularity does not guarantee revenue. Not to mention popularity is hard to get. Here's the quote at the end of the story:

“Now it doesn’t matter if you want scale first because you just can’t have it,” said Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. “You have the luxury of being able to decide between small and focused on revenues or large when you have capital. When there isn’t money, there’s no choice.”

a couple alternate takes

Apologies for not posting earlier. It was a crazy weekend with that web design competition. (We'll find out just how awesome we did in a couple to a few weeks.)

Anyway...

There was a prediction today that newspapers may become primarily for news junkies who don't mind forking out a little cash. The idea was also that they'd be published less frequently and contain more investigative pieces. This would be interesting because it would be a return to many paper's roots, or those of their predecessors.

However, I don't think this is the only possible scenario. I think the somewhat different business model of newsletters and industry oriented publications might be where many newspapers are headed. As Garlock said when he talked to our class last week, very topically focused magazines that are sent to members of various organizations or industries may be where it's at. For example, AARP Magazine is sent to all of the organization's 40+ million members and calls itself the largest circulation magazine in the world.

Another similar example, but one that is subscription oriented, are the handful of political newsletters here in town. They are pretty small operations but are relatively costly to receive as publications go. But subscribers get dozens of articles and other short news alert blurbs each day on the very targeted topic that they're interested in. Some of these publications let non-subscribers receive headlines for free but all other content is strictly controlled and certainly not easily available on the web.

Houston, being an oil and energy center, hosts many similar publications for those industries.

Anthropology of YouTube

Or watch the high-quality version here.

Future for participatory media

(From Mark Deuze)

User generated content and business models

For the past few years, the news media industry has been trying to figure out how to get people pay for their content. And of late, it isn’t just trying to get paid for your online content, but fighting the good fight against free user-generated content. So in that case, are blogs and podcasts the way to go? And if yes, then why are news organisations not better at this than their non-journalistic counterparts?

Obviously previous business models, both in terms of advertising and content have not worked well. Keeping that in mind, are we going to see a rise in subscription for blogs and podcasts? For instance, someone in Egypt might pay to view Sandmonkey’s blog. Will his rants start paying his bills?

Also, there are a lot of MoJos (Mobile Journalists) in the industry. The very fact that they exist and are on the rise is testimony that news organisations are trying to diversify and get one reporter to get all their content. So what kind of business model are we looking at?

Making sense of secondary data

Different ways of interpreting similar market data:

A typical story on increase in newspaper site usage:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003875202

A better story with meaningful analysis:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/top-us-newspaper-sites-see-more-visitors-shorter-stays/

There is still room for more context information (example: original Excel file).

---

Other examples:
Interesting theory/analysis supported by market data

http://publishing2.com/2008/09/15/drudge-report-news-site-that-sends-readers-away-with-links-has-highest-engagement/

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/04/many_newspapers.php

By whom?

If the value is still content, then what content and how should we package the content?

As Picard said, 

A business model involves the conception of how the business operates, its underlying foundations, and the exchange activities and financial flows upon which it can be successful.

Different media need different model. What fits one medium might not fit another. Right after reading Gao’s Participation Business Model, I started thinking if we could use a participation business model for online news. Many newspapers’ online sites indeed have participatory features, such as blog, comment, rating, or allowing users to submit photos and videos. These do not seem to be very innovative or popular features if we compare these features to MyShow, Super Girl, or American Idol. 

Probably participation is not a major “value” users expect from a newspaper web site, as both Picard and Gao emphasized value is the center of a business model. So if we go back to wheat Picard said that content is the core business of publishing industry, then now in the digital and online environment, what “kind” of content? Instead of telling people what to do or what to read, why not say: how may I help you today? In addition to what kind of content a user would value from a local newspaper site, a different kind of navigation maybe? Something like google's front page or iPone's main page that there are several preset icons and users can modify those icons. 

Business models

Picard’s chapter suggested that newspaper’s business model has shifted from dependency on circulation to advertisement, and now with the declining of the readership it is time for newspaper to go back to the old business model. Like the recent article in AJR: The Elite Newspaper of the Future argued that:

A smaller, less frequently published version packed with analysis and investigative reporting and aimed at well-educated news junkies that may well be a smart survival strategy for the beleaguered old print product.

Those all sound like cliché to me. It is just one of the myths that has been repeated so many times but has not become the reality yet? Besides WSJ, which newspaper has actually managed to do that or even tried to do that? I think the blogs are the ones that are really making the effort to provide analysis and investigative stuff.

Gao’s analysis of emerging business model is very neat. Just a footnote, after the success of Super Girl, there are many similar TV programs in China . Over the time, people will eventually get tired of it. So even a really good business model is venerable to repetition.

Building on our discussion of online advertising

This from Reuters yesterday:

YouTube will need at least two years to start making a meaningful contribution to parent Google Inc's revenue, despite a clutch of advertising initiatives this month aimed at cashing in on its online video dominance.

In the last eight days the popular video-sharing site has launched four new ad formats, signed its first full-length video pact and even taken its first dip into e-commerce.

Executives described most of the revenue-generating initiatives as experiments or beta tests, but analysts said the long-awaited moves will increase Google's revenue, though not in the near-term.

Google rakes in about $5 billion in quarterly revenue, mainly from Web search advertising. Though Google doesn't break out YouTube's revenue, analysts estimate it will make $200 million to $250 million -- a small percentage of the parent's revenue -- this year.

11 troubled Web companies

Here is the article I talked about yesterday

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10063020-2.html

As the post says,

The problem is that being loved is no guarantee for success. Even being used isn't enough.

NYT: Newspapers’ Web Revenue Is Stalling

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/business/media/13adco.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=technology

Two interesting stories about Google services

On YouTube's revenue model:
http://www.minyanville.com/articles/AAPL-GOOG-YHOO-MSFT-apple-AMZN/index/a/19419/from/yahoo

On GMail Goggle:
http://biz.yahoo.com/portfolio/081009/tag_www_portfolio_com_2008_5_14791.html?.v=1

Newspapers and their future

Oh, the pain. Just thinking about newspapers and the challenge they face wants to make you sigh and almost shrug. Like our economy, it's going to be a whole lot worse before it (ever?) gets better.

Principally, this because ... breathe deep here ... there is no business model ... at least not one to sustain current ways of doing things, and that's a key distinction. We have to think about the work of journalism may change in the future — from gatekeeper to gatewatcher, from content creator to content curator — and then we can better explore and predict ways in which the economics might make sense.

Consider some writings in this area ... first, Nicholas Carr lays out the central problem in The Great Unbundling.

“How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.

Clay Shirky, a fascinating thinker on all things new media, picks up with this:

We should stop worrying about the newspaper as a whole, and instead turn our attention to the important question: taking unbundling as a given, what bits merit saving? It isn’t the physical fact of newsprint, or the expensive yet ineffective classified ads, or having a movie reviewer in every town.

What’s worth saving, as a critical function, is investigative journalism. We need someone, many someones, to do long, deep, boring research, for stories that may not even pan out. Without that, government at all levels will simply slide back into the nepotism and corruption of the 19th century.

That is the challenge we need to take on, and as Carr notes, it’s not one currently being met well on the Internet.

However, it’s not obvious that the old ways of producing such journalism are better than any possible future ways, both because the current model is far from perfect, and because the Internet brings a suppleness to media design that has barely been flexed yet.

So, we need to experiment ... and fast. The transition will be messy, but new models are emerging that offer some hope. Finally, consider Jeff Jarvis' picture of newspapers in 2020, as well as 10 questions he says news organizations must confront going forward. (Key among them: "Who are we?")

Ultimately, though, the stats are numbingly bad. Time to panic, and for the news industry to actually act like it.

Secondary data available online

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press -- Biennial Media Consumption 2004, 2006, 2008 (coming up)
http://people-press.org/dataarchive/

Pew Internet and American Life Project
http://www.pewinternet.org/datasets.asp

ABC -- Newspaper/Magazine Circulation Data
http://www.accessabc.com/products/freereports.htm

Newspaper Association of America -- Trends and Numbers: Newspaper Web sites (Reach by DMA)
(Click on menu items on the top and on the left for more stuff)
http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Newspaper-Websites.aspx

Scarborough:
The 2008 Scarborough Newspaper Audience Ratings Report (Combined audience numbers for newspapers in DMAs)
Understanding the Digital Savvy Consumer (Guess which city is the most digi-savvy in the U.S.?)
http://www.scarborough.com/freeStudies.php

Newspaper Next 2.0 --
1. Market Selector
2. Online Spending Analysis
3. 2007 Online Spending Per DMA
4. Future Tools (one for each quintile)
5. WebAudits (one for each quintile)
http://www.newspapernext.org/2008/02/online_revenue_resources.htm

Borrell Free Data -- 2008 U.S. DMA Ad Spending (newer but not as detailed as Newspaper Next 2.0)
http://www.borrellassociates.com/freedata.aspx

Newspaper Association of America -- The Newspaper Audience Database or NADbase (membership required)
http://www.naa.org/Resources/Articles/Circulation-The-Newspaper-Audience-Database-or-NADbase.aspx

ABC's Audience-FAX online database (registration required):
Data on newspapers' average circulation, average print and online readership, total combined audience, and total unique Web site users as well as a variety of print demographic information for both national and local newspapers.
http://abcas3.accessabc.com/scarborough/login.aspx

ABC's Audience-FAX^* eTrends Tool (registration required):
The tool is designed to allow users to create trending reports by reporting period on newspaper's average circulation, average print and online readership, total combined audience, and total unique Web site users.
http://abcas3.accessabc.com/audience-fax/default.aspx

General thoughts on future of print newspapers

Earlier this semester, I assumed in this blog that there might not be print newspaper in future, dominated by online newspapers. At that time, I thought I was being too optimistic about online newspapers and too pessimistic about print newspapers. But watching “Epic 2015,” and reading “Maybe it’s Time to Panic” kind of comforted me since I realized that I was not the only one who thought the disappearance of print newspaper could actually happen. (I don’t think it’s going to be anytime soon though)

In “Maybe It’s Time to Panic,” the author said, “daily newspaper circulation has declined every year since 1987.” This is more than 20 years of declining. Earlier this semester, I also assumed that the newspaper industries were probably busier than ever to research the main cause for this in order to revive the print newspapers. But then again, I was wrong. Actually, the newspapers are not doing much research about this problem. They are still busy to do research about this presidential election polls, but don’t do much about “surviving”. There’s got to be elements that only print newspapers can have while online newspapers don’t. I honestly don’t know what these elements could be, but I believe, if newspaper industries keep digging into finding this “unique feature” of print newspapers, maybe they will survive in future. Or at the very least, their readership will decrease by less percent each year.

cobWeb covered crystal ball (or how computer/internet related predictions don't work well) and more!

Somehow I fixated on this part of the article "Online Salvation" article:

Predictions about where the Internet is headed are, of course, hazardous. A dozen or so years after it began to become a fixture in American life, the Internet is still in a formative stage, subject to periodic earthquakes and lightning strikes. Google didn't exist a decade ago. Five years ago, no one had heard of MySpace. Facebook is just four years old, and YouTube is not quite three. Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. compares the current state of the Internet to television in the age of "Howdy Doody."

I don't really get that last line. Maybe it's a generational thing? Too far before my time? Does this mean the internet is still young?

Anyway, I was reminded of the now infamous quote from a tech company worker about how eventually there might be a market for a dozen or so computers in the world. Today, of course, there are billions. (Apologies for not finding the quote and quoting it verbatim.)

I basically live on the web. (I know a web developer whose business cards, rather than having a physical address, say "I come from the internet.") I like keeping up with the latest gadgets, newest sites, etc. It is also interesting to hear what people predict. But somehow I never place too much emphasis on or faith in it. Odds are they won't pan out. It's like Howdy Doody trying to envision MTV.

In a December 2006 blog entry, for example, an expert on ZDNet predicted:

Vista is going to raise the bar for experiences across the board. When Vista goes out to regular consumers in January it's going to set a new level for what they expect their applications to be. The subtleties of the UI and overall focus on a better experience is going to affect how those consumers see the web. When you think about the kind of applications that will be built for Vista using Windows Presentation Foundation, an even higher level if rich interactivity and media integration is going to be expected by Joe user.

In retrospect, this prediction was very off target. It's almost funny. Vista is hated by many, even techies. I've heard many a story about people forcibly jury rigging new laptops to work with older operating systems.

Need more of a fix? Check out Imagining the Internet Prediction Database for ideas that will make us giggle in a few years.

--

From later on in the same AJR piece:

These dynamics could change, perhaps as stronger news sources emerge on the Web and weaker ones disappear. But even if the newspaper industry continued to lose about 8 percent of its print ad revenue a year and online revenue continued to grow at 20 percent a year – the pace of the first half of 2007 – it would take more than a decade for online revenue to catch up to print.

Journalists, or indeed anyone with an interest in journalism, had better pray that doesn't happen. Because online revenue is still relatively small and will remain so even at its current pace, this scenario implies years of financial decline for the newspaper industry. Even a 5 percent decline in print revenue year after year might look something like Armageddon. Newspapers were already cutting their staffs before this year's advertising downturns. A sustained frost of similar intensity would likely lead to even more devastating slashing. The cuts could take on their own vicious momentum, with each one prompting a few more readers to drop their subscriptions, which would prompt still more cuts. Some daily papers would undoubtedly fold.

I had issues with this assertion. The implication seems to me that the only real form of journalism is the newspaper industry. This seems like a very closed minded worldview. Yes, industries change. Newspapers in the States have undoubtedly changed significantly during their tenure.

If the author was concerned about some untouchable form of high journalism, why isn't he concerned about the fact that many newspapers have been getting lazy because they have had a virtual monopoly on their print market?

Competition with other forms of media is a good thing. It helps keep newspapers on target and give readers/buyers/etc what they want. In a one newspaper per town era, the internet has also helped locals have multiple news sources.

Smart Newspaper

Like we have smart phone, I think it is the time for newspaper to become smart too. One publisher of the newspaper complained in the AJR pieces about:

"Newspapers need to negotiate a more equitable share with search engines that are making billions of dollars by selling ads around newspaper content without the costs of creating that content.... The book industry and the movie industry don't give their content away."

It is important for the newspaper publishers to aware that it is not solely the information itself but the way one media processes, organizes and presents the information, which creates value. It is true that Google does not produce any news content, but it creates a channel for people to effectively get the information they pursue. Google is valuable to users because it is smart and you can do things with it.

Newspapers, even online, are barely organizing their content innovatively than their print products. The newspaper still functions in a way, in which they assume that they are on the top of the information food chain. But as the AJR articles pointed out, it is no longer the case:

Today journalists stand not at the head of the pipeline but in the middle of a boundless web of interconnected media, messages, senders and receivers. This is the new, right-brain, digital world. The journalist-in-the-middle is a ringmaster, a maker and a consumer, a grand impresario of a two-way information flow that has no beginning, end or fixed schedule.

The newspaper should find the right position in the cycle of information flow. At least, newspapers must think themselves as information portals rather than the fixed number of pages arrived at people’s door every morning.

P.S. Please consider this post is written by a young adult (if under 30 considered young)who finally decided to become a subscriber of New York Times and have NOT received a single copy of the paper two weeks after placing the order online.

Apocalypse Now

The apocalypse is upon us. It’s time to run around like headless chickens. And yes, newspapers are dying a faster, albeit painful death. While some people in the industry have been writing eulogies to newspapers, others think physical newspapers aren’t dying off – they’re evolving. Really?

When Michael Crichton, in a 1993 issue of Wired Magazine, said print would become obsolete, journalists sniggered in a corner and said he was on to his sci-fi fiction. Now look who’s sniggering? Advertising revenue in US newspapers in 2007 dropped 9.4 per cent, the sharpest decline since the Newspaper Association of America began measuring ad revenues in 1950. Are we still going to live in denial?

In July, the New York Times reported that its earnings were declining. Then came the news that it was hiking the newsstands price by 25 cents. I’m sorry, I know I sound like one of the fist-shaking and bellicose advocates for the Internet, but it really is time to wake up, smell the roses and go online.

Tweet me the news

Journalism is still valuable, as well as local (print or online) newspapers. Yes, I do think spelling and grammar are important, and especially for journalism. How would people think the news is credible if the writing is crappy?

The discussion on Monday and also the Maybe it is time to panic made me think other possibilities of online news. In the article "technology doesn't dumb us down. It frees our minds" the author suggested maybe we can blam twitter for making us stupid. And as Nan's really refreshing idea in her post that "media requires less attention may attract more users," a twitter style news might be convenient for people who do not have enough time or attention. 

Actually rss feeds are something similar to twitter style format, but it really depends on what kind of reader (or widget) you are using, the format of the article from the production (news web site maybe) end, and so on. So sometimes the news feeds we end up getting is one headline, or full article. A twitter style means it is short, straightforward, with headline and the blurb text. Nothing else. Maybe something else if the user click on it. But the what shows up on the screen initially should not be more or less than the headline and the blurb text. 

So who will use that? I don't know. But it should not be hard to try this idea. And again, a twitter style does not mean bad writing. It should be the best journalistic writing among all.

Selling Sex

We're all trying to figure out the mother lode of online advertising. And they key concept to that, like my advertising professor used to say is: grabbing eyeballs. And how do you do that? Sell through sex.

Being edgy and creative are different concepts, yet they mean the same in marketing parlance. Viewers have been anaesthetized to such an extent that the marketing people should not be worried about stereotyping or offending people. There is so much sex and nudity in advertising that the combination is mind numbing. So what the marketing guys should be more worried about is on being ignored because of the viewer being desensitised to the image.

Essentially, what is offensive to my parents’ generation need not necessarily offend me. The radical and in-your-face concept moves from the extremes towards the centre. And what is now the extreme will be the ‘centre’ in a few more years. What I am trying to say is that edginess is a dynamic concept that marketing theories hold on to for dear life. And if at any point the ad is not edgy enough, they OD on it.

Advertising agencies and their clients would not spend millions of dollars in making ads if they didn’t think they would give them the publicity they need to sell their products. Why would they invest in a lost cause?

However evil I think the advertising world is, and much as I hate to admit it, sex sells. And like SeongBae said, movies and advertising are getting more violent and obscene. Products are pitched with such explicit sexual imagery and innuendo to the extent that some even border on pornography. But then again, sex sells and we’re all buying.

Measuring Attention

Sorry about the delayed posting.

I have ADD. But is this because of technology and the possibly ‘evil’ Google? No. In fact, technology helps me deal with the ADD and has turned it to an advantage! But I guess the ADD is caused by the need for people to multitask and maximise output.

So PDAs, mobile phones and other such devices are crammed with as much technology as possible because there is a demand for it. The very fact that devices such as the iPhones exist, is a testimony to the fact that people want to do a lot more in as limited time as possible. And since technology allows people to get as much work done in as little time as possible, there are arguments about shrinking attention spans and the digital media.

It’s not about walking and chewing gum anymore. If about walking, listening to your iPod, texting your friends and talking to a classmate – all at the same time. And let me not get started about the Blackberry owning lot.

will media become more provocative?

I believe this “lack of attention due to information overload” in this century is one of the reasons why TV, movies and advertising are getting more violent and obscene. It makes sense if you look at this issue from media companies. Media are all about getting attention, and I guess they have to do what they have to do to catch up with these “busy people.” But then, what is the boiling point for this attention-begging phenomenon?

People will pay more attention to more violence and obscenity first, but they will eventually get used to it. It’s like the Jerry Springer Show. People got used to seeing so called “freaks” on the show that they don’t consider these “freaks” to be freaks anymore. Back in 1990s, gay people were considered to be extraordinary to put on the Jerry Springer Show, but nowadays, if Jerry puts some random gay couples on the show, it will not draw much attention from viewers. Gay couples in this century are pretty much normalized compared to 10 and 20 years ago. This is why the show is becoming more and more provocative. (I don’t know if "provocative" is the right word choice. I tried to think of an English word to properly describe this.)

So, here is my point of view. If media companies try to get more attention by becoming more provocative every time audience becomes apathetic toward the media’s degree of provocation, would there be some kind of boiling point for this? How far will the definition of “provocation” keep changing over the courses of time?

auto-confirm@amazon.com Your Order with Amazon.com 8:58 pm... aka OMG this post is long. apologies.

Okay, yes. I went and bought the book from Amazon before I came here to post this. I bought it with my Amazon Prime account, so it'll get here in two days. Delivered to my front door.

I am Rob Lippincott. Well, at least as much like Rob Lippincott as a graduate student who has never had a real full time job, barring internships and summer jobs, can be. I'm an editor of two graduate publications. I have two side companies with a single partner. I intern for a group downtown. (I'll go into a little more detail about that later.) My only sister is getting married in a month and two days. My grandmother's health is in such a state that I have lots of family emergencies. Oh yeah, and I take more than the full load of graduate classes every semester. I'm a busy lady. And that's why I use Amazon Prime.

Who has the time to drive to a bookstore and purchase a book? I'd rather pay more to get it delivered to me. (In this case, you get free 2 day shipping on any purchase for $80/year.) I usually don't have time to look at anything more quickly than 2 business days later anyway. I've also tried an organic grocery delivery service here in town. They were pricey and I don't really care if food is organic or not. But I needed one less thing on my to do list. Ultimately, I stopped using them because their UI was too high maintenance after they went through a redesign. I started getting deliveries that I hadn't thought I'd ordered and I canceled the service. The reps when I sent them frantic emails were not very understanding or accommodating. I guess they had too many people competing for their attention too.

--

I recently had a conversation with the big boss at my internship. My internship, I should mention, without using actual names that will pop up in searches, is for the state office of a national organization for older people.

Anyway, the state boss, while not the most technologically inclined person, also likes to play devil's advocate. I had long conversation, in which he lamented having to deal with 100+ emails a day that actually required some type of action or response. He also often had to respond to staff members' queries after hours. How, he asked, is this manageable? How is this reasonable?

Ever the technological optimist, I argued that an equilibrium point would be reached in the next 10 or 20 years. Otherwise, execs and managers would have to begin to be compensated accordingly; if they're spending more hours working, they should be paid for it.

My direct boss, I think, sees some generational differences. He recognizes that I don't feel obligated to respond to every single email if it doesn't warrant it or to people who I'm not responsible or beholden to.

In this way, I think many people in my generation-- or perhaps just uber geeky/dorky (I know there's a difference to some people, but I can't keep them straight) techie people like me-- are a little more savvy in managing info flow in this way. While many people at the organization that I'm interning for have hundreds or even thousands of emails (unread or not) in their inboxes, I use mine as a to do list. I intentionally keep my work outlook and my student/personal/student organizational/freelance gmail inboxes under 20 emails. I quickly address issues that need to be address and funnel emails into some sort of filing system away from the inbox.

Is this the wave of the future? How do y'all operating?

Should managers and execs be given trainings on managing information and incoming calls/emails/etc and work flow?

Attention Economy

Attention economy reminds me of Putnam’s famous argument that TV (or Internet) has a time displacement effect on people’s civic engagement. But the attention economy provides a more sophisticated measure of people’s use of time, which is attention. Most of mass communication studies still utilize the time spent on media consumption to measure the media use. This approach fails to account for the increasing thinner attention people paid to the media, even when they claim to spend time with it.

Attention economy also proposed two interesting laws:
First, the amount of information increases, the demand for attention increases.
Second, the more attention to have begin with, the easier it is to get more.

The first one can be used to explain the information overload phenomenon. However, the increase in demand for attention may be disappointed by the supply. What people are paying attention to and which get the most devoted attention can be an interesting topic for mass communication studies. The second law shows a rich get richer model in attention economy. I am wondering whether some media outlets are more attention efficient than others. Especially new media, would reading twitter less attention consuming than reading New York Times? Therefore, one media does not have to be dominant attention grabber in order to succeed, media requires less attention may attracts more users, who live in a information overload society.

Week 7 Readings

The point highlighted in the green circle on page 14 left some food for thought. In this era of information overload, attention is precious and scarce. One of the ways that has seen some success of retaining attention is to give customers attention. Like the quote says, "One way to get attention from customers is to give them attention." With the plethora of participatory journalists now, and the ability to get attention through many ways (iReport, YouTube, etc.) companies are now becoming the platform to HOST others' attention instead of being the ones who constantly feed information to the consumer. For example on CNN's iReport, you can go to the site to read the news but then if you so choose, be able to report news as well. Of course the topics are limited to what CNN will allow on iReport but it is a big step towards giving customers attention and not only limiting the information flow to a one-way street. Maybe in the long run, the winners will be the ones who are able to give the most attention and shed the best light on the customers?

Adaptation in the age of ADD

The most startling thing about this sessions' reading — chapter 1 from Davenport and Beck's "The Attention Economy" — was to realize that it had been published in 2001. In "digital" years, that might as well have been the dark ages: before ubiquitous cell phones and text messaging; before Facebook and the like; before other Web 2.0 applications that are highly attention-intensive—in short, before our digital lives really became crazy. It's remarkable to realize how taxing all of these daily, almost constant distractions must be on our brains ... but is all of this making us stupid (as Jacie brought up)?

Clearly, we've all become a little more ADD in the way we approach information: We skim, browse, surf, and otherwise gloss over wide expanses of data ... but, then, we have to out of sheer necessity. Perhaps this is rewiring our way of thinking, but it (meaning the digital realm, especially the Web) is also expanding our ability to create, collaborate, connect, explore, co-critique, and expand our understanding. As Jacie pointed out, by allowing us to "forget" certain things that we can always Google later on when we need that piece of information, this should free up more brain space for greater niche knowledge and deeper wells of creative thought. In this sense, as we increasingly learn to manage our everyday information overload, we (theoretically speaking) should be able to adapt such that we can parcel out our attention more effectively—in other words, we're learning how to give less attention to the useless spam (mostly because better filters have improved that dramatically since 2001) and, hypothetically then, we should have more time/attention for the work that matters. Again, we're talking in theory here, since I recognize that we're still so inundated with information that actually carving out quiet space for creative work is getting harder and harder to do.

So, bottom line: The "attention economy" hypothesis put forward here certainly has merit in today's environment, but it doesn't account for the likely improvement, over time, of individuals in the way they manage that scarce attention.

Ah, but at the end of the day, I didn't really get through this article in full ... I just couldn't give it my full attention. ;)

measuring attention?

With so much information and so much to do, we use our own ways and often times we use new technologies help us manage our tasks, time, and attention. Then the debate starts here. There was an article on atlantic.com arguing Google is making us stupid. Guess you know I would not agree with that...... There's counter-argument from nytimes.com, however, saying technology doesn't dumb us down but frees our minds.

I like the second article on nytimes.com a lot more in that it argues we are in an era with so much information that advanced technology helps us save time and spend more time on creating. Similar to what we saw in attention economy, the article from nytimes.com also argued:

In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time.

It is really interesting to see that a HP scientific calculator was banned in some classrooms in 1972 with the fear that it is detrimental to human intelligence. Well, ban calculators! Ban computers!! Ban SPSS!!

Sorry.... back to attention, thus companies use money to buy attention and users trade in their attention for something else. Attention, compared with cooking pot model, seems to be more concrete in that attention can be transformed into other currency more easily. But even though it seems more concrete, it is still hard to measure. One measurement suggested was time, a poor measurement. How else can attention be measured?

Here's a link to the videos of Poynter's eyetrack method (?).

Making money on the Web

This really is the BIG QUESTION of Web economics: How do you make money? (or, to use Web 2.0 parlance, how do you "monetize"?)

A couple of thoughts came to mind as we read the piece "Cooking Pot Markets" piece by Ghosh. Consider this a stream of consciousness ....

One, as for journalism and online news, there might not be a business model. Period. It becomes free forever.

Two, I'm not sure that I totally agree with Ghosh's central argument: "money is not the prime motivator of most producers of the Internet's free goods, and neither is altruism." Oh, really? I think can think of some instances when the primary motivators are either of those two — more often money, but altruism as well. (Think of Yochai Benkler's notion of "sharing nicely.")

Third, much of the monetary value to be made via the Web comes offline ... as in the case of Jeff Jarvis, who leveraged his online blogging to enhance his offline opportunities to speak, write books, teach, and consult. I like how he puts it here in this column for The Guardian:

Some people think I'm nuts for blogging when I could be doing real work (as if writing newspaper columns were the only real work). They ask me how much money I make directly from my blog and the answer is: not much. But to me, the blog is worth a million dollars - or more - for it brings me value in many other ways. So I thought I'd give you an accounting of that worth.

Last year, Buzzmachine.com, which has been in business, loosely speaking, since 2001, made $9,315 (£4,655) from two blog ad networks, $1,866 from ads on my RSS feeds, and $2,674 from Google ads, for a total of $13,855. Though I've written many a blog post and column lamenting that there aren't better, richer ad networks to support grassroots media, when I add that up, I'd say it's not too shabby. Nonetheless, you'd still be forgiven for thinking I shouldn't have quit my day job.

When I did quit that day job - as president of an online division of Condé Nast's parent company, which I left in 2005 - I got my next job thanks to the blog. If I hadn't been pontificating about the state of the news in the internet era, I wouldn't have come to the attention of the City University of New York, which appointed me to the faculty of its journalism school - a job I love. But I must confess that my teaching post pays a fraction of my prior salary. So you may still think me a fool.

To make the money I don't make teaching, I consult and speak for various media companies and brands. The only reason I get those gigs is because companies read the ideas I discuss at Buzzmachine and ask me to come and repeat them in PowerPoint form and explore them with their staff. I've also been asked to teach executives how to blog (a class that should, by rights, take about two minutes). That work and the teaching get me to a nice income in six figures. So I'm not looking quite as idiotic now, I hope.

It was also because of the blog that I got this column. The MediaGuardian editors asked me to take some of the topics I write about online and turn them into columns; the newspaper is an aftermarket for the blog. It pays a bit, a few hundred dollars a column, but that's not why I do it. I enjoy the discipline of taking the lumpy clay of a blog post and moulding it into a column. I like discussing column ideas with my community before I write them. And I quite like having you readers as an audience. So please don't tell my editors that I like doing this so much I would do it for free.

I just got a book contract because of a notion that began in the blog and that I kneaded over and over for about a year. As I write What Would Google Do?, I continue to explore ideas on my blog, helping me to think them through. The US contract roughly doubled my consulting income last year; international contracts may add more.

If I add all that up over the past five years and the five to come, to me the blog is worth a few million (dollars, not pounds, sadly). But it's worth even more than that. Buzzmachine has taught me about the new architecture of media; I wouldn't have learned that without jumping into the new world myself. The blog has stoked my ego, getting me on TV and on conference stages to blather to audiences far and wide.

It has also checked my ego, as my readers never hesitate to challenge and correct me. It has forced me to be more open to new ideas. It has given me a second career playing with new toys; professionally, it keeps me young. Personally, it has made me countless new friends and reconnected me with old ones, owing to a blog's ability to give a person a strong identity in Google searches.

People ask how I have the time to blog on top of everything else. But the real question is, how could I not blog when it leads to so much more? Finally, for a proper accounting, I should also give you the other side of the ledger: the blog costs me $327 a year for hosting. So this is one web 2.0 venture that is profitable.

Blue Man Group

money and the web

Being on the Internet is not quite like being in love (though some would argue about that) - but it brings with it the same sheen of pricelessness. On the Internet, through much of its past, the bulk of its present and the best of its foreseeable future, prices often don't matter at all. People don't seem to want to pay - or charge - for the most popular goods and services that breed on the Internet. Not only is information usually free on the Net, it even wants to be free, so they say.

I found it really interesting to read this blurb, from 1998, with the ongoing net neutrality debate in mind. Soon, we may pay for internet access like we pay for cable TV, which would be drastically different from the picture of the internet that the author conceived of 10 years ago.

I recently found a couple short videos about the net neutrality issue, which I find entertaining even if they're admittedly perhaps not unbiased. They are entirely put together by Lauren Weinstein, who has been involved with the internet since ARPANET.
Network Neutrality in 30 Seconds - Part 1
Network Neutrality in 30 Seconds - Part 2