Posts Categorized as "Industry Notes & Commentary"

23
Apr 10

APRIL 30, 2010 – NYC: Wharton hosts ‘The Future of Publishing,’ Conference, Outside.In CEO Mark Josephson to Participate

Posted by Esther Brown in Announcements / Events / General / Industry Notes & Commentary / News — View Comments

One week from today, on April 30, the University of Pennsylvania‘s Wharton School of Business will be hosting a conference entitled ‘The Future of Publishing: Technology, Publishing and Academia Build a Forum for Solutions.’ The conference will be held at the Marriot Marquis here in New York City (7:30 AM – 7:00 PM), and our CEO, Mark Josephson, will be participating as a panelist.

It should be a fantastic event and we really hope you can make it!

Here are more details, from Wharton’s website:

Traditional publishing models have been disrupted, fragmented and dissolved. For books, magazines or newspapers, new behaviors and technologies have changed the face of publishing forever. Join the Wharton Lab for Innovation in Publishing (part of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, Knowledge@Wharton, and Wharton School Publishing to examine the new technologies and strategies that impact all facets of the industry to help bring actionable answers to publishing executives. Conference highlights include:

* Keynote addresses from Gordon Crovitz, Co-Founder of Press+ (a service of Journalism Online) and Martin Nisenholtz, Senior Vice President for Digital Operations at The New York Times Company
* Panel discussions spanning the consumer, publisher and delivery of the future, the value of social media in publishing and the mobility of new content with speakers from Hearst Interactive, Google, Simon & Schuster, Condé Nast, Wall Street Journal, Ipsos Mendelsohn, Demand Media, Digg.com, Hyperion Books, Fast Pencil, Open Road Media, Outside.In, NBC Universal, Flurry, and many more
* Open forum style where attendees will be strongly encouraged to engage in discussion and brainstorming in the panel workshops

Mark will be participating in a salon panel entitled ‘Hyperlocal Content’, in the afternoon:

This panel will examine geographic-specific content development mechanisms and how many platforms are moving to a model of “content by consumers for consumers.” As consumers narrow their focus, this hyperlocal strategy seems to create more super-niche markets.

Eric Bradlow, Co-Director, Wharton Interactive Media Initiative

Barbara Bry, Associate Publisher and Executive Editor, U.S. Local News Network
Mark Josephson, CEO, Outside.In
Rob King, Executive Editor, ESPN.com
Darian Shirazi, CEO, Fwix

Register Now or read more about what promises to be a really engaging conference!

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
1
Dec 09

Grants Spur More New Media Ventures… Will They Survive?

Posted by camilla in General / Industry Notes & Commentary — View Comments

moniesIt feels like almost every week I read about a new media venture sprouting up thanks to grant money from xyz foundation or donors. NPR recently received a $3MM grant from the Corporation for Publication Broadcasting and the Knight Foundation to fund bloggers and curators in 12 cities. There is a long list of recipients that are embarking on online local news ventures, including:

The most recent news comes out of Chicago where a dozen groups have received a total of $500,000 in grant from the Community News Matters program. The list of recipients struck me, not because of WHO they are, but HOW they are planning on using the funds. Many organizations will use the tens of thousands of dollars to cover news in specific neighborhoods and hire/engage bloggers and citizen journalists.

A boost of cash is great but what happens after it’s all spent? Apply for more grant money or is there a viable business model to keep it running? How that initial source of start-up funding will be spent is key. It’d be a shame to hire a bunch of bloggers and curators and then lose them when the money runs out. It’d be disappointing to see the launch of a hyperlocal news site with great community information that can’t update the data on a regular basis when the funds run dry.

I am all for financial support, especially for these types of new media ventures, but the opportunities that the grants provide for need to be seized in a right way that is strategic and sustainable. With the generosity and good will of many of these foundation and donors, combined with the passion and entrepreneurship of these upstarts, we at Outside.in see this as a great opportunity to work with the ventures to help build and execute on an efficient and viable business model. Assuming that these grant recipients are in it for the long haul, we have ideas, products, and tools to help them meet their short-term and long-term goals.

13
Nov 09

More on the #NewBiz Conference at CUNY

Posted by camilla in Events / Industry Notes & Commentary / Outside.in for Publishers — View Comments

picture-12My colleague Jared provided a great commentary on this blog after the recent New Business Models for News Conference and HyperCamp at CUNY. Thought I’d add a few more thoughts from the revenue angle.

As Sean Blanda points out in his recap, and repeatedly expressed by the confab attendees, a major unmet need in the hyperlocal space is around selling. In other words, what I heard loud and clear is: “I need revenue!” As this conference re-affirmed, there are plenty of journalists, bloggers, publishers (large and small) who are producing and featuring hyperlocal content, the challenge is how does one monetize this content.

Not surprising… after all, who doesn’t want to make some money? But here is why this is interesting:

  • No real mention of the usual self-service online sales route, such as Google or other ad networks). You can read into what is NOT being spoken aloud here… Google AdSense is not enough. Generating pennies off of clicks may work for the behemoth that is Google, but not for the independent local news site. Folks are well aware of how big the local ad market is ($100B+) and appear hungry to go after some of this big pie.
  • I sensed a DIY attitude when it came to ad sales. Individual publishers want to know how to sell. Journalists may not “do spreadsheets” but maybe some will do sales? I’m usually a fan of the DIY mentality and entrepreneurial spirit, but to make local ad sales work, DIY will not cut it. Local networks need to form to provide scale and efficiency. Rather than you sell what’s yours and I sell what’s mine, how about the best person sell on behalf of everyone in the market?
  • Not every hyperlocal site or news org should have to sell. The staff of the new news organization should focus on what they are good at, and in most cases, that will not be sales. The ability to sell is not something you teach and voila: You’re now making money. I wish it were that simple. Not only does it require recruiting the right people and training them properly, but you also need to equip them with the right tools and products to sell with, and most importantly, incentivize and motivate them to sell something that is not theirs. But local sales teams that have the skills and relationships already exist. The key is how to connect them with the relevant inventory that best services the advertisers… Sounds very similar to the challenge of connecting the big media folks to the local network of bloggers.

So, what does all this portend? Well, the future is still being shaped (by some of the folks there at the conference and other thought leaders and innovators), but a few things are clear on the ad sales front: Training will not be the answer and generating meaningful local dollars will require more cooperation and collaboration amongst the relevant parties. Yes, more group hugs are in order, as Jeff Jarvis insisted. And local networks being sold by the right sales teams will be the key in this new ecosystem.

23
Sep 09

Solution for “Newsfail” Situations

Posted by camilla in General / Industry Notes & Commentary / Tips & Tricks — View Comments

Have you heard of the recent “newsfail” in Atlanta? According to the Center for Future Civic Media, there was a significant lack of coverage on the terrible massive flooding in the Atlanta area and local TV stations were scrambling to cover the story. Such big, important news and no one seemed to have been on top of it in a timely manner. What gives?

atlfloodpeachtreeparkpicture-5
Photo courtesy of the City of Atlanta, via Creative Loafing

Coincidentally, a few of us at outside.in were preparing for a business trip to Atlanta in the midst of all this flooding and disaster. I only heard of the news through an IM from a friend who asked why I was about to fly out to an area where offices and schools were shutting down and the airports were backed up like crazy. Had it not been for this message, I doubt I would have been in the know, since I don’t really follow Atlanta news and didn’t see it mentioned in my national news feeds. I would have probably shown up at the airport only to realize flights to Atlanta had been canceled or severely delayed.

You would assume that major news like this would be covered by pretty much all national news outlets. But that did not happen. I’m sure all publishers may have their own set of circumstances but one major cause that likely led to the “newsfail” is the fact that many news publishers no longer have the resources to stay on top of all the news breaking in a timely manner (especially when weather makes it even tougher to travel to the right locations). And consequently, the consumers are left to rely less and less on traditional media sources. We now rely heavily on word of mouth via Facebook, Twitter, or IM.

So, the solution? Smart aggregation. Publishers and consumers would be best served through the power of aggregation and distribution. Publishers do not need to cover every major news breaking in their metro. If there are other content producers and local bloggers that are already reporting the story as it breaks, publishers can take advantage of the content by aggregating from these complementary news sources and link out from your site. Your audience do not need to search the web to find the news. You should provide this information, even if it means the content is from an aggregated set of a variety of sources, which can provide for a more comprehensive perspective and coverage.

For local bloggers, such “newsfail” provides a great opportunity. My colleague has already written about the power and benefits of local blogs in this type of a situation on our blogger HQ site. In Atlanta, there were several blogs providing the latest updates, including rounding up tweets, on the flooding early on when only a few major news sources were covering it. Decatur Metro started blogging about this as early as 9/17. We here at outside.in think this is what the new news ecosystem is all about–major publishers tapping into the aggregated set of content and helping to drive traffic to the network local bloggers and the smaller publishers.

Whether it’s a devastating flood in Atlanta, a recent manhunt in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago (covered on the Arlington Heights Neighborhood News Page on our partner site, ChicagoBreakingNews), we believe “newsfail” should and could be avoided.

picture-22

16
Sep 09

Google Fast Flip Misses the Point

Posted by lauren in Industry Notes & Commentary — View Comments

fast flip logo

Tech blogs were buzzing yesterday about Google Fast Flip.

The new experimental service allows users to flip through screenshots of web articles from “three dozen top publishers,” according to the announcement on The Official Google Blog. You can choose to sift through latest articles or specify a vertical or source publication—typical filtering mechanisms also available in the more traditional interface of Google News.

Fast Flip aims to speed up news consumption by eliminating the need for end users to load an entire page (including the publisher’s template, navigation, ads, and analytics tags) to read an article.

To make up for showing more than the accepted fair use summary of articles, Google will share an undisclosed percentage of revenue on the ads shown next to the screenshots.

fast flip section thumbnails

The product concept is interesting, but its execution misses the mark in two major ways:

Aggregation

As a high-touch opt-in service for publishers, Fast Flip faces an uphill battle to gain breadth and diversity of source articles. Its baseline content providers show a heavy bias toward major national and international media companies.

Under this model, users never see content from small hyperlocal or niche vertical publishers who may have innovative coverage in their area of expertise. And smaller publishers can’t easily opt-in through a form on the Fast Flip site—presumably they must contact Google via email and prove reach or name recognition to warrant the time Google would spend setting up a rev share deal and what seem to be screenshots at a custom size for each publisher (screenshots for Salon.com are 995px wide, whereas those for Fast Company are 640px wide and those for BBC are 655px wide).

fast flip section thumbnails

Improving the UX of News Consumption

Does Fast Flip fulfill its lofty goal of saving users from the sometimes-painful load times of media sites?

microfiche reader by Mosman Library on Flickr

New microfiche/film reader by Mosman Library on Flickr

The product claims to bring the experience of reading a magazine online, but the interface more closely resembles that of a microfiche machine (hat tip to Outiside.in Biz Dev VP Camilla Cho for the observation) and provides neither the physical immediacy of print nor standard web conventions to guide users through content.

By sticking screenshots of articles into a bulky wrapper, Google breaks the page layout and UI choices of each original site design. By centering publishers’ templates within the Fast Flip interface, Fast Flip often pushes the content out of prime locations where we’re used to focusing our eyes.

The screenshots also kill accessibility and interactivity. Without HTML, no one can click on links within the article, play embedded video, or enlarge photos. Users with screen readers are hosed and the weak of sight can’t use their browser settings to resize fonts.

For all those normal features of web browsing, you have to visit the original article, complete with long download time and a jarring experience of adjusting from the Fast Flip-wrapped screenshot to the original site.

We love to see innovative interfaces for news consumption, but this one doesn’t seem up to snuff. Publishers, what do you think? Is Fast Flip the kind of interface you’d like to see your readers using?

9
Sep 09

National Media Companies Chase Local

Posted by camilla in General / Industry Notes & Commentary — View Comments

There’s been a flurry of major news surrounding hyperlocal lately: AOL acquiring Patch and Going.com, MSNBC snatching up EveryBlock, and just this week, we hear that The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times will soon be launching local editions in the San Francisco market. ESPN recently launched a Chicago-focused site and will soon launch in two other sports-centric cities: Boston and Dallas. Similarly, Fox Sports is planning to go after the Detroit and Houston sports fans. All very interesting news. All with the same theme: big national (actually, global) media companies going after the local market. Before you know it, every major national media company will be pursuing a local strategy.

So, why are these big corporations chasing after local? What makes them think they can enter this new space when their focus has historically been on a much broader national level? Well, the temptations are compelling, and a smart local approach actually may make sense for some of these companies at this point in time. Some factors they’re probably considering:

  1. increasing local online ad dollars
  2. changing local landscape with new entrants and incumbents, where the once-dominant local papers are facing serious financial problems
  3. demand for more hyperlocal content and news that the local publishers are not covering like they used to due to resource constraints
  4. “keeping up with the Joneses” factor: everybody else is doing it, maybe I should get in on the action too

The combination of these factors (and probably several others) add up to a big opportunity. After all, local content brings the potential of new users, improved visitor loyalty, and additional local / regional ad revenues.

But as many folks know, the online local game is a tough nut to crack.  The notion of local is personal and subjective, sources of relevant content are numerous and growing, and local ad sales presents its own set of challenges with SMBs still struggling to make the online transition. The best player poised to win this game is still the local publisher! They have the inside knowledge, the connection to the community, and the long-standing relationships with the local businesses. As long as the local publishers are willing to adapt to a new model of news and committed to innovating and working with the right set of partners, they have a leg up on their national or global competitors.

So, local publishers: Don’t panic that the big boys are out to eat your lunch. Think of this as a wake-up call that you are in a highly desirable sector full of new opportunities. And the time is now: Big corporations move slowly, so the smaller guys should be more nimble to make and implement changes. We hope many of the local publishers see this as the ideal time to reinvent yourselves and re-claim your local territory. And outside.in is here to help.

26
Aug 09

Seattle Times Partners With Local News Sites – Is It Enough?

Posted by camilla in General / Industry Notes & Commentary / News / Outside.in for Publishers — View Comments

Today the Seattle Times announced an editorial partnership with four local news publishers. Obviously, this caught our attention. A major news publisher working with and driving traffic to hyperlocal sites is part of how we envision the new news ecosystem. Thus, we do commend the Seattle Times for taking this encouraging first step and embracing the notion of aggregation, connecting with their community, and taking note of the wealth of great local content being produced in their backyard. But how will this really work? Is this the beginning of a new news model or an interesting experiment? Well, there are some issues that should be addressed.

  • Limited Content: Why isolate this to just four content publishers? Why not 20? Why not 100? If you were the publisher, wouldn’t you want access to ALL the great content producers in your market? Seattle is a blog-rich metro with hundreds of local bloggers (we capture over 300 sources in this market). The barriers to entry to becoming a content producer are extremely low. New content producers are popping up everyday that the Seattle Times won’t have direct access to. My Ballard may have the best coverage on a specific event one day but the next day it might come from an unknown new blogger. If I were the editor, I’d want access to it all rather than limiting myself to an exclusive set of a few local publishers and possibly alienating everyone else out there.
  • Lack of Scale and Automation: Without these two elements, this initiative will likely prove to be challenging to manage on a day-to-day basis. For publishers in other cities that may want to adopt a similar strategy, no doubt the concerns will be around resources. Who will pick and choose what articles to link to and communicate with the bloggers? With so many news publishers strapped for resources, is this a realistic initiative to pull off successfully?
  • Sustainability: This is a one-year ‘project’ funded by the Knight Foundation. A grant from the Knight Foundation via American University will fund a liaison at Seattle Times and provide a stipend to the participating local bloggers. What happens after one year? Who will continue to fund this ‘liaison’ and the bloggers? What seems to be missing is a sustainable model that builds a relationship with the local bloggers and encourages a constant exchange of content, inventory, and revenue–a model that can be replicated at other cities all over the country.

The solution to the above issues and many of the questions is pretty simple–organized aggregation. This is why we built Outside.in for Publishers–a product to automate and ease the efforts of collecting local content.  We give you the ‘fire hose’ of all aggregated content organized by neighborhoods and places, along with simple tools to manage and curate all of this. As news constantly changes, we believe local publishers need this level of flexibility and control.

We will be watching to see how this Seattle partnership works out. As of now, it sounds like a great concept but in practice, I question whether this is a sustainable or an efficient strategy. We are excited to see more publishers like Seattle Times embracing the notion of working with smaller local content producers in their market to give bloggers the much-desired and deserved eyeballs and distribution. But publishers can do a lot more and faster. The tools are there… we invite you to see just how easy it is and take advantage of the opportunities.

19
Aug 09

Uncertainty and Chaos Create Bigger Need for Organization

Posted by camilla in Announcements / General / Industry Notes & Commentary / Outside.in for Publishers — View Comments

I’ve been tuned into Aspen Institute’s Forum on Communication and Society (FOCAS) on the theme Of the Press: Models for Preserving American Journalism. There were lots of smart folks talking, debating, listening, refuting, and defending their vision for the future of journalism.

One big theme that jumped out at me as I listened to the questions and comments to Jeff Jarvis / CUNY’s New Business Model for News and what pretty much everyone in the room seems to agree on is that the current news ecosystem is full of “uncertainty and chaos.” With non-profits, big media, local and community papers, local bloggers, and start-ups – there are plenty of players. With all the various revenue options and models (many of which have yet to be proven), the challenges in attaining profitability are also numerous but risky. What all this signals is loud and clear: the need for organization. And that is exactly where Outside.in comes in…what we excel at is aggregating AND organizing the explosion of local content (by region, city, neighborhood, as well as by topic and category). In fact, that is how we are supporting various publishers right now, primarily through our online platform—Outside.in for Publishers (http://publishers.outside.in), which is now being used by dozens of media partners (such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Chicago Tribune / Chicago Breaking News) who are digging into hyperlocal sources in their markets and leveraging our tool to create rich, community news pages for their sites.

The FOCAS participants, though highly accomplished and well-established veterans in their respective industries, seem to be crying out for some organization (note: Jeff Jarvis’s scatter diagram illustrating the various players in the ecosystem didn’t really do the trick) to make sense of the fragmented and disparate news world out there. Well, we have our own vision of the new news ecosystem, which relies on Outside.in enabling the flow of content and inventory from the network of local bloggers and less highly-trafficked content creators up to the publishers who will curate this long tail of content and send traffic and revenue down to the network (see image below of how we picture this). An ecosystem is only effective if there is an exchange of values amongst the parties. And our vision is to build products and provide services that enable this efficient exchange.

ecosystem-graphic

Newer Entries →
Blog WebMastered by All in One Webmaster.