One of the most troubling things for me about watching newspapers go through what they’re going through is that none of it is really necessary. I mean, yeah, I’m really upset that so many of the watchdog’s of democracy are dying off, but I’m even more upset that there’s so much they can do save [...]
The session I gave at Podcamp Toronto 2010 was titled Saving Newspapers Using Search & Social. It was all about how newspapers could use a blend of SEO, social media, and mobile apps to increase their audience and offer more diversified and targeted ad buys. Some of the audience seemed to thinks that I was [...]
A couple of weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch announced that Newscorp is likely to make its content unfindable to users on Google when it launches its paid content strategy. To me, Murdoch’s decision sounds like stubborn chauvinism. I mean, NewsCorp isn’t the only name in news, and I think in the midst of so many Google [...]
Print publishing is seen as a lot more authoritative than blogs because of the investment put into it. With a blog, you just write and publish. With a piece of print, someone was hired to assign the story/beat to someone who was hired to write it, and when the writer files it, it’s then vetted [...]
The root problem facing newspapers (and other mainstream publishers) isn’t so much falling ad revenues. That’s just a symptom of a greater problem. The bigger problem facing mainstream publishers is that ad technology hasn’t caught up with content technology. Right now, there are so many ways to publish and distribute content. But there really aren’t [...]
The transition from mere a newspaper to full-blown social news organizations (SNO) requires a significant investement in technological infrastructre. That’s not an easy bullet to bite when ad-revenues are falling and potential investors are increasingly wary of a fledgling industry. So perhaps print publishers should be looking at technology VCs, rather than the more conventional [...]
Considering how the New York Times is coping with the the plight of the publishing industry and news media better than most, it’s not surprising to see that they might be pursuing a more symbiotic editorial model. Granted, when it comes to weathering the storm, the NYT is a lot larger in both scope and [...]
Symbiotic editorial is kind of like when you treat your content like a public park rather than a walled garden. And there are three parts to pursuing the model: (1) having two poducts; (2) having two target markets — one readers, the other advertisers; and (3) understanding that readers are also both consumers and users. [...]
