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Early Edition: Webloggers Steal the
Real-Time Thunder of News Headlines |
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3 July 2006 |
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Where to people go to get today's headlines online? For
many it's not a news portal but the front pages of weblogs
that crib little snippets of stories that are breaking (or
have yet to break) on the major news sites. The hunger to
be first with a story in print is not being reconciled
efficiently with the realities of online news, which favor
those who keep their eyes open for breaking news from all
sources agnostically. News organizations have an
opportunity to define premium services in this mix - and to
consider how they can become the "go to" destinations for
people wanting a first edition of today's headlines from a
world of authoritative sources. |
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For many years my family lived
a lot closer to New York City than we do today, enjoying the
ability to hop into the city on short notice and to slip back
home quickly in the small hours of the morning. One of the
luxuries of that lifestyle was the early edition of the New
York papers hitting the curbs as we neared our home. It was a
special pleasure to peruse the day's news while most of our
neighbors were fast asleep. Today I still get my sneak peeks,
but not from the newsboy under the train trestle. Instead I get
to monitor weblogs that sneak out headlines and small snips of
text from stories before they hit newspaper Web sites in full.
While I may still read the full stories when they come out
later, the weblogs are fast becoming the front pages that I
peruse to get the first picture of developing news.
I think of this changing ritual in light of last week's ContentNext
mixer in New York City (Shore coverage).
At the end of Rafat Ali's interview with Arthur O. Sulzberger,
Jr., Chairman of The New York Times Company and Publisher of
The New York Times, I asked Sulzberger if the NY Times had
given any thought to introducing a more real-time online
service to their Web offerings. In the brief dip in the decibel
level that followed my question Sulzberger answered no, it
hadn't been in their plans. Strangely the element of timeliness
is not considered a major factor for determining premium levels
of service on the Web. If anything, news services do rather the
opposite: push stories out to all as soon as they are available
and then have them slip behind a registration or subscription
firewall.
I say strangely because in the world of enterprise content
timeliness of news oftentimes becomes one of the key factors
for determining premium levels of service. Real-time news
services from Dow Jones, Nikkei, Reuters, Thomson and other
major suppliers vie for beats that may last only a fraction of
a second, but they are beats that can move markets nevertheless
- value that drives substantial revenues for these
organizations. Webloggers who have very limited resources to
generate their own news stories rely on their ability to scan
major news outlets to get that small beat on news that's about
to be posted and to assemble it into a useful "early edition"
to sate news junkies of various kinds. These advantages in news
gathering may prove to be temporary, but in the meantime news
organizations don't seem to be thinking carefully about how to
value the timeliness of news online for both consumer and
enterprise audiences. Here are a few thoughts as to how news
organizations can beef up their rewards for delivering news
immediately:
- Build premium revenues in the real-time window. In
securities markets some major exchanges charge a premium for
real-time stock quotations and then make them available to
individuals for free after a fifteen minute delay. It's a
factor that provides stock brokers and some private traders
with a market edge, one that they are willing to pay a
premium for in many instances. With the ability to copy and
distribute content globally and instantly a given the window
of opportunity for a premium real-time service for online
news may be relatively narrow - perhaps not even as wide as
fifteen minutes in some instances - but it's a window in
which news publishers and other content producers could make
exclusive some level of details on key new content prior to
releasing it to the general public. If opinion-makers on
weblogs are stealing some of the punch of these headlines
anyway, you may as well recognize that competitive factor and
make some hard cash while these sources build up interest in
stories among the general readership.
- Beat the weblogs and bookmarkers at their own games.
Many news-oriented weblogs are doing well in part because
they are willing to cast an agnostic eye on content sourcing
to come up with the stories that matter most in a given
moment. While original content is always a key factor in
driving revenues the opportunity to provide original context
for content from many sources is becoming a primary driver
for revenues that can no longer be ignored by news
organizations. Original stories need to be supplemented
aggressively by news-gathering professionals who are willing
to point out all sources that are contributing to the
news flow - regardless of whether they're part of your
article-level advertising base or not. The success of Rafat
Ali's
paidContent.org rests largely on a good mix of original
reporting and a pithy summary and analysis of news from other
sources. This is a microcosm of where news organizations as a
whole need to head. If you can't break the story itself,
break the take that everyone waits for.
- Join the conversation aggressively. There's no way
in a world filled with search engines, webloggers and social
bookmarking that one team of journalists can hope to say
"here's the news" with any real breadth through their own
direct reporting talents. News has become a global fabric of
multi-tiered communications that requires journalists to be
active members of that global conversation. Many journalists
are doing this fairly passively thus far, monitoring weblogs
and cribbing ideas for stories when they see key information
or trends emerging, but generally folding those insights into
rigid traditional story formats. When the online conversation
IS the news oftentimes, it pays to be involved in those
conversations if you're going to get the story first.
It's time for news organizations to put a price on the
immediate value of their coverage that's more in sync with the
costs of producing those short-lived exclusive insights and in
line with the value that audiences place in being the first to
know about something in detail - regardless of its source. It's
an exclusivity that many would gladly pay for - if news
organizations can muster will to think like a hungry weblogger
for a moment instead of like a newsboy under a lonesome train
track.
-
John Blossom
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