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| Friday, April 28, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:27 AM |
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| Thursday, April 27, 2006 |
 The Associated Press highlights along with major papers the details of McClatchy's spinoff of four newspapers recently acquired from Knight Ridder, a complex series of deals that puts privately held MediaNews in the spotlight as the principal winner of the Bay Area's San Jose Mercury News and The Contra Costa Times with support from other chains, while Hearst gains The Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minnesota and The Herald in Monterey County. The interest in the was enough to bring Editor & Publisher's analysis of this story for a good period of time today. But apart from MediaNews becoming the fourth largest paper chain via this deal there's not a lot that's terribly new here. Like a game of Texas Hold 'Em poker most of the cards were already on the table before the final pieces fell into place. The interesting parts of this story are mostly in the little details, such as McClatchy picking up pieces of even more papers in non-major markets, emphasizing their positioning for news in markets in which electronic competitors are less likely to dilute earnings over the next few years. The other not-so-small detail is that Hearst and Gannett are picking up minority interests in the MediaNews acquisitions, which is likely to raise concerns about the concentration of media ownership again at some point, but not likely to raise dust in the short run. But with both newspapers and magazines emphasizing online video production as a hot new outlet for their content there could be more complex ownership issues emerging in local markets where print video production begins to compete effectively with local TV news producers. In the meantime a series of relatively quiet and complex deals such as those being executed via McClatchy is a good way to keep the regulatory spotlight away from potential ownership concerns. All appears to be on track in this little poker game, and perhaps everyone will go home happy yet. But if I were a betting man I'd put my money on McClatchy's markets. MediaNews knows what it has to do, but it's a far showier bet to think that any major is going to catch up with today's well-wired users that have a galaxy of good substitute content available. For now, I'm hiding my wallet.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:48 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:38 PM |
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| Wednesday, April 26, 2006 |
The Times Online notes the latest chapter in the perennial battle between financial content rivals Reuters and Bloomberg in their efforts to gain market share supremacy through their services to the global securities industry. According to The Times, Reuters is claiming through its slim eking out of another one percent of market share that its 27 percent slice of the pie now places it atop Bloomberg for the first time in a decade. As noted by The Times, though, this comes in part due to the absorption of user positions gained via the Reuters acquisition of Telerate last year - an indication of just how much potential redundancy there is in the financial content game - and a more accurate assessment of how data feeds contribute to the Reuters market share. So although Reuters has much to cheer about in terms of its efforts to revitalize and consolidate its product line, the gains in market share are hardly to be called organic at this point. The broader concern, though, is whether this annual exercise in "mine is bigger than yours" is really telling Reuters shareholders what they need to know about their market position. Bloomberg is certainly facing major challenges as it tries to roll out expanded datafeed services and to fend off vendors nibbling away at their messaging services that are at the heart of their platform's value as a channel for deal-making; their monolithic pricing also faces stiffer opposition from clients as "The" Bloomberg becomes less of a desktop presence. All good news for the crew over in Canary Wharf, to be sure. But the broader issue of market share is not how much Reuters is slicing out of Bloomberg but rather the death by a thousand cuts that it is suffering from niche players, networks and content distributors more willing to bypass Reuters and Bloomberg services altogether to create a new fabric for financial content services. A new generation of content services is emerging in financial markets thanks to the rise of increasingly independent content creators and network infrastructure and standards that eliminate much of the historical need for content aggregators to manage real-time market data. In this new era of financial content value-add service providers such as Reuters and Bloomberg are still critical components but they can hardly call the tune for the dance as they did when their global technology services were the only cost-effective way to glue financial content together effectively. We'll continue to see the annual Reuters market share studies come out, no doubt, but it would be refreshing to see them consider some of the emerging factors in the marketplace for financial content services more seriously. Otherwise these stats will have all of the heart-pounding relevance of major television network rankings in an era of online access.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:17 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:14 PM |
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| Tuesday, April 25, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:56 PM |
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The recent SIIA Brown Bag Lunch Series panel on personal knowledge management highlighted tools from leading suppliers that support collaborative publishing by individuals in and beyond major enterprises who create collective knowledge quickly and easily. Be it wikis, weblogs, messaging systems or new forms of publishing personal knowledge management has taken content into new enterprise environments that attract people who want to share information effectively for profit with the ease that people doing it for fun on the Web enjoy. When anyone from any enterprise could be a part of this collaborative publishing environment it's time for publishers to examine more closely how their content can be central to these highly productive user/publishers. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:23 AM |
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| Monday, April 24, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:59 AM |
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| Sunday, April 23, 2006 |
Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:56 PM |
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| Saturday, April 22, 2006 |
InfoWorld picks up on a new round of PR for Congoo, a tool to make it easier to access premium content located via a Web search engine. Congoo is a toolbar that you can download for your Internet Explorer browser (Firefox promised) that will allow you to form search queries much as any other search engine's toolbar. Enter some personal information in the Congoo tool such as zip code and email address typically asked for registration-based access to premium content and you're ready to start looking for premium sources. Search results yield a section on top of the page with premium results, followed by normal query results from the Yahoo! search engine, along with sponsored links to advertisers on the right side. Click on a premium result and you can get limited free access or easy pay-as-you go access with a click from a popup box, which then stays out of the way to allow you to access premium sources unimpeded. That's the good news...now for the not-so-good news. Most of the premium sources are news and press releases stored in a subscription collection called Libraryo.com, with the most prominent direct access sources being Encyclopedia Britannica and institutional Investor. In some informal testing, I was able to find articles from Institutional Investor on the open Web that were displayed in the premium results of Congoo, as well as BusinessWire archive press releases available for free on the free side of the HighBeam research portal. However, on the plus side the Institutional Investor and EB results link to their native Web sites rather than the stripped-down Libraryo.com results for papers and press releases. The larger problem is that the Congoo tool does not work in conjunction with other search engines: you access the premium content only from the Congoo search portal, which is available today only to tool downloaders. In a general sense there's a lot to be said for having a tool like Congoo to make premium content accessible easily from an interface that includes Web content. It's an idea that has been tried from many angles already by Factiva, Yahoo!, Highbeam and other prominent suppliers. But none of these efforts have been able to detach their subscription access schemes from a proprietary search engine or database management system. At the same time Yahoo!'s Subscription Search beta has virtually disappeared: the landing page still exists but it no longer returns search results. Aggregating segregated premium content works well for some specific applications and content types, but as a general concept it's proven itself to be a loser on the open Web. The segregation of premium content in search engines has not enabled its value to be assessed in direct comparison to non-premium sources. Shore research shows consistently that people are willing to pay for premium content when it serves an important purpose in an important context, with Web search engines a key source. If that perceived value is so high, why continue to confuse content consumers by insisting on artificial segregation? In enterprise search engines and applications content from personal, enterprise and external sources are combined as needed to provide the highest contextual value possible. There's no real reason to do otherwise on the open Web - a fact that more and more publishers are beginning to appreciate without the help of traditional aggregation services. Content license management for subscription content still revolves largely around database access controls rather than the devices used by individuals and institutions licensing content. With the prevalence of search and access methods for content in today's public Web and enterprise networks, there is a real need for more universal content monetization controls that don't tie publishers to these database services. Congoo tries to look like it can provide that universal access, but it's a long way off the mark, unfortunately. Next...
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:53 PM |
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| Friday, April 21, 2006 |
I just opened up a gift box from a company for whom I provided a presentation at a private gathering and discovered to my pleasant surprise a 500MB memory stick beautifully bound in leather and brushed metal ( photo and details). Memory sticks are now very popular as trade show giveaways, but this is a keeper, to be sure. It's very much like the difference between a fine leather-bound book and a trade paperback - except that the content inside could be anyone's, including my own. Packaging content in digital form doesn't mean that people don't care about its physical manifestation, but today's content user is less concerned about the specific item that's being cared for and more about the ability to have a treasured collection in the places where they need it most. Accessories such as my new memory stick are simple reminders that portable content is highly revered by today's users, independent of any one device on which it makes an appearance. Thanks for the gift!
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:54 PM |
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The New York Times' summary of Google's quarterly earnings is a good piece, highlighting increased revenues from value-add initiatives such as Google Maps, Google Video and Google Earth, as well as the success of new news portals in overseas markets. paidContent.org notes that Google's Jonathan Rosenberg waived off notions of monetizing GoogleBase (in spite of reports of Google Payments being in the hands of key GoogleBase users - see Ecommerce Guide) and sees GoogleBase primarily as a way to gather more content for Google's search engine. It's all about growing the contextual value of content at Google, including scattered A/B test sightings ( PC World) of expanded search results with more result-specific content, keywords, links and searching. Apparently gathering all the world's information and making it useful is putting quite a strain on Google's infrastructure: "We have a huge machine crisis," Google's CEO Eric Schmidt noted, prompting this little tidbit in the Times article: Jordan Rohan, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets, called Google's capital spending "unfathomably high," noting that it spent the same percentage of its revenue on equipment as a company in the telephone business, an industry traditionally seen as far more capital-intensive than the Internet. What's kind of ironic about this observation from Rohan is the amount of media attention being lavished on cable and phone networks trying to leverage their network infrastructure more effectively for profits via Web content. Be it native search, GoogleBase or the myriad of other content products and features being rolled out by Google and other major Web content outlets the main difference between Web companies and the telco/cable companies is that their models were designed from the get-go not to be about distribution of content so much as enabling the value of content from all sources in the eyes of global audiences. So yes, Google is a content company with a heck of a server farm and a growing network presence, but that infrastructure is always the means to a content end that eschews the "water and pipe" metaphor that the telcos and cable companies still embrace. Maybe the Wall Street analysts will come up with new yardsticks for Google that take a closer look at how well they monetize I.T. infrastructure versus the water-pipe crowd. In the meantime keep your peepers peeled for the expanded search results feature testing being conducted by Google, it's going to be a boat-rocker.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:55 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:49 AM |
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| Thursday, April 20, 2006 |
Missed yesterday's Brown Bag panel? It was an excellent session, my thanks to the panelists who I moderated for a very insightful and informative event. SIIA members may catch up with it by following the link below (check in with Marion Janic if you need help logging in): http://siiacontent.scribestudio.com/ Panel summary:
Personal Knowledge Management is engaging individuals with today’s advanced collaborative publishing tools to create groups of people in enterprises and beyond who can communicate far more effectively with one another than ever before. From finance to major industries to the open Web these tools are creating bodies of content that leverage the insights, knowledge and opinions of actively engaged contributors to enable them to understand what a group as a whole understands with amazing speed and effectiveness. The technologies used to accomplish this can vary quite a bit, but they all have the same net effect: groups as large as entire enterprises can all be on the same page to respond to major opportunities and challenges without a lot of support from traditional content and technology providers. This panel will explore how Personal Knowledge Management tools are making it easier than ever for people to share knowledge with one another and how publishers will need to adapt their marketing strategies to publishing environments in which personally engaged users are the center of the value equation for content.
My panelists included:
Bob Serr, CTO, Parlano
Matthew Mahoney, Business Development, Socialtext
Greg Lloyd, President and Founder, Traction Software, Inc.
Ben Elowitz, CEO, Wetpaint.com
I'll post a News Analysis summing up the panel later this week.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:02 PM |
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While Alan Meckler and Jason Calacanis mix it up in a WSJ Online "Reply All" online debate on whether bloggers can make money (answer: some do and will, more could) Phil Hall in a Media Industry Newsletter commentary punctuates the debate with a commentary on how the traditional career paths of young journalists only accelerate the rate at which writing talent is lured into online niches far away from traditional publications. Phil charts the fate of poorly paid J-School grads who wind up at a trade journal trying to cover niches that they know little or nothing about and then having to make choices between paying the rent and staying a reporter. It's nothing that any journalist hasn't been through before, but the publications that they work for are now paying the price of having relied on sub-grade reporting while attractive online alternatives developed before their eyes. The key benefit that weblogging has brought to journalism is that subject matter experts no longer have to wait to be interviewed to get their views out in the press: they can just punch them in and join the online publication world. As more trade journals add their own weblogs (see today's Accountancy Age announcement) the niches for young journalists to ply are likely to become even more narrow within the traditional trade and consumer media world. Add in the wide availability of corporate press releases on the Web and the rationale for traditional trade journalism becomes more narrow yet. This is not necessarily a bad thing: the remaining journalists are likely to be left with assignments that are more worthy of the craft and develop their skills through a wider variety of outlets, including weblogs. But with all the world a-blogging, perhaps the greater question is why journalism schools are still little coddled enclaves churning out grads for a job market that no longer exists. Perhaps it would be better to include journalism skills adapted to the online era as a part of regular university curricula, so that subject matter experts can be better prepared to write to their colleagues in an online world of publishing that favors trusted peers as sources of news and insight at least as much as traditional journalism. We're entering a world in which being able to communicate with audiences online is becoming a fundamental job skill. Perhaps not everyone will churn out prose worthy of a major journal or newspaper, but the ability to communicate through writing is only going to increase the general need for journalism skills - even as specialists begin to fade into niche roles.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:29 AM |
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