I've tried to remain low-key about the Associated Press action against the Drudge Retort, a parody of the famous Drudge Report political Web site, but given the furor out there I think that a post on the topic is worthwhile. The AP has raised "takedown requests" claiming violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other laws in unlicensed use of its content in seven of the Drudge Retort's blog post. Not only is the Drudge Retort being challenged on its own use of AP's content but as well for people in comments sections that quote paragraphs from AP content. The Drudge Retort's Rogers Cadenhead commented on the takedown letter on his own weblog and provided a summary of each of the takedown requests, citing the examples.

Similar to the lawsuit raised by AP against Moreover for their use of AP headlines and ledes to provide links to AP content the concern of AP seems to center on the use of headlines and ledes as copyrighted content. Unlike the AP/Moreover suit, though, this takedown letter focuses on only seven items rather than a bulk use of AP headlines and ledes. And unlike the AP/Moreover suit, some of the headlines on the Drudge Retort site were not AP headlines but headlines rewritten by the site's staff. Also notable was that the sections of text from AP stories were quite small. In all of the sections posted by the Drudge Retort itself they were either just a lede sentence or a lede plus a quote from someone at a public event.

The Drudge Report appears to have complied with the takedown order and AP's Jim Kennedy promises guidelines for bloggers using AP content, but awareness of it spread quickly through social bookmarking services and weblogs and has ignited a widespread reaction from major bloggers and mainstream commentators. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington offered one of the stronger statements, claiming that his prominent weblog would no longer reference AP content. Others were more inflamed in their rhetoric, including this gem from Matthew Ingram:

I don’t want to be accused of succumbing to Godwin’s Law, but I would argue that a dialogue with the AP has about as much chance of being “constructive” as Chamberlain’s discussions with Hitler over the fate of eastern Europe.

The New York Times' Saul Hansell tries to steer a calm course through the AP challenge in their Bits blog but in the era of sub-millisecond delays of information transition used to power most large-scale trading of financial securities his citation of the century-old "Hot News" New York statute is shaky at best. If someone is linking to a story that's already minutes, hours or days old on the Web, much less in investment banks, how "hot" can that news be? And since to get the story in full one must still go to the licensed source, the licensed source is going to benefit financially from more public awareness of their having a story available.

The clear benefit of inbound links and short, fair use-style citations can be seen in the impact that social bookmarking has had on AP licensors. Looking at the data at right from Compete.com, news Web sites that are major licensors of AP content do not appear to have been harmed by the growth of social bookmarking sites such as Digg, which provide similar small snippets of content and headlines from AP and other sources. In fact, one could argue by such a trend that much of the growth at news sites in recent years has been due to the attention that weblogs and social bookmarking sites have paid to their content. Social media is the news world's best friend at this point, providing an editorial capability that curates high-value content from professional media organizations that would otherwise be ignored.

But the real point seems to be whether AP can gain financially from this exercise. Facing a dwindling number of mainstream media companies available to purchase its content AP its struggling to come up with a way to build a broader base of revenues in an environment in which their audience has become a far greater source of content curation than their traditional client base. Whatever the validity of AP's legal citations - they seem to be to be quite weak and awaiting only a decent lawyer in opposition to them to have them swept away - they are alienating the very marketplace that is driving growth for their existing licensors at a time when that marketplace needs AP content less than ever before. It is all too unfortunately like the RIAA-led lawsuits against consumers of online music, which have done little to change the fate of music publishers who have lacked a coherent marketing strategy to deal with the power of online music consumers to drive both tastes and sales.

As valuable as AP content may be, for most news stories that people will link to and comment upon online there are readily available substitutes from other wire services. AP's position as a service bureau complicates their ability to counter the power of proprietary wire services such as Reuters and Agence France-Presse, but clearly the problem is one of having only so many popularly-tracked newsworthy events to cover that will result in real "hot news" that others lack. In the meantime weblogs and other emerging publishing outlets are creating new sources of news and newsworthy opinions that could be syndicated by AP into their distribution network far more aggressively.

From a marketing perspective the real issue for AP, like the music business, seems to be far less about protecting an existing product line and far more about what needs to be done to rethink both the product line and the marketing rationale for the core product. Instead of resorting to lawsuits and takedown letters as a primary strategy to enforce the value of AP content on the Web, tactics that could create both legal confusion and a potential dilution of the value of the AP brand in the eyes of consumers, AP needs a "win-win" strategy that looks upon the drivers of economic value in online publishing more realistically - and that begins to incorporate new sources of content worth distributing to its worldwide subscribers and more valuable services.

A more refreshing approach to the opportunities available from social media is definitely in order. Simple example: instead of thinking about charging people for using AP headlines, why not PAY people for the click-throughs that they bring to subscriber content and charge higher rates to subscribers for the service? Hmm, maybe those bloggers are pretty good folks after all.
In the meantime, perhaps that nice linear relationship between social media growth and sites using AP content may not be looking so linear for a while.

Labels: AP, blogs, copyright, DMCA, drudge retort, fair use, michael arrington, News, techcrunch

In years past one could visit the head office of Bloomberg, L.P. and peer into the newsroom right off of the main lobby. Mike Bloomberg's office was right off of that news floor, with a glass partition that segregated him about as much as a head of an investment bank trading floor is separated from his or her operations. This was a natural for someone whose career took off in the trading rooms of Merrill Lynch driven by traders responding to real-time news events, but it also underscored the importance to Bloomberg of making authoritative market-moving news a key component of its success.

Times change, and now Bloomberg has announced the appointment of Time Inc. and Wall Street Journal veteran Norm Pearlstine as their first Chief Content Officer, a move that one presumes will enable Bloomberg to leverage its news and data assets more effectively in rapidly changing professional and consumer business news markets. Certainly this will help Bloomberg to move its revenue base more heavily away from professional markets, where its ubiquitous content displays are encountering fewer seats in an increasingly automated and specialized securities trading industry.

As I've noted for several years the financial information industry, like many enterprise content sectors, is moving away from a "bell curve" market model, in which lots of money is made off of many people equipped with subscription content delivery, to a "U"-shaped market model, in which lots of money is made off of highly automated content services and highly analytical services for a small cadre of decision-makers, with your typical "seat" revenues being realized more profitably through a media model where delivery has been commoditized as a benefit. Bloomberg has been relatively slow to respond to these changes, sticking to its highly profitable professional products but only recently beginning to up investment in its media brand audiences.

That's a challenging formula for growth given the continuing evolution of both Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones in supporting media markets more aggressively. Bloomberg 's online operations have grown audence significantly in the past year, almost doubling its online portal audience, but still trails Reuters and Dow Jones significantly for global markets. Thomson Reuters reported 18 percent quarter-on-quarter growth in its media sales in its first combined reports, an indication of how its global presence in online news markets has helped to fuel profits. So while Bloomberg's online, television and licensed content is strong, there is room for growth, especially in overseas markets.

But undoubtedly the increasingly sophisticated presence of Dow Jones has to loom large in Bloomberg's radar as much as the newly combined forces of Thomson Reuters. News Corp has managed this acquisition very wisely so far, retaining an online subscription base that both Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg lack while beefing up its Enterprise Media Group with its Generate acquisition. As these kinds of products that create professional value out of media sources begin to be adopted to Dow Jones' online media offerings Bloomberg will be challenged to devise both more powerful media offerings and a subscription community willing to pay for them. This will be at least as tricky as building a global content brand out of its existing news operations. The real challenge for Bloomberg is to respond to both new opportunities for media revenues and new challenges to high-end content analytics and real-time sales intelligence services in its core markets from newly strengthened players such as Dow Jones.

Pearlstine brings a deep and impressive legacy in the content industry to Bloomberg, but more importantly he brings an outlook on the media business which recognizes that the days of a handful of news monopolies dominating news gathering and dissemination are drawing to a close. To succeed with an electronic news brand one must not only excel at traditional journalism but as well one must excel in making news valuable in whatever context an audience finds it to be valuable. While it's not clear that Pearlstine's insider view of the media industry will lead Bloomberg to new successes in adapting to this more contextual view of the content marketplace he is likely to help open doors for Bloomberg to build out a more competitive brand for both online markets and for print markets seeking out new sources of editorial content.

Labels: B2b media, Bloomberg, financial information, media, News, Norm Pearlstine

There's the usual spate of moans and groans about print profits coming out of the Argyle Executive Forum on Leadership in Media, according to Red Herring, which featured insights from many key figures in today's news media markets. This negative outlook is underscored by News Corp's withdrawal from bidding for New York area newspaper Newsday based on it being "uneconomical" and setting the stage for a potential takeover of the paper by Cablevision. While revenues continue to climb from online content at news outlets classified revenues are still highly vulnerable from online competitors, making it hard to translate growing online audiences into profiles that resemble print.

There's not much new in all of this, to be sure, but I was interested in the following comment from the Argyle conference:

Norman Pearlstine of the Carlyle Group told attendees that newspapers enjoyed a brief period of monopoly that attracted investors and convinced many families to take their businesses public. However, he said, for most of its history, the newspaper business did not enjoy the double-digit margins that characterized the 1980s and 1990s. “At the end of the 19th century there were 29 newspapers in Chicago,” he said.

In other words at the end of the day perhaps the consolidation in the print industry of the past fifty years or so, first in response to rising fixed labor costs and television competition and then from the Web, created an illusion that highly capitalized media operations would yield superior results in an industry that has historically favored diversity in lower-margin operations. By creating larger swaths of exclusivity for fewer brands in major markets, newspapers and other print outlets were able to attract advertisers for several decades and provide reach at the same level of television markets. But in doing so they never really addressed the lack of technologies that could deliver higher margins except through higher production volume. This created an artificial illusion of technology scarcity that helped to drive both margins and the expectations of people creating print content. As long as there was a steady stream of companies to acquire to build up the illusion of scarcity, this worked rather well. But we seem to have come to the end of the run of worthwhile mass market print acquisitions. Big will probably get bigger yet if government regulations allow it, but to far less avail.

By contrast, the Red Herring article highlights how Playboy Magazine was one of the very first to invest heavily in Web technologies and to learn how to make them both profitable and attractive to advertisers and audiences, including heavy investments in online video and multiplatform delivery. The result: a highly profitable and attractive operation that offers some unique appeal to online audiences based on both content and branding. Instead of focusing on acquisitions in a sea of abundant competitors to create more artificial scarcity, Playboy worked to create something more appealing what would create quality that would be hard to replace.

Another important contrast comes from a recent MediaPost article, in which Ken Doctor points out that local newspapers are still doing fairly well, in part because many local advertisers as well as audiences have yet to be able to leverage a confusing array of online options effectively. This creates a real scarcity of audiences focused on local online content that are easy for advertisers to attract with some scale. Online alternatives are catching up fairly quickly in terms of content quality, but until GPS-enabled advertising services grow more sophisticated local print will continue to offer a ray of hope for print.

The bottom line is that it's far from clear that major media outlets as we know them really need to exist as they have for the past fifty or so years much longer. If the historical state of content is a wide variety of focused outlets with relatively low revenues, low volumes and low margins, then maybe what online publishing is beginning to usher in is simply the return of publishing to its more normal state. The difference with current markets is that electronic content aggregation makes it relatively easy for a wide variety of publications to leverage common technology. For example, individual weblogs such as ours use a tiny fraction of the power found in Google's Blogger.com infrastructure. So by focusing their capital mostly on pure infrastructure, Google has created true scarcity of highly scalable publishing capabilities that can service both localized and broad audiences very effectively.

Notably even companies like Google go out and buy market share through acquisitions - online video outlet Blinkx is rumored to be on their short list of short-term possible acquistions -
but these tend to be acquisitions that bring in both unique technologies and unique audiences. Where major media companies look mostly at reducing costs through online and print publication consolidation, the Googles of the world stay focused on creating more unique product value through acquisitions. With such an insistence on sticking with old metrics for performance it's not clear that established media companies can commit their capital effectively to gain a market advantage as long as they continue to focus on creating more artificial scarcity for dated products and dated delivery technologies. In the meantime private equity abounds to fund technology platforms that will take away the best opportunities for a wide variety of producers content with higher margins on lower volume and advertisers pleased with more focused audiences.

In other words, it's very unclear where the news industry goes from this point if they don't want to invest far more heavily in new electronic product development for more focused audiences. With a sour economy making it all the more hard to raise more capital for investment, expect media titans to continue to wrestle with their place in a content market traditionally dominated by smaller, more agile and more innovative players.

Labels: media, Monetization, News, News Corp, newspapers, print

When first I arrived on Wall Street many years ago at a major financial information company I was totally captivated by the notion of real-time news and information being at our fingertips every moment of the day. While other people lived through events in a seemingly second-hand world of news we were in on the cutting edge of events at all times. Reporters leaping over one another to cover these events in our newsroom was a given, and a thrill to watch as they shaped the news for leading investors worldwide.

But times change. Today what we used to consider elite real-time news is what most people on the Web expect to get as a matter of course, while traders in financial circles measure information timeliness that can give them a trading advantage via "hot news" in sub-millisecond timeframes. The Associated Press' CEO Tom Curley painted a picture of this evolving landscape for news in a recent address at the annual Knight-Bagehot Dinner in New York. In his address Curley was quick to chide "editors [who] need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new" and to suggest that news organizations' "focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people’s 24-hour news needs." He also outlined how AP bureau offices would be staffed with more people dedicated to creating news rather than distributing it. Certainly moves such as these will help AP to generate quality news cost-effectively. But Curley fell short in his defining the scope of a number of key parameters that would help real changes to come about.

A key unrealistic expectation that Curley advanced is the role that distribution management plays in online content: "We have the power to control how our content flows on the Web. We must use that power if we’re to continue to be financially secure and independent enough to speak truth to power." It would be more accurate to say that publishers have the power to understand how their content flows on the Web. Yes, through proper packaging a publisher can employ business or legal measures to enforce some commercial arrangements over that flow in many instances, but the notion that a wire service or any other content distribution service has the ability to control distribution on the Web definitively is not only inaccurate but a folly for growing a business.

With the exception of high-end professional applications such as securities trading the ability to monetize news lies far less in its ability to be distributed and far more in its ability to be contextualized. "Hot news" without a hot context is just not hot - especially when the hot contexts far outweigh the relatively small handful of contexts that used to exist through distribution-oriented media outlets. With social media creating millions of highly personalized contexts for news it is to a publisher's advantage to maximize distribution in the most cost-effective manner to those contexts. The brand value is not in the "AP" logo next to the headline or lede but in the value that it provides in the moment. While copyright in those contexts is certainly worth defending if you make the brand less able to flow into the contexts in which news can be monetized most effectively you reduce the opportunity for revenues substantially.

The New York Times understood this well enough when it lowered its subscription barrier to TimesSelect content and the Wall Street Journal appears headed towards more such exposure. Curley's suggestion of introducing tiered pricing for "hot" news versus hours-old news may have some value in this regard but if others are adept at making money without such a scheme it will be hard position to defend except at the highest end of enterprise markets. The general abandonment of 15-minute delayed pricing for stock tickers on television and the Web points towards an environment where the ability to monetize news on an exclusive basis has disappeared in large part from consumer media. It's about value relative to what else can be created in a medium, not just what you feel is valuable independent of that medium.

The fault lies not in the Web but in the reluctance of publishers to embrace monetization models beyond distribution control. "Speaking the truth to power" does indeed cost money, but it doesn't seem to ring true that this necessitates the primacy of one particular monetization model. AP has begun some experimentation with viral distribution via embedded content which is a hopeful sign for future efforts. But in an era in which the world edits its own front page and in doing so assigns value to news an organization creating news must adjust its expectations and acknowledge that speaking the truth to power also requires the active cooperation of those user-editors to make that truth relevant to power.

It's not just a matter of protecting copyright in a social media environment: it's a matter of being the master of monetizing social media through the inherent strengths of its contexts. Where value is created, monetization - and brand authority - follows. To insist that monetization and brand authority must be respected regardless of their relative value in new contexts leads inevitably to a degradation of both monetization and brand authority. Monetization isn't the real protection of quality news, it's really the creation of a defensible value proposition that protects quality news. The money - and the security to speak the truth confidently - comes from people valuing what you have to say in the most open marketplace of ideas available.

This is the inherent shift in publishing that continues to leave many in the industry not only at a fork in the road but well behind others who didn't even bother to look for the fork. It is, you might say, the difference in shifting an outlook from the East side of Manhattan to the West side versus shifting an outlook from the East coast to the West coast of the U.S. (or any other source of publishing innovation). Be a master of value in these new contexts, says the West coast, and the East coast time and again says, "Show me the money" - which sounds great and practical, except when the West coast comes up with so many new contexts that can make money that they are dumbfounded as to where to start to pick off what turns out to be sloppy seconds for monetization.

The solution to this problem lies in part in recognizing that the East coast crowd needs to be the master of monetizing contexts that the West coast creates, not the follower. Instead of sitting back on their heels and sending in a licensing team after the lawyers have roughed up a dot-com baddie established players in publishing need to think, "How can we be the next Google of content monetization? How can we be outrageously on the front lines of helping people make money from content that gets consumed the way that people want it? How can we create content packaging that is so compelling that it cannot help but to make money?" With an increasing stream of large media companies cutting deals for contextual ad networks you can see that they are starting to get a hint of what this is all about, but it's still mostly about putting up ads and not really about owning the most compelling value proposition that makes people want to advertise.

An example of this can be seen in the abandonment of print as a valuable medium. Curley suggests in his speech, "There’s still a place for appointment media -- a home-delivered newspaper on the porch each morning or an evening newscast while making dinner. But it is a smaller place. People, of course, want the news when they want it." While print's lack of exclusivity is hardly news, most publishers have been utterly uncreative in their approach to print as a highly valuable medium. Print is a medium for the most tactile and high-quality physical engagement with content: its value will be long-standing. An organization like AP has the ability to enable technologies that would allow consumers and enterprises to get highly customized print publications that would be highly affordable - and highly valuable to marketers. Instead, publishers crank out the same old proprietary content instead of putting the selection and the editing in the hands of their readers.

If this sounds as if I got up on the wrong side of the bed you may be right, but only because it is really frustrating at times to see how slowly major media companies adapt to these trends - frustration that is shared with many people working for those companies, I can assure you. There are scarce few that have had the courage to innovate with the fearlessness that's required to become a winner in the 21st century content world. AP may yet be one of those survivors under Curley's leadership as he strives to reinvent a culture that has much of which to be proud, but that equally needs to put aside that pride and acknowledge what the real goals must be for a news organization in the 20th century. AP's worldwide network of journalists and member organizations has an opportunity to reinvent the value of news around contexts rather than distribution, and many of the skills to make that so. But time is of the essence...

Labels: AP Tom Curley, Monetization, News, Trends

When Seattle-based Newsvine launched in Beta form last January we documented its promise enthusiastically and kept a close eye on it. Not surprisingly so did a number of hot prospects for financing a profitable exit, including MSNBC, which Newsvine has announced in its own story as its new owner. No details are available at this time about the size of the deal or how Newsvine will be integrated into MSNBC.com, but MSNBC News' estimate of USD 75 million seems about right given Newsvine's position in the social news marketplace and there are promises by MSNBC to keep Newsvine an independent entity for now.

It's a pretty good first acquisition for MSNBC.com, which is a humdrum online news portal that trails major outlets for cable news such as CNN.com and Foxnews.com by significant margins and seems to be caught in a major identity crisis. Unlike the online portals for CNN and Fox News, MSNBC.com is obliged to promote the broadcast NBC news properties more than the MSNBC cable unit, drawing away precious attention span to TV shows that have little to do with core online audience demographics. Add in an alliance with Newsweek magazine for feature content and the marketing muddle for the MSNBC.com brand gets no more clear.

Newsvine itself is not a traffic leader in overall visits amongst social news outlets and struggles to build momentum behind an intensely loyal core of news, opinion and bookmark contributors. But unlike other social news outlets Newsvine features a maturing mix of original content along with links to external news stories, a combination that will help MSNBC.com to build inventories of unique destination content and a network of popular online personalities that could be leveraged via MSNBC's cable outlet to build visibility for the community. Newsvine has had a few minor but noteworthy news scoops of its own - a member on the scene of the Virginia Tech shootings broke the initial details of the event - but the strength of the community tends to be a core of contributors who opine on and spin key topics in politics, religion, world events and popular culture. With a reasonable mix of views across the spectrum and the ability for talented writers to expand on their thoughts in their own pieces Newsvine offers a rich mix of content that's sure to complement any mainstream news outlet's offerings if managed effectively.

What Newsvine gets most out of this deal is a parent who's willing to put a little more muscle behind an organization that's been challenged to keep up with itself. With only a staff of six and an editorial policy that requires regular and timely monitoring and intervention by senior Newsvine staff to keep controversial content and comments from spinning out of control Newsvine suffers from the typical startup myopia that keeps it from looking at larger prizes at its disposal. Newsvine's features generally do a good job of promoting engaging content to the attention of its members and its social networking features were well ahead of other social news outlets but its up-only voting system tends to promote content that echoes much of the same controversy-for-controversy's-sake content that one finds in major media outlets. Ironically this may turn out to be a plus when you have a cable news outlet that focuses on much the same sort of stories.

Most major news outlets have been extremely hesitant to embrace social media too closely, a factor that has benefited portals such as Newsvine along the way: when The New York Times closed down its online comments features a few months back Newsvine picked up a good chunk of NYT commenters. With the acquisition of Newsvine established news media outlets may be beginning to recognize that this uneasy balance between social media and their own news is tipping away from their operations, creating loyalties tied to online communities creating and discussiong news that is likely in time to eclipse loyalties to news brands tied to established media channels. It's hardly a one-for-one swapout at this point in time, so the initial decision of MSNBC to keep the Newsvine brand alive as an independent unit is a wise move for now, especially given the typical sensitivities in online communities to being "sold out."

But as audiences empowered as newshounds create and discover a widening range of content their ability to build quality inventory and insights rapidly will eventually find more of today's journalists and commentators becoming professional members of online communities like Newsvine. Social news communities are accelerating in their ability to get their articles good placement in search engine results, a factor that certainly contributed to The New York Times' decision to open up its prime columnists' content to get our from behind their subscription firewall and into the mix of these communities. This transition is still fairly gradual and generational, but essential for ensuring future revenues amongst news audiences becoming used to having their peers help them select what's newsworthy - and worth their attention.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Digg, MSNBC, New York Times, News, Newsvine, Social Media

Reuters covers the licensing of content by Google from four major wire services, including Britain's Press Association, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and the U.S.-based Associated Press. On one level this is a very typical licensing deal equivalent to those inked by other major portals such as Yahoo, MSN and other outlets - and in fact Google had licensed rights to these content sources earlier in some instances but had not hosted their content. But the deal takes on a far different dimension given that it's with the leading Web search engine - one whose ability to deliver advertising revenues to portals using wire services is an important driver for traffic.

While Google ranking algorithms will take into account the appearance of wire content in other sites the links from Google searches and portal pages will lead to Google itself - helping its own ratings and, presumably, for its own ad revenues eventually. The AP story claims that this will have a major impact on AP member sites using their content but at least one commenter on Poynter Online claims that "For the vast majority of newspaper.coms I know, wire story traffic is not a big factor, and revenues from AP pages barely, if at all,... For the vast majority of newspaper.coms I know, wire story traffic is not a big factor, and revenues from AP pages barely, if at all, cover the cost AP charges us for its CustomWire service." That may be true, but it's bound to hit those sites' overall traffic counts and referrals to other pages in their sites from wire content.

While newspaper sites will certainly feel some pinch from this move, the far larger losers in this deal will be the major portals such as Yahoo that rely on wire content for a significant portion of their news traffic and search engine referrals. With Google now playing by the same rules their relative lack of original news is bound to be yet another chink in their armor in the battle for ratings and advertising supremacy. At the same time wire services are looking at the diminishing fortunes of traditional news outlets such as newspapers and broadcast services and recognizing that they need to move more aggressively to build their brands online. In this sense Reuters has pointed the way for these wire services with its increasingly selective use of online syndication partners.

The biggest winner in this mix are the original news producers who are looking for stronger marketing of their content. From this perspective member-driven wire services such as AP are going to find themselves in a more advantageous situation as they continue to make it easier for their members to market unique content filed with AP into major outlets without having to hassle licensing deals. At the same time, though, these traditional news producers must become more adept at marketing their unique content directly via search engines, portals and social media services if they are going to continue to build the audience metrics that advertisers expect. Google's move places even more pressure on local news producers to come up with more viable strategies to engage their audiences in the contexts that they value most - and more opportunities for wire services to act as channels for those strategies.

Labels: AP, CP, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Google, News

Reuters reports the news story on CNN's elimination of Reuters as a major supplier of news and video footage, but the story behind the story provided on the Reuters MediaFile weblog gets to some of the meat of the matter. An internal CNN memo surfaced by MediaFile from Editorial Director Richard Griffiths details the sudden and troublesome transition that CNN must manage. The termination of using Reuters content is immediate and global and must include purging clips of Reuters video footage from archived video segments. Though the official story from CNN that it is deciding to make "significant investments" in its own news gathering operation to counter the loss of Reuters content there is some speculation that this is more of a cost-cutting measure or a "play tough" negotiating stance on the contract for syndicated Reuters content.

The truth is probably somewhere in between these two stances. It's hard to imagine that CNN, which has relied strongly on Reuters content for most of its existence, is going to be able to fill the gap easily for coverage lost through dropping Reuters, especially as it impacts their archives so deeply. If this is a strategic move, then one would think that the strategy would have accounted for these losses more smoothly.

To some degree the claim that news feeds and video footage from suppliers such as AP can help to fill the gap may be a major part of the CNN strategy, but the larger factor seems to be how the increasingly context-dependent nature of Web content is changing how content brands are managed online. In dropping a major syndication source such as Reuters CNN is acknowledging that aggregating content from other premium branded suppliers does not necessarily help a publisher to score well in metrics managed by comScore and other audience measurement services that look increasingly at how content gets consumed away from a portal.

This is underscored by portals such as CNN making more aggressive use of their own feeds to users via RSS, search engine positioning and other techniques that are putting their content into on-the-fly contexts that users value more. In this sense, a content brand is built around what it does for an audience in the contexts that they care about most - which may or may not be the brand's parent portal.

While this gives Reuters a bit of a bloody nose in the short run it's also an acknowledgment that their strategy of using Web syndication partners sparingly is paying off to some degree as its own brand begins to gain more prominence through search engines and its increasingly sophisticated portal. However CNN's willingness to stick with content from AP and other wire services may also indicate that Reuters' once-dominant international position in news gathering is eroding to the point that it is becoming harder to position its news effectively in consumer markets. Reuters has also lagged behind AP in seeking out social media partners to build context for its content, and unlike AP does not have the advantage of a membership-driven network that relies on AP in many instances to drive branded news portals in many local markets.

All of this begs a very delicate question: is the Reuters news brand going to be strong enough to survive alone in an era in which traditional syndication is experiencing major challenges? By moving its consumer Web operations away from partners such as CNN over the past few years Reuters has tried to innoculate itself against this very question through its quest to build up non-syndication revenues through advertising and other types of business deals. But with more global news sources than ever before and a surge of user-generated content gaining more authority it is becoming ever-harder for Reuters to define that brand, a move that may be complicated by the eminent takeover of Reuters by Thomson.

Consider, for example, the fact that the far more interesting analysis of this particular story appeared on the Reuters MediaFile weblog. MediaFile is an excellent blog, but it's hardly the only one of its kind. Being able to define their brand effectively online whilst contending with both traditional and non-traditional competitors that can be exposed the the global communications afforded by the Web is going to be an ongoing challenge for Reuters and other major wire services. For now consider CNN the winner in this battle as it gains more freedom to build its brand through online channels for its text and video content, but consider both parties having to scramble to make their news strategies fly in a world of contextual content branding.

Labels: aggregation, CNN, News, Reuters, syndication

Newser is a new take on online news aggregation backed by HighBeam Research's Patrick Spain with a hand from media figure Michael Wolff. The concept behind Newser is relatively simple: use a central editorial staff with some automated support from HighBeam's search and aggregation infrastructure for premium and Web content to highlight news from mainstream media sources and from select social media channels. Newser presents a fresh face to news, with a tic-tac-toe matrix of nine lead story boxes for top news in each major category complemented by automatically generated related topics and headlines from AP news. The Newser editorial staff whips up a digest of each lead story that is complemented by a link to the underlying source, online video clips where available and links to Newser content on related topics and people in the story. News from the front page and major topic areas can be fed via RSS into a user's news reader of choice. For now Google's AdSense network provides a revenue stream.

Newser provides a lot of best practices for online news aggregation and is an attractive and well-conceived package for consuming general news content. Its editorial selections, while somewhat eccentric at times, are thoughtful and make for a nice feed of interesting reading. But strangely Newser doesn't seem to have much mojo going for it. Is it just a matter of not having the West Coast buzz that other news aggregation sites have? Lacking the right chatter is perhaps part of the story, as prominent articles in The New York Times, Gawker and other major media channels have focused at least as much on the personality of Michael Wolff as they have on the site itself. As a media figure who has had his fair share of unkind thoughts about the online world perhaps leading with Wolff's East Coast view of media is not such a keen idea.

But Newser's momentum issues are also locked in somewhat into the product itself. While the story-scanning interface is an improvement over some search engine news interfaces the tic-tac-toe look makes it very hard for the eye to focus on what's important in the news. There are things to be said for simple column layouts, even if they don't look have that catchy, Blinkx-like "wall of content" look to them. The new Netscape's tab structure for editorially-selected stories is one other option as well that could help eliminate visual clutter. This is especially important for audiences becoming increasingly used to the scrolling headlines of news feed reader services as well as for more traditional news reading audiences. My guess is that a lot of people will take a look at the product, say "huh?" and move on to the next click. It's just too hard to focus on something at first glance.

Another key factor in Newser's mix that's troubling is also one of its strengths: its editorial selections. Unfortunately the editors of Newser are anonymous, and there is no opportunity to establish a conversation of any sort in the Newser framework with editors or with other registrants. The uncertainty of who does what in the editorial process seems to leave Newser at a disadvantage to sites like Netscape, whose anchors are both known and attract supplementary news and comments from readers. Readers like to have a sense of whose hands are on the editorial process. This is accentuated somewhat by Newser's near-exclusive focus on the typical mainstream news sources, with only an occasional smattering of online news from blogs and topical portals. If Newser's primary mission is to filter mainstream news sources then they should have an editorial voice that can be held to account as MSM sources are.

But the largest factor that may be holding back Newser is that while it is a well conceived news delivery machine there are already a preponderance of ways in which people can get news delivered to them effectively in agnostic aggregations. Google News provides highly readable and relevant selections from mainstream news sources and news reading software available through Google Reader, MyYahoo!, NewsGator and other services enable people to tune in to the news sources that they select and trust most. The New Aggregation is driving news content more quickly into personalized contexts than ever before, including sites such as Netscape and Newsvine where news can be discussed and ranked through audience-driven editorial processes. In such an already crowded field for news aggregation Newser may have a hard time getting some momentum behind just competent editing, aggregation and delivery of the usual suspects.

Newser's thoughtful capabilities are likely to serve as a good platform for others who are trying to get an improved approach to news aggregation, so my best guess at this point is that Newser will wind up being acquired fairly rapidly by an online service with established audience share that's trying to improve its news aggregation capabilities. Alternatively Newser might do well by opening up its platform with APIs that will enable it to provide its aggregation services to portals and other services on a licensed basis. But without reasons to stick around at Newser itself it's capabilities are not likely to draw advertisers who are dwelling more on how long people are engaged in a given site - a factor that will favor more interactive news sites. With further product improvements and more hooks into the social media crowd Newser could develop its own following in time, but doing something that others already do pretty well a little better may not develop the fanatical following that will propel Newser to high-profile success.

Labels: aggregation, HighBeam, News, Newser

Mashable notes along with a number of other sources the testing of what's labeled a comments feature for Google News. In a sample Google News query (link will not age well) on a new drug for treating AIDS you can see a comment posted by a doctor specializing in AIDS treatment. Clicking on the comment yields a detailed entry by this person. Mashable indicates that people can submit verifiable emails to Google that relate to a person or entity mentioned in an article to comment on it, though based on this sample query it would appear that it is not just people directly associated with a company or product that can comment. Note also that if you click on a detailed entry you get a number of news stories that relate to the topic covered in this person's comment.

This is obviously not a full-blown comments feature but rather an attempt to draw in original content from experts who can provide insight into topics relating to specific news stories. With the editorial verification and filtering provided by Google it becomes in effect a "letters to the editor" feature for Google News that attaches these expert insights of relatively unlimited length to a wide variety of sources on a topic, giving Google News a unique editorial depth that no one publication will be able to provide.

Most news sites tread on providing user comments very lightly, especially in the aftermath of the failed LA Times' experiment with crowdsourced op-ed pieces and The New York Times' exorcising of user comment boards, but in doing so they threw out the baby with the bath water in many important ways. In the search for increasing user engagement Google has enabled its news users to use its news service as a master source of expert-driven editorial content, even as most news organizations work to reduce unique content from users relating to their own editorial operations. It precludes such experts from having to rely on maintaining their own weblogs or in engaging in the fray of a specific social media service in which their comments may be lost or drowned out all too easily. Kudos to the Google News team for recognizing the opportunity to put news content into perspective with its own unique content - and to pave the way for a new way of looking at how one collects expert insights on both leading and specialized news topics.

Labels: editorial, expert systems, Google, News, Social Media

AP reports on the new Microsoft Surface PC which provides a touch-friendly tabletop interface to a Vista PC - kind of like playing PacMan in a bar back in the 1980's, I suppose - but the real item that I wanted to highlight is that the link above goes directly to the AP site where an ad-supported version of the story can be found. That's right, AP.org provides a content portal platform for its syndication partners who want their AP content served up from AP's own host facilities. This is something that's not readily evident from the front page or site map of the portal, nor is it really exposed in search engines, but it's clear from the layout of this page that AP is now able to deliver a general news site comparable in general terms to Reuters and other wire services. AP's position as an association wire service prevents it from advancing this capability, no doubt, but it opens up some intriguing options for AP should it decide to deliver news more directly as a part of its business model. With destination portals losing market share and AP's content being embedded successfully in a wealth of mainstream and social media destination content sites, though, it's doubtful that AP really needs such a site to advance its current business goals. Ironically AP's positioning as a pure-play syndication service may have been the ideal positioning for it to weather the changing environment for monetizing online news.

CLARIFICATION: Jim Kennedy, AP Vice President for Strategic Planning, posted this comment:

I'm a great fan of Shore, but this post needs clarification. The "destination" portal you think you landed on is actually nothing of the sort.

Since 1996, AP has hosted general news pages for many of its subscribing members. The pages are generally branded for each member and carry each member's look and feel.

In this case, you found your way to an unbranded page, which we use for in-house and demo purposes.

No change in strategy here. We're not interested in creating a destination. We are doing just fine as a B2B supplier.

Thanks for the information, Jim, I understood this to be a service for AP members but I don't think that this came through clearly enough in the original post. I think that what happened is that one of your partners was using the hosted service with a frame and not a "skin", so it was easy to pop the article out of the frame and to see the hosted site in its demo form. I see this not as a budding strategy from AP but an interesting example of what AP could have done but did not do as a result of its positioning as a membership-driven syndication service.

Labels: AP, News, Trends

CNBC Reports along with others on the USD 5 billion cash offer from NewsCorp to acquire control of Dow Jones & Company from the Bancroft family and other majority shareholders. Dow Jones has long been in the eyesights of Rupert Murdoch who prizes the Wall Street Journal editorial page's outlook as much as its healthy subscription revenues and improving online profile, but certainly the recent reoganization at Dow Jones under CEO Richard Zannino doesn't hurt the prospects of Dow Jones getting a good asking price for a traditional news and business information service in a problematic market. The broader problem is what happens if the Bancrofts et al. come back and express interest. Certainly Bloomberg and other business information companies may be willing to put in an offer as a prophylactic move to ensure that another well-funded global competitor is not breathing down their necks, but few outside of NewsCorp would have a globally positioned product that would complement Dow Jones' existing media and business information capabilities effectively.

In the CNBC article Mort Zuckerman notes that NewsCorp's efforts to launch a cable business news channel to compete with offerings from CNBC, CNN and Bloomberg can make this a good fit, and it's a key point. Dow Jones' footprint in video has been very limited so a broadcast-savvy ownership provided by NewsCorp's Fox division would certainly position their editorial assets more effectively - especially in exploding online video markets. The same factor argues somewhat against a Bloomberg acquisition, as it already has a reasonably successful broadcast presence in both television and radio. But the ringer in all of this is business information. The Dow Jones Enterprise Media group under Clare Hart provides NewsCorp with an enterprise footprint that it lacks - and that it needs to give it a more interesting balance sheet compared to Reuters, which maintains growing media interests and solid enterprise interests.

All in all this may be the offer that the Bancrofts can at last not refuse. Expect considerations from Bloomberg and others to enter the picture in reaction to the bid but my sense is that this may be the time for Dow Jones to move into the hands of new ownership - and for Zannino and crew to benefit from a broader array of outlets through which to market their editorial products.

UPDATE: ABC News reports that Dow Jones rejected the NewsCorp bid within hours of its posting. The article mentions, though, that there is no statement from DJ indicating that it would not consider other bids from NewsCorp or other companies. This is not entirely surprising - Dow Jones is likely to want to remain in U.S. ownership, given its history - but my comments stand. This may have been the last best chance for Dow Jones to bail out under reasonably good conditions. Their online operations are doing well enough and they are finding more innovative ways to market non-financial content but the long-term trend for print revenues is not promising. To stay healthy more video production is a must.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, News, NewsCorp