Growing demand for online news pages

What do you do if you're a big media company looking to expand your online presence? You could employ more people to produce more stories. Or you could look around the marketplace and size up compatible online publications for purchase.

A looming crunch issue for some sites is a revenue squeeze that's partly a result of their own success. According to the New York Times (reg rq'd) news and information web sites are back in town.

The problem is that advertisers want prime page positions, but the available inventory of pages is in limited supply. On the spectrum of problems for online publishers this is up the friendlier end of the scale, but nevertheless it's real.

So bidding wars are happening over businesses that only a short time ago were seen as undesirable.

"Online advertising is expected reach $9.7 billion in 2004, or about 3.7 percent of United States advertising spending, according to a recent Merrill Lynch report. Still, that number is expected to grow 19 percent this year as the nation's largest advertisers shift budgets from print and network television to cable and the Internet, the report said.

As a result, publishers are being forced to confront a potential advertising inventory crunch. There is no physical limitation to the number of Web pages, of course, but advertisers want to be placed on the most popular pages and those which cater to their most profitable audiences. And those kind of pages are in shorter supply. "

Looking for common ground

To time with the Harvard webcred conference, this piece in the Wall Street Journal continues the mainstreaming of blogs. ABC radio were on the phone this morning for a comment on a morning drive program (for the Northern Territory) - at least they recognise it's a genuine phenomenon.

There's a bunch of stuff in response to the conference on aggregators here and here. But the best one-stop roundup comes from Jay Rosen. Jay lists six key moments he took away from the two day meeting:

1. Public involvement leads to information hunger
2. Profitable for whom? How blogging makes money
3. There is no continuum on which journalists and bloggers fit
4. A passion for neutrality and the challenge from Wiki News
5. The podcasting era dawns for Powerline
6. Keep Your Eye on the Open Archive.

Number 3 came from Dave Weinberger. Dave is a respected authority on blog matters and co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, but I'm inclined to think that insisting there is no common ground between bloggers and journalists relies on an overly narrow definition of both.

I'm in full agreement with Jay on Number 6, though.

Marked man

In what can safely be described as a copout, former opposition leader Mark Latham took a swipe at the media as he exited the top ALP job:

"When I was hospitalised in August, for instance, the media frenzy was over the top, with photographers shooting through my hospital window. Accordingly, I have done everything I could to keep subsequent episodes as private as possible.

Unfortunately ever since the recent bout became known, and even though I was on annual leave, the media has been harassing people in our street, forcing our neighbours to call the police on several occasions."

Bad behaviour by individuals in the media is inexcusable, but Latham was the alternative Prime Minister. What did he expect?

Max Suich unravels some of the Latham angst:

"Latham was seriously ill and tried to hide it. When his illness was reluctantly revealed (after a suggestion from the Government that his absence deserved inquiry) he offered no intelligent explanation for the secrecy and the true seriousness of the illness was not revealed.

He appears to have had no members of his office who were competent - or, more likely, perhaps, trusted - enough for him to rely on to manage the essential affairs of a leader while ill.

Once a crisis blew up, largely because of this inept and secretive management of the news of his illness, almost the entire party leaked the desire for him to go. "

And the MEAA reported today:

"On Tuesday NSW police threatened to arrest journalists waiting for comment after Mark Latham's resignation announcement. Police attempted to use Section 28F(b) of the Summary Offences Act to restrict the movement of journalists covering the major political event. The Alliance wrote to the NSW Police Minister demanding that police immediately stop threatening journalists with a law generally used for harassment or to disperse gangs."

Photo: Penny Bradfield / theage.com.au

Explode the newsroom

Great post from Tim Porter on First Draft about the failure of current newsroom structures to deal adequately with changing media technologies, reader expectations, and the needs of reporting staff for clear direction and resources so they can "go out and commit some journalism".

Porter writes: "It is time to explode the newsroom and remake it in ways that bring flexibility, creativity, awareness of audience and collaboration to the forefront."

He offers six suggestions as starting points for a newsroom revolution, and concludes:

"There are principles of journalism that should remain inviolate, but there are no permanent rules about how to put those principles into practice. Nowhere is it written that the current structure of newspapers is the only way to do journalism. In fact, we've arrived where we are more by happenstance than by purpose, often by mimicking a singular innovation that moved the industry in a new direction. The introduction into newspapers of comics, of photography, of color, of editorial pages, even of the notion of objectivity, each broke a rule of its day and eventually enticed others to follow.

The future of newspapers belongs to those bold enough, and skilled enough, to invent their own rules. Who among the traditional newsrooms is going to lead us into tomorrow by being the rule-breaker of today?"

Jeff Jarvis makes some similar observations:

"Thanks to the internet - and the consumer control and choice it enables - the mass market is dying ... How do we serve a mass of niches instead of the mass audience? How do we afford to do that? How do we assure we do not ghettoize and marginalize those publics?"

Getting the story straight

Here's a New York Times (reg req'd) story from yesterday about a blog run by three Baghdad brothers. The article is free here.

Jeff Jarvis is highly critical of the reporter for sloppy work and for the decision to name the bloggers in full and then speculate on their relationship to US authorities in Iraq.

Interestingly, there's a conference at Harvard University this weekend titled Blogging, Journalism & Credibility. Jarvis will be there and promises to thrash this one out with the other participants. The conference will be webcast live. Check out the del.icio.us tagged page for updates.

Also attending is Jay Rosen who has written a terrific essay on Pressthink as part of his contribution to the conference. Jay says the blogging v journalism debate is over, not so according to Red Herring.

Malcolm Gladwell: guru or scribe?

New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell is always worth reading, and now Fast Company has elevated him to guru status:

"Gladwell has, as his editor Henry Finder puts it, 'essentially invented a genre of story.' A 'Malcolm Gladwell story' is an idea-driven narrative, one focused on the mundane rather than the bizarre. It takes you on a journey in and out of research through personal, social, and historical moments, transports you to a place you didn't know you were going to end up, and changes the way you think about an idea. The result is articles such as 'The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated?' published in 2002 and still circulating today."

Allawi allegations redux

In July last year Fairfax correspondent Paul McGeough wrote a damning story about the Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, in which he claimed that Allawi had personally executed as many as six suspected insurgents. The story ran on the front page of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, July 17. And then it sank like a stone.

A few short wire pieces ran in the following days, but no major US news organisation picked up the story. Newsweek touched on it in order to dismiss the allegation. McGeough publicly defended his story, but there was still no reaction.

Despite not getting the attention it might have the story has never really gone away. And now the New Yorker has picked it up. Jon Anderson writes:

"During my visit to Jordan, a well-known former government minister told me that an American official had confirmed that the killings took place, saying to him, "What a mess we’re in—we got rid of one son of a bitch only to get another.'"

What's good for the goose ...

Egoli reports:

"Following a meeting held yesterday, a spokesperson for John Fairfax Holdings Limited (FXJ) yesterday advised that while the group is not standing still, it has no developments to report to the market at this time. The comments come as speculation that the group could buy CanWest’s stake in Ten Network Holdings Limited (TEN) intensifies."

Sounds like Fairfax's enthusiasm for a deal with Ten may be waning. Shareholders didn't like it, which may have been enough to scotch an agreement which also hinged on regulatory approval for transfer of the Canwest ownership structure and would have been an advance bet against the likelihood of favourable changes to legislation later this year.

Too many variables, perhaps?

An editorial in today's Oz took the 'we can't do it, so they shouldn't be allowed to' angle:

"Perhaps Fairfax and its friends think the Government will allow them to get a start before the law changes ... If the Government is committed to fair reform, it must let Fairfax and Ten know it will permit no more cunning company structures that avoid the intent of the rules. Any opportunities that are open for Fairfax and Ten should also be available at the same time to Kerry Packer's Publishing and Broadcasting Limited and News Limited."

Sour grapes anyone?

Aceh's daily miracle

In a truly inspirational example of the 'daily miracle' that is newspaper production Aceh's daily newspaper was back on the streets just days after the tsunami killed many staff.

"On January 1, just six days after the disaster, Serambi Indonesia was back in circulation, albeit on a drastically reduced scale. It is now printing 10,000 copies a day, compared with 100,000 daily before the disaster. It has been reduced from a 16-page to an eight-page edition, as there are not enough journalists to produce the original size. The new edition is being run by 10 people - six journalists and four production staff - and is being printed in Lhokseumawe, the second city of Aceh province, and distributed free. "

Digital radio's star is rising

They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine and new technology
and now I understand the problems you can see
- The Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Star

Garage Band is gathering steam amongst my musician friends - most of whom still play instruments that were made in the fifties and sixties.

But they are a little slower catching on to digital radio. There have been a few experiments in Australia, notably the ABC's Dig who are now also getting in to podcasting, but the take-up has been slow. I guess we're still watching to see how it plays out in Europe and the US.

I'm late to this, but still very keen to try podcasting which I'm intending to do soonest. It's another strand to the increasingly complex evolution of media we called convergence in 2004.