MediaFlect

LATimes.com is is “talking with the USC game lab about coming up with new story-telling formats,” according to LATimes General Manager Rob Barrett (full disclosure: used to work with Rob at ABCNews.com) on OJR.com. I think the game lab Rob refers to is the engineering school’s GamePipe project, which has a serious component but doesn’t mention news on its Web page.

Wow. Folks are always talking about devising “new ways of telling stories” for the Web, but this is one of the few real outside-the-box explorations I’ve seen mentioned specifically. How would it work? Could you enter a gaming environment and see how an Iraqi battle appears to the soldiers there (I’ve seen a game like that, based on real events, I was told)? Instead of relatively flat graphics and panels, would you be able to, say, navigate through three-dimensional representations of technological or scientific stories?

The possibilities are mind-blowing. Maybe there’ll even at some point be an interchange between news divisions and gaming companies or brokers (see bottom of page).

Jon Friedman of Marketwatch has his conjecture about what’s going on at the NY Times and their decision to charge for columnists. He thinks the Times is betting liberals (or at least what I’d call the Great Liberal Elite) will pay to get their daily Dowd and (Tom) Friedman fix. I’m not sure, and I’ll give my analysis of how the Times may have made its choice in a sec.

But first, I want to point out what I see a mischaracterization of what the No-Longer Gray Lady is doing. Jon Friedman and others are portraying the Times’ move as charging $49.95 per year to read the New York Times’ columnists — Dowd, Friedman, Nick Kristoff, Paul Krugman, etc. But a close reading of the NY Times’ own memo on the planned transition makes it clear the columnists are only part of it. For $49.95, you get: *access to the archives (which now costs much more than $50/year if you use it just a few times per month), *NewsTracker, basically a clipping service (which costs $29.95/year), *sneak peaks at upcoming stories (which used to be the purview only of a select few who would, for example, buy the Sunday edition’s early materials on Wednesday after they were first printed), and a few other pieces of functionality. So, really, the $50/year is not so much for the columnists, but rather for the kinds of archival access and info-manipulation that Internauts are getting used to paying for. Take me: I love my Maureen Dowd, my David Brooks and my William Safire, but it’s the other stuff that’ll make me cough up the cash.

Now, here’s my conjecture on what might be going on at the Times and how they decided to put columnists behind the wall: They wanted to figure out a way to test the paid content waters, consolidate some products, get some buzz and make some more cash by increasing volume to offset whatever decrease there was in incremental revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to hurt ad inventory. So what editorial content could they put behind the paid wall that, if there were a drop in pageviews, wouldn’t hurt ad revenue, could get some new subscribers, and generate some buzz so people like Jon Friedman would write about it? Columnists!

I don’t know how many pageviews those pages generate (quite a few I’d guess from outside linking), but I do know that the OpEd section is notoriously free of the kinds of high-paying ads that populate real revenue-generating sections like Technology, Business and, perhaps, Movies. Today on the OpEd section there’s a lot of Times house ads and the columns have one small text ad. Meanwhile, Business and Technology sections and articles are blinking and popping with what looks like high-priced sponsorships. So, there’s what I think is very good business math: Put the columnists behind the wall, lose few big ad dollars, pick up some subscription dollars, convert that ad inventory into potentially higher value inventory (because subscribers are worth more to advertisers than any old readers), give yourself an excuse to repackage archives and newstracker, throw in a few more gizmos, AND generate the kind of buzz you’d never get if all you did was the gizmos and archives. Not sure if it was thought through like this at the Times (I’ll see what I can find out), but I think it was very well done, at least from a business perspective.

LA Times story on Greensboro NC’s News and Record experiment with community outreach through blogging contains a quote from an apparent newspaper reader saying the editor, John Robinson, is “like a pregnant teenager– lame excuse after lame excuse.”

I’m glad that today’s editors are no longer making excuses, but instead exposing themselves to critcism and addressing outrage. Even the letter from Newsweek leader Rick Smith on the qu’uran messup shows, I think, that openness leads this industry (eventually) to self-correction.

Are we doomed to always be composing for one medium prevoius to the most current one we’re using? A lot of observers, including Jeff Jarvis, write incisively about the anywhere, anyhow demands users place on news now. People want what they want, when they want it, HOW they want it.

But if we train ourselves and our staffs to provide news — or any media — on the larger screens of computers, or even TVs, then what happens when the majority of folks are consuming on cellphone screens, or maybe their watches, or even their glasses in some sort of 3-D holographic projection? What happens when the pen you carry projects whatever you want on whatever surface you aim at? Meaning, we have to consider a world in which not only information is sliced and diced, but the manner in which it’s presented may also be completely out of the control of whoever put it together. Alternately, we may have to program with sniffers, and adjust the presentation according to how the user is consuming it. Already, some do a masterful job on the smaller Palm or Blackberry screens. Others’ look like crap.

RR Bowker, essentially the official database agency of books (they assign ISBN numbers), has released this press release in which they herald the fact that the number of books published in 2004 was up 14% to some 195,000 titles, upending three years of flatness.

The obvious observation is that the spread of new media, Google highlighting scholarly titles and the like has not cut out the hunger for book publishing. But a figure that jumped out at me was that, while the number of adult fiction books led the trend (up 43%), the number of poetry and drama books was right behind at more than 40%. Poetry? Drama? Really? Why, I wonder? Do the sales justify the push?

They didn’t give a figure for celebrity-published children’s fiction, but I bet that Madonna, Jay Leno and Jason Alexander among others (why why why do celebs feel the need to write kids’ books?) have helped push that category up a notch, too.

AdAge.com fired off this editorial yesterday espousing the reasons advertisers should not use their budgets to bludgeon content providers into a “friendly” environment. While I agree with Ad Age’s assertion, I don’t see anything to back up their imploring tone other than a somewhat (through a marketer’s eyes) weak assertion that the advertiser should try to reach the audience that the content provider provides.

If I, as a marketer (and I’m not), can get my qualified audience, and some control of the message, why not go there? I think in the long run it’s a losing strategy — because ultimately the content will get diluted the point that users will go elsewhere — but in the meantime (for the two years or so I as ad buyer may have any given job) won’t the ad spend seem more justified? I don’t like this equation, but I think it exists.

Reading James B. Stewart’s “Disney War,” struck by how much of the first part of the book, in which former CEO Michael Eisner and other top execcs spend their time visiting other top execs at their homes, for dinners, etc. I know it’s a schmooze-fest, and it’s all Hollywoooood, but it’s fascinating to me how even in this electronic age, the execs spend so much time doing one-to-one human relations. Now there’s a problem for media to solve.

We’ll see a pendulum swing at some point in the future. As citizen journalism like CommandPost take hold, and more and more people refer to them, at some point, there will be some rumor or innacurate coverage picked up and spread around. At that point we’ll see a move, however slight, back to edited or “branded” journalism, where people know the information they’re reading is vouched for.

Jeff Jarvis, on the same page where he notes he’s leaving Advance Media, talks about the needs of news of the future. Reminds me of panel at a Nora Paul-hosted conference at U of Minn where we reached many similar conclusions. (If a confernece is in Minnesota and no one blogs it, did it happen?). Here’s my synopsis, in brief, under which you can see our longer contibutions: the issues future journalists/editors will grapple with: Convenience - someone gets what they want, when. You, as newsperson, may not know the device the consumer is using or how they’ll use it, and, thus, will not know how your news product is consumed; portability - anything, anywhere, any time. Manipulability- true customization, personalization, data-sifting. News organizations’ pre-set rubrics become much less relevant. Ubiquitous Collection - A Webcam on every lamppost? Ubiquitous Dissemination. Ease of Use/Intuitive - Both for the news gatherers and users of the devices that receive the news. Legal/Rights Issues - Will the government control and perhaps even sell access to “events” it “stages”? (”The Gulf War, Exclusively on CNN.”) If everyone is a news gatherer, and everyone can be in any piece of it at any time, even as a micro-bit of data, what are the potential privacy and legal issues?

This is a relatively new blog of Dorian Benkoil, covering his observations on the media, etc. Recently, other posts on media can be seen at this section of PaidContent.org or my Blogger blog, which was here. I’m playing around with Blogsome (and who knows if I’ll stay?) because my good friend and Internet journalism guru-extraordinaire Sree Sreenivasan noted that Blogsome was the only place I could get categories in a blog for free. (And who doesn’t want categories?)