MediaFlect

Maybe this is the moral equivalent of songwriters referring to DJs in their songs to get them to play the song on the air. Scobleizer notes that with all the blogs po’d at Forbes, it may get great traffic, from Dan Gilmore, among others. And News.com has a few more links.

NY Times wants to “build a site that can sustain that level of journalism” that supports $250 million budget and 1,200 journalists, says publisher Arthur Sulzberger, answering a question at the Online News Association about whether the Times plans to distribute its info or try to get people to the site.

It’s about “building the NY Times site,” which means, I guess, ads and other revenues that accrue from clicks, and not a more wire service model.

Information “does not yearn to be free. Opinion, quality opinion does not yearn to be free.”

Sulzberger just learned from an audience member that Cheney’s chief of staff Libby was indicted. “What am I doing talking to you?” he jokes, meaning he’ll have to head back to the office, I guess.

Walking over to the Hilton Hotel for the 2005 Online News Association conference in New York today, I grabbed my copies of free tabloids “AM New York” and “metro.” It occurred to me that I pay more for my digital media than print.

And that makes sense: The online versions are worth more – I can see today’s and yesterday’s and weeks-ago news, search headlines or words, email to a friend, easily save stories with a few clicks, sort things into folders, and all without having to stuff a file drawer or two or three. Some sites let me use their functionality to sift and sort and get feeds of what I want, or check how a company’s stock price has moved in relation to a story. I can see what people are commenting about related to a story, and set up or access a tag cloud to see what’s going on in the blog-sphere. I can get RSS feeds of many of the subject areas I’m interested in, including for paid products. In print, I can’t do very much of that at all.

So here’s a rough version of the financials of it: I pay $99 per year for The Wall Street Journal online, about $15 for Avantgo, I get subscriptions to Factiva and Thomson and Reuters through business school (which I have paid for if you count the $60,000 exec MBA tuition). I get access to Time-Warner publications for my family’s $15 or so monthly AOL subscription, and a few things (including WSJ.com ) through T-Mobile Hotspots and a few others through Verizon’s DSL service. In print, I pay for the weekend New York Times, in part because the coupons in there repay that price of about $19/month, and a couple of magazine subscriptions at between $5 and $20/year. One of those magazines, Business2.0, I paid for just to get full access online (though maybe I could’ve achieved the same thing through AOL).

I almost never buy a single copy of a newspaper or magazine, except maybe 25 or 50 cents for a tabloid or when I’m at an airport.

That’s a long, maybe boring, and incomplete litany, but the basic message is that I pay for digital, and not as much for print. I also could desperately use a consolidator, someone who would come to me and say “You can have it all for $25 or $50 or $75 per month.” Or even some way of charging me on a per-use basis.

Regardless: Isn’t media in a digital format to you, the user, worth more than in ink-on-paper format?

By now it’s oldish news that blog creator and aggregator Weblogs Inc., run by the irrepressible Jason Calacanis, is being bought by AOL, after flirtations with a lot of the other big players.

How did Calacanis’s network, home to leading tech-blog Engadget, and other blog powerhouses, get so big so fast, so he’s able to cash out only two years after creating it? One way is through careful and constant use, care and feeding of Google’s Ad Sense ads to maximize revenue. So good, in fact, that Google has done a case study to talk about how Calacanis did it. (Here’s a short piece on the study.) Another way, according to this piece, is by “gaming” blog-rating service Technorati by having all the blogs link and cross-link. Look in the lower right column of any of the Weblogs Inc. blogs, like Engadget, to see the list. But if that’s a crime, there are a LOT of guilty people, from pornographers to B2B sites and major media. (Perhaps it’s more incumbent on the folks writing the blog-crawling algorithms to correct for that, as search engines have corrected as best they can for “keyword packing.” It’s a constant challenge. But can we blame Weblogs for pointing us to its other properties?)

And, when I met Calacanis at the “We Media” conference a couple weeks ago, he told me the secret to his success, and how he’s managed in some instances to leapfrog rival Gawker Media run by Nick Denton: hire good bloggers and keep them. If they do well, and traffic is going up, keep giving them more money, so they’ll stay with Weblogs. Meaning, get good people, and treat them well. Comforting to hear a publisher say the way to gain audience that leads to financial success is by finding and rewarding talented journalists.

While we’re on the topic of blog networks: By way, Glam.com, a fashion blog network pointed out to me by TopButton.com, which I do work for, is being hailed as a sign that the VC money is back for real: Many are calling it the first “vertical” aggregation — a group of properties on a single topic area (fashion) — with serious money behind it since the go-go days.

Lots of people talking about the announcement of the new browser Flock, which aggregates a lot of the latest new-new things — RSS, blogs, search — in one place.

While you’re looking at the story, here’s something that’s just as cool. Look at the big (336X336?) box below the ad, showing the story you’re looking at and stories related to it, in schematic form. Very cool. Will see what more I might find out about this new search, from LivePlasma.

Since I learned today that Jeff Mignon looks at this blog every day, here’s an interesting tidbit that’s a bit arcane but is crucial to valuing the stock of what’s one of the world’s biggest media companies. (See John Battelle for more on why Google is a media company. It certainly accounts for a lot of traffic that a lot of media companies are counting on.)

You may have noticed that Google reported earnings yesterday that were well above analysts’ expectations and made its stock rise 12% to an all-time high of $339. But you may have missed that before yesterday, the search engine giant had been pulling an accounting maneuver that had been driving Wall Street analysts nuts. The unconventional company (remember the “Dutch Auction” ? How about the world-saving lingo http://www.google.com/corporate/ in their statement of principles) decided until yesterday to file their accounting numbers according to strict rules, the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles decreed by the people who mandate these things.

But last week, Google’s chief accountant said they would report not only GAAP results on Oct. 20, but also “pro-forma” results, which strip out financials not directly relating to normal operations – things like employee stock options and the tax benefits the company gets from compensating employees that way.

Wall Street analysts like the “pro-forma” results because they are supposed to show how well the company is doing from its real business, its day-to-day operations. Yet, the Wall Streeters pull their own funny maneuver by stripping out the non-operating charges but including the tax benefits that come from them. In the words of Marketwatch’s Bambi Francisco they “accentuate the positive.”

Google said it would start to play nice, giving the pro-forma earnings, but would be more honest by also NOT including the tax benefits related to stuff it had stripped out. So, while Google did give non-GAAP numbers yesterday that were easier to compare to estimates, it still didn’t give numbers in a way that we can easily compare to stock analysts’ expectations; they did however specify exactly what was removed to calculate their pro-forma earnings. And what a whopping number it was.

Repeating my post on Rebuilding Media, where you can read more of my stuff these days:

A bunch of journalists, many from mainstream media, are setting up a new group blog under the name Pajamas Media, to, says the story, get their word out and make some money by aggregating their material and serve ads on it. The piece also points out that there may be a conservative slant, that this may be an answer to a liberal blog ad network, and that they hope to raise the credibility of blogs.

I’m an inveterate listener to On the Media, and often find the most interesting parts of the material there to be things said almost in passing. A couple of weeks ago, talking about coverage of hurricane Katrina, weather historian David Laskin told host Bob Garfield that “it’s very difficult to remain fresh and reactive when you’re a reporter of whatever sort. I mean, I think you’re always playing to expectations.”

He has, in a nutshell, talked about a true dilemma of reporting from the field, and reporting in today’s media environment. As a foreign correspondent, I sometimes found myself subject to editors’ expectations of how to frame what I was seeing and hearing, and if I didn’t write to those expectations, the stories could be rejiggered, or rewritten, to conform.

In today’s echo-chamber media environment, that sense of pre-formed expectations — essentially going in with preconceptions, or letting preconceptions shape conceiving, writing and producing of a story — can be especially severe. If, for example, you write to a liberal audience of postitive conservative actions, or vice-versa, you can be drummed out of the room. If you asked conservatives after President Bush had named Harriet E. Miers as a Supreme Court justice whether the president might know what he was doing, you could have been drummed out of the room.

It’s tough — and not just in a hurricane — to be reactive to the storms, and not let the expectations form one’s ideas.

Given “hot off the presses” copy of a new Yahoo! study done with Ipsos Insight whose headline conclusion is that 27 percent of the people use RSS but don’t know that they’re using it. That’s another sign the medium is arriving. We all use telephones. Few of us wonder about, or care about, the technology behind it. I can’t give you a link to the study, because so far there’s only a white paper, in print (no kidding), headlined “RSS – Crossing Into the Mainstream.”

Other findings: 12 of people are aware of RSS. 31 percent use RSS (but 27 percent unknowingly). My Yahoo, Firefox and My MSN are the top three providers of RSS to the “RSS Aware” public. For the “unaware” it’s My Yahoo at a whopping 72%, My MSN at 41% and Google’s personalized page at 10%. Bloglines is in fourth at 2%.

See coverage of the We Media conference at Rebuilding Media.

CORRECTED from an earlier version to clarify that 27% figure is of all Internet users.

WWD reports that Time chief Norm Pearlstine is doing a book that’s NOT an apologia for making reporter Matt Cooper reveal his sources in the Valerie Plame affair. Same page has a bit on Jon Stewart roasting sensitive magazine industry types at an event they paid him $150,000 to attend. Time managing editor Jim Kelly sounds less burned than others: “”If you hire a fire-eater to come to your party, the curtains are going to get singed.”

Get it now, while it’s free, at the normally subscription-walled WWD.com. (They are making some stories, especially media ones, free for a short period of time when linked from outside.)