MediaFlect

A little bit of horn-blowing for one of my other hats. Did a report for Borrell Associates about how the local space is heating up: Newspapers even in so-called destination cities (places people want to travel to) have largely ignored the tourism market, and a lot of other sites are picking off that revenue.

Meanwhile, a lot of hyper-locals are nibbling from another direction. And you’ve got the Googles and Craigslists trying to eat the main portion of the newspapers’ lunches. What newspapers won’t survive? How long before we see one or two newspapers in single-newspaper cities go under?

The old new way of looking at a Web site used to be that the homepage wasn’t king, that every page was now the homepage. Meaning, with Google and Yahoo and a lot of other ways to get someone to look at your content on your site, you had to be mindful that someone could come in on any page, and every page had to have the things you wanted folks to see – and navigate to. Maybe top stories, or “best-of” or the latest Special Report or e-commerce applications. Whatever.

Now, a newer way of looking at the world is that folks will be viewing your content without even having to come to your site. Syndication technologies, most notably RSS –which sends some chunk of your material out to whoever takes the feed – mean folks essentially scrape a portion of your site into their reader and may or may not click back in. The good news is that you get your stuff in front of them. The difficult part for traditional media operators to swallow is that your content could appear in any number of configurations next to any mix of content over which you have no control.

Try to control it, and in the long run you’ll probably lose. Very little content is so compelling time after time that folks will go through hassle to get it over something else that’s easier. Or they’ll find a way to get it the way they want, anyway (witness TiVO).

And now, the syndication model is, it seems, moving to video, as well. A sizeable chunk of seed money is going for a new video venture called Brightcove, with a lot of big names like Jeremy Allaire and Barry Diller involved. Brightcove plans to let people – most likely independents rather than Hollywood types — syndicate their content to the many minions, supported by advertising.

This is a little different than JD Lasica’s Ourmedia http://ourmedia.org/ , which is providing hosting space in a non-profit forum for people to place their videos online. Maybe there’s room for both models.

… for their social networking conference. www.corante.com.

Lots more buzz about what classified advertising guru Peter Zollman is calling Google’s “all-out move” into the classfied advertising space. Seems the non-media media company has filed for a patent to control an application that would tie into other Google functionality, including the recently disclosed Google Base, to give full classified ad-like functionality to listings. For free, I assume?

One managerr of unaffiliated local sites that give listings for locals and tourists told me yesterday he thinks newspapers are going to start folding in five years, maybe ten. Wonder if he was reading this news.

Been talking to a bunch of owners of locally targeted sites that aren’t affiliated with any major media company, and am amazed by the profit margins: 50% in many cases. Almost pure revenue when they build new properties, and none of the zero-sum effect newspapers, TV or radio have, where dollars spent online steal from the mainstream property.

Hard to imagine how “legacy” media can compete in the space, unless they form a partnership. Or maybe there’s math I don’t understand.

Will say more about the report I’m working on relevant to this later.

Taking a break from posting over at Rebuilding Media, I come across some laments over the death of newspapers, and interesting discussion: everything from “good riddance” to how TV covered 9/11 very well, to the role of newsmagazines to blogs being a sorry substitute and that they rely on newspapers.

And find myself thinking how, in aggregate, these various and sundry posts add up to the arguments one would read in a typical newspaper or short magazine piece about whether the newspaper is dead, has a future, etc.

Meanwhile, I’m reminded of this video of the death of The New York Times, which is worth a look if you haven’t already.

We here have evidence people will pay for content on the Internet, but not news. Well, yes, but what about WSJ.com? Maybe it’s not news people won’t pay for, but rather news they don’t absolutely need. And maybe, then, there has to be another way to pay for what news organizations produce (whcih is the strategy of sites like MSNBC and CBS, which are going for advertising support.)