phd051809s.gif (GIF Image, 600×667 pixels).

the elephant in the room was and is, if there is still a value proposition in associating advertising content against editorial content online. then, do media companies realize they are in the advertising business as much or more than they are in the content business? then, what are they doing to innovate the advertising problem online to raise the value for publisher, advertiser and consumer?

Bankoff mentioned that SBNation was able to build a business through scale… “off the backs of bloggers,” was the language I remember. This reminded me of google's adwords business model. while google makes the lion's share of revenue from keyword search advertising, adwords makes it on sheer scale. but if this, and other ad networks for ROS products, are the best the industry can produce, it is no wonder that the only ads that seem to work are short pre-roll video.

and that's not very innovative. the audience expected more. if these speakers had more to offer, it wasn't evidently apparent. and it was very discouraging for the future of media. when i tweeted that i felt sorry for the panelists, andy carvin tweeted back that he hoped they saw the tweckling as constructive criticism. i hope they do, and realize that a lot more than just their own jobs are riding on their ability to not just broker and leverage existing ad networks – but actually innovate the advertising space to more effectively monetize quality content. otherwise, brands will see less value in being associated with content… and continue to see more value being associated with social and participatory media and products webmail where users spend vast majority of their time already.

good luck, panel. i sincerely hope you get another shot. this town loves a comeback.

via Going up in smoke: the future of the media.

Gallery: Digitizing the past and present at the Library of Congress – Boing Boing.

Infographic of the Day: The Best Guide to the Oil Spill’s Impacts | Fast Company.

a well written shorty on self-publishing online. it leaves out an important note though, publishers are doing less and less for new authors, if and when they sign them. want to break in, write a self-help book. and when you look at the contract, you may find that you’d make more money publishing on your own.

The State of Web Development 2010 | Web Directions.

With low attendance at the conference, a lingering low pressure system of bleak industry news, hot new mobile devices on the market, and recent pew reports, it could be easy to argue that “print is dead” and the future is all online. And you’d probably expect me to say that, my students did.

But I don’t think that’s true.

As social media and wine guru Gary Vaynerchuck told a packed room when we hosted him A.U. — “If there’s a fish in that pond, you gotta eat that fish.”

That answer was for a question of if a social media strategy should focus on facebook or twitter or something else. And the answer is good for newspapers and all legacy media as they deal with the change moment. It isn’t print OR online, it is print AND online.

Here’s an article I read with interest today about the future of print in the newspaper business:

Would You Want To Buy A Newspaper Business These Days?.

While it looks at the financials  and multiples from a high altitude, and beats the currently popular drum about iPads saving print, it doesn’t get into the real deal: the service and value proposition that was lost when newspapers lost classified advertising.

I would buy a newspaper in a heartbeat today, and work my ass off to use the print platform and the online platform together to tell stories more effectively and advertise more smartly.

The growing mobile market of small screen smartphones and tablets offers an opportunity to harness the immediacy and depth of the web. We’ve seen how effective broadcast can be in driving traffic online when folks are sitting in lean back viewing experiences. Print has not been an effective pusher in some part because people are often reading print on the go, and by the time they’re back at a machine, other priorities distract them from looking up the site they wanted to check.

Since those web phones almost all have cameras, and lots of print folk are working on apps for those platforms, why not make the apps use the camera to scan 2d or matrix barcodes in stories and ads to jump online instantly for more depth, the latest updates, the reviews closest to your gps location? Make the app a service that adds value to the print piece, not a bookmark to your mobile web content.

We tried this with a crazy device called a cuecat a decade ago, but the technology and market were not ready. Now, with a scanner on board the connected browsing device in your pocket, the culture is primed to go. Witness how mobile photos took off with camera phones.

But, I’m not sure that newspapers are ready to think about convergence on a meaningful level where advertising, editorial and technology can work together in a rolling, flexible sequenced approach where print and online can offer value to each other and make sure that users and readers are engaged with the brand on both platforms. Notice how netflix is a movie service, managed online and delivered in the mail or streaming on a number of devices. If there’s a fish in the pond that can show a movie, neflix is going to eat that fish. If you’re a news service, you be it on print or online or on the go, but you eat every fish in the pond.

Right now, most newspaper apps are just easily dumped for mobile web or simply bookmark devices to mobile web content – repackaging internet content from the browser  — just like the active desktop and active channels in older windows releases that never caught on.

Bloggers are learning that content and advertising online isn’t the way to make money, but offering free content is a great way to draw people to buy a service you provide or product you sell. Kind of like how news and information was a great way to get people into a local peer-to-peer classified advertising and marketing service. So now media needs to offer more value to local advertisers (both companies and people) as a service platform to innovate the classified space.

Synergizing print and online means harnessing technology and building new workflows in a smart way to offer local online advertising and better access to live news information via a large and effective design canvas that is cheap to buy, produce and distribute, but can only be made once a day. Right now, we give lip service to convergence, but the fish are swimming by each other, and the industry leaders are wondering which fish will eat the other.

That’s how you take two fish from the pond and feed a multitude. You will find salvation by providing a useful service. Not by repackaging a print product as a print-looking animated product on a shiny screen. Or by putting a fence and tollgate around the pond.

Will Columbia-Trained, Code-Savvy Journalists Bridge the Media/Tech Divide? | Epicenter | Wired.com.

yes i love that columbia is doing this degree. it is rigorous and serious and lengthy.

and i love that medill is successfully  working with coder journalists. and i am involved in the new hacks and hackers group. i teach this stuff at american university and have been doing it for more than a decade now. AU’s interactive journalism masters degree is also a decade old. no big press releases or anything, we just do it. it is part of the fabric of journalism and communication. and we’re not alone. many communication and journalism programs are right out there on the edge with us, advancing and creating new knowledge. ten years is a long time to be “frantic” about updating programs.

but that’s not my beef. here’s the thing that i have with this article, and the whole conversation in general. it is based in the premise that media is old and computer science can save it.  it perpetuates the self loathing rut that newsmedia has been wallowing in since they woke up to the market change moment, and fuels ranters and bashers who follow media critics like jeff jarvis and jay rosen (they’re respected friends, so chill before you flame).  to be fair and accurate, media bloggers like jeff and jay are the quickest to point out the positive work and are forces in moving journalism forward. (see note below)

and it completely ignores that  journo coders, designers and developers have done a huge deal to move the Web (and technology in general) forward… for everyone, including hackers.

i could just mention that the django python framework is a product of the journalism industry and that would probably be enough. after all, google even noticed and hosted 2008 djangoCon. but while adrian and jacob are journo coder rockstars, this isn’t a one hit wonder crossover story. there are a lot of hard working folks in the industry who have been hitting stages big and small and cranking out the hits for years. there is no way to name them all and give them justice here, but you could meet a lot of them by following the hacksandhackers.com twitter list or just go to a local  ONA meetup.

homegrown cms success stories are actually many. and things are more commonplace than the maps and data mashup applications and interactive narratives and multimedia storytelling we all think of first when we think of online journalism. whole families of wordpress and other content management  system themes are categorized as “newspaper-style” or “magazine themes” since they follow successful design patterns established by media sites over years. online media and news sites have been major players in driving video and multimedia products forward into the mass user base. soundslides was developed by a photojournalist. One of the great early evangelists of podcasting was a VJ on MTV.

so yes, there are business and management problems in the wide industry and there is a real and serious culture issue about how it regards and has regarded coders, developers and designers. and i am on the record as saying “as multimedia journalism becomes commonplace, the bar for interactive journalism moves farther.” so yes, the columbia degree is necessary. the work at medill is necessary. my work is necessary. and i will be presenting all of this and our ongoing and rolling curriculum reform at the AAUP conference this summer. and i’m working on putting a book together on the subject of how hacks and hackers work together (want to contribute a chapter?)

and i will also put it in context by noting that journalism has given a lot back to the web. because we need to get past stoking the panic with the banner headlines that journalism is dying. cause it just plain isn’t. and it never will.

NOTE:

jay rosen commented on this post at my friendfeed and took it quite personally. it wasn’t my intent to single out jay or jeff in hostility or lump them in as “bashers,” but i can see how jay got that impression. now it did strike me as a little funny that he flamed me on it even when i called him a respected friend, but i added the italicized line out of fairness  to better reflect my intent and more accurately represent them since i didn’t set out to go trolling. and even though i’m a ranter, basher, and media critic myself, the irony of not adding that context in  a post that rants about rants without context certainly didn’t escape me.

Ex-newspaper industry executive Alan Mutter coined the phrase “journicide” to describe the “looming, lost generation” of young reporters abandoning the profession due to “vanishing employment opportunities and shrinking freelance compensation.” Along with the recession, unethical media industry practices like internships and “permalance” jobs are fueling this trend. J-schools need to fight the media sweatshop mentality. Otherwise, they may have no future.

via Hunter walker: 10 Ways To Earn More Than You Can Working At The Columbia Journalism Review.

Your blog is a strategy, a branding and marketing vehicle, a means toward an end.

Your business is the money-making model. A product or service for sale.

Your blog isn’t for sale. It may be of service, but it’s a service you’re giving away for free.

Which means, if giving out free content is all you’re doing, or if your blogging has become the core deliverable of what you believe to be a business, your strategy is upside-down.

via The Critical Mistake that Keeps Bloggers Broke | Copyblogger.

and one more passage:

David, in essence, said this: blogs don’t make money. Businesses make money.

…

Your blog is the face of your business, the voice of your brand, the bait that attracts a following.

And yes, you give away as much as you can with it, selflessly and abundantly.

But until you have a product or service to sell, and until the blog connects to that enterprise in a way that actually begins to generate actual revenue in addition to pumping up your online reputation and ego, your blog is nothing other than you expelling positive energy into the universe.

words to the wise, journobloggers, words to the wise. now you know why classified ads were so important, they were the service that generated the revenue. now, think about the service facebook provides to users, and how people just share news freely on their platform.

the same holds true for all the different apps that sites are creating for iphone and blackberry. there is no need to create a desktop or platform icon that links to your content. that app should perform a service that people need.