Hopefully the first of many: this nice note from Tom Watson MP:
More funny than Paul Delaire Staines at Guido, less obsequious than Iain Dale, more informative than Labour home, less partisan than me - I am very much enjoying Westmonster.
Couldn't have put it better ourselves!
The fantastic Mr Cowen makes some comments on the decline of the music industry:
In the past most people didn't much like or listen to most of the music they bought, or in any case most of the value came from their very favorites. A relatively small percentage of our music purchases accounted for most of our listening pleasure. So if people can sample music in advance, and know in advance what they will like, music sales will plummet. This will be a sign of market efficiency, not market failure.
Admittedly copyright issues are being superimposed on this scenario at the same time, so the net assessment of current music trends is complex. But when there is uncertainty about consumer tastes, falling output can be a strong Pareto improvement. (It's just like how having lots of dates is not necessarily the sign of a happy love life.) Less music is being produced, but we're getting more of the stuff we want.
The first point clearly has a lot of truth in it, and also applies to an awful lot of packaged media (including newspapers). As we find it easier and easier to get hold of exactly what we want, and as it becomes available to us in individual, unpackaged form, we turn away from the packaged entities because, for us, they're economically inefficient: we have to buy a bunch of stuff we're not interested in in order to get what we want. But this destroys the economics of packaged media (including newspapers), since they relied on us subsidising the production of something we're not interested in in return for access to the stuff we do want (it's actually more complex than this, but this is an OK summary for now).
The second point - that less music is being produced is, I think, very wrong. My strong impression is that more music is being produced, of greater variety. Just like more words are being produced every day by bloggers and independent publishers. By giving people access to the tools of creation and distribution, we have unlocked a lot of new content. Whether there's more good stuff than before is a very interesting question, and one I'm not going to attempt on a Sunday morning.
This was interesting on the BBC NEWS | The Editors blog:
In an interview with Jeremy, the Foreign Secretary David Miliband took exception to a figure we had quoted in a piece about UK companies' investment in Burma. He also admiited - and this is a rarity for a politician - that he didn't know the answer to one of Jeremy's questions, and promised to clear up both points by posting something on our website.
I've often thought politicians should feel comfortable saying "I don't know, I'll follow that up." Not least because it opens the debate out to include the rest of us, away from the sterile me-versus-you format of TV debate. As the BBC editors go on to say:
The next day the FCO duly sent through a statement confirming that the figure we'd used was out of date. Then the Burma campaign group sent us a statement taking a dim view of the FCO's clarification. Viewers piled in too, demanding and debating the answers, while the programme producer responsible for the piece went online to direct the traffic.
Now go and look at the sequence of statements on the Newsnight site itself. It's very sterile, very "corporation shall speak unto corporation," but it is a start, and a very interesting one.
One small gripe: can't someone at the BBC do something about the URL http://bbc.co.uk/newsnight resolving to a 403? Shouldn't that be a URL that works?
Well, that was quite a ride. Major speech from Gordon Brown, brilliantly covered by our editor Sadie, a press release to get out, calls to answer and on top of everything an oddly threatening email from Guido Fawkes.
As launches go, Westmonster's was one of the smoothest I've worked on (memo to self: smaller teams make for smoother launches). Overall, I think Sadie did a great job on the first day, with some funny insightful stuff and a live blogview of Brown's speech which had me laughing out loud.
The feedback has, so far, been overwhelmingly positive.
So, lots of coverage, thanks to all. And one rather oddly threatening email from Guido Fawkes himself, saying simply: "Like Governor Arnie says:- if you bleed, I will kill you." It's actually Arnie from Predator, and it should read: "If it bleeds, we can kill it." Thanks for that.
Today's a big day: Gordon Brown's delivering his first speech at a Labour party conference as Prime Minister, and MessyMedia is launching its first title: Westmonster. It is, as you may have guessed, about politics.
The editor, Sadie Smith, is in Bournemouth this week blogging from the conference, and as I speak she's doing a live report of Gordon Brown's speech. You can find out more about the title and what it's all about here, or take a look at the press release, but here's a taster:
We believe in personalities before policies and arguments before debate. We want to say who's doing what to whom and why. We want to prick some bubbles and maybe bother some pricks. And somewhere along the line laws will get made, ministers will fall and Dennis Skinner will continue to rumble.
Westmonster is, we hope, going to be an essential destination for anyone interested in British politics. And we also intend it to be the first of several such titles, delivering great content from new writers in a professional package.
We're also announcing our partnership with Ad2One, who are handling all our advertising sales. It's been great working with them so far, and we hope the relationship is a long and fruitful one.
Please let us know what you think by contacting us. And if you think you'd also like to write for us, drop us a line at talent [at] messymedia.net.
Scott Rosenberg has some very, very wise words about the future for online newsrooms in a world where online revenue is never going to be anything like as great as offline revenue was before the Internet:
Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard:After Times Select: how do you support a big newsroom online?:
We know that the old newspaper business is on the way out. (We don't know how fast but we know where things are heading.) We knew how to pay for newsrooms under the old business. But we still don't have much of a clue how to take a newspaper-scale newsroom and support it on the Web.
Given all this, I think it's important not to sugarcoat things. Even a well-managed transition from print to Web will diminish newspapers and shrink newsrooms. It's understandable that newspaper workers are fearful: their jobs are indeed on the line.
If their profession has a future - and of course it does - the answers for how to support that future are unlikely to come from the sort of old-line newsroom management that gave us Times Select and so many other ill-fated big media schemes on the Web. It will come instead from some of the thousand and one little experiments in the Web journalism business that are flowering today.
Indeed. My old boss Simon Waldman has written eloquently and frequently on the problem facing newspapers in the transition to online, that problem essentially being: how do we manage decline on the newspaper while turning up the volume online without slashing and burning a talented workforce whose huge value also carries a huge price? And all the while in the context of newspaper revenues declining, yes, but still being hugely significant and in almost all cases dramatically greater than online revenues.
There's no simple answer to this, although I like Rosenberg's nod towards a "thousand and one little experiements in the Web journalism business." FWIW, my take on this is that newspaper businesses have to organise themselves to make the most of their editorial expertise in an online environment. And that means asking hard, practical questions like: what resource do I need to allow a talented editor to get something live in the online world as quickly as they can offline? And: how do I get print journalists to think in the 3D terms of the web rather than the 2D terms of print? And: how can journalists talk like client-side developers, and how can client-side developers talk like journalists? All of which is why people like Ben Hammersley are so interesting - watching what they do is like imagining how journalists could be a decade from now.
As reported here and by my old boss Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine, the New York Times has finally decided to end its two-year experiment in subscription web content, TimesSelect.
As an avid reader of the Times columnists who were behind the pay wall and an occasional user of the Times archives (plus a crossword junkie), I was one of the 272,000 or so people who was willing to pay the $50 (£25) per year for access to the likes of Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. But even though I made the calculation that the content was worth paying for (or at least paying less for than a daily copy of the International Herald Tribune, where these columns and crosswords also run), the Times made the calculation that it was harming their business overall by limiting their distribution on popular search engines.
Jarvis writes:
TimesSelect’s brilliant cynicism was that, when forced to find something to put behind a pay wall, they came up with content that was, indeed, uniquely valuable — the columnists and archives. But this was also content for which there was no significant ad revenue at the time (advertisers buy ads in food and travel but not opinion sections; there is essentially no endemic advertising for blather). Thus they made the good college try to prove whether or not a pay news service could work without harming the ad revenue of the business. Even so, TimesSelect hurt the larger brand and its position in the marketplace, in the conversation, and in Google. It was a short-sighted strategy.
A short-sighted strategy, indeed. Mickey Kaus of Slate has been waging a crusade against TimesSelect for as long as the idea's been in the public domain. If you can read between the gloats below, he makes a point about the Times' arrogance that I find particularly salient given the business we're embarking on:
TimesSelect -- Pinch Sulzberger's attempt to put his prized columnists behind a subscription wall on the theory that they were so much better than free bloggers that people would pay for them -- is finally so doomed it's actually dead, dead, dead, as of midnight tomorrow.
But from my perspective, this decision reflects more than the dollars and cents that may have served as its basis. It's a reflection that the "communities" we refer to on the web really extend beyond the walls of any one site. The internet, itself, is the community, and the extent to which a piece of writing provokes a (reasoned) response anywhere is a pretty good measure of its worth. We may measure things in page views and unique users, but the interconnectedness of things makes it matter less, to a degree, where the response is posted. If you respond elsewhere to what I have to say, chances are that will pay a return of some sort by way of making my comments easier to find.
I've been having a few meetings with Big Media Companies recently in my role as a consultant (best gag of recent weeks: someone I met told a friend that they thought they were now officially a consultant, and the friend replied: "Neither am I"). One thing that's hit me very strongly is that all these companies have community elements to their sites. And actually none of them quite know why.
Some of them have a strategy, but it's at such a high level that the reality of managing the community on the ground is completely out of whack with what senior management think is happening. Some of them have provided community tools, but only out of some sense that this is the "right thing to do" for the 21st century media company. But none of them have sat down, looked into each other's eyes and asked the fundamental question "why do I need a community? What does this add to my business?".
I think there are several answers to the question "why". They differ by company, but they include:
There are almost certainly more, and these are only ingredients. Listing them is rather like saying a cake contains butter, flour and eggs. And of these four ingredients listed here, I think the second is the most dangerous, because it is vague and actually potentially misleading. Communities do deepen engagement, but only for a subset of users, and often quite a small subset. Conversely, the amount of management attention placed on them is out of all proportion to the impact they have on most users.
Also, what I've seen happen when companies are thinking about the second option is that they end up creating an environment where a subset of users can simply go into hyper-critical mode. It's like a shop opening an area where people can stand around slagging off their goods. Then the company hosting the critical community goes into hand-wringing mode, with some internally arguing that they have an obligation to allow the feedback, while others argue that the whole thing should be shut down.
What's happening, of course, is that the theoretical nirvana of community - engaged users who are enriching the output - is crashing up against lack of internal skills, lack of planning and in many cases lack of confidence. And by lack of confidence I don't just mean the confidence to allow users to criticise you on your own platform; I also mean the confidence to shut that community down when it starts becoming toxic. People talk about banning or suspending users like it's the nuclear option. It isn't. The nuclear option is shutting the thing down and rethinking why you did it in the first place.
So, in summary: user engagement with your output is almost always, and almost always by definition, a good thing. But if you don't think about why you want it, and thus about the best way to deliver it, you're headed for a world of pain. And never forget that it's your platform, even when it's peopled by your users, and you should deal with it confidently and in a way that benefits most users, not just the ones who have something to say.
Thinking of launching what we used to call an "online community" and what we now call a "sticky Web 2.0 social media experience"? Then read Alan Jones on moderating community and social media. In fact, read it, print it out and laminate it for use when talking to managers and lawyers who may not understand risk:
Will moderating content too much kill the pavlovian reward of "post-reply-reply-to-reply-repeat" that makes a social network sticky and compelling?
Why does that matter? Because woven tight into the good stuff, growing like weeds, you'll always find weird stuff also growing on your social networks, no matter what original purpose it has. Show me a user-generated content database, I'll show you some weird shit in there, every time.
Further, the line between "weird" and "bad" is wiggly, broad and fuzzy, with transparency set at >10% and sporting extra-aliased edges. Further, "bad" comes in a wide variety of flavours, including "bad for business", "bad for conservative families" and "bad for the legal budget line".
Alan comes down on the side of less moderation and more weirdness, which is pretty much what I'd expect from him, in the nicest possible way. And I think this story should be read alongside the slightly odd news that BBC News is making its "UGC hub" work "24/7", though interestingly they seem to be more interested in people as case studies rather than contributors.
Jay Rosen has written a characteristically intelligent piece on the work Charlie Savage is doing in uncovering a "master narrative" about the relationship between the George Bush White House and the press. In it, he includes a parenthesis which I think really nails the relationship between bloggers and professional journalists:
The Master Narrative that Went Missing During the Bush Years Turns Up in Charlie Savage's Book: Why do I say bloggers vs. journalists is stupid and should be declared over? Because the two “sides” are already part of one news system. A large portion of that “huge” response he got was the blogosphere roaring its approval for the digging and synthesizing Charlie Savage did, which influenced the bureau chief to spend the manpower on more stories like that. The big response online amplifies the Globe’s voice in the national conversation, and expands the circle of people who care about the newspaper’s reporting.
Read the whole piece to get the context, but I think this image of an engaged audience of bloggers affecting the news agenda in very human ways - in this case, by influencing a newspaper bureau chief to assign resource differently - is powerful and true, in the US at least.
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