PaidContent's interview with Jean-Philippe Maheu, Chief Digital Officer at Ogilvy, has lots of interesting stuff in it - such as the fact that Ogilvy no longer has a "digital" department, but instead adds digital to "everything we do". But I was particularly taken by this:

Marrying search with storytelling: Digital advertising has largely been focused on search, while traditional advertising has been about condensing a narrative about a product into a 30-second TV commercial, a page in a magazine or newspaper, or a billboard. Among Maheu's goals when he took the job at Ogilvy last year was to bring the art of storytelling to interactive advertising: "One of the key things we're working on is how to engage with Yahoo, Google and MSN in a way that is creative, unique and that is a bit more strategic than just buying media."

The notion of "telling stories" through advertising seems to me to be fundamental to the business of selling stuff to people. And it seems it must be particularly hard to do through search advertising (so why are Ogilvy only talking to GYM about it?). Advertising through "social media" seems to be all about telling stories. Which is maybe why Bebo went for as much as it did.

Max Beesley has won his libel case against Popbitch:

Hotel Babylon star Max Beesley today accepted a formal apology and "substantial" damages from gossip website Popbitch at London's High Court.

The actor sued after Popbitch Ltd claimed in its weekly celebrity gossip e-mail to members that he had lined up three women for sex at a TV industry party in Cannes.

In the 11 October issue of the e-mail, which is sent to roughly 360,000 people, it was also claimed that Beesley told one woman who had turned him down to go away so he could find someone else.

Is this the first time an online-only publication has paid out "substantial" damages - without bankrupting itself?

One workable definition of media is the collection of properties capable of mobilising large audiences, and if Techcrunch's article on Yahoo Buzz's first two weeks is anything to go by, Yahoo! can still mobilise massive audiences through the presentation of news on its page. It seems extraordinary that an organisation that can shove these kinds of numbers through its pipeline should be struggling to find a future. But there you go.

Rafat's picked up on something interesting from the Washington Post's most recent 10:

The Washington Post Company filed its annual 10-K with SEC yesterday, and some points about its digital growth (outside of Kaplan). One thing that caught my eye: “The Company’s online publishing businesses, Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive and Slate, reported an 11 percent revenue increase in 2007; however, online revenue growth has slowed down, from 28 percent growth in 2006.” The slower growth rate for online wasn’t explained, though, but would it be a trend?

-- Also this data point on employees: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive has approximately 329 full-time and 14 part-time employees, none of whom is represented by a union.

330 employees and only 11% growth? Doesn't sound like a recipe for long-term success to us.

After reading Kevin Kelly's superb essay Better Than Free, I have realised why we need EMI, and what EMI really is - it's an aggregator of attention:

The giant aggregators such as Amazon and Netflix make their living in part by helping the audience find works they love. They bring out the good news of the "long tail" phenomenon, which we all know, connects niche audiences with niche productions. But sadly, the long tail is only good news for the giant aggregators, and larger mid-level aggregators such as publishers, studios, and labels. The "long tail" is only lukewarm news to creators themselves. But since findability can really only happen at the systems level, creators need aggregators. This is why publishers, studios, and labels (PSL)will never disappear. They are not needed for distribution of the copies (the internet machine does that). Rather the PSL are needed for the distribution of the users' attention back to the works. From an ocean of possibilities the PSL find, nurture and refine the work of creators that they believe fans will connect with. Other intermediates such as critics and reviewers also channel attention. Fans rely on this multi-level apparatus of findability to discover the works of worth out of the zillions produced. There is money to be made (indirectly for the creatives) by finding talent. For many years the paper publication TV Guide made more money than all of the 3 major TV networks it "guided" combined. The magazine guided and pointed viewers to the good stuff on the tube that week. Stuff, it is worth noting, that was free to the viewers.  There is little doubt that besides the mega-aggregators, in the world of the free many PDLs will make money selling findability -- in addition to the other generative qualities.

A hearty thank you today to our friend Ed Freyfogle at Nestoria, who's given Lloyd an opportunity to sound off on things online-ish.

In the piece, Lloyd talks about online media, classifieds, and the challenges facing vertical search engines like Nestoria.

Nestoria, for those of you who don't know, is a real estate search engine focusing at present on the UK and Spanish property markets. They've recently signed deals to provide property listings for Channel 4, The Independent, and CityAM.

I was in Moscow last week, at the invitation of my friend and ex-colleague Ben Wegg-Prosser. Ben now works for Russian web firm SUP, and the big news for them is that they've just acquired LiveJournal.

I'm not going to say anything about the details of the deal, because I don't know them, but I thought it would be worthwhile pointing something out - SUP already owns the licence to operate LiveJournal in Russia, has been doing so for almost two years, and LiveJournal is huge in Russia. It really is an established media platform. Most of the leading journalists, particularly the independent ones, are bloggers on LiveJournal, and the biggest ones of have tens of thousands of daily readers. Sup have leveraged this content into a news site, which uses the top posts as its content source. The fact that LiveJournal is independent of state control (genuinely independent, as far as I could tell) is obviously what makes this attractive to Russians, particularly at a time when the Russian state seems to be playing fast and loose with democratic process and a free press. It seemed interesting to me that, while we debate the details of blogging and journalism and the like, LiveJournal's very nature as a blogging platform is what makes it plausible as a journalism platform. Looked at through the lens of state control, the blogosphere becomes the true journalistic endeavour.

SUP is backed financially by one of Russia's leading oligarchs, Alexander Mamut, which is certain to create anxiety within LiveJournal's userbase. I don't know anything about the guy, but I will say this: from what I saw Sup is a well-run, well-resourced and very Western-looking outfit. Its offices look like the offices of a particularly cool Western Web firm, full of smart, bright people with the right instincts. As well as operating LiveJournal in Russia, they also run a leading sports site (championat.ru) and sell ads to Russian IPs for Yahoo!, last.fm, the Times and the Guardian.

I also met Anton Nossik, Russia's leading blogger and a LiveJournal user. In the three bars we visited, he seemed to know everybody and everybody knew him. He didn't have a bad word to say about SUP, or LiveJournal. He had a few harsh words to say about other Russian media, needless to say, and seemed to value his independence fiercely and uncompromisingly. In Russia, LiveJournal equals independence, it seems. Which seems to be the exact opposite of what many said would happen when Sup acquired the LiveJournal licence in Russia in 2006.

So, this post is not an advert for LiveJournal or a means of advocating the deal. All I'll say is SUP seems a well-run outfit on Western lines (ie, it's there to make money, not to peddle influence) and LiveJournal continues to be a massively important independent media platform in Russia, which should in itself give some pause to those who are already criticising the deal.

Don't try to reinvent the web | Media | The Guardian:

Magazine people spend most of their time deciding what to leave out of their magazines. They are trying to fashion a balanced package to slot into a very particular context, the newsstand. The web, on the other hand, is about bottomless inventory. It's also about the users and not editors. The former group are always stranger and more diverse than the latter group ever give them credit for. The most you can do on the web is provide a place where they like to gather. You're the hosts and it's your place but you don't really make the rules. You seek to steer the behaviour but in the end this will actually be decided by the people. If you've developed a site where your staff are providing more than 5% of the material then that's not a site at all. It's advertising. And it's probably unsustainable.

As a manifesto for an offline/online publishing strategy, Hepworth's is very, very hard to beat.

Former telegraph.co.uk editor Richard Burton on the pay of local reports:

That's as maybe but, 30 years on, it's hard to justify paying a daily paper reporter who exposes a paedophile ring in Newcastle or a columnist in Manchester who changes the way a Bill on disability is drafted thousands of pounds less than a graduate who uploads video to a national website.

In response to David Montgomery's remarks that local journalists were scandalously underpaid. Some nice remarks on subbing in Burton's post, too.

PaidContent on a very polite but firm spat between James Murdoch and Ashley Highfield. Murdoch smartly attacks the BBC's acquisition of Lonely Planet as "nationalisation", Highfield equally adroitly goes straight for the closed Sky settop. Always interesting when two monopolists go for it.