Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Martin Langeveld estimates the online share of news audience is only 3%.

Surprise.

All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.

I don’t have a way to verify his numbers, but I am really surprised by them. Most people I know do not read print newspapers. Are they the exception? Possible but I doubt it. Is it possible that too many newspapers are being printed that no one reads? Hmm.

NYT profiles hyperlocal news sites that leverage a rich source of news: blogs.

Adrian Holovaty, who founded EveryBlock two years ago after working at The Washington Post, calls blogs a rich source of news.

If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.

The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants 

Aggregator seems to have suddenly become a dirty word. News media thinks that news aggregators steal content and violate copyright laws. They think google is an aggregator and therefore is stealing their content.

But what does google aggregate? Links and snippets of the web  page. The idea is that snippet is a preview of the page the link points to. When the user clicks on the link they are taken to the original source. Is that really stealing? I don’t think so.

I love techmeme. They index all the blog posts about technology. Is that stealing? Techmeme founder gabe revera does not think so. I agree with him.

But Gabe Rivera, who founded Techmeme, a popular tech-news aggregation site, suggests that Techmeme only displays a short snapshot of a a story. This, says Rivera, only serves to promote the content.

“All successful Web publishers want their content quoted and linked,” Rivera wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. “The benefits are clear. Some prefer that the quotes remain short…these are precisely the kind that Google and Techmeme use. So for AP and News Corp. to discourage quoting is a clue that they don’t really get the Web and are in danger of shooting themselves in the foot.”  

NYT has a post on news media’s efforts in search of paying customers. It asks, ‘They pay for cable, music and extra bags. How about news’.

Just a year ago, most media companies believed the formula for Internet success was to offer free content, build an audience and rake in advertising dollars. Now, with the recession battering advertising online, in print and on television, media executives are contemplating a tougher trick: making the consumer pay.

Publishers like Hearst Newspapers, The New York Times and Time Inc.are drawing up plans for possible Internet fees. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive, is promoting a plan called “TV Everywhere,” to offer consumers a vast array of television online, provided they are paying cable TV customers. And Rupert Murdoch, who once vowed to make The Wall Street Journal’s Web site free, is now an evangelist for charging readers.

“People reading news for free on the Web, that’s got to change,” Mr. Murdoch said last week at a cable industry conference in Washington.

The Associated Press said on Monday that it intended to police the use of news articles linked on countless Web sites, where many consumers read them free, to make sure the sites shared advertising revenue with those who created the material.

But from networks selling downloads of TV shows, to music companies trying to curb file-sharing, to struggling newspapers and magazines, the make-or-break question is this: How do you get consumers to pay for something they have grown used to getting free?

That is a great question. The answer lies is making news easily accessible everywhere including the web, mobile (iphone etc) and devices (kindle etc) and charge for premium content and device access. I think freemium model works here.

The answer is certainly not taking on the web .

 Here is a fascinating view of a WSJ edtior on why aggregators such as google are nothing but parasites. The article from the australian  is one of the best articles that describes the views of news media thinking so I am quoting most of it here just to show how to be a parasite.

Thomson, who was holidaying in Australia last week, said companies such as Google were profiting from the “mistaken perception” that content should be free.

“There is a collective consciousness among content creators that they are bearing the costs and that others are reaping some of the revenues — inevitably that profound contradiction will be a catalyst for action and the moment is nigh,” he told Media.

“There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet.”

Thomson, a former editor of The Times who was appointed editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal last May, said consumers must understand why they were paying a premium for content.

“It’s certainly true that readers have been socialised — wrongly I believe — that much content should be free,” he said.

“And there is no doubt that’s in the interest of aggregators like Google who have profited from that mistaken perception. And they have little incentive to recognise the value they are trading on that’s created by others.”

Thomson said Google benefited from aggregating content from The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers.

“Google argues they drive traffic to sites, but the whole Google sensibility is inimical to traditional brand loyalty,” he said.

“Google encourages promiscuity — and shamelessly so — and therefore a significant proportion of their users don’t necessarily associate that content with the creator.

“Therefore revenue that should be associated with the creator is not garnered.”

In contrast, Thomson noted Dow Jones’ Factiva information service paid licence fees to its content providers. “The model is entirely different and certainly proper,” he said.

Thomson argued aggregators “need to be honest in their role as deliverers of other people’s content”. And as those sites were exploiting the value of mainstream media content, “we have to be at least as clever as they are in understanding the value of our own content”.

He said “quite a few newspapers are ready to have a serious discussion about whose content it is anyway”.

Thomson’s comments came as Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation (owner of The Wall Street Journal and The Australian) revealed last week News was considering an investment in a Kindle-like e-reader.

E-reader devices aim to provide a mobile platform on which online newspapers can be effectively displayed.

Meantime Thomson said it was “amusing” to read media blogs and comment sites, all of which traded on other people’s information.

“They are basically editorial echo chambers rather than centres of creation, and the cynicism they have about so-called traditional media is only matched by their opportunism in exploiting the quality of traditional media,” he said. 

Thomson also said it was incumbent on content creators to make their own websites compelling for readers. While the Journal earned online subscription revenues, Thomson said few US news groups had yet to learn how to make money online.

“Papers should look at what their assets are — is it their people? What is their role in any given society? And how do those assets play on the web? So how do we create an experience for readers using those assets which is clearly a premium experience?

“And if you think that through starting from first principles rather than from an existing business view, there are opportunities. But I’ll leave it to others to figure out what they may be.” 

What is an aggregator? Is an index an aggregator? They are just creating a map of where the content is.  I would agree that they are parasites if they are making a copy and making it possible for the reader to read the article without leaving the site. But these aggregators send the readers to the source sites. How is that being a parasite? That is distribution. That is not cloning content. There is a difference which somehow this editor misses. The web distribution model is vastly different from the traditional distribution in that it can not be controlled. That is the crux of the problem.