The Media I Eat

You know how in the movie Independence Day the aliens go from planet to planet to absorb the resources? I can’t help but think Yahoo and Google are those aliens:

“Mayer has been buying up a range of similar small mobile startups, largely for their teams of talented and innovative engineers. And, at a recent employee meeting, its M&A head Jackie Reses said the Silicon Valley company was looking at two significant purchases and a half-dozen smaller ones.”

More here.

“I’ve believed now for a while — we should stop looking at competition. We should stop worrying about The New York Times or The Guardian or the FT or Bloomberg or Reuters, because in this day and age audiences can be very, very promiscuous because of technology. What I’m really competing for, at the end of the day, is the one single non-renewable thing my readers have, which is their time. So if I can grab 5, 10, 15 more minutes of it, I think I can win this battle and not worry about where they might have spent that time.”

-Monday Q&A: Raju Narisetti on designing for mobile, the paywall fallacy, and reinventing ads

I think a few things… would your videos generate money anywhere else (unless you got them sponsored)? So, you’re making cash that you might not normally make. That’s a plus. Right? But I don’t see this being sustainable and I don’t see partners making enough cash presently to generate a nice revenue stream. You’ll generate some cash but for most channels, not bringing in millions (billions) of views, better keep your day job. And, still, even the ones generated millions, better keep your day job.

“In the near term, that’s pushing many big YouTube networks and partners to look hard for new sources of revenue. The bigger question is whether YouTube will be able to generate enough ad money for content makers to support the “premium” programming it has been trying to attract so it can compete with traditional TV.”

All Things D.

Maybe there’s a reason Journatic and lunatic are similar… the “service” that the Chicago Tribune used to create hyperlocal stories for their hyperlocal network TribLocal was first discovered using false bylines (by This American Life) then discovered straight up plagiarising. I suppose that’s what happens when you outsource the production of HYPERLOCAL news gathering and then depend on an algorithm to collect said news.

Well, they’re back, sort of.

But not as a “news gathering” outfit but more as an information outfit, sort of. The Trib writes about it here:

Five months after suspending Journatic for plagiarism and other ethical breaches in its TribLocal suburban newspapers, the Chicago Tribune announced to employees Thursday it will resume use of the hyperlocal content provider on a limited basis for such information as community listings.  

But the newspaper’s executives said the Tribune will not go back to using Journatic as a source of reported news stories for TribLocal.    

Over the next few weeks, TribLocal will begin incorporating listings and other informational  items for 11 community editions, with plans to expand to other geographies from there. Chicago Tribune staff reporters and freelance writers will continue to supply all bylined news stories, with the newspaper maintaining full editorial responsibility for news content. Tribune reporters took on that responsibility during Journatic’s suspension.  

But maybe this is exactly where Journatic is useful. The collection and aggregation of basic public info — phone numbers, street addresses, website addresses, hours of operations. This makes sense. Not “writing” stories for a hyperlocal with an an equation and a computer 4,000 miles away, but pulling in the most basic info and not having to “report” on anything.

Also, this is funny… a fake Twitter account for Journatic with the tag line: “We are creating a bitter future for journalism.” Adding: “Hyperlocal from afar.”

First let me say about 80 percent (and I’m really just pulling that number out of my magic top hat) of social media articles are silly. Yeah, there may be some good info in there I guess, but it’s the same thing over and over and over and over again. Even when it says “NEW STUDY!” I guarantee you’re still reading the same crap “with a new twist” that the last study produced. What drives engagement? Content (is this a cliche yet?). Super awesome amazing compelling crazy sexy bloody clever funny content. Not posting at lunchtime. Not scheduling tweets every hour. Not making sure your posts are spread out in a certain amount of time. But this latest piece, I’ll give a thumbs up because I like the idea of geo-targeting content. Haven’t been doing this. Will start doing this.

With that said, here’s this:

I don’t want to be the asshole but those maps suck. I wish I had a better word for it, I really do. I wish I could be more articulate or have some larger insight on it… but I don’t. The Apple map application is terrible. It sucks. It’s ruined days. It’s got me lost. I bet it’s ruined marriages. And left kids at school. And it might ruin Christmas. Though I’m sure it ruined Christmas for the fired dude and his family. Still. I don’t mean to be insensitive but what in the hell were you thinking? Shoulda been a whole team maybe? ‘Cause that had to do through a few eyeballs and through a few hands before it hit my phone and ruined my day.

Again, I don’t mean to be an asshole but someone needed to lose their job over this.

From the NYTimes Bits blog:

Apple has fired a manager who oversaw its mobile mapping service, continuing to clean house after a bad stumble.

Eddy Cue, senior vice president for Internet software and services at Apple, fired the manager, Richard Williamson, according to two people briefed on the matter who did not want to be named to avoid Apple’s ire. The firing happened shortly before Thanksgiving, according to one of these people.

I remember coming across Newsbound many months ago through a job posting. I can’t remember what they were looking for but it sounded cool. I didn’t apply. I seem to recall something like “Explainer and Chief.”

Anyway, the whole thing was to take complex issues and boil it down to a level of understanding… but not skimping. The tag line on the site right now is “Slow down the news, stay up to speed.” Pretty clever.

So they create these “explainers”. And they do a good job explaining. I went through the one on the “fiscal cliff” last night. You get it. I like it. It’s short snippets, you click an arrow, you get a new snippet or a new slide. The graphics are all right (better than I could do). And as far as information goes, I feel satisfied. They explained it.

What I wish, though, was a level of interactive-ness or another dimension to it. Maybe they planned it this way but, really, I feel like I’m watching a power point presentation that is just a little bit more “edgy” than your run of the mill power point presentation.

But maybe throwing that in would be a distraction? This way, maybe, it stays focused and slow. Maybe I like it this way. Wait, I think I do. No, I do. I do.

Text below the explainer (which you can see on the page itself) takes you a little deeper with supplement articles. Again, it’s all very 2D and slow (which is NOT a bad thing when the info is good … and it is).

So, here’s Newsbound’s “fiscal whatchamacallit”:

Bro, make your newsletter fit in my inbox. I hate scrolling.

NYTimes assigns an editor to an editor who posts on Twitter and Facebook.

Such loose behavior demanded correction, in the view of the Times, because—and I am quoting Sullivan here—the paper didn’t want to be “exposed to a reporter’s unfiltered and unedited thoughts.” Mercy me! What newspaper would ever want to be exposed to the unfiltered and unedited thoughts of the people that it pays to think and write? The very notion of an unfiltered and unedited thought is anathema to the conception of reporting and writing that the New York Times currently suffers from, one that places power in multiple layers of editors whose jobs consist primarily of hammering life, point of view, serendipity, and wit out of the stories their reporters write. One that filters and edits.

I read this much before I stopped:

If you’re a journalist with any kind of honesty and ambition, I don’t see how the dubious tactics of aggressive hedge fund traders can’t have a gut appeal. Steven A Cohen, the hedge funder now being hotly pursued by the Feds, does what I do. Many of the people who work for Cohen seem to do what I do. We call up people and ask for information.

The government frames this differently. It casts this as a conspiracy between a small number of individuals: one who has the information, passing it, for some benefit, to others who will act on it. The metaphor is spying. Trafficking in secrets. Often, the government has wire taps that reinforce this sense of organized crime and its cryptic vulgarity.

But a high-performing hedge fund, like Cohen’s SAC, also sounds like a news organization of old – when there were no limits on expenses, and coziness with your sources was the norm, and the feeling of belonging to a club produced reliable and remarkable gossip. (This happens much less in news organizations now, because there are no expense accounts and because the news business is no longer a salubrious or sought-after club.)

You can read the rest here though.

This study found that devices essentially dictate how overwhelmed people become when consuming their news sources. For example, as Nieman points out, 40 tabs on your laptop and in your browser is much more overwhelming then cycling through articles and readers on your iPad or iPhone or whatever smart device you read on the bus.

That makes sense. I feel much more relaxed when flipping through Zite — for instances — on my phone than sitting in front of a screen with dozens of tabs and trying to get through each story. It’s much more daunting, it’s much more pressure, and it feels like work. I enjoy my phone much more than those 40 tabs.

Check out the study and the piece on the above links.

But, before you go, this graph was interesting. Between 2010 and now, consumption has changed so much that the study is (some might argue) out of date. In two years these researchers went from current to antiquated.

The mention of netbooks — that declining form factor — raises an important factor about the study: Its survey took place in 2010, which was like another world when it comes to news consumption platforms. The iPad was brand new; Android was just starting its rapid growth. The kind of early(ish) adopter who was using Twitter or a Kindle in 2010 is likely to be different from the broader user base those platforms have in 2012.

…and this doesn’t count.

Change customer to reader, and I’m totally on board:

“There’s no such thing as a national customer,” a client once said to me. “Just lots of local ones.” And it takes insight into local tastes, local demographics, local issues and local competitors to be relevant and win the consumer. Organize national, act local is starting to get some traction. But the media are leading the way.

From AdAge.com, btw.

Photo is The National, a different thing all together.

So a new thing is out… sorta. It’s called Medium, done by the dudes who started Blogger and Twitter. Nieman just put out a piece on it, that’s how I know. That’s how I learn about, like, 40 percent of this type of stuff. (Twenty percent I probably owe to Zuckerberg, 20 percent to Twitter, and the rest I owe to my mother.)

I’m still navigating it — in what feels like a really super limited way. Nieman says it’s a mash-up (which is now a word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, btw) between Tumblr (shout-out!) and Pinterest.

Blah blah blah. Check it out here.

Anyway, I wanted to point this little nugget out from Nieman. The title of the piece was “13 ways of looking at Medium…” Of the 13 ways, this is what hit home but, really, it has nothing to do with Medium. It really just has to do with media. And it’s right.

Degrading authorship is something the web already does spectacularly well. Work gets chopped and sliced and repurposed. That last animated GIF you saw — do you know who made it? Probably not. That infonugget you saw on Gawker or The Atlantic — did it start there? Probably not. Sites like Buzzfeed are built largely on reshuffling the Internet, rearranging work into streams and slideshows.

It’s been a while since auteur theory made sense as an explanation of the web. And you know what? We’re better for it. In a world of functionally infinite content, relying on authorship doesn’t scale. We need people to mash things up, to point things out, to sample, to remix.

Why do you think DJs are so popular?

…wait — I think I just got an idea.