links for 2009-09-16 September 16, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Uncategorized.add a comment
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For too many people in too many newsrooms, things on the internet really don't seem to be considered that important. [Alison Gow]
Google Fast Flip Verdict – Good News For Users, Bad News For Newspapers September 15, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Newspapers, Search.Tags: Google, Google News
2 comments
So long Google News and thanks for all the traffic.
Google Fast Flip may still be in the labs but the search giant’s latest efforts should give some in the newspaper industry nightmares.
First things first, it is a pretty nice concept (if far from new) and it offers a decent user experience. Search a news event – Kim Clijsters US Open win for example - and Google Fast Flip will return results in all their visual glory by rendering the look and feel of the host website.
You can browse from one page to the next by clicking backwards and forwards on the blue arrows. And if you want to visit the site in question simply click on the image.
Google is in no doubt why you’ll want to use it:
In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.
There’s also a promise of a revenue share for publishers who sign up but here’s where it starts to unravel for a news industry increasingly fretful about generating revenue online.
Paul Bradshaw, writing on the Online Journalism Blog, is in no doubt that this is a bad move for publishers and the only motivation to sign up is “blind panic”. He notes:
Of course, by hosting screenshots Google are eating into one of the key metrics that publishers use to sell advertising: the time a user spends on your site. And given that many readers don’t read beyond the first few pars, there’s a good chance it will eat into the numbers clicking through to the actual page at all.
The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond nicely satirises the move in his Fake Eric Schmidt blog this morning. Adopting the potty-mouth of Google’s (fake) CEO, he writes:
And here’s the part you ——— will love: we’ll share the revenue with you. Of course the ads will be ours, not yours. Oh, and Fast Flip shows enough of the article that readers will decide not to click through and read your pages at all. But you’ll thank us for it because we’ve saved your business model. Happy now bitches?
Related:
- Top 10 News Aggregators In The UK
- What Would Google Do? Fail Quietly.
- ‘I Consider Google News A Gift, Newspapers Consider It Theft.’
links for 2009-09-15 September 15, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Uncategorized.add a comment
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Google Fast Flip will generate revenue for publishers and aims to replicate the magazine reading experience online. [Telegraph.co.uk]
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Talk about massive disconnects — here we have a media company that’s not MTV making money off of part of this year’s big MTV scandal, but it’s not even a clip of the scandal itself! [Catharine P Taylor, Bnet]
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The pyramid is dead. Long live the totem pole. [Advancing the Story]
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Hulu's reach as a video platform keeps growing, now reaching more video viewers than the second biggest U.S. cable company. [Business Insider]
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Subject-wise it's also a good example of how social media tactics can bridge the traditional divide between diverse sections of the community and old media. [Will Sturgeon]
Lehman Collapse Showed Power Of Print September 15, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Newspapers.Tags: BBC, Daily Telegraph, Google
2 comments
A couple of years ago the BBC revamped its news website so when a major story came along it could push aside all the detritus and devote the top of the page to a single story – larger headline font and bigger image.
It was an admission of sorts that template-driven websites were all very well but come a big event (think 7/7, 9/11, Blair’s resignation etc) there was a need to make a visual impact.
Implicit is the power of print. Despite the onward rush of digital, no where is a splash quite as effective than on the front page of a newspaper.
The Daily Telegraph’s coverage of the Lehman Brothers’ collapse last September is a vivid reminder of that. Appropriate then that one year on Google has unveiled Fast Flip, digital’s latest attempt to ape that power.
Related:
- News websites 1990s-style
- What’s Wrong With This Telegraph Front Page?
- The Express Fiddles While The Mail Earns
Google Ads. FAIL September 14, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Advertising, Offbeat.Tags: Google
7 comments
Great spot by Martin Belam, aka currybetdotnet. If you’re inclined to visit the forum of the English Defence League (‘Peacefully Protesting Against Militant Islam’), you are likely to be greeted by this advert:
The introductory blurb to the forum is duly reassuring:
The EDL will not tolerate any racist or Islamaphobic behaviour on this forum. We are against Islamic Extremists and all that they stand for, but do not want innocent Muslims being victimised or abused.
So that’s okay then, and presumably that passing reference to “innocent Muslims” was enough for Google to serve an ad for Muslima.com, ‘The International Muslim Matimonial Site!’
I wonder whether any EDL members will be tempted to click through.
Related:
- Fox News Anchor To Rupert Murdoch: ‘Mr Chairman Sir, Why Are You So Great?’
- What’s Wrong With This Telegraph Front Page?
- One Of The Best Photo Captions Ever
Adebayor, Arsenal And The Limits Of Crowdsourcing September 14, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Crowdsourcing.Tags: Crowdsourcing, Daily Telegraph
2 comments
When James Surowiecki coined the phrase ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ for his 2004 book, it was a play on a 19th century work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay.
Well this weekend the madness returned, and not just inside the City of Manchester Stadium.
Surowiecki argument – “the many are smarter than the few” - is a theme that’s been taken up by others, most notably Jeff Howe in his book Crowdsourcing, and applied in a variety of ways in the digital space.
One of the best newspaper adaptations of the crowdsourcing idea is player ratings – rather than rely on the opinion of one sports reporter, an irregular watcher of the players on view, source the opinions of the fans.
The aggregate marks out of 10 you’ll find on the Daily Telegraph ratings application are invariably a better guide to the true worth of a footballer’s 90 minutes than those from your correspondent of choice.
Counterintuitive, maybe, but the football fanatic is also the football realist and knows more than most when the talent is failing to deliver. It’s the media that often has the blinkers on when it comes to Gerrard, Rooney, Lampard, Fabregas et al.
But once in a while the crowd gets it wrong – and the correspondent gets it right.
Take Emmanuel Adebayor’s performance on Saturday when the Manchester City striker faced his former club.
Fuelled by festering animosity towards the Arsenal fans and some of his former colleagues, Adebayor was an effective footballer (one goal from one opportunity) but an ineffective diplomat (inappropriate, near riot-inducing goal celebration and a boot, seemingly put there deliberately, into a ex-teammates face).
On the football alone, the player deserved a strong rating. And that’s what he got from the writers - 7 out of 10 in the Sun and the Guardian; 8 out of 10 in the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and The Times.
And in the Telegraph’s crowdsourced player ratings? 5.82 at the time of posting. In other words, the worst Manchester City player on the pitch. Surely not? A case of Arsenal fans getting some digital retaliation, perhaps.
Of course these ratings are subjective but in this particular case the wisdom of football writers does seem nearer the mark than the madness of football fans.
Just as the custodians of Wikipedia put editing restrictions on pages covering the Middle East, perhaps the Telegraph should re-consider how it deals with some footballing conflict zones.
Related:
- How The Guardian’s Crowdsourcing Experiment Ran Out Of Steam
- Crowdsourcing 1920s-Style
- BBC Goes Crowdsourcing To Save The NHS
The Week’s Most Read Posts (7 – 13 Sep 2009) September 14, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
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Enough with the paywalls, the micropayments and member clubs. This is the future of the newspaper. Possibly. [jonbernstein.wordpress.com]
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The 15 minute presentation from Google’s Maile Ohye offers some advice that you’re probably familiar with – and much you’re not. [jonbernstein.wordpress.com]
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Jon Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy jam with Mercury prize nominees Led Bib. [jonbernstein.wordpress.com]
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Disintermediation is just a posh way of cutting out the middle man, and the internet was meant to do this in spades. [jonbernstein.wordpress.com]
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‘For me, the blog is at the core of everything I do, it is the bedrock of my output.’ [jonbernstein.wordpress.com]
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What price nine minutes and nine seconds over a month for average visiting time to the New York Post site Rupert Murdoch hopes to charge for? (Not much of a revenue stream at 19 seconds a day!) [jonbernstein.wordpress.com]
Alan Duncan And The Disintermediation Myth September 9, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Uncategorized.2 comments
Disintermediation is just a posh way of cutting out the middle man, and the internet was meant to do this in spades.
From the insurance broker to the estate agent to the news outlet, the consumer would bypass these intermediaries and go straight to the source.
And while this has sometimes been the case, the promise has rarely matched the reality.
Two recent attempts – singer Chris Brown’s YouTube apology and the Cabinet Office’s efforts to right some misreporting wrongs – have been largely unsuccessful.
But now in the wake of a political demotion – Alan Duncan’s move to shadow prison’s minister following some embarrassing secret filming -it is back on the agenda.
Guido Fawkes says the political blogosphere was responsible for the scalp and concludes that “the news is now disintermediated”.
Even here, I’m not so sure, as I argue in my latest piece for Journalism.co.uk. Certainly the journalistic craft and energy belonged to the activists but, put simply, it took the mainstream media to put it into the mainstream – to mediate it.
Guido has written in response to my piece, and you can read that here. He ends by saying:
Increasingly old media parasitically leeches off new media sources. The ecology of the media has fundamentally changed.
That may be the case, but it is not the point I’m making.
If disintermediation is indeed “the elimination of an intermediary in a transaction between two parties” (in this case source of news and the consumer of news), then it is difficult to argue that the broadcasters and newspapers have gone away.
They haven’t been eliminated and they are an essential part of the 2009 news ecology.
Will that change in time? Possibly. But until then the bloggers need the BBC, the Evening Standard etc to spread the word.
And speaking of the Evening Standard, I owe an apology to Paul Waugh who rightly points out I overlooked his paper’s role in the Duncan saga.
I used the BBC in the headline to exaggerate a point - big, national media carry the biggest weight, influence and capacity to disseminate. And none is bigger than the BBC. Still, it was the Standard’s lunchtime splash on 12 August that prompted the broadcasters to act.
Related:
- Sorry Guido, the BBC did for Duncan
- Daily Telegraph Meets Fail Whale In Case Of The Phantom Twittercrat
- What Chris Brown’s YouTube Apology Tells Us About New Media
Channel 4 News Theme Like You’ve Never Heard It… September 9, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in TV.Tags: Channel 4 News
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…unless, of course, you were watching last night.
Jon Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy invited Mercury nominees, Led Bib, into Studio 6 for a bit jamming.
Half way through the band’s line-up changes – Jon on keyboards and Krishnan on guitar.
“Rocks your socks off,” says the notoriously well-attired Mr Snow.
Speech Debelle, meanwhile, was in another part of the building reworking the News at Ten bongs with Mark Austin. Probably.
(In case you are wondering, the Channel 4 News theme is called ‘Best Endeavours’ by Alan Hawkshaw.)
Related:
– Ron Wood Bee Sting Returns To YouTube
– Wogan Wages War On The Anchorman
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