Reuters reports the news story on CNN's elimination of Reuters as a major supplier of news and video footage, but the story behind the story provided on the Reuters MediaFile weblog gets to some of the meat of the matter. An internal CNN memo surfaced by MediaFile from Editorial Director Richard Griffiths details the sudden and troublesome transition that CNN must manage. The termination of using Reuters content is immediate and global and must include purging clips of Reuters video footage from archived video segments. Though the official story from CNN that it is deciding to make "significant investments" in its own news gathering operation to counter the loss of Reuters content there is some speculation that this is more of a cost-cutting measure or a "play tough" negotiating stance on the contract for syndicated Reuters content.
The truth is probably somewhere in between these two stances. It's hard to imagine that CNN, which has relied strongly on Reuters content for most of its existence, is going to be able to fill the gap easily for coverage lost through dropping Reuters, especially as it impacts their archives so deeply. If this is a strategic move, then one would think that the strategy would have accounted for these losses more smoothly.
To some degree the claim that news feeds and video footage from suppliers such as AP can help to fill the gap may be a major part of the CNN strategy, but the larger factor seems to be how the increasingly context-dependent nature of Web content is changing how content brands are managed online. In dropping a major syndication source such as Reuters CNN is acknowledging that aggregating content from other premium branded suppliers does not necessarily help a publisher to score well in metrics managed by comScore and other audience measurement services that look increasingly at how content gets consumed away from a portal.
This is underscored by portals such as CNN making more aggressive use of their own feeds to users via RSS, search engine positioning and other techniques that are putting their content into on-the-fly contexts that users value more. In this sense, a content brand is built around what it does for an audience in the contexts that they care about most - which may or may not be the brand's parent portal.
While this gives Reuters a bit of a bloody nose in the short run it's also an acknowledgment that their strategy of using Web syndication partners sparingly is paying off to some degree as its own brand begins to gain more prominence through search engines and its increasingly sophisticated portal. However CNN's willingness to stick with content from AP and other wire services may also indicate that Reuters' once-dominant international position in news gathering is eroding to the point that it is becoming harder to position its news effectively in consumer markets. Reuters has also lagged behind AP in seeking out social media partners to build context for its content, and unlike AP does not have the advantage of a membership-driven network that relies on AP in many instances to drive branded news portals in many local markets.
All of this begs a very delicate question: is the Reuters news brand going to be strong enough to survive alone in an era in which traditional syndication is experiencing major challenges? By moving its consumer Web operations away from partners such as CNN over the past few years Reuters has tried to innoculate itself against this very question through its quest to build up non-syndication revenues through advertising and other types of business deals. But with more global news sources than ever before and a surge of user-generated content gaining more authority it is becoming ever-harder for Reuters to define that brand, a move that may be complicated by the eminent takeover of Reuters by Thomson.
Consider, for example, the fact that the far more interesting analysis of this particular story appeared on the Reuters MediaFile weblog. MediaFile is an excellent blog, but it's hardly the only one of its kind. Being able to define their brand effectively online whilst contending with both traditional and non-traditional competitors that can be exposed the the global communications afforded by the Web is going to be an ongoing challenge for Reuters and other major wire services. For now consider CNN the winner in this battle as it gains more freedom to build its brand through online channels for its text and video content, but consider both parties having to scramble to make their news strategies fly in a world of contextual content branding.
CNET News covers the first major ratings results from its revised audience ratings methodology at comScore's Media Metrix unit and the results are not altogether rosy for major portal providers. According to CNET under ComScore's new qSearch 2.0, Yahoo lost market share from a year ago and is now at 23.5 percent for July, while Google gained share, reaching 55.2 percent market share. The New York Times notes also a fall in Forbes.com's audience measurement from 15.3 million in its original February data to a revised figure of 13.2 million.
One of the key factors aiding Google in the new measurement system is comScore's inclusion of search queries initiated via Google's infrastructure through search partners, as well as queries into "universal search" categories such as news or images from a search engine's home page initiated off of an initial query.
All of this builds audience share, which despite protests from other portal providers about quality audiences is still a major factor. The difference now, though, is that ratings companies are recognizing that in a world of embedded content, OEM relationships and mashups the "here" of content is less about who comes to your site and more about how your content gets in front of audiences in many venues. Jeff Jarvis notes in a "portals are past" rant that it doesn't matter if you get 10,000 impressions on a site with an audience of 100 million impressions or from multiple sites with smaller audiences, which is somewhat to the point but misleading.
With advertisers focusing increasingly on conversational marketing and contextual ad placement the new audience metrics are rewarding publishers whose content can engage those audiences in as many finely defined contexts as possible. The issue is less the total size of a portal's audience and more the ability of a portal to define the right audiences for advertisers. It isn't so much a matter of "big is bad and small is good" as it is getting the right context for your audience no matter where they congregate.
This is where Google has done itself an enormous favor over the past several years in encouraging the use of its content via mashups, Google Co-Op and other tools that make it easy for both professionals and amateurs to use Google content in so many different contexts. There is a lot to be said for the strategies of portals such as Yahoo! and Ask.com to engage audiences more deeply at their own destination sites to build quality audience engagement but they have lagged behind Google in defining unique contexts for content beyond their portals that may be less heavily branded but of equal value to advertisers. At publisher sites such as Forbes.com the problems are not so different, with a preponderance of traditionally syndicated content building up clicks but failing to produce enough unique content that can make a dent through their own syndication strategies to take advantage of new audience metrics.
In all of these instances Google gained an advantage by focusing on syndicating context rather than content, avoiding the expenses and lethargic pace of traditional content licensing deals in favor of making it easy for people to find anyone's content in the right context and to build additional and unique content around it. This can happen on large portals or small portals - it matters not to Google, as long as it keeps growing.
We've long held that portal strategies were topping out, so none of this comes as a terrible surprise, but it's interesting to see how advertisers in search of meaningful metrics are now one of the key drivers that are showing the way to online publishers who may have doubted the value of Google's strategies to advertisers. Traditional portals will continue to be important as branding mechanisms for content producers and marketers but the highly portable value of context is beginning to to carve away at the bottom line of portal producers.
Wired Science has the most in-your-face coverage of the formation of PRISM, an advocacy group formed by scholarly publishers to stem the legislative movement towards free access to government-funded scholarly research. This in and of itself is not a surprise, but Wired claims that the site is an example of astroturf advocacy, meaning an organization that tries to position itself as a grass-roots movement when in fact it is created by others wanting to appear to have grass roots support. PRISM is the creation of the Association of American Publishers, so one assumes that the roots of this organization are more likely to grow in the yards of scholarly publishers than the scientists providing the research. But is Wired's angry attitude towards PRISM justified?
The primary problem with PRISM is that it seems to be advocating on a range of issues which, while valid in their own right, are more about fear, uncertainty and doubt - those familiar sales tools - than the real issues at hand. Let's take a brief look at sme of the points that PRISM feels will result from unpaid access to government-sponsored research:
Undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it
This seems to be somewhat disingenuous, in that there may be alternative methods for supporting effective peer review that have not been explored by scientific publishers. Certainly a government-mandated publishing of research for free that doesn't take into account how that research is produced has the potential to be an unfunded mandate that could place an undue burden on scientific publishers. This is a real issue, but the answers to the issue may not lie with the government itself - they may lie with addressing how the peer review process is funded in general.
Opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record;
There are certainly recent instances in which government research has been interfered with by political appointees in government agencies, but the bulk of this has been aimed towards communications with the public and legislators, not towards scientific papers. PRISM raises a valid concern but by conflating it with proposed government mandates to require public access to peer-reviewed publicly funded research they are playing more on sentiment than on actual evidence. Surely politics should stay out of science, but there's no indication at this time that the government would have the ability to influence the peer review process politically through these proposed mandates any more than it does today.
Subjecting the scientific record to the uncertainty that comes with changing federal budget priorities and bureaucratic meddling with definitive versions
There may be legitimate concerns raised in this point based on experience with the U.S. government's implementation of its current voluntary public access program, but PRISM seems to have conflated a number of issues under one banner. They would do better to call out the specific issues for people to understand their concerns and to reduce the emotional component of this appeal.
Introducing duplication and inefficiencies that will divert resources that would otherwise be dedicated to research.
While this is a legitimate concern also, in fairness inefficiency is nothing new to the process of producing scholarly research, as are difficulties in dealing with publicly funded research programs. What this is really saying is "It's going to cost us publishers and we're not being given a penny for it."
If the purpose of PRISM is to convince legislators that there is an advocacy group that supports the publishers' goals then my sense is that they are going to fail. The site is not very convincing and lacks information about its supporters or any input from them that would influence people into thinking that there is a broad base of support for PRISM's views. PRISM does raise some important issues that need to be addressed in the rush to make access to government-funded research public, especially in how to support the peer review process realistically in an era in which public access to research is becoming a given. But the broader outlines of the solutions to many of these problems would seem to lie in how the scholarly publishing community has resisted changes in publishing technologies that disrupt their traditional business models.
With some added focus and some sponsorship of honest debate between government research sponsors, scientists and publishers PRISM may yet serve a positive and constructive purpose as an advocacy group. But if PRISM remains little more than an "astroturf" organization that defends the commercial interests of publishers then it's not likely to gain the needed respect from any of the parties that it needs to influence in this debate. Publishers in general are reluctant to engage their markets in a more conversational manner, but if scholarly publishers can position PRISM as a tool to build an honest conversation about the future of commercial and non-commercial scholarly publishing then they may be able to make some headway. At the moment I wouldn't bet on that happening, but you never know.
These are not the salad days for many Digital Rights Management providers, with major music producers such as Universal eschewing proprietary copy protection in an effort to blunt efforts by Apple and others to control music distribution and pricing. But just because you are enabling open copying doesn't mean that you have to give up on copyright. PC World covers a new digital watermarking technology from Activated Content that enables music producers to track copying of music via standard audio file formats. The technology in Activated's watermarking algorithms is very powerful, but because it does not prevent access to the music itself there's very little motivation for the average music consumer to crack the code. This is very much along the lines of what we've been encouraging for some time, analogous in some ways to what Attributor is doing with hypertext-based digital content.
The key to success in digital content distribution in an era that values the context that content finds itself in as much as the content itself is to not use access control as a mechanism for copyright enforcement. For those such as movie producers who have not yet come up with effective contextual monetization models DRM will be with us for quite some time, though, as evidenced by the prevalence of Blu-ray format DVD discs driving HD video sales. When your focus is more on an uninterrupted performance with a high-level technology component DRM may still be able to carry the freight. But as contextual advertising makes its way into video distribution as well (pre-rolls as in move theatres today) we may begin to see some loosening of DRM for video also, especially as it will find itself competing more with increasingly ad-driven game content for audience attention. All content producers concerned about copyright in an era that increasingly values user-initiated content distribution need to consider how watermarking technologies may be able to help further revenue streams beyond their traditional models.
You have your choice of horror stories to choose from as AT+T sends out its first service bills for Web access via Apple's iPhones. USA Today covers an active text messager who had her 300-page bill delivered in a box (YouTube video below) while a design consultant who got socked with roaming charges for Web access had to cough up USD 5,000 to settle his everyday use of the mobile web. The culprit in both instances is message units, with AT&T's by-the-byte metering making single-page Web downloads as much as USD 20 per page or more in some instances. With rates like this one can only wonder what mobile Web carriers would have in mind if they decided to start adding on fees for high-traffic Web sites as some of them are proposing for general Web access.
While AT&T dismisses these as extreme examples of billing charges the fact of the matter is that it's indicative of how little phone carriers have come in accepting what creates value in content access today. We have had more than a decade of flat-rate Internet access services and increasing use of free or flat-rate telephony to accelerate the growth of electronic publishing but still the major carriers want to play by the old rules - to the long-term detriment of publishers. The most likely consequence of this early application of inflexible metered billing is to heighten the appeal of proposals before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to make new frequencies available for broadband wireless access more open to competition and transparent access to content and supporting services.
The same threats to revenues faced by publishers as telecommunications companies try to impose tariffs on land-line Internet access are already in place in a mobile marketplace that will represent an increasingly significant portion of publisher revenues - if we can get beyond USD 20-per-page Web downloads. AT&T's clumsy handling of billing may back-handedly do publishers a great favor by letting them see both the promise of a device like the iPhone and the inordinate restrictions for its use to access the Web. Publishers know already that print revenues will no longer fill the bottom line as before: it's time for publishers to push aggressively in the U.S. Congress for a more open, flat-rate approach to mobile Web access that will help them to build online revenues as quickly as possible and to promote more accessible and profitable mobile services that will help them to do that more effectively.
CNET interviews Jaideep Singh, the CEO and Co-Founder of the newly launched personal profile search engine Spock, and reveals insights into what is perhaps the hottest online content product launch this year. The Spock team has already assembled about 100 million tagged personal profiles of both living and historical people, including high profile people from the past like Diana, Princess of Wales and somewhat more mundane people from today like, well, me. Spock has carved out a very clever niche for itself, providing bone-simple search and navigation features like Google, personal profiling and networking as found in social media services such as LinkedIn and Facebook, content tagging, bookmarking and voting features like Digg and del.icio.us and content embedding features like PhotoBucket that enable a Spock profile to appear on Web pages beyond Spock.
There are all too many instances of features checklists like the above that could result in tragically bad content services but that's not the case with Spock. Through its system of content tagging and linking Spock winds up being a very powerful tool to research people who might have something to say on a given topic or to find out people who may have a connection to someone who you need to research. For example if you try a Spock search on "global warming" you get to no one's surprise a Spock profile of Al Gore as your first entry, but it's followed closely by Bill Clinton's profile (listed as "global warming advocate" [sic] as well as having a relationship link to Al Gore) and then by profiles of numerous global warming skeptics, including Rush Limbaugh. These are interesting and highly relevant search results that Google, as good as it may be from its own perspective, simply cannot duplicate.
Anyone can tag a person's profile returned on Spock with additional keywords that may be relevant to the person or add a vote for an existing tag. This is an exciting combination of content categorization and user feedback that provides the ability to create more relevance for a given person's relationship to a tagged topic without having to rely on evaluating external content sources. However Spock does quite a bit of external content evaluation as well, using patented algorithms to determine relevance, personal links and profile information. This information may be verified and edited by a person logging in to the Spock service and claiming their profile, much as in the Zoominfo online directory of professionals. In building a profile one can add links to existing personal profiles on social media services or links to relevant Web pages. Others may add links to your profile as well and vote on them, so there is a social media aspect to profile building also.
There's very little redundant information in Spock, it's mostly links to relevant information found elsewhere, as with other search engines. But the social media features, profile links, user tagging, bookmarking and personal profile validation features combine with straight search capabilities to create a truly unique experience with very useful information. Given that people have been "Googling" people for a long time you'd think that a major search engine like Google would have come up with Spock-like features to add value to personal searching, but Spock found that need and has filled it very nicely. While it may lack some of the strong business oriented capabilities of finding professionals via services such as LinkedIn, Jigsaw or Zoominfo the Spock method seems to try to be a Switzerland of sorts for social media profiles: have as many as you want wherever you want them and Spock will use them as useful input for building yourself an all-encompassing profile and content directory on their own service.
The mixture of both solid results and fun exploration is sure to make Spock a very popular and useful service for people in both personal and professional roles, a factor that is likely to encourage people to build and maintain a high profile via Spock's search services. Spock helps to fill in the area between purely automated searches that fail to incorporate personal wisdom on both people an topics and does so in novel ways that challenge both conventional search engines and more traditional directory services to consider how people can be exposed most effectively to audiences searching for both information about people and both personal and professional relationships with people. It's still early days for Spock, of course - performance is so-so at times and there are still some bugs to be found in basic features such as profile claiming - but as a tool to probe into people within the framework of key topics expect Spock to become a trend-setter for some time to come.
Then again, you can always try aggregating other people's news editorially...oh, we've done that already... Newser: Burned Once, but Starting Up Again The New York Times
Newser is a new take on online news aggregation backed by HighBeam Research's Patrick Spain with a hand from media figure Michael Wolff. The concept behind Newser is relatively simple: use a central editorial staff with some automated support from HighBeam's search and aggregation infrastructure for premium and Web content to highlight news from mainstream media sources and from select social media channels. Newser presents a fresh face to news, with a tic-tac-toe matrix of nine lead story boxes for top news in each major category complemented by automatically generated related topics and headlines from AP news. The Newser editorial staff whips up a digest of each lead story that is complemented by a link to the underlying source, online video clips where available and links to Newser content on related topics and people in the story. News from the front page and major topic areas can be fed via RSS into a user's news reader of choice. For now Google's AdSense network provides a revenue stream.
Newser provides a lot of best practices for online news aggregation and is an attractive and well-conceived package for consuming general news content. Its editorial selections, while somewhat eccentric at times, are thoughtful and make for a nice feed of interesting reading. But strangely Newser doesn't seem to have much mojo going for it. Is it just a matter of not having the West Coast buzz that other news aggregation sites have? Lacking the right chatter is perhaps part of the story, as prominent articles in The New York Times, Gawker and other major media channels have focused at least as much on the personality of Michael Wolff as they have on the site itself. As a media figure who has had his fair share of unkind thoughts about the online world perhaps leading with Wolff's East Coast view of media is not such a keen idea.
But Newser's momentum issues are also locked in somewhat into the product itself. While the story-scanning interface is an improvement over some search engine news interfaces the tic-tac-toe look makes it very hard for the eye to focus on what's important in the news. There are things to be said for simple column layouts, even if they don't look have that catchy, Blinkx-like "wall of content" look to them. The new Netscape's tab structure for editorially-selected stories is one other option as well that could help eliminate visual clutter. This is especially important for audiences becoming increasingly used to the scrolling headlines of news feed reader services as well as for more traditional news reading audiences. My guess is that a lot of people will take a look at the product, say "huh?" and move on to the next click. It's just too hard to focus on something at first glance.
Another key factor in Newser's mix that's troubling is also one of its strengths: its editorial selections. Unfortunately the editors of Newser are anonymous, and there is no opportunity to establish a conversation of any sort in the Newser framework with editors or with other registrants. The uncertainty of who does what in the editorial process seems to leave Newser at a disadvantage to sites like Netscape, whose anchors are both known and attract supplementary news and comments from readers. Readers like to have a sense of whose hands are on the editorial process. This is accentuated somewhat by Newser's near-exclusive focus on the typical mainstream news sources, with only an occasional smattering of online news from blogs and topical portals. If Newser's primary mission is to filter mainstream news sources then they should have an editorial voice that can be held to account as MSM sources are.
But the largest factor that may be holding back Newser is that while it is a well conceived news delivery machine there are already a preponderance of ways in which people can get news delivered to them effectively in agnostic aggregations. Google News provides highly readable and relevant selections from mainstream news sources and news reading software available through Google Reader, MyYahoo!, NewsGator and other services enable people to tune in to the news sources that they select and trust most. The New Aggregation is driving news content more quickly into personalized contexts than ever before, including sites such as Netscape and Newsvine where news can be discussed and ranked through audience-driven editorial processes. In such an already crowded field for news aggregation Newser may have a hard time getting some momentum behind just competent editing, aggregation and delivery of the usual suspects.
Newser's thoughtful capabilities are likely to serve as a good platform for others who are trying to get an improved approach to news aggregation, so my best guess at this point is that Newser will wind up being acquired fairly rapidly by an online service with established audience share that's trying to improve its news aggregation capabilities. Alternatively Newser might do well by opening up its platform with APIs that will enable it to provide its aggregation services to portals and other services on a licensed basis. But without reasons to stick around at Newser itself it's capabilities are not likely to draw advertisers who are dwelling more on how long people are engaged in a given site - a factor that will favor more interactive news sites. With further product improvements and more hooks into the social media crowd Newser could develop its own following in time, but doing something that others already do pretty well a little better may not develop the fanatical following that will propel Newser to high-profile success.
Mashable notes along with a number of other sources the testing of what's labeled a comments feature for Google News. In a sample Google News query (link will not age well) on a new drug for treating AIDS you can see a comment posted by a doctor specializing in AIDS treatment. Clicking on the comment yields a detailed entry by this person. Mashable indicates that people can submit verifiable emails to Google that relate to a person or entity mentioned in an article to comment on it, though based on this sample query it would appear that it is not just people directly associated with a company or product that can comment. Note also that if you click on a detailed entry you get a number of news stories that relate to the topic covered in this person's comment.
This is obviously not a full-blown comments feature but rather an attempt to draw in original content from experts who can provide insight into topics relating to specific news stories. With the editorial verification and filtering provided by Google it becomes in effect a "letters to the editor" feature for Google News that attaches these expert insights of relatively unlimited length to a wide variety of sources on a topic, giving Google News a unique editorial depth that no one publication will be able to provide.
Most news sites tread on providing user comments very lightly, especially in the aftermath of the failed LA Times' experiment with crowdsourced op-ed pieces and The New York Times' exorcising of user comment boards, but in doing so they threw out the baby with the bath water in many important ways. In the search for increasing user engagement Google has enabled its news users to use its news service as a master source of expert-driven editorial content, even as most news organizations work to reduce unique content from users relating to their own editorial operations. It precludes such experts from having to rely on maintaining their own weblogs or in engaging in the fray of a specific social media service in which their comments may be lost or drowned out all too easily. Kudos to the Google News team for recognizing the opportunity to put news content into perspective with its own unique content - and to pave the way for a new way of looking at how one collects expert insights on both leading and specialized news topics.
While the New York Post's report on a possible move by The New York Times to sunset its premium TimesSelect online service is still in the rumor mill, the plateauing and gentle decline of Web-only subscribers to the package underscores that general news content is not a likely candidate for online subscriptions. When TimesSelect came out a couple of years back, we noted:
The Times Select model provides temporary bolstering of online and print revenues squeezed from those who need their Op/Ed "fix" of established columnists, but in the long run it isolates these columnists from the media mix that's driving much of the value of online news content today.
This seems to be exactly what has happened. While some NYT columnists behind the TimesSelect firewall still have some influence outside of traditional media channels the deafening growth of social media has drowned out many of their voices - and has helped to amplify the strength of new online opinion-makers. In the meantime the NYTimes has slipped in its overall online rank and reach, emphasizing the need to be able to expose more page inventory to search engines and social media for ad monetization. Once conceived of as the cream of their online content TimesSelect has become more like a pricey version of Slate, an online general-interest news magazine which long ago abandoned premium pricing to capture online market share.
While specialty publications like The Wall Street Journal have enough focus and demographic cachet to benefit still from a premium pricing strategy the huge projected growth for online ad spending argues strongly for traditional news organizations with far broader reader demographics becoming far more efficient in exposing both current and archived general news content online as aggressively as possible. As pointed out by Read/Write Web, though, much of the growth in online ads will go to social media sites which do very well with highly targeted contextual ad buys from Google's AdSense and other contextual ad services.
In other words if the readership is going online and online advertising is becoming far less about broadly based selling and far more about selling in microcontexts then the future of news organizations like The New York Times is to get their content into those microcontexts as efficiently as possible. This may still leave room for some premium components, but it's likely to be a set of components built around social networking. Rather than viewing social networking as a dangerous marketing environment, many context-driven marketers are learning how to exploit social media fairly effectively. While major brand advertisers are still nervous about committing their brands to social media it's where the eyeballs are - and it's where news has to prove itself as being able to provide an effective context for marketing.
It's likely that there will be some residual TimesSelect premium package for some time, perhaps built up around a new type of social media experience that allows for more conversational interaction with the news and editorial staff, but the bulk of TimesSelect content is likely to be put out to general ad exposure by year's end. While this may not slow the decay in online readership at "premium" news publications such as the NY Times it will be likely to provide short-term ad revenues more quickly to help fill the gap left by rapidly declining print revenues. So think of the potential fading away of TimesSelect from the NYT perspective as more of a stopgap measure that acknowledges well-established changes in the online ad marketplace.
Unless newspapers can define truly elite communities that will benefit from premium subscriptions there's little reason to think that the failure of the TimesSelect experiment should spell out anything less than the official death of the online premium model for general interest publications. The long-standing relationships between editorial operations and audiences have changed fundamentally but traditional news organizations have moved at the most ponderous of paces away from being isolated teams of experts to acknowledge and adapt to the new conversational world of news-making. Here's hoping that The New York Times can now focus on engaging their audiences more effectively in the contexts that matter most to them.
Newstex CEO Larry Schwartz points out on his weblog the announcement by Sun Microystems that they will be putting Fair Disclosure reports of material corporate events required by the Securities and Exchange Commission on their investor relations Web site at the same time as they file these reports with the SEC. Traditionally corporations file these 8-K reports with the SEC at the same time that they file press releases through major media channels, but Sun has taken the step of releasing reports to media channels ten minutes after they have released them to the public via their own RSS feed-enabled Web site. The SEC has been mulling over allowing corporate Web sites enabled with standard feed protocols such as RSS and Atom to be distribution points for public dissemination of Reg FD materials, with help from Sun as a leading advocate for such distribution. This experiment by Sun seems to be a way for the SEC to gauge the effectiveness of open Web distribution as a methodology to serve the public.
While traditional press release distributors are barking hard at the notion of being bypassed as a primary source of Reg FD information it's likely that their arguments will begin to fall on deaf ears as the ease and effectiveness of direct and aggregated Web distribution of feed-enabled corporate announcements becomes evident. Since the RSS and Atom feed formats are "pull" protocols that are polled for new content by their recipients they're not strictly real-time "push" feeds, but weblogging packages enable push-out notifications of new posts to central services such as Verisign's weblogs.com that can notify services to pick up new content. So although Web feeds may not have the high-tech underpinnings of many established press feeds the ability of a corporation to post in one place and notify the world once that content is available in effect creates its own real-time publishing event. Services such as Newstex can then be used to pick up fees of these corporate announcements for those who would like them in an enhanced bulk form rather than having to deal with individual corporate feeds.
While traditional press release services are still a "go-to" source for many kinds of marketing-oriented corporate announcements they are starting to lose their luster as services that can respond to corporate needs as effectively as the Web itself for communications with the public. These services can turn around and aggregate corporate feeds for a fee charged to both sources and recipients but with the direct distribution available via the Web it's likely that corporations will be able to negotiate lower fees for such a service eventually. If the Sun experiment succeeds - and I believe that it will - the playing field for the distribution of critical business information will become more level yet again, enabling a wider array of value-add services to enhance corporate press release distribution well beyond the "king's ransom for a wire" services that have been long on profits but short on innovation for some time. Press release companies will still be able to bend ears in Washington for a while on this issue but expect that within two to three years most U.S. corporations will have their own Web feeds at minimum in parallel with established press channels for their Reg FD announcements.
Several weblogs are reporting on anonymous comments appearing on a prominent political weblog that appear to have been posted by a high-level member of the Bush administration based on their detailed knowledge of the inner workings of their national security operations. As in the famous reportage of Bob Woodward who used his "Deep Throat" source Mark Felt of the FBI to learn tangentially about many details of illegal Nixon White House operations this new anonymous source seems to like to play cat and mouse with his/her online questioners. An interesting exchange goes as follows:
mo2: Could it be that they did do something, but that something was illegal?
You are correct.
mo2: "And they feel it is better to be called do-nothings than criminals?"
Also, they like the idea people are focusing on the wrong surveillance, wrong time period: The confusion means they can blame Congress for "not asking the right questions."
While such exchanges could only be used as notes or deep background references at most rather than quotable sources it is interesting that in today's world of social media high-level governmental figures might feel more comfortable leaking their view of issues to the public over the Web rather than via established media channels. There are obvious opportunities for abuse in this methodology - facts can be tailored easily by such a source to whatever effect they may have in mind - but it may be indicative of a problem that journalists in general are facing. One of the key remaining advantages that journalists in established news organizations have is their relationships with key figures that they can mine for inside insights. If those key figures are just as disposed to tell their story to the public through exposed or anonymous channels the ability to cultivate exclusive news contacts is weakened considerably even at the highest levels of news gathering.
While many relationships in journalism with sources are bound to stay in place based on well-established personal trust the hard fact is that such trust is not strictly necessary today for a public figure to get their story out. A comment here, an RSS feed there, and before you know it each person can have an amazing amount of power to tell the truth as they see it to the world at large. Much is made at times of the power of citizen journalism, but perhaps one of the most important aspects of the trend is that webloggers seem to be developing quickly the personal relationships with their audiences that are calling forth from their online following the kind of trustworthy sources that used to require a lot of wining, dining and weekends to develop. If the words and the medium itself are the power that can draw out news sources the days of expense account journalism may become ever more lean. Call this an isolated example for now of where news sourcing is going, but as more people gain the ability to put their view of the world out to the world anonymously as well as personally the profession of journalism is going to emphasize online relationship building as much as face-to-face connections for a long time to come.
While Silicon Valley figure Mark Cuban mutters that the Internet is dead the real concern should be about how United States markets for Web publishing have begun to stagnate in recent years as overseas markets are gaining steam. While broadband Web access is available to about half of U.S. residents according to recent research, nations such as South Korea and Finland have been much more aggressive in pushing for universal access to broadband services., with China coming into its own rapidly. This gap in access is accentuated in mobile markets, where U.S.-based media producers have tied up with various telecommunications companies to license content through mobile carriers' private channels. In focusing on these short-term deals publishers lost momentum towards more widespread access to their content via mobile channels that could have added significantly to their audience base.
The Federal Communications Commission hopes to undo some of this backwardness by creating consumer-friendly rules for the radio frequencies being freed up for broadband wireless Internet access when analog U.S. television signals go off the air in 2009. USA today notes that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is proposing new rules for this newly auctioned spectrum to use any wireless device to download any mobile broadband application, without restrictions. In other words the new mobile broadband coverage would preclude private deals for the distribution of intellectual property based on networks and mobile devices. Private deals would still be allowed via existing mobile channels, but the generally open framework of the Web would finally be available via mobile devices in the U.S.
This is a very positive move for the publishing industry, one which will accelerate rapidly their ability to reach audiences electronically and to broaden their market reach rapidly. With revenues dwindling rapidly in print publishing for all but the most esoteric or base interests publishers are faced with a widening gap in their top and bottom lines as online markets fail to grow penetration into a full-blown marketplace. Universal mobile broadband access will eliminate the barriers of entry into mobile markets for publishers, enabling them to push more aggressively into many of the lifestyle niches being abandoned in print format in favor of mobile content and to reach less affluent markets that will be able to use mobile devices as their primary Web access point if in-home access is not cost-effective.
It's appropriate that these frequencies being readied for new uses were the original backbone of the broadcast television industry. Just as broadcast television created vast new opportunities for entertainment, information and marketing the new broadband wireless capabilities will enable the U.S. to create a new universal access medium for enabling communications with its citizens. And unlike the broadcast television era the advent of social media will enable people to reach out to one another as well as to merchants and services providers as never before. Broadband wireless access has already enabled this for people in select locations on select networks, but the establishment of broadband wireless Internet access as the common denominator for American communications promises a bright future for all.
Mercifully the carnival that has been the negotiations for News Corporation's acquisition of Dow Jones appears to have pulled out of town, with factions of the Bancroft family finally wrestled into line with the financial and managerial realities of the deal. One shudders to think as to whether any right-thinking corporation would have considered an acquisition of Dow Jones any time soon after these machinations, so from at least that perspective the shareholders of Dow Jones should consider themselves very lucky indeed. But now that the glow of the spotlight is beginning to die down from this fracas, what's really going to happen with Murdoch's new acquisition?
As we said more than two months ago the benefits of having a global media company as a parent that has strengths in markets where Dow Jones needs to become stronger are the key to the real value in this deal. Murdoch's desire to have a major U.S. gem like Dow Jones in his crown will be overshadowed ultimately by his use of Dow Jones as an international brand that will allow him to become a more dominant player in influencing world markets. This will be especially important in U.K. Asian and Australian markets, where the online expertise and editorial strengths of Dow Jones can be used to build an English language global business media brand more able to dominate regional brands and Pearson's struggling Financial Times. But it's also likely that the Dow Jones brand will be able to find footholds in other markets over times with Murdoch's leverage.
The missing piece from this empire is a strong presence in real-time trading markets. But given the cutthroat nature of those technology-driven markets that are not easily adapted to the managerial strengths of the Dow Jones organization this may be an omission worth skipping for the time being. As financial markets split into highly automated trading venues and opportunities driven by high-end market analysis tools the opportunity for Dow Jones to make better use of its strengths is not likely to solidify for some time in the wake of Thomson's pending deal for Reuters. A conjectural bid for Bloomberg is not really even worth considering at this point, though in two years' time it might be a reasonable play for NewsCorp if Murdoch's focus on succession takes his portfolio into more diversified channels.
While there is doubtless a fair amount of sadness in some hearts at Dow Jones as a proudly American brand passes to offshore ownership it's also an opportunity to reflect on the need for American business media in general to become more adept at managing international footprints. A weak dollar makes this a difficult time to buy in to those markets, so the wave of international acquisitions of U.S. targets this year at favorable exchange rates makes it that much harder for U.S. B2B media companies to make progress in overseas markets. But times will change - if B2B media companies take on a Murdoch-like view of the world that goes beyond the local golf courses and into more international circles of power. In the meantime congratulations to everyone involved in the Dow Jones deal - I hope that you get a few days off to forget about it all.
