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After a gap of lots I have resurrected my personal site. The lacuna was not just down to laziness. In the interim I have been:
- Running a newspaper: The Caledonian Mercury.
- Writing for said paper.
- Consulting on digital and social media.
- Training others how to use digital and social media.
- Speaking at conferences and on broadcast media about digital and social media.
- Teaching.
And other things, such as attending the Fèis Ìle – the Islay music and malt whisky festival, hence the picture.
Journalists! Now is the time to start your own news site.
Confusing their need for income with a desire among customers to pay for content, the papers are about to hand over their audiences following the lead of the Dirty Digger.
They made you and you friends redundant, they froze your pay, they made you write umpteen stories a day during 12-hour shifts in increasingly empty newsrooms. And all the while they creamed off ludicrous profits. Now they want the online reader to foot the bill.
It’s an enormous mistake but it’s great news for the future of journalism.
Murdoch’s wrong because everything about the net is moving towards sharing and the free movement of content. Hiding content behing barriers simply ignores how most people access it.
Murdoch, Lionel Barber and the other pro-chargers assume that because they need a lot of money that people will pay to access news and comment online. But that’s not how life works. Something is only worth what people will pay for it.
Charging for news has alwyas been bonkers. How can you put a barrier round “Lord Jones is dead”? It is instantly, immediately copiable without contravening any known or possible copyright laws.
In essence, the problem is that of Spotify vs iTunes. Spotify lets you listen to unlimited amounts of music from a vast playlist. It’s free but the catch is you don’t get to download or keep any of it. If you want to own it, you need to hop onto iTunes and buy a download.
The problem is that online news and comment is like most music on Spotify – you access it once and walk away. Unlike with music, though, there are very, very few news or comment items that you would pay to keep for ever.
However, news media companies do have access to a suite of products that people will pay to keep – and that are more suited than the web to the presentation of all that high-quality fabby content that the moguls have been boasting of: print.
You see, it’s not the online products that are broken: it’s the print ones. Just because large numbers of readers don’t like the one size fits all version doesn’t mean that that’s it for print. And it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly going to want to pay for material online.
So what’s the good news for journalism?
Well, when J Arthur Reader pops online to enquire after the health of Lord Jones, what will he do when he sees that all the “Lord Jones is dead” stories from the mainstream news organisations are behind payment barriers? Will he A) get out his chequebook or B) read the story for free somewhere else?
And what is to stop journalists from setting up their own nimble news enterprises to supply that free news? (Sure there’s the BBC but it can’t do attitude or opinion.) These specialist enterpises would have no legacy costs and which could make use of targeted print products to boost revenue. They could even co-operate with other non-competing enterprises to buy back-room services (ad sales, printing, IT).
When the big boys shoot themselves in the foot, it’s a great time to challenge them to a race.
I await with interest the launch of Herald Scotland.
I have not held back from criticising Johnston Press’s handling of my baby scotsman.com but I see signs that what the Herald are about to do will make JP’s decisions look like the greatest internet wisdom since Tim Berners-Lee saw a spider making a trap for flies. (Actually that might have been Robert the Bruce but you know what I mean.)
My pessimism is based on four warning signs:
1) A new URL: According to the excellent AllMediaScotland, the Herald plans to amalgamate its existing sites to create one seven-day operation. The key risk here is what happens to the current sites and, crucially, all the inbound links and search engine reputation they have built up over the years. If the old sites are junked then all those inbound links (vital for search engine reputation) will be lost. Also, their very valuable search engine page ranks will be lost. Now there are ways and means of sending traffic to new address. But even a 301 redirect can take months to take effect completely (thus losing valuable traffic and revenue). Also, given that the Herald and Sunday Herald’s web addresses have different structures a redirect might struggle.
But if they run the old and new sites in parallel then they face a massive search engine penalty for having duplicate content.
And if they launch the new URL without a ton of content, it will lose the huge benefit of the Heralds’ exisitng content.
In short, once you ‘ve got a URL stick with it. Sod rebranding.
2) Flash: The holding page is a search-engine-invisible Flash animation. An emphasis on “looking pretty” over “working properly” is no a good sign for whatever’s coming next.
3) Tag line: The marketing slogan for the new site appears to be: “Make it home”. That smacks of “make this your hompage”, which has been made hopelessly outdated by bookmarking, decent search engines and social networks.
4) The suggestion of charging. No, no, no, no. No matter what Rupert Murdoch says, the arguments for charging for content are all to do with what newspapers would like and not what readers will do. If you put your content behind a payment barrier, people will not pay you. They will go to a free site that offers content similar to yours. This is not an argument about quality – though the Herald’s has taken a big hit by cutting so many staff – but about how the customer behaves.
Now, all these indications might be off the mark but, for me, they point to worrying times ahead for Scotland’s online media.
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On the press Small is inevitable
guardian.co.uk, UK - 6 hours ago Not in journalism. The loss of journalists may damage quality, turning away readers in the long term, but there is no simple way of proving the point. … |
Click to continue reading “guardian.co.uk: On the press Small is inevitable”
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It’s 18 months since I left scotsman.com. I knew the new Johnston Press redesign was, to put it very, very, mildly, unworthy to lick the boots of the 2001-2007 model.
I also knew that traffic would tank. I warned Tim Bowlder, the JP chief executive, of this face to face saying the JP redesign would lose “millions of page views and hundreds of thousands of users”. My warning was ignored and a JP apparatchik later explained that I had not understood how good their plans were.
Well, we can finally see how good their plans were. Audited traffic figures for scotsman.com have finally escaped into the light of day. According to ABCe, the site I edited for seven years now gets about 2 million unique users a month.
Click to continue reading “Johnston Press halves scotsman.com’s traffic: well played”
More on the problems of a small newspaper getting its money from the print edtion. Summary: If the top guys don't all want to see the website work, it's not gonna happen. Trying to get a staff that is used to the print edition and doesn't really understand online to use the internet is difficult. – Joey Baker
 Jossip |
The Future of Journalism Is In the Hands of Idiots
Gawker, NY - 8 hours ago Now he’s in an immature fight with Ron Rosenbaum, who is much smarter than he is, if also old and blinkered, about THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM. … Jeff Jarvis Is Kind of Jerky About Journalism New York Magazine New Media Versus Print Journalism: Finally, a Deathmatch! Jossip Jeff Jarvis Responds: Yes, Journalists ARE Responsible For Death … Silicon Alley Insider all 4 news articles |
“It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting,” Rosenbaum asks, lamenting his “contempt for the beautiful losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession.”
Click to continue reading “From my RSS feed: Jeff Jarvis Is Kind of Jerky About Journalism”
I’m still shaking my head over the American Press Institute’s announcement of a closed-door, invitation-only emergency meeting of only CEO-level newspaper executives to, in the words of E&P “ponder ways to revive the newspaper business.”
This is the last thing the newspaper industry needs. First, these are the very same proprietors of the newspaper industry’s decline. [...]
Click to continue reading “From my RSS feed: The last thing newspapers need”
DON Brash and Nicky Hager may not see eye to eye on many issues - but they agree media coverage of the election campaign has been inadequate. They say high profile MPs Winston Peters, Peter Dunne, Bill English and Clayton Cosgrove have all had accusations levelled at them late in the campaign, with little or no analysis provided. Former National Party leader Dr Brash believes the media has a role in probing potential hypocrisy in a candidate’s statements, provided they give the candidate the
Click to continue reading “From my RSS Feed: Brash, Hager slam media lack of election analysis”
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