Last week was our crazy conference week; now we have our crazy earnings week. Check out our earnings channel for Q3 results from News Corp., Disney, Time Warner, and many more. We also have interviews with Disney CFO Tom Staggs and new Yahoo SVP Jeff Dossett by our own Staci D. Kramer.
Top headlines of the week from mocoNews.net and paidContentUK:
mocoNews:
– Microsoft Trying To Shiv the Potential Google-Verizon Wireless Search Deal
– Obama Used Mobile Advertising To Target Youth And Voters In Key Battleground States
– FCC Approves White Space Use For Wireless Broadband
– Nokia Slashes 600 Jobs; Targets Emerging Markets With Internet Services And New Handsets
– Sprint Decides To Keep Nextel After Potential Deal Unravels
paidContent:UK:
– Virgin Media Considers Content Divison Sell-Off To Become Comms Platform, Not Content Producer
– EMI Music To Reorg; Divided Into Three Global Units; EMI.com’s Limited Scope
– Babelgum COO Leaves In Latest High-Level Shakeup
– Election Section Perfection?: News Sites’ Presidential Strategies Prize Blogs, Tweets, Maps
– Industry Moves: Reed Elsevier Picks Smith For CEO; £3.6M Possible Salary, RBI Sale Top Of To-Do List
Briefing notes from our research director Lauren Rich Fine are still available: Positive Bias: The Problem With the Latest Online Ad Forecasts | Online Fantasy Sports: Growth Outlook Intact
Social Media Deals Report: This 199-page report, filled with charts and data, examines the categories, number and size of VC and M&A deal in social media from 2007 through 2008. Visit the ContentNext Reports page
Overseas web TV viewers could soon be watching Eastenders or Dr Who on the BBC’s VOD iPlayer, says the Beeb’s director of new media and technology, Erik Huggers. Speaking at Screen Digest‘s conference on the future of online distribution (via MediaGuardian), he said that the iPlayer had built up 248 million views since its Christmas Day launch last year and said the barriers to non-UK viewers could be lifted. “The internet is, by definition, a global medium, yet today we are artificially blocking international access to the iPlayer. That’s a problem, in my mind, and a big challenge for the industry,” he said.
It’s a nice idea, but the question remains: what access model would the Beeb opt for? The iPlayer is funded through the British license fee, so would foreign viewers be expected to pay for the service? Or perhaps with the help of commercial division BBC Worldwide, views could be monetized? BBCWW this week began selling BBC TV shows on the French iTunes store for download from €1.99 per episode. If this same content were given away for free, it could hinder BBCWW’s foreign business plan. Another option would be to emulate the Virgin Media-iPlayer carriage deal; Virgin subscribers have watched 49 million videos since June.
– Multi-platform downloads: Huggers says another persistent problem for the iPlayer, multi-platform functionality, will be solved by the end of the year with a download manager compatible with every OS. PC users make up 85 percent of the iPlayer audience, Mac users 10 percent and minority platforms Linux and the Nintendo Wii users make up one percent each.
Rafat adds: Yoohoooo….if it happens.
Mark Logic Digital Publishing Summit, Thursday November 6, Westin Times Square. Insight and perspective from Outsell, Gilbane, Simon & Schuster, BusinessWeek.com, more. Evening cocktail reception. Cost is complimentary. Register now!
Click to continue reading “From my RSS Feed: BBC May Open The iPlayer To Overseas Viewers”
Rhett Smith discusses the Obama campaign’s use of sites like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter: “Obama dominated the social media world…which is where the young voters live. It’s a world they inhabit, trust, socialize, converse, and confer with one another.” Related posts:Applying the (virtual) brakesRhett Smith shares how to tell if you’re a social…Contrary to popular belief …… young evangelicals may be less likely to vote Democrat…Do something about human traffickingFrom Southeast Asia, S
Click to continue reading “From my RSS Feed: Social media a boon for Obama”
Mad propz to Craig McGill over at Cluttered desk for spotting this brilliant vision of a zombie outbreak as seen through Twitter. Key quote: “Rigged the house with explosives. This may be my last tweet, people.”
And that’s a sentiment I share as I find myself overwhelmed by social media: this blog, podcasts, my work blog, Twitter, Facebook, Dopplerz, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr. And that’s without the daily grind of reading through my Yahoo Pipes and Google Reader. When’s a net professional supposed to get any work done?
Treehouse Media Project has unveiled a manifesto for embittered journos everywhere. (Thanks to Irish-Swedish internet guru Mark Comerford for flagging this up.) Let me give you a flavour with this superbly passionate line:
Laid off? Bought out? Pissed off? Or just overworked because you’re one of the “lucky” ones still working for the walking corpse that is the daily newspaper? Join us, the diaspora, as we work to recapture the joy and passion of our noble profession.
The project has a noble aim: equipping journalists with the entrepreneurial skills to survive in a Web 2.0 world. It’s right: we should go it alone. But it strikes a bum note for me by starting off its homepage with “F*** Google. F*** Craig’s List.”
Even if this is just a come-hither to embittered hacks, it’s a mistake. Google, Craig’s List and other changes to online advertising give us the tools to be free.
Message to journalists everywhere: The internet is not the enemy, your employer’s business model is.
The internet will last. Big newspaper companies that screw profits out of cowed staff and unsophisticated advertisers are doomed.
Good.
F*** ‘em. Not Google. Not Craig’s List. F*** big media. They deserve to die. They have betrayed our sacred calling. And everyone who’s really a journalist in their hearts, guts and gonads will water their graves in the only way we know how – on the way home from the pub.
I’m inspired by Treehouse’s manifesto. And its prompted me to begin my own. But it’s not a manifesto. It’s a business plan. And while its mired in the net up to its oxters it still has that sickly sweet smell of printer’s ink.
Oh yes, print.
Print’s not dead. It’s just going through a painful adolescence.
Like all true hacks, that ink’s in my blood. Before I moved to the web in 2000, I’d experienced the joy-cum-terror of the “hold the front page” call. Until I became a husband and father, the proudest moment of my life was my first byline (The Scotsman, 1988). I’ll never forget my first splash (The Sunday Mail, 1994) or my first interview (Joe Strummer for The List, 1988.) On my wall I have three copper printer’s plates of The Scotsman from 1972 and 1999 – as well as a framed picture of the first edition of that paper not to carry ads on the front page (1956). And I know that for the consumption of some information print is the best answer.
But it’s only part of the whole picture – and the whole business plan. As I have said many times before, I believe that the net has brought us to the verge of a golden age of journalism. In fact, there has never been a better time to be a journalist. It’s just that there’s never been a worse time to work for a newspaper.
So don’t work for a newspaper. Work for a news organisation which understands the 21st century and isn’t relying on a business model that started looking dated after the invention of radio.
As for Scotland, it has one world-class newsroom in it. One which would stick the heid on the Times, Guardian, BBC and tediously navel-gazing US papers. Sadly, this talented newsroom is spread across dying titles, desperate news agencies and PR-land.
But it doesn’t need to be that way.
Let me paint you a picture of a world of direct communication with the reader. A world that rewarded the best in journalism with the greatest readership. A world of untainted revenue, without advertising department twats in ties with overlarge knots. Imagine a life without 30% profit margins taken out of your pocket. Dream of a life free from megalomaniac proprietors and muppet editors who exist only to trim costs and wouldn’t recognise a story if it kicked them in the old Niagaras with steel-toed boots embroidered with the words: “I AM A STORY, YOU STUPID, PAPERCLIP-COUNTING CHOOB.”
I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you … but only because I’m going there on a motorbike.
Anyone coming for the ride?
MORE FOLLOWS
I believe this is the first anyway… It’s about my experiences being embedded in the civil service for a while.
Sour Alba podcast 1: Historic first and the civil service [ 2:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadOver at the site of my new business, we’ve been having fun with the seven deadly sins. Nothing sordid, mind, all very tasteful. We’ve been listing the various downfalls we’ve seen befall sites and matching them up against the classical vices. (Of course, being a business, we then offer ourselves as the solution.) It’s part of our radical strategy of making clients’ content interesting.

Posted on w00tonomy:
Stewart Kirkpatrick, our Content Marketing Director, has induced a bout of vomiting at w00tonomy with this self-serving communique:
“I have been elected to the New Media Industry Council of the National Union of Journalists (in a jobshare with Euan Williamson of Imagineering). Like nearly every large body, the NUJ has struggled with what the web means for today and tomorrow. I am delighted to have this opportunity to help guide its thinking.”
Stewart will also be speaking at the Sunday Herald’s Shaping Scotland’s Digital Future event – at 9am on 24 April at The Teacher Building, St Enoch Square, Glasgow – where he will be tarred and feathered by the rest of w00tonomy if he comes out with anything similar in tone to the above statement.
I just took the What Is Your Net Culture IQ quiz. Man, has my finger slipped off the web trivia pulse. Given that I used to pen the Lazy Guide To Net Culture I was disappointed with the result: 104. Higher than average but less than half of the top score.
Mind you my disappointment was as nothing compared to what I felt what the redesign of scotsman.com did to the display of my old columns in the link above…
For eight years I plied my trade as an online journalist. My mission, should I have no choice but to accept it, was to attract readers to pages where adverts were served. For every 1,000 page impression a piece of content received we could expect something like £10 (plus any sponsorship for the relevant section).
That’s a lot of work to get a lot of traffic for not much cash. That’s a key problem for commercial publishers online. Another key problem is the way that online has moved in the past two years or so.
Thanks to the phenomenon known as Web 2.0, the focus has shifted to individual items of content not to where they are displayed. Blogs, RSS feeds, widgets, wikis, social network and umpteen other phenomena take content out of its context and share, manipulate and distribute it in more ways than seem possible. If the content is interesting enough, that is.
This presents a bijout problemette for commercial content producers. While it’s great to have lots of people reading their stories or watching their videos it’s hard to generate revenue unless you can drag those users under an advertising banner or beside a sponsor’s logo. This mission is not impossible but it is damn hard.
But this is all great news if your aim is not to make money from attracting people but simply getting a message to them. And this is where the public sector wins big, especially when it comes to delivering public service messages.
Online is now about distribution and content. If you can embed your message in interesting content then the natural flow of the web will take it to the people for you.
Recent Comments
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Blogroll
- Alastair McKay
- Alistair Brown
- Black and white and read all over
- Clay Shirky
- Cluttered Desk: Craig McGill
- Complete Tosh
- Corante.com
- Corriganreid
- David Low
- Destruct
- Digital Deliverance
- Doctor Vee
- El Despiole
- Enemies of Reason
- Hugh Martin
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- Meskel Square – Andrew Heavens
- Mike Wade
- Mulitmedia Maniac: Tim Overdiek
- Recovering Journalist
- Reporters sans frontières
- Site Meter
- Stephen C Walker
- Stephen Rafferty, Sure PR
- Stewart’s shared items in Google Reader
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- The Journalism Iconoclast
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