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2004-11-15 Home Front: Tech

AP CEO's View of News & Internet - Web 2.0 (The New Media)

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Posted by .com 2004-11-15 04:54|| || Front Page|| [11135 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 lex - This is a topic you've commented on many times, so I was sure you'd enjoy this.

It looks like this is the competition - and I'm not sure he "gets it" regards what users want. Definitely gets it regards content, that it will be separated out by the users one way or another, and the fact that the package won't sell, anymore.

Where he seems to still miss the point is that he believes users need or want the AP's analysis component - I guess he views this as his org's value added function. Lol! Speaking for myself, that's dead wrong. I want facts - I'll synthesize the big picture myself, so thanks, but no thanks, heh.

Posted by .com 2004-11-15 5:12:00 AM|| 2004-11-15 5:12:00 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 Adding to .com's observations. He sort of gets that the MSM business model is breaking down and he raises the very pertinent question who will pay for collecting content (facts) when the internet is the main distribution channel. And BTW does anyone know if you can copyright a fact?

Re: Users wanting AP's analysis component. I recall from my dotcom days that this kind of thinking was v common, i.e. people over-estimated the value of certain components in a disagregated product. 'Personal service' in selling financial products is a good example.

Posted by phil_b 2004-11-15 5:36:11 AM|| 2004-11-15 5:36:11 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 And BTW does anyone know if you can copyright a fact?

Facts aren't copyrightable but particular selections and arrangements of facts are. Thus a wire service story will be copyrightable even if it contains 100% factual information because the wire service reporters selected a particular group of facts to include and arranged / expressed them in a particular way.

Posted by AzCat 2004-11-15 7:59:28 AM|| 2004-11-15 7:59:28 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 ROTFL!!

The arrogance of these bastards shines through. haahhahaaa!! They think they can control this??? Get a grip? A sufer may ride the wave, but he doesn't control the sea.

The implications for content providers are enormous. You cannot control the "containers" anymore. You have to let the content flow where the users want it to go,

Being able to control the news through print was of the 20th Century. These guys think they can hang on. heh heh...a nice dream about the good ol' days.

Posted by 2b 2004-11-15 9:46:47 AM|| 2004-11-15 9:46:47 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 ...Anybody remember the line from Tomorrow Never Dies when 007 runs the meglomaniac newpaper publisher thru with a drill?

"...You didn't give the people what they want!!

Mike

Posted by Mike Kozlowski 2004-11-15 9:57:55 AM|| 2004-11-15 9:57:55 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 Long post - sorry in advance, but as .com points out, this is near and dear to my heart (and with any luck, also to my pocketbook one day).

Thus a wire service story will be copyrightable even if it contains 100% factual information because the wire service reporters selected a particular group of facts to include and arranged / expressed them in a particular way

Thanks, AZCat, phil_b, .com. This helps clarify an issue that I'm grappling with. The question that our media betters don't want asked is, Where in a news story is the source of greatest value? That is, what in their product is commodity and what is real competitive differentiation? What will their consumers actually pay for?

Is it in the scooping of the facts, or the selection of those facts? Or is it the presentation and ordering of those facts? Or is the initial story of little consequence, a loss leader, so to speak, that quickly becomes commoditized, to be displaced by analytical follow-on articles that create real value for which consumers will pay hard cash?

My guess is that phil_b is correct: the MSM analysis is of little value to consumers. Or to put it better, of little added value above and beyond what intelligent, trusted bloggers provide. MSM hacks like Andrew Nagourney are no more competent as deep, insightful political analysts than your average 24 year-old Merrill traineee is competent at stock picking. In other words, the MSM conceit that "they really trust and value our analysis, and this sets us apart" can work only in the same environment that fixed-commission brokerage worked: consumer ignorance and government restrictions on supply and competition.

All gone now. Every man now owns a printing press. And as the blogosphere makes obvious each day, there are at least a dozen voices readily available on the web who can provide better, more insightful, often better-written analysis than these pseudo-professionals who call themselves journalists.

Which is why the only consumers who would still pay for MSM analysis are 1) the diminishing ranks of ignorant, gullible, and cash-rich newshounds and 2) partisans who desire not so much analysis as camaraderie, encouragement, a sense of community and shared struggle. Group #1 is not sustainable, except perhaps for the geriatric crowd that watches network TV news. But group #2 may contain gold for publications like the NYTimes that are willing to dispense with the "paper of record" pretense and recast themselves as lifestyle guides in which opinion and ideological posing is just another Fashion of the Times that urban childless blue Americans need to drape theselves in: Screw Anthony Lewis, give 'em the east coast's own valley girl, Mo Dowd. Who cares about Russia or China or Japan? Let's add more stories about the porn industry, gay Broadway, the fashion industry.

Posted by lex 2004-11-15 1:16:49 PM|| 2004-11-15 1:16:49 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 As to the blogosphere, we need to get better at scooping stories. That is, we need to start using more effectively that old media device known as the telephone, and the new media technique of online swarming, to research our own stories and cultivate our own sources. This is not so crazy as it sounds, partly because the Bush admin's tightness and secrecy has sharply restricted the monopoly on sources that the MSM used to enjoy.

And if someone smarter than I can figure out how to use RSS feed scripts to cull and then sift and sort info from the blogs and comment sections, we might be able to make scoops like Charles Johnson's MS Word forgery scoop a regular feature of blogging. In other words, actually do real reporting, with real-time story editing and evolution via hundreds of blogger inputs.

Posted by lex 2004-11-15 1:22:22 PM|| 2004-11-15 1:22:22 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 Thanks AzCat! Facts aren't copyrightable but particular selections and arrangements of facts are. This means you could disaggregate the facts from a news report and legally create your own product by resequencing or desequencing (the facts). Interesting!

Otherwise, IMVHO what adds value to the bare facts is (relevant) context. An example is reporting on climate change. It drives me crazy that effectively all reporting in the MSM on the subject is predicated on an implied steady state (theory of) climate, whereas we know that climate has always changed and often dramatically.

Posted by phil_b 2004-11-15 1:41:21 PM|| 2004-11-15 1:41:21 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 Facts aren't copyrightable but particular selections and arrangements of facts are. This means you could disaggregate the facts from a news report and legally create your own product by resequencing or desequencing (the facts). Interesting!

Now you're cooking. Wonder if there's a software tool that could do this automatically to every AP and other wire service story? ie parse the stories to get their basic elements in headline/ticker format... No "analysis", no BS, just grab the news and then fling it out to a thousand bloggers for them to parse, add new info from credible sources, or challenge with info from credible sources, and develop without MSM intervention?

Bloggers as a petri dish. Or maybe a source of superior counter-memes that replicate and evolve more rapidly than the MSM can develop their original memes.

Posted by lex 2004-11-15 1:50:39 PM|| 2004-11-15 1:50:39 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 Lex, I'm a software guy and I think I know something about semantics. IMO automatically parsing news reports to get the facts is not possible. OTOH doing it manually wouldn't be too onerous - the kind of thing say a dozen people working round the clock could do easily.

Its an interesting idea and one many bloggers would love, but where's your business model? I.e. who is going to pay for the service?

Posted by phil_b 2004-11-15 2:30:18 PM|| 2004-11-15 2:30:18 PM|| Front Page Top

#11 It's always been that way - you take research from others - rewrite it and make it your own.

I don't know where the money will be in the future - but it won't be in analysis. Opinions are like belly buttons - everyone has one and no two are the same.

But what's difficult and most valuable are those phone calls. For example - I'd really like to know if all Presbyterian churches ...or Episcopalian churches have disinvested in Israel, or is it done by individual congregations? It is only those churches belonging to the National Council of Churches? What exactly is the relationship of the National Council of Churches to the individual churches?

I could pick up the phone and call around and probably have an answer in 15 minutes. But...I won't. I'll just keep wondering ..until one day I stumble on somebody who knows.

My point is that it is the person who makes the calls...that one who gets the reliable info from the appropriate sources, who is a "reporter". That's the hard work. Opinion writing - once the facts have been collected by someone else- is the easy part.

Posted by 2b 2004-11-15 2:41:53 PM|| 2004-11-15 2:41:53 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 gosh...I just answered my question above with one quick google and one quick phone call. So, I'm going to retratct my statement in my comment above. Making the calls and getting the facts is easy.

Now I'm wondering where WILL the money come from in publishing and news content? Afterall - I just realized that I could post an interesting article (I'll spare you all) with quotes and supporting docs. Time involved would be minimal and could be easily conducted in my spare time. Since I'm interested ...I could really get into it and publish a detailed summary.

How can the media compete with that? Interested people who get facts and publish FOR FREE...FOR FUN?

I now think that the commodity will be a in a BRAND that produces reliable facts, quotes and data. It will be the something like the NYT once was - an authoritative source to quote from. That will be the commodity - it's worth remains to be determined.

Posted by 2b 2004-11-15 3:25:56 PM|| 2004-11-15 3:25:56 PM|| Front Page Top

#13 If people do journalism for fun, then its like science in the 18th/19th century. Something that motivated amateurs did. Maybe 2b is onto something - an amateur equivalent of Reuters/AP. Interesting times!

Posted by phil_b 2004-11-15 3:37:09 PM|| 2004-11-15 3:37:09 PM|| Front Page Top

#14 I'd rather have a big ass telescope.

Posted by Hershel 2004-11-15 4:39:07 PM|| 2004-11-15 4:39:07 PM|| Front Page Top

#15 This means you could disaggregate the facts from a news report and legally create your own product by resequencing or desequencing (the facts).

In a logical world yes but it's not that simple.

In 1918 the Supreme Court decided UPI v. AP in which the court recognized the AP's right in the news they'd gathered even though neither the existing copyright law nor (IIRC) the existing unfair competition law quite covered the situation. If I recall the facts correctly UPI was buying early edition newspapers containing AP stories on the east coast, making minimal changes and telegraphing the stories to their own clients on the west coast who were subsequently running these "new" UPI stories in their morning editions. Remember that news in those days was still largely fact-based so we're really talking about UPI's merely cherry-picking and rewriting the facts AP had gathered.

What the Court recognized in UPI v. AP was the inherent value of the AP's news gathering service and the AP's right to protect the value they created via that activity. Or to put it another way they recognized and protected the value of fresh news and the AP's right to profit on the same while preventing free riders from doing so.

Worth noting also that the copyright statute has matured greatly since that time and includes other provisions that you could easily run afoul of. Additionally you'd have to worry about the body of unfair competition law which is far more mature than it was at the time AP v. UPI was decided.

But you definitely can't copyright a fact.

Posted by AzCat 2004-11-15 4:53:14 PM|| 2004-11-15 4:53:14 PM|| Front Page Top

#16 phil_b - Its an interesting idea and one many bloggers would love, but where's your business model? I.e. who is going to pay for the service?

News producers and editors mainly but also political campaigns, activist groups and other fund-raisers; corporations; research insitutions. Advertising revenue would be important, as would subscription revenues, but one interesting feature I toy with is the notion of an online news story exchange, ie a kind of eBay for news and other non-copyrighted content.

Editors, publishers etc would bid for exclusive rights to stories that develop in front of their eyes on the auction site. However the full content of each story would not be revealed, rather a teaser headline and background about the source. As stories evolve toward publication-ready articles, the bid price would increase.

Offerors of news stories could accumulate reputational ratings over time similar to those for eBay sellers. Offerors could be individuals, blogs, or groups, or even on the fly partnerships formed out of the "open-source"-type contributors to the thread.

Imagine a hybrid of Rantburg and Drudge but with a store of content that's 100x larger, genuinely global and dynamically amended, updated, developed further, taken along tangents to reveal new memes and generate new scoops. If the site can scale adequately, it would displace the NYTimes and the other online versions of the print MSM sources.

The ultimate prize, however, is translating this and blogs into audio on demand, downloadable to any device. A platform capable of delivering, 24x7, thousands of Limbaughs, Sterns, Hannitys = a billion $ business.

Posted by lex 2004-11-15 5:22:19 PM|| 2004-11-15 5:22:19 PM|| Front Page Top

#17 interesting..

What I do see developing clearly is the change from organizational credibility to individual credibility and marketability. For example - I don't care who prints articles by VDH, Ralph Peteres, Glenn Reynolds, Wretchard, etc. etc., I still want to read them.

For the individuals, this will translate into book sales - but I doubt that is enough to sustain them. But their popularity will no doubt translate into a valuable commodity....like cartoons.

The NYT has no credibility - nor does Rather or any of the others who fell on their swords during this last election. But (some of) their individual writers do have credibility.

I think we will go from quoting the NYT to quoting individuals who have a reputation for accuracy ...and that's the direction this is headed. It will matter less where they say it than who says it. Individuals will rise and fall on their own reliability. Where the money comes from, remains to be seen.

Posted by 2b 2004-11-15 5:39:51 PM|| 2004-11-15 5:39:51 PM|| Front Page Top

#18 lex / 2b - Killer points in those last posts - and I think you're homing in on the model that will work.

I think that the economics of the reliable individual, to combine your closing ideas, is spot-on - and TV will be here for the forseeable future. TIVO may well be your biggest competitor, but...

Transcripts, audio, A/V of those trustworthy (or so individual and personality-laden that they have an audience no matter their accuracy; e.g. Stern the Dick) individuals will sell on the net. The org that can corral this content by the believable sources and serve it up either PPV or subscription looks viable in the near-term.

Long-term, the owners of the "atoms" of news content (to give the AP jerk his due) will be King and determine where the market goes.

Posted by .com 2004-11-15 5:49:14 PM|| 2004-11-15 5:49:14 PM|| Front Page Top

#19 the change from organizational credibility to individual credibility and marketability

Bingo. If I read something on Fallujah at the NYT, I don't trust it. If I read it on Winds of Change or Command Post, I'll give it credence.

This is a huge development with profound implications. First, the notion of a legacy media "paper of record" or Uncle Walter Cronkite national newscast that most citizens find trustworthy is pretty much dead. I'm the core reader that the NYT seeks, and I find theiir stuff less trustworthy than obscure amateur websites created a couple years ago.

Second, you're right that credibility will be fragmented and split among dozens of individuals whose reputation will wax and wane. But another huge problem is availability. The sum of individuals model doesn't really scale unless you aggregate hundreds of trustworthy bloggers. Glenn Reynolds ain't the phone company. When he goes dark his site's useless, and the MSM have a huge edge for the simple reason that they never go dark. Also, Glenn's inherently parochial. He doesn't cover Russia or China or India or the technology business or demographic change or transatlantic mergers and acquisitions etc.

So the goal has to be to a) transform reputational currency into monetary currency in a dynamic way-- see my auction idea-- and b) achieve 24x7 uptime and reliability, with truly global coverage. Good news, maybe, is that these are essentially technical problems that the MSM types don't care to try to solve.

So he who builds the platform likely builds the new killer newsinfo brand. As you point out, reporting on the news is essentially a simple job that any intelligent, educated person with decent judgment, some writing ability, a browser and a phone can manage.

Posted by lex 2004-11-15 5:57:48 PM|| 2004-11-15 5:57:48 PM|| Front Page Top

#20 lex - Is it mere semantics on my part to prefer a "news exchange" (ala stock exchange) description versus the "news auction"? Perhaps so.

An aspect not explored thusfar is that the product degrades - "news" spoils quickly.

Overselling is another... "Early adopters" will pay more for the timeliness - once it's relatively common knowledge, then the news purveyors will try to add that analysis component to add value to "old" news.

Posted by .com 2004-11-15 6:07:35 PM|| 2004-11-15 6:07:35 PM|| Front Page Top

#21 the product degrades - "news" spoils quickly.

Hence my preference for the auction concept. Selling news stories is like selling hotel rooms or airplane seats. The time element adds greatly to the price bid. Imagine how much Charles J's Rathergate scoop would have fetched from producers at ABC or NBC! $10k easily.

Posted by lex 2004-11-15 6:15:48 PM|| 2004-11-15 6:15:48 PM|| Front Page Top

#22 Imagine a hybrid of Rantburg and Drudge but with a store of content that's 100x larger, genuinely global and dynamically amended, updated, developed further, taken along tangents to reveal new memes and generate new scoops.

In other words: Imagine the ... Associated Press, but with a different political slant. I don't think you could scale the blog model all the way up to compete with MSM without itself becoming MSM. Blogs are interesting because they're numerous, highly focused, of deep personal interest to their authors, and because they exist in a highly communicative medium. This allows the blogosphere to assemble ad hoc groups of experts spontaneously, use them as needed, and then return them to the pool of available resources.

You can sort of scale that up but when you make the effort a business rather than a passion your experts will morph into consultants (no one is going to do unpaid expert analysis for your money-making venture) and you'll wind up with another AP that has a slightly different slant.

The value in an organization like the AP is going to remain in the timely gathering and dissemination of large volumes of factual informtion. They won't however be able to compete with the blogosphere for commentary and expert analysis. What the AP sorely needs is a regression: fire all opinion writers, axe anyone who spins rather than reports the facts, and just generally lean down the organization's role to what it was almost a century ago.

Posted by AzCat 2004-11-15 6:19:59 PM|| 2004-11-15 6:19:59 PM|| Front Page Top

#23 And that brings up another issue, lol! PowerLine was first because of their reader (can't recall his name at the moment)... Charles did the Word demo (and more), Bill at INDC Journal extended the game by being first with a first-hand knowledge source, etc.

Who gets the $10K?

I see some stories as "developing" news and some as self-contained "scoop" news... Imagine the institutional whistle-blower game once there is an open bidding market...

Posted by .com 2004-11-15 6:21:21 PM|| 2004-11-15 6:21:21 PM|| Front Page Top

#24 he who builds the platform likely builds the new killer newsinfo brand

I think you are right. And I'd like to believe that the news exchange/auction will be the way it will work...for personal reasons...but I'm not sure.

I think the first thing to go to the darkside will be the search engines. But ....I wouldn't go investing my money in them just yet. It's just too easy for a univeristy or other public group (anywhere in the world) to provide them for free- a la public libraries. Plus, as computers get faster and better - super-dooper search capabilities could become cheap and easy technology - so I'm not sure if the idea of restricting searches to direct us to what "they" want us to see (like the news media does today) will work for very long.

Posted by 2b 2004-11-15 6:24:09 PM|| 2004-11-15 6:24:09 PM|| Front Page Top

#25 Oops - overlapped with Azcat. My comment directed at #21.

Azcat takes the big picture to the next level... and it rings ture.

So: "atoms" of information. AP, et al, become mere collectors (as they once did and Azcat indentifies) and peddlers of news-wire content...

Posted by .com 2004-11-15 6:24:54 PM|| 2004-11-15 6:24:54 PM|| Front Page Top

#26 I agree with above - but I still think it is too soon to see where this is going. We are putting our 20th century ideas of "news" and trying to project it forward to what remains yet unknown in terms of technology, platforms and societal changes.

The difference will be the sheer volume of people willing to report the news and the sheer volume of people who will be willing to do it FOR FREE and FOR FUN. It's supply and demand - and the supply just increased exponentially!

Posted by 2b 2004-11-15 6:29:58 PM|| 2004-11-15 6:29:58 PM|| Front Page Top

#27 aack..where did everyone go. I've been discussing with a friend - and I think this will boil down to two things - brand or name recognition and exposure. As exposure increases the ability to attach advertising to specific groups will result in money. Same ol' same ol' on a different format.

As such..I think your auction/exchange will be a very logical method of it happening.

Posted by 2b 2004-11-15 6:58:44 PM|| 2004-11-15 6:58:44 PM|| Front Page Top

#28 AZCat - In other words: Imagine the ... Associated Press, but with a different political slant. I don't think you could scale the blog model all the way up to compete with MSM without itself becoming MSM

Hmm, good points, but there's an inherent MSM tendency toward convergence around a central meme. No matter what the story, journalists look at what other journos write and, consciously or no, shape their own telling of the story into conformity with the Emergent Meme du Jour. Zarqawi Got Away. Election Was About "Values." etc

What I hope to do is to create multiple memes that compete with each other, dynamically, and that are placed side by side for all to see and comment upon and contribute to. A dialectic rather than an echo chamber. And the thread of this dialectic would be preserved on the site for all to see. In other words, rip away the pretense of neatly packaged "objective" self-contained MSM stories and show the authors and their biases, and next to them, their critics' rebuttals, counter-evidence, debunking/fisking etc.

So the presentation of news would also change. Inst of the typical AP format-- headline, lede, facts reinforced with quotes regurgitated down to wherever point the editor deemed in necessary to chop-- you'd have a structure more similar to a legal brief or a debating proposition, as in:

MEME: Fallujah is (success)(not a success).
ARGUMENT: Fallujah is a success because it destroyed a key logistical center of the fascist resistance and enables a pincer movement that will disrupt the ratline from Syria.
EVIDENCE: A, B, C
LOGIC: asdfasdfsdf
AUTHOR: Tom Wretchard (link)

COUNTER-MEME #1: Fallujah was a failure because Z-man got away, blah blah blah...
AUTHOR: Poindexter Filkins, NYT...

COUNTER-MEME #2: Fallujah = Stalingrad, humanitarian disaster...
AUTHOR: BBC, Reuters, etc

Posted by lex 2004-11-15 7:15:30 PM|| 2004-11-15 7:15:30 PM|| Front Page Top

#29 2b, need to run but appreciate very much your insights and wd like to continue conversation. Ditto for .com and AZCat.

pls email me at tom_p_mclaughlin@yahoo.com

Posted by lex 2004-11-15 7:16:52 PM|| 2004-11-15 7:16:52 PM|| Front Page Top

#30 It's Hitler in the bunker time for Old Media, and AP's Tom Curley is every bit as delusional. Just as Adolf moved his phantom divisions to meet the onrushing Soviet hordes, the AP chair sees a place for his fossil service in the New Media. He asks us to "Imagine Drudge without somebody to link to, or Wonkette without somebody to poke fun at," as though these two would be starved for content without AP and similar legacy services.

In fact, local media will continue to exist for a number of reasons, information posted by these will continue to be available worldwide, and it will be found and linked when appropriate every bit as easily as an AP story. Paid specialist publications; in business, security affairs, and science, for example; will continue to publish and these, too, will be linked instantly from the New Media. Large newspapers and other publications will continue to send their own correspondents overseas, or the web will make it easier to recruit suitable locals or freelancers wherever needed. AP is often not an originator of content so much as a packager and distributor. New Media bypasses this process, making the actual originator accessible instantly. In doing so, it makes the AP's stringers and reporters redundant, along with their dubious analysis and biased interpretation.

When I started reading newspapers, about 1955, I did not typically have access to anything from south of Manchester, let alone to the Times of India or the Washington Post. Today, both of these are literally a click away. Similarly, acknowledged experts in military affairs, like John Pike, are right at my fingertips. Before the net, this took a trip to the library, where the information was necessarily weeks out of date. For immediate news of military events, we had to depend on politically biased and militarily illiterate hacks from the old Media. The same is true in every area of specialized knowledge relevant to global newsgathering.

Curley's assertion of qualified and expert analysis is simply untrue. Typical journalists; driven isolated elitists and strivers that they are; often know less about many subjects than the average person on the street. How many APers can change the oil in their car or kill and dress a rabbit? I am a professor of science, not a mechanic or a woodsman, but I can do those things.

Curley's biggest delusion is in citing analysis as a major selling point. In one way he is right. "Analysis", aka spin or embedded editorializing, is the main point of sale for AP clients, the portion of the content that is most helpful to advertising objectives.

Lex cited the tendency of news organizations to converge around a central meme. The driving force behind this, I believe, is the recognized viability of certain memes in supporting advertising objectives: the heroic revolutionary as James Dean figure, for example.
What Curley and other hubris-bound Old Media proponents fail to recognize is that this subjective and often outrageously biased "analytical" content is one of the chief causes of the resentment that fuels the rise of New Media. It is the hated "spin" and the repository of world-destroying bias.

While it will sell to the commercial clients, it is increasingly a liability to the actual consumers. This discontinuity in product marketing, appealing to the effective "retailers" (the media clients) while alienating the actual audience and causing it to seek alternatives, will be the real downfall of Old Media, including the AP. The extinction will be total, inmho. In twenty years, there will be NO national or global general news organizations. There will be localized media and specialist publications, and the internet to tie them together.

The net will serve as a conduit between local media, taking over the original role of services like AP and Reuters. For example, you are news director at KROK TV in Humbug, Nb. You see on the net that WART TV in Little Hope, MA has a story about a two headed frog, and you would like to have it. You can exchange both the content and the necessary compensation directly on the web; possibly through a web-based clearing house operation, possibly with just the functions that are available to anyone. The clearing house could be a low-cost service or conceivably even free, since it would not have its own hordes of stringers and photogs to support.

Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2004-11-15 8:44:13 PM|| 2004-11-15 8:44:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#31 Well said, AC. The web will enable specialists and local experts will gain power. Centralized MSM blowhards will lose power.

What remains to be built is the web-based aggregating engine that will connect sources of real expertise and insight with consumers who value such expertise and will pay accordingly for it. It needs to be extremely simple to use, vast in scope and reach, remunerative for the specialist contributors, and capable of personalization for consumers.

It will replace blog-surfing and Googling alike, and will eventually be independent of the laptop as well, when it becomes capable of serving as a platform for audio delivered on demand to any number of devices.

Posted by lex 2004-11-15 9:10:34 PM|| 2004-11-15 9:10:34 PM|| Front Page Top

#32 fascinating! I've been thinking on this (can't e-mail from this site - tom- I'd get fired)

Curley's biggest delusion is in citing analysis as a major selling

has a story about a two headed frog, and you would like to have it. You can exchange both the content and the necessary compensation directly on the web; possibly through a web-based clearing house operation, possibly with just the functions that are available to anyone. The clearing house could be a low-cost service or conceivably even free, since it would not have its own hordes of stringers and photogs to support.

We all seem to go back to this idea - so it must have merit.

We all seem to recognize that it will be reliable individuals that will be the commodity.......ie: we want it.

The format still remains unclear, but basically...not everyone is a VDH or Pavarotti. As in the past, the cream will rise and we will demand the cream. The cream will command a following which advertisers can attach themselves to.

To get to the top, the Pavarotti's will intitally be glad to give it away for free to get exposure. As they gain a following and it becomes "work" rather than pleasure - they will need some compensation.

Rantburg is an excellent source of info - I'd pay to access it (I send a contribution every so often) and I'd still come here if Fred made me suffer through an ad for guns in order to log on. As Fred gains more exposure - he can get better advertisements - today guns - tomorrow Boeing.

In the end...as in all things ...things change but remain the same. Ultimately, it will be about the guy who gets the most hits . He will get the most advertising dollars. But in order to get the most hits, he's got to give the best stuff. In order to get the best stuff - he's going to have to put out a little more than the next guy. He'll invest to get the rewards.

News is a perishable commodity. That it will eventually end up traded as such, makes sense.

But I ramble...anyone still out there? A glass of wine awaits!

Posted by 2b 2004-11-15 9:35:27 PM|| 2004-11-15 9:35:27 PM|| Front Page Top

#33 Oops, I was out at Ruth's Chris - my Bush Reelection Celebration dinner - I collected my winnings, heh.

Great analysis, AC... If I understand you, I'm visualizing a model that has been debated in O&G Engineering circles of R&D for a couple of years... In fact, it's similar to what has happened to the industry-specific publishing business. But, of course, I may have you all wrong. Anyway is this what you see?

A realignment of news-gathering capabilities into vertical expertise / accessibility (since they are realistically connected anyway) sources / channels which could feed into horizontal distribution centers - some generic and some specialized?

Posted by .com 2004-11-15 9:40:54 PM|| 2004-11-15 9:40:54 PM|| Front Page Top

#34 .com, yes, that's exactly it. The centralized model that we have lived with for 150 years is obsolete, and a multi-dimensional model will take its place.

Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2004-11-15 10:01:25 PM|| 2004-11-15 10:01:25 PM|| Front Page Top

#35 Waay cool - I "joined" an entity that wanted to institute this at Aramco, our engineering support dept was a perfect example of where it could pay dividends by going to a commercial model of Customer-Centric Support... but, alas, it would've reduced the power of certain Saudis, so the idea was DOA. Lol! Of course it was DOA, lol! Saudis. Give up power? LOLOLOLOL!

Okay, so if I'm getting it:
The verticals are the worker bees in a narrow slice of life, the guys with contacts and expertise (to know shit from shinola, understand the nomenclature of the vertical), who gather and glean content from their slice of the world. These guys can be anyone in the right place at the right time with their ears and eyes open - I almost picture them as "fences" who specialize. They either originate the content through observation / analysis / etc. or are first level customers from individuals with unique position-to-know access.

The horizontals may specialize, too, but a few will certainly try to aggregate into something akin to the wire-service model. They are the second level customer and sell to us or to a third level subscription channel.

I forsee and anticipate real dangers in increased spying and whistleblowing for personal profit. Consider what a regular guy in Govt Job X might see crossing his desk everyday. Formalizing the content purchase business is a leaker's dream - could be highly profitable and much less dangerous, perhaps, than leaving chalk marks on mailboxes and doing dead-drop games, ala Moscow Rules.

The Watchers will have to increase as the money sources move closer to the product purveyor, I'm afraid.

Posted by .com 2004-11-15 10:26:30 PM|| 2004-11-15 10:26:30 PM|| Front Page Top

#36 Dang, wish I hadn't got onto this thing so late. But here are a couple of thoughts:

What do we want from news? For me, in order (1) Facts, (2) Context, (3) Background/Analysis. In the ancient days of multiple wire services and multiple newspaper clients in each market, the wires were primarily sources of (1) and occasional (2), with (3) being reserved for syndicated columnists and Sunday-supplement specials. (One reason: Different papers had different viewpoints and wanted to add their own spin!) I agree with AzCat that the future of orgs. like AP is rediscovering their past, and moving back to the older model of fact collection.

Web-savvy news consumers can usually find their own (2) by searching the web for earlier reports and background on sources (although imagine an AP report with imbedded links, much as Rantburg flags people and organizations but more extensive). Analysis (3) is already available in abundance via weblogs and probably is the weakest in ever being the way to make money, although if we ever get a decent micropayments system bloggers with even relatively small followings should be able to make a few bucks.

Sudden thought: Micropayments solves the problem of aggregating specialized demand. If George is an enthusiast for (say) polka performances, internet+micropayments could aggregate enough people who share his interest to let George make money off his hobby by keeping them informed. Maybe not a full-time income, but a nice one-or-two-evenings-a-week supplement. (Say 5,000 people at 1Â¢/view, well that's $50. George has just paid for the beer at his next Oktoberfest, doing something he'd be doing anyway!)

And as mentioned above the other end of the process is credibility/trustworthiness: I don't have time to read everything; I need a "trusted agent" who reads all the news and gives me a heads-up when something I want/need to know happens. Part of this could probably be automated, maybe by using some Bayesian method that's the mirror of spam-filtering, where I rate stories that I get on an interest scale. But I still need sites like Instapundit and Rantburg to cover the "unknown unknowns;" the things of interest I didn't already know about. That's valuable, and I would be willing to pay for it.

Anyway, My $.02.

Posted by Old Grouch 2004-11-15 10:52:38 PM|| 2004-11-15 10:52:38 PM|| Front Page Top

#37 In other words, rip away the pretense of neatly packaged "objective" self-contained MSM stories and show the authors and their biases, and next to them, their critics' rebuttals, counter-evidence, debunking/fisking etc. - Now you are on to something. Not only is the MSM business model broken, but the news story model is inadequate/inferior when there are a billion information sources out there. In a sense RB, the Command Post, etc. are version 1.0 of a new model of news dissemination. What will version 2.0 look like? Definitely developing threads that you go back into and link to analysis, context, history, people, what opinion makers/bloggers think, etc.

I think you have a ways to go on a business model. You need something that works today. I have some experience of developing business models for the net and am interested in kicking this around some more you can email me at pxbradley@excite.com

BTW, I though micro-payments would be huge and they never went anywhere.

Posted by phil_b 2004-11-15 11:28:39 PM|| 2004-11-15 11:28:39 PM|| Front Page Top

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