Tag Archives: Online

But first the news…

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Scott Karp has an inter­est­ing sug­ges­tion for news­pa­pers online. Put news first.

[L]et’s look at the New York Times. It’s homepage is arranged, like most tra­di­tional media brand sites, by what is most important.

Here’s the prob­lem — if you visit the New York Times through­out the day, and no import­ant news has broken, the homepage remains largely unchanged, static, like a print newspaper.

Organ­iz­ing news by import­ance as the default makes sense when you’re only deliv­er­ing the news once a day (and the “default” is all you get). But when news pub­lish­ing is con­tinu­ous, it’s not the best way to server fre­quent news consumers.

The prob­lem remains — as it does for blogs — draw­ing atten­tion to your archive mater­ial. Do you just have to leave it to search engines…

Writing about TV — the pre-download era

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Tele­v­i­sion com­mis­sion­ing. How hard can it be? Roll up, buy a series, put it on TV. That was before you could down­load the stuff.

Writ­ing about TV is more dif­fi­cult. But here is Will Hut­ton con­jur­ing up the pre-download era:

Every Brit­ish tele­vi­sion exec­ut­ive would love to have com­mis­sioned the Amer­ican series Mad Men. With com­pel­ling accur­acy, it trans­ports you back to the advert­ising world of Man­hat­tan in the 1960s.

The second epis­ode is on BBC4 tonight. It hits every sweet spot — recept­ive audi­ences, buzz and crit­ical acclaim. And des­pite being deeply Amer­ican, it will enrich our cul­ture, too.

Will thinks this is pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing. Say Will — what if they let you down­load the show on the inter­Web? D’ya think?

I know…

The barriers to user-generated content

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My col­league at City Uni­ver­sity, Neil Thur­man, has pub­lished his latest study on user-generated con­tent (UGC). You can read a pre-press ver­sion on his webpage. The head­lines?

UGC is being held back by:

1. Legal liab­il­it­ies — pub­lish and be damned.

2. Mod­er­a­tion costs — “80 per cent of the user gen­er­ated con­tent ini­ti­at­ives launched by the pub­lic­a­tions sur­veyed for the study were edited or pre-moderated. These costs have not yet been fully off-set by the rev­en­ues generated.”

3. Low par­ti­cip­a­tion - not enough users actu­ally gen­er­at­ing content.

4. Insu­lar­ity — the nar­row­ness of some UGC.

Transnational news traffic

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So is online help­ing Brit­ish journ­al­ism col­on­ise the US? Fish­bowlNY’s take on a Guard­ian piece cer­tainly makes it look that way:

# The Daily Mail saw online traffic increase 31% for Mail Online com­pared to 01/07.
# The Guard­ian’s traffic increased by 25.5%.
# Rupert Murdoch’s highbrow/lowbrow Times of Lon­don and The Sun saw traffic up 38% and 40% respect­ively.
# A stag­ger­ing 65% jump in web traffic for The Tele­graph…

So, apart from a shared lan­guage and Matt Drudge, what might be driv­ing the transna­tional traffic uptick?

  • In celebrity news, big estab­lished mar­kets — remem­ber Splash emerged in L.A. to ser­vice Britain’s tabloids

  • In elec­tion cov­er­age, none of the sens­it­iv­it­ies or respons­ib­il­it­ies of U.S. outlets

It’s prob­ably that simple.

And a reminder too that people are not drawn to journ­al­ism for information.