virtualeconomics

A citizen journalism model that really breaks news?

London-based citizen journalism start-up Blottr, which destealthed towards the end of February with a Techrunch write-up and recently announced a round of angel funding, led the news agenda for much of Monday by breaking the day's major UK news story. 

First publishing a few minutes after 10am, Blottr broke the news of a bomb alert in London and over the day added pictures, detail and coverage of the events in the square and the controlled explosion carried out in Trafalgar Square around 9am. Sky and the BBC picked up the story around 3 hours later, and Blottr founder Adam Baker told virtualeconomics:

"It was the only full story available of the incident for 3 hours, until Sky News put it as their "breaking" news, followed by the BBC. By this time, everyone discussing the story on Twitter (was) linking to our story, as the main source."

Maybe Demand Media's CEO doesn't use Google

Google's latest update, Panda, was targeted specifically at content farms.

This isn't ambiguous or in any way contentious. Panda, named after a Google employee but also known as the farmer update, was explictly "designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful", and while the Panda announcement itself was reluctant to use the term "content farm" an earlier blog post by Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer and co-signatory of the Panda announcement, stated that Google was targeting "“content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content". 

So when Demand Media's Richard Rosenblatt recently told Kara Swisher that "I don’t think anyone has defined what a content farm is and I am not sure what it means either"...that was a very strange claim.

The people formerly known as the media

"Billy Jones" is not, of course, the first person on Twitter to break (or pretend to break, or erroneously break) a super-injunction. All of Fleet Street knows who is named in the super-injunctions, not least because those injunctions require them to be told so they don't cover the story or name the names.

But over the past day or so Billy Jones' "Injunctionsuper" Twitter account has made a fair job of demolishing the comfortable celebrity fantasy that sending half a dozen letters to the lawyers at Northcliffe House, Wapping and Buckingham Palace Road to say that their papers are not allowed to cover some of the news is the same as keeping that news a secret.

Everyone is a media company now.

But is it true?

A news organisation's moral authority arises from its validation of the news. If something appears on the front page of the Guardian or the New York Times, we can be confident that people there have checked that it's right. Insofar as news sources have our trust, they have earned it by making sure that what they publish is right (and issuing immediate, full corrections when they're wrong). 

In Australia, Fairfax just sacked its subs - and with them, it threw away its moral authority as a news organisation.

Newspapers don't break news - since the plane that went down in the Hudson River to Osama's execution yesterday, news breaks on Twitter, then on blogs, then on radio and TV. Newspapers don't have the only or the best writers, they don't own the only printing presses, they aren't the only way to find out what's going on or what it means.

A news organisation's unique selling point is the process by which it verifies and legitimates information, a process on which their reputation is built (see what happened to the Mirror when it emerged their Abu Ghraib photos were fiction - the immediate and evidently permanent loss of about 10% of the readers). Anyone can write anything they like, on Twitter or their own blog or in the comments on the BBC, but it's not until a recognised news authoriity checks it out that anyone takes it as more than an ubsubstantiated rumour. If the recognised news authorities out-source that validation, taking the subbing function outside the building, all they're doing is publishing words and letting someone check if those words are true. Even I can do that, and so can you. Actual news publishers would probably be better 0ff outsourcing the writing.

Little more than a glance at the new economics of news

Strange to see Scout Analytics' latest infographic on the disparity between online and print news revenues getting so much coverage. It's obviously true, but it's also just a fairly superficial restatement of a small subset of the known facts.

Is online news worth less than offline news because less time is spent reading it (both absolutely and relatively), because of anchoring at "free" and because of commoditised online ad rates? Well...sort of. Partly. It's true as far as it goes.

First, this isn't about news.

Hyperlocal is growing by shrinking

Hyperlocal is shrinking. Not the market, or the number of sites, or even the number of start-ups in the space - just a glance at the OpenlyLocal directory reveals that the sites are multiplying as quickly as ever. But the size of the communities that new local businesses and sites aim to serve are getting smaller all the time, with the latest websites and businesses launching in this space often aiming to cover communities of fewer than a dozen streets or a single postcode.

And that's potentially very interesting news for local journalists facing yet another round of newspaper cutbacks, because if smaller communities will support viable hyperlocal community websites there's potentially more jobs covering the news in those communities to go around.

In the US last year Patch.com hired more than 600 journalists (probably the most of any company in 2010) to roll out more than 500 sites to towns with populations between 15,000 and 75,000 people. But in the UK new businesses are already emerging with a plan for publishing hyperlocal community sites, with original news reporting, in towns of 5,000 people or fewer.  

News International seeks to establish a print/online equivalence that simply isn't there

So the latest numbers are in for the Times paywall. Now eight months old it deserves, perhaps, to no longer be dubbed an experiment. Charging for people to look at the Times online is now business as usual in the Wapping fortress, and business as usual is doing...ok. Over at Paidcontent there's a copy of the full release and Robert Andrews takes a more detailed look at what the numbers mean.

At the end of the first four months behind a paywall they'd racked up 50,000 actual subscribers (people paying £2 a week) plus 105,000 other "digital purchase events" - people buying a one-day pass. Four more months on, at the end of Feb, they have a total of 79,000 monthly subscribers and a total 222,000 "sales of digital products" - people buying a one-day pass, plus sales of the Sunday Times iPad app. So, as Paidcontent notes, subscription sales have slowed down but sales overall have increased.

New York Times experiments with perverse incentives

The New York Times paywall (don't call it a paywall? Right...) is a strategic error, and not even a very complicated one.

So there's some science behind it, and the number of articles you can see before you have to pay (20) has been calculated from actual traffic data rather than just pulled out of the air, which is a good start. And it's always good to see a news org putting in some serious R&D, which at $40 million just to develop NYT's paywall definitely counts. It's not as if there's nothing about the move to like - it's considerably more thoughtful and nuanced than TimesSelect or the other, many, failed experiments in charging for (non-porn, non-finance) content that have failed over the past decade and a half.

Google's reading age tool - comparing US news sources

Last one of these for now - I've run the Google reading age numbers for the main US news sites too, with the results you see to the left. 

"Main" US news sites in this context are a combination of the Hitwise and Nielssen data as reported in Pew's State of the News Media 2010 report. 

Confirmation of the expected includes business and finance websites using the most challenging language (less basic, more intermediate - almost no major site uses much advanced language according to this schema, except Facebook). By this point I'm not surprised that the aggregators come out using more challenging language than their constituents - I can't yet account for it, but is seems to be consistent across the board.

That the Washington Times and LA Times use almost the same complexity of language as Fox is more of a surprise, but living in England I know Fox only through its abominable reputation. Perhaps American right-wing demagoguery is more articulate than ours.  

Support for #ukuncut in unexpected quarters?

Currently running on the Daily Mail website - a poll asking the question "do you still support the students after these riots?" Never mind the phrasing of the question, which a cynical observer might even consider loaded; at time of writing respondents have voted overwhelmingly "yes", by 63 to 37 per cent of the vote.

Possibly this merely proves that the Mail's online audience genuinely supports the students' right to protest, regardless of how they are asked or the negativity with which those demonstrations have been portrayed through much of the mainstream media. If so, I take my hat off to those readers - the right to legitimate political dissent is one I am pleased to see attract such support.