Mapping newspaper layoffs – where will the journalists go?

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Erica Smith of Graphic Designer has done some great map mashups of US newspaper layoffs so far in 2008 (4,490+) and in the last seven months of 2007 (2,185+), as below.

While you can pick out trends from the maps such as a big rise in layoffs in the North-East, this is more about underlining the trends in newspaper jobs.

One of the key topics at the Future of Media Summit 2008 on July 14/15 will be the future of journalism. I absolutely believe that journalistic skills and training are immensely relevant in the economy today. However many current newspaper journalists will have to adapt their skills to new jobs and roles, often outside traditional media. We will explore, among other issues, how this transition might happen.

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US newspaper layoffs: 2008 to date

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Ad networks for the long tail: Technorati enters the fray

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One of the most important developments underlying the transformation of media is the emergence of advertising networks, that sell advertising and place it across a wide variety of online media properties. Back in the Future of Media Report 2006, describing the role of ad aggregation in supporting the growth of the long tail, I wrote:

“… now anyone can publish online and get advertising revenue without having to sell [the advertising]. This is transformative in enabling the many of the “long tail” to move towards becoming viable – though small – media properties.”

Getting others to perform the advertising sales function means media becomes completely scalable. Certainly many of the ad networks are targeting major media properties. Sixteen of the 20 online advertising groups with the greatest reach are ad networks, with online four (Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and Microsoft) distinct online properties (more on this in a subsequent post).

In this world, Technorati, still the leading blog search engine, though far more precariously than before, is today launching an ad network, Technorati Media, according to Techcrunch. Techcrunch says:

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Radio National interview: The state of Australia startups and major online media players

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Last Thursday’s Media Report on ABC Radio National features an extended interview with me on the state of Australian Web 2.0 and major online media (there is both a podcast and transcript available from the link). Some of the points we covered:

Major online media players

* The well-publicized challenges of NineMSN (the Australian 50/50 jiont venture between Microsoft and PBL Media) are partly company-specific, and partly a reflection of the difficulties of the incumbent position.

* Australia’s major media companies have done far better than their international peers in dominating online news (and other aspects of the online space including classifieds). Blogs and micro-publishing are now finally taking off, taking market share from the majors, leading to the major online publishers losing readers in a growing market. The long tail is the natural distribution of readers, and it has always been inevitable that the majors would lose their dominant market share.

* In media conglomerates that are experiencing revenue challenges in traditional channels such as TV, newspapers, and magazines, expectations for growth in the online business are often unrealistic, leading to disappointments when budgets are not met.

* PBL Media, which owns 50% of NineMSN, is 75% owned by private equity company CVC Capital Partners. Private equity companies, for reasons including their debt structure, are often biased to short-term over long-term revenue, relative to their listed company peers. This leads to pressures on management and staff, which can make attracting and retaining staff more difficult when other companies are enjoying participating in a rapidly growing market. The 50/50 ownership structure doesn’t make things easier.

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Registrations open for Future of Media Summit 2008 – Sydney early bird still on

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The Future of Media Summit 2008 is now open for registration in both Sydney and Silicon Valley. After the great success of the Future of Media Summit 2006 and Future of Media Summit 2007, the third annual event is quickly rolling up!

See Future of Media Summit 2008 website for full details.

Note that there is an early bird offer for the Sydney Summit until June 16, then full price applies.

There’s too much to cover in one blog post, so I’ll be providing more detail on everything that’s happening in coming days and weeks. However some of the key features of the event include:

* Simultaneous events in Silicon Valley and Sydney merged seamlessly by video, online discussion, and cross-continental panels and conversations

* Highly participatory Conference AND Unconference formats at both Sydney and Silicon Valley events

* Discussions on global media strategies, future of journalism, future of privacy, and the future of TV and video

* Peer video discussions by participants across continents (world-first)

* Prediction markets on the future of the media before and during the Summit to tap collective wisdom of event participants and global media leaders

* Future of Media Summit blog for insights and discussion by all speakers and participants

* Detailed content and analysis, including the Future of Media Report 2008

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The rise of professional-quality user generated media

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The launch of Blogger in August 1999 opened the door to anyone and everyone creating media. Since then platforms to share writing, photos, video and more have enabled an extraordinary volume of content to be made available to the world. The media world has at least doubled in size this decade, adding many new content formats to the existing professionally produced media on channels such as TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers.

Despite cries from many that all user generated content is crap, that’s not true. It’s just that most user generated content is crap, and a small proportion is outstanding. Anyone who has browsed through the best photos on Flickr, for example, will see some extraordinary images they never would have seen otherwise. The best industry blogs are certainly considered on a par with mainstream reporting and analysis.

There are now some compelling examples of businesses that are based on professional-quality submissions from their users. A great article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle titled Everywhere, JPG – magazines for the future describes how these glossy magazines are compiled from people submitting their travel stories and photos, with the promise of being paid $100 and a year’s subscription to the magazine if their contributions are published. The selections are in fact made by the readers by voting on the site.

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Search engines and journalism: Seven key issues as news goes online

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Recently the Future of Journalism conference was held in Sydney, run by the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the body that represents workers in media and entertainment, including journalists. One of the broadcast media channels which covered the event called me last week to get some ideas for their interviews with the keynote speakers at the conference.

Their first question to me was about the impact of search engines on journalism. While our conversation went off in quite different directions regarding the future of journalism, I think it’s a very interesting issue to address. There are seven important issues for how search engines impact journalism:

Traffic from search engines provides a significant proportion of online media income. In some cases up to one third of traffic to online news sites comes from search engines. With the primary revenue from most online news coming from advertising, search engine optimization is not an optional activity for news sites and editors.

Headline writing is becoming a completely new art (and now science). As many have written on headline writing for search engines before, including the New York Times and an article I wrote on newspapers, search optimization, and old-school editors, publishing online requires a very different approach to headlines. The cute wordplays that have characterized newspaper headlines through the last century (Headless Body In Topless Bar; Ice Cream Man Has Assets Frozen; Two Convicts Evade Noose, Jury Hung etc. etc.) don’t tend to bring search traffic. Morever, visitors will usually find the content was not what they were looking for, and will leave in seconds.

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Thoughts from the Walkley Public Affairs conference

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Today I spoke at the Walkley Public Affairs conference, organized by the MEAA, the peak body representing workers in the Australian media industry. I spoke on the Enterprise 2.0 panel, running through many of the issues I’ve raised on the Enterprise 2.0 Forum blog.

Here are a few summarized comments and reflections on what I heard while I was at the event from late morning to the end of the first day.

As I walked in, Sam Mostyn of IAG was saying, reflecting on what she’d seen at the insurer, that ‘what builds loyalty and commitment is trust’. That is a fundamentally important point. Corporate loyalty is evanescent today, particularly with younger workers. The only potential source of loyalty is trusting your employees. Not trusting them automatically results in zero loyalty. This is deeply relevant to the issue of blocking or allowing social networks in the enterprise.

On the next panel, Mark Pesce commented that social networks in Australia are extremely shallow. Outrageous news travels very fast. At the Future of Journalism conference comments that Roy Greenslade made about Andrew Jaspan, editor of The Age, were immediately heard. Messages propagate ubiquitously, in this case enabled by journalists in the audience live-blogging the event. Those who were interested in what Greenslade said heard about it almost instantaneously. Mark describes Twitter as his twenty-first century brain trust, extending his capabilities by giving him access to many with complementary knowledge. He describes this as ‘hyperempowerment’.

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The Shyftr debate: If you provide all your content on feeds, does that give permission for anyone to do anything with it?

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This is a very interesting issue and discussion that has a long, long way to run. Shyftr is a service that uses blogs’ RSS feeds to replicate their content, and encourages people to comment on the blogs within their own service. On one level, it is providing a useful service so that people not only have a reader for all their feeds, but can share feeds and recommendations. However blog writers are finding that the discussion their posts are generating is not happening at their own site, so they are not getting the traffic, attention, and potential to monetize the visitors.

Louis Gray gives a very good overview of the issue, covering the many feed services that have enabled comments within their site. Louis is ambivalent, but basically believes that bloggers need to go to where the conversation is happening:

As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don’t want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else’s name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held. Just as my blog’s RSS views have undoubtedly eclipsed my blog page views, I would not be surprised to see that more comments on my posts might eventually live outside of my blog. It would behoove me and other bloggers to be aware of the other places the conversation will be taking place, and to engage there, in my opinion, rather than railing against the continued evolution of how we’re consuming content and engaging online.

Robert Scoble agrees. He believes that:

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The many layers of collaborative filtering – news and entertainment comes to us

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For the last ten years I have believed that collaborative filtering will be one of the most fundamental platforms for business and society. In a world of massively increasing information overload, the only way we will cope is to collaborate to filter what will be most relevant to us. Early this decade I was finding myself very surprised by how slow progress had been over the last five years, despite some interesting research and initiatives. However the last five years on the Internet could almost be characterized as the rise of collaborative filtering. Our Web 2.0 Framework is in a sense a description of how we collectively filter information. Almost all the significant developments on the web I would interpret as related to this evolution of collaborative filtering.

An article out a few days ago in the New York Times titled Finding Political News Online, The Young Pass It On described how young people share political news they are interested in by email and on social networks. In the same way, many young people primarily read articles that has found them in this way. In short:

“..they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.”

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Notes from the PR and New Media Summit

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I’m at the PR and New Media Summit in Sydney, organised by frocomm. The delegates, drawing on frocomm’s market presence, are primarily in-house PR people, with a good represention of government departments as well as corporates. The initial show of hands on how many people read blogs (a few), write blogs (almost none), listen to podcasts ( fair few), or create podcasts (reasonable smattering), indicates most here are here to learn. Australian organizations have In the main been slow to engage externally with social media, though more case studies are becoming visible.

Ross Monaghan’s engaging opening presentation gave a broad overview of the scene, including showing the audience Michael Wesch’s marvellous Teaching the Machine video. He also shared results from a survey the conference organizers had recently run, with notably 55% of CEOs saying they couldn’t see the value from new media. He did use quite a few examples of how organizations including Southwest Airlines, General Motors, and others, though unfortunately no Australian cases.

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