User filtered content site Reddit bought by Conde Nast

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Conde Nast, the owner of Wired magazine, has just bought the user filtered news site Reddit, according to TechCrunch. After AOL set up Netscape beta as a user filtered news site, this is the second signficant foray of large media into this space. As described in our Future of Media Report 2006, user filtering is the Web 2.0/ participative analogue of editorial. It is not just users creating content, but also editing. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, is very excited about the acquisition, which plays perfectly to his long tail themes. There will be lots more play in this space yet.

Giving structure to citizen journalism

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Jay Rosen has just announced that Reuters is giving $100,000 to NewAssignment.Net, which provides a more structured model for open source journalism, bringing together amateur and professional media creators. The money will be applied to hiring a full-time editor for the site. Jay gives some background to why Reuters is choosing to support this project:

Part of the background to the gift is a speech given March 2nd 2006 by Reuters CEO Tom Glocer to the Online Publishing Association. It was called “The Two-Way Pipe.” Glocer said the news industry “faces a profound challenge from home-created content-– everything from blogging and citizen journalism to video mash-ups.”

In 2005 he and his colleagues were worried about a shift in power they saw coming, but “it was about the consumer as editor,” Glocer said. “You get the news you want when you want it, either pulled by something like an RSS feed or a Tivo box or pushed by the media company.” This was a legitimate demand. And while companies like his are still catching up with that demand “our audiences have already moved on-– now they are consuming, creating, sharing and publishing.” Consumers as producers! That’s a power shift more confounding than the explosion of choice.

His puzzle: “If users want to be both author and editor, and technology is enabling this, what will be the role of the media company in the second decade of this century?” As Scott Karp pointed out (his blog is about the next era in publishing) Glocer’s answers to that question weren’t very revolutionary.

But some of his observations were keen. “On the day the Tsunami struck, Reuters had 2,300 journalists positioned around the world, mercifully none were on those beaches,” he said. “On that fateful day we also had 1,000 stringers around the globe – but none of them were there either.” The only way to get the story was from amateurs to whom the tools of media production had been re-distributed. His conclusion: “You have to be open to both amateur and professional to tell the story completely.”

NewAssignment.Net is explicitly joining traditional and social media in creating a “pro-am”, or professional-amateur model. For example, amateurs can collectively be given fact-checking tasks, or issues identified by amateurs can be passed on to professional journalists. For a long time I’ve believed that what is happening and will happen is a merging and integration of traditional mass media and emergent social media. In our Future of Media Report, we explicitly discussed how the “professionalism” of traditional media both provides standards and expectations, and is also a limiting box. NewAssignment.Net looks like a particularly promising model, though the details are not yet clear. However irrespective of how successful it is, the space in which it is playing, of bringing together the resources and capabilities of amateurs and professionals, is where much of the action will be moving forward in the world of media.

[UPDATE:] Chris Ahearn, head of media at Reuters, has posted his comments on the deal. An extract:

Professionals and amateurs will cooperate to produce work that neither could manage alone, using “open source” methods to develop assignments and help bring them to completion. The idea is that people will contribute to stories that they believe will make a difference.

While the Internet is rapidly transforming the world of traditional media, it also presents amazing new possibilities in terms of strengthening the investigative arm of journalism. The Internet is the perfect vehicle for galvanizing the public to become more involved in reporting.

Interview on MySpace and social media

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Yesterday I was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint program about MySpace and social media, together with Sebastian Chan, the web services manager for Powerhouse Museum – the interview is available for streaming and download (listen from 39:10). I talked about how social media is unleashing our latent humanity, by providing us with new ways of interacting and relating. We now have a multiplicity of new ways of communicating, all of them additional to the existing communication channels we have. We are exploring and discovering who we become as individuals and a society through using the new tools of social media. Second Life is a powerful manifestation of this, and we can expect to live significant parts of our life in alternative worlds. MySpace is a specific manifestation of how young people’s attention is shifting. They are spending less time on TV and traditional media, and more on their relationships. Companies can reach people within the social media where they spend their time, far better than through traditional advertising. Businesspeople are finding that they can build their networks online at least as well as they can in the usual cocktail parties. Gaming is becoming a social and relationship space, absolutely not just for young people and geeks.

A manifesto for the newspaper industry

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Tom Mohr, formerly president of Knight-Ridder Digital before its sale in June, has just published Winning Online – A Manifesto, proposing that the US newspaper industry should merge into a single industry-wide network, at least for its digital assets. He suggests that there is $4 billion of additional revenue to be gained by 2010, primarily by gaining targetted advertising. Part of Tom’s argument starts from the fact that in the US market, all but a few newspapers are local. It is important to note that there are very different dynamics in just about every other country in the world, where the newspaper markets are dominated by national players, so this is a particularly US view. Other key aspects of his case are the combined power of the newspapers’ advertising salesforces, and the negotiating power they have collectively, for example being able to withhold their content from the content aggregators such as Yahoo!. However Tom’s last point is that this collective work will take leadership. Indeed. In a network economy, leadership is required to show the potential of collaboration, and to bring participants together to create and share collective value. Having closely studied similar situations across many industries (for example FXall, RosettaNet, XBRL, CPFR), I simply do not believe that the industry structure or the participants in the US newspaper industry will allow this plan to make any headway. Reflecting on Tom’s piece, Don Dodge thinks that newspapers and magazines will die as soon as their current readers die. No way. E-paper will revitalize them in a new form. Don is in a minority of people who are happy to read news and entertainment sitting in front of a screen or on a portable device. Once the current print publications are digital, they will have a new lease of life.

The gradual rise of music collaborative filtering

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A piece just out in the New York Times covers the current array of music collaborative filtering services (though it doesn’t call them that), including Pandora and Last.FM. I’ve written about these numerous times in my books and blog, including my initial thoughts on discovering Last.FM in 2003 (still love it!) and a comparison between Last.FM and Pandora. The article refers to a report by Gartner that predicts that by 2010, 25% of online music sales will be driven by collaborative filtering engines. That’s a high figure, given that social networks and personal recommendations will always be at the heart of individual musical discovery, but I do agree that much of the way new music will become visible will be through these kinds of tools. To review, the concept of “collaborative filtering” is that we collaborate to filter the virtually infinite possibilities we face. This is largely done through tools that compare our tastes with those of others, so we can benefit from what people with similar taste to us have discovered. The magic of this is that it becomes far easier to find what we like (be it entertainment, information, or anything else) in a world of infinite choice. One of the most important impacts of technology has been to uncover creative talent, since access to either high-quality production or distribution is no longer a barrier. This means we have far more entertainment choices than ever before. The growth of the “long tail” is vastly enabled by software that provides recommendations for things that we love, that we would never find otherwise. These collaborative filtering services are fundamental to the way the future media landscape will unfold. Progress on these for the last decade has been slower than I would have hoped, but it is picking up, and the promise is there for all of us to find far more music that we love.

Yet more on the future of PR

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This week I was interviewed by Nicholas Scibetta, Global Director of Ketchum’s Communications & Media Strategy Network, on The New Media Transformation, looking at the implications for the PR industry.

The full interview is below. Click here to read the interview on the Ketchum site.

NS: What companies do you feel are doing a good job of playing in the ‘new media’ space and why?

RD: News Corp. is the media conglomerate that has done the best job among its peers in getting into new-media forms. This has been not only through its highly discussed acquisition of MySpace, but also its less-visible purchase of IGN [a gaming network], which recognized that video games are now part of the media space.

In the start-up space, I like Edgeio, which competes with eBay and other classified services. It enables people to publish listings on their own blog or Web site, which are then aggregated into one space so people can search for and find what they are looking for across all advertisers. One of the most important questions in the media space is whether classifieds will remain associated with traditional media. Edgeio is a very interesting experiment based on the assumption that they will be separate.

NS: What do you feel are the biggest misconceptions about working with new-media outlets and what are the three things you think all PR professionals should know before reaching out to them?

RD: Many people associate new media with blogs and podcasts. These are part of the emerging media space, but any Internet presence that has significant reach can be considered new media. Three things for public relations professionals to keep in mind when reaching out to new-media outlets are, one, PR professionals should always be completely transparent and open in their communication with new media; if they don’t, it will swiftly boomerang on them. Two, every message should be targeted based on an understanding of their interests — you will get no respect if you contact people with irrelevant information, but you will be respected if you know what they will be interested in and why. Three, the way to engage new media is to build relationships — people in new media believe in relationships and conversations, not in press releases.

NS: What is the future of media and what is the role of both new and traditional media in PR programs, given the current media landscape?

RD: Mass media will not die — what we are seeing emerge is a continuous spectrum from traditional mass media through to small community-based conversations. For any particular client or campaign, PR professionals will have to consider where across this spectrum of media they should be investing energy to achieve results. In some cases, accessing only traditional media will be appropriate, while in others, new-media channels will be the primary target. Usually these will be complementary, especially given that traditional media increasingly takes its cues from key bloggers, and their stories can have little impact if they do not generate a discussion among bloggers.

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Will the 1% rule change?

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I was recently interviewed by Mediasnackers, a neat site that focuses on how young people consume and create media. The interview, which is on the Mediasnackers site, covers a number of interesting themes, such as power shifting to the edge and edgeio, user generated content, and the shift by Gen Y to heuristic learning styles that Ross Gibson of UTS pointed out at the Future of Media Summit. I was asked about the 1% rule, which, based on research on YouTube, Wikipedia, and other sites, suggests that approximately 1% of a site’s visitors contribute content, and 10% interact in some form with the content. For those old enough to remember bulletin board systems (BBS), the rule of thumb used to be a “lurker” to participant ratio of 1:10. However there are now far more options to consume content, and clearly video and other multimedia content takes more effort to create than text comments. Undoubtedly, as generations shift a far larger proportion of people will create online content. In the US over half of teens have created and posted online content of some form. Yet it’s also important to note that 18% of American over 65s have also created content, so the gap may not be as big as people tend to think. The proliferation of online content sites is likely to keep pace with growth in content creation, leaving the 1% rule a good rule of thumb, especially for multimedia content.

Analyzing media industry networks

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One of the more interesting and original aspects of the Future of Media Report 2006 was the Media industry network analysis. I have broken this out as a separate piece here, as many people interested in industry network analysis may not have delved into the report. This research was performed by Laurie Lock-Lee of CSC, who has done much innovative work on industry network analysis. Below is the Media industry network analysis section of the Future of Media Report. Note that this analysis is very much a first pass at the subject, and we intend to take this analysis substantially further. Sponsors for the next phase of this analysis would be very helpful!

MEDIA INDUSTRY NETWORKS

One of the most powerful approaches to understanding industries and how they are evolving is to examine them as a network of relationships. The media industry network maps presented here compare the network of the largest corporate participants in the media landscape in 2005-2006, to the situation five years earlier.

Diagram explanation

Each circle represents a company. The thickness of the lines between organizations represents the number of joint ventures, consortia, and other strategic alliances reported in the press over the one-year period 1 July to 30 June, as found in Factiva. As such the map shows activity rather than existing relationships, making it a view of how dynamic companies are. The size of the nodes reflects how many new relationships were reported in this period. The diagram is constructed so that the companies most central to the network are depicted at the center of the image.

Media industry networks 2005/06

medianetworks06_sml.gif

Media industry networks 2000/01

medianetworks01_sml.gif

Diagram commentary

What is first apparent from this analysis is that the media industry is far more deeply interconnected than it was five years ago. The growth in alliances and joint ventures reflects that it is increasingly necessary to work with other companies, for example in content and distribution deals. Microsoft has retained its position as most central to the media industry networks. New media companies such as Yahoo!, Google and eBay have rapidly become more prominent and central, with others that are more active including Apple, CBS, Viacom, and Sony Ericsson. Time Warner has developed new and strong relationships with Microsoft, CBS, and Google, while AT&T, despite its growth, has become less central. The mobile device manufacturers have become more integrated into the network, illustrating their shift to become true media players rather than simply selling phones. Overall the telecommunications companies remain relatively peripheral, which will need to change if they are to succeed in moving beyond selling connectivity. Print participants remain fairly isolated.

Marshall McLuhan and the laws of the media

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I have been a long-time fan of Marshall McLuhan. Some of his well-known insights and aphorisms are immensely powerful. It is profoundly true that media are extensions of man; they extend our senses to take us to distant places and perspectives. McLuhan’s best known tenet, the medium is the message, is something that we all implicity understand in our media-rich world, though we rarely express it. When I first read The Medium is the Massage, which came out in 1967, it looked to me almost exactly like the bold typographical style and layout that Wired magazine was thought to have pioneered in the late 1990s. McLuhan had been there three decades earlier, and he was acknowledged as the “patron saint” of the magazine.. His influence has been profound, but now 26 years after his death, his thinking is embedded into the way we think rather than being broadly acknowledged.

While I’m not a big reader of biographies, I have just finished reading Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger , by Philip Marchand, who did an outstanding job at capturing the life and whimsy of the man. One theme that comes across very strongly through the book is how incoherent most of McLuhan’s speaking and writing was. This is not a surprise to those that have tried to get their heads around even some of McLuhan’s more mainstream work such as Understanding Media, however this seems to have been pervasive through almost all his work. The thing was McLuhan had no interest in being coherent or consistent – his approach was to spin off a million ideas and see which ones landed. Many of those that worked with him recognized both his genius, and that he was virtually crazy.

One episode that illustrates McLuhan’s extraordinary prescience is that in 1955, well before he became famous, he set up a company called Idea Consultants. One of their slogans was “A headache is a million-dollar idea trying to get born. Idea Consultants are obstetricians for these ideas.” The company never sold any ideas or got any work. However one of McLuhan’s often brillliant ideas at the time was to create a TV program that would select a business problem, build it into an interesting format, then offer a reward for the viewer who came up with the best approach. McLuhan thought that this would be far more likely to result in a good solution than hiring any group of consultants, however good they were. Today, this would be considered an innovative, pragmatic, and viable project. Maybe it will happen in the next few years. Fifty years ago, clearly the world was not quite ready for it.

One new thing I learned about in reading the book was what McLuhan called the Tetrads, or the “laws of the media”. it stirkes me that these “laws” are actually highly relevant to strategic analysis of any industry which is undergoing rapid change. I still have to dig up the original material to interpret it properly, but the following is my loose interpretation of McLuhan’s Tetrads.

1. Any innovative technology enhances or accelerates some of what existed before.

[Q: What does it enhance or accelerate?]

2. Any innovative technology erodes or renders obsolescent some of what existed before.

[Q: What does it erode or obselesce?]

3. Any innovative technology retrieves something that has become obsolescent.

[Q: What does it retrieve that has eroded or become obsolescent?]

4. Any innovative technology, when pushed to the limits of its potential, reverses or flips into something entirely new.

[Q: What does it reverse or flip into?]

McLuhan used the telegraph as an example. Again adapting his work:

1. The telegraph amplified the reach of events, and changed daily news to instaneous news.

2. The telegraph rendered opinion based, local broadsheets obsolescent as people sought faster, broader news.

3. The telegraph brought back group involvement and discussion around events, which had been fading.

4. The telegraph flipped from one-on-one communication into multi-point broadcast, and reversed the corporate hoarding of information.

I am a strong believer in strategic questions (as briefly illustrated in the Future of Media report). Asking the right question is most of the way to getting the right answer. The strategic questions raised by McLuhan, if applied effectively as part of a strategy process, can be immensely valuable in understanding how specific new technologies will change us, and the opportunities they create. I will play with these questions more around some current issues, and will share anything interesting here.

Global discussion on the future of media

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The Future of Media Report 2006 has certainly achieved its intention of generating discussion with dozens of posts and also good media coverage. So far there has been discussion in five languages from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Peru, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, UK, and the US (these are representative links only – in most of these countries there have been many references to the report).

Here is the full list of links to the report and Summit website (Technorati).

[UPDATE: Over 7,000 copies of the report have been downloaded.]

There were two particularly thorough and thoughtful analyses of the report, the first of the reviews from Robin Good at Master New Media, and another one from Sanjana Hattotuwa – these are both very much worth reading. I’d like to pick up on and respond to just a few of their comments.

Robin says:

The report is way too US-centric. The revolution in the making is a global one, not an American one. Do you think that if by accident the US had a sustained black out this would somehow stop? Many other local and regional realities are at work, and often with a much greater impact on society and with a faster evolutionary speed than what the US content and advertising marketplaces have done.

…

Given the highlights and the relative majority of research data focusing on the US-UK-Australia triangle only, ironically the report could have been better titled something as The Future of American and Anglo-Saxon Media.

Absolutely a fair comment Robin. The reason we limited the research focus of the report to US, UK, and Australia was primarily one of resources. While Future Exploration Network is a global organization, these are our “home” countries. In creating the report we considered whether to include other interesting media markets, which could have included China, Brazil, Scandinavia, or many others. However the report was pulled together very quickly, and we simply didn’t have the time and resources to extend beyond these three markets for the research portion of the report. The other themes and issues, such as the strategic framework, absolutely apply in all media markets, and it’s certainly been encouraging how global the response to the report has been. We would love to do a report either truly more global in scope, or addressing specific markets such as East Asia, continental Europe, or Latin America, however this would require some resources. So if any organizations are interested in sponsoring or getting involved in a report that would go further than the original one, definitely get in touch with us.

Robin says:

Global media market highlights.

32 years [for the media and entertainment industry to double its share of the global economy]? I think it will take much less time than that, and looking at the report I get no reference or URL to verify and deepen my understanding. The data reported to support this point say only: “based on 1999-2004 trends” (page 3 of the report).

Sorry, yes this is worth elaborating. In 1999-2004 the global media and entertainment industries grew by 28.5%, while global GDP increased by 18.7%. If these growth rates continue, the share of media and entertainment of the global economy will double in 32 years. Since these years include both the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, they may not be representative. I too believe that it will take less than 32 years, but it’s an interesting extrapolation. While the global economy is likely to grow at a strong pace (barring disasters), the shift to intangible value will definitely accelerate.

Robin says:

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