Online Publishing - Publishing 2.0

High-End Brand Publishers Need to Sell Scalable Premium Ad Solutions, Not Commodity Ad Space

Newspaper online advertising has not benefited greatly from the recent upswing in online ad spending, according to the New York Times and most of the recent newspaper company quarterly results. This is no surprise because most newspaper websites sell SPACE for commodity advertising — display ads and classifieds — and thus are

Aggregation

Content Doesn't Matter Without the Package

In response to the launch of Google’s Fast Flip, I observed that Google is correctly focused on creating a new user interface for news, when most media companies are not. A lot of people responded that Fast Flip is not an innovative or effective UI for news — which may

Distribution Channels

What Google Understands About the Future of News and Publishing That Publishers Do Not

Google knows a lot about the future of news — more than many publishers. It’s evident in Google’s new product, Fast Flip, which allows news consumers to “flip” through news stories. What’s striking about Fast Flip is that Google is innovating precisely where publishers used to lead innovation.

Newspapers

The Great Seattle Advertising Experiment: What Will Happen to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Print Advertising Dollars?

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer today because the first major metro newspaper to stop publishing in print but keep the news brand alive on the web. Seattlepi.com’s Executive Editor Michelle Nicolosi promises bold experiments, “to break a lot of rules that newspaper Web sites stick to.” And to be sure,

Online Publishing

Guardian Launches Full RSS Feeds, First Media Company Not To Suppress RSS Adoption

On the eve of The Guardian’s launch of full text RSS feeds, Matt McAlister, Head of Guardian Developer Network, pinged me looking for examples of other mainstream media companies that have full text RSS feeds. Surely this many years into the age of syndication, Guardian couldn’t be the

Aggregation

Mainstream News Organizations Entering the Web's Link Economy Will Shift the Balance of Power and Wealth

The New York Times published an article this week about mainstream news organizations embracing link journalism and news aggregation. Gawker and others scoffed that they are late to the game, which they are, but that misses (predictably) the BIG story. If news orgs like the NYT, Washington Post, and hundreds

Citizen Journalism

False Steve Jobs Heart Attack Report on CNN's iReport Is a Failure of Open Systems

Someone posted a false report that Steve Jobs had heart attack to CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport. The fallout (which could include an SEC investigation) lead to the inevitable question of whether this is a failure of citizen journalism. It’s not. It’s a failure of open systems.

Link Journalism

How Newspapers Abdicated the Front Page's Influence and How They Can Get it Back By Linking

The front page of the newspaper used to set the news agenda. Extra, Extra, read all about it! But that influence has steadily waned through the TV and Cable News era, and the web now threatens to obliterate it entirely. So who sets the news agenda now? One significant influence

Aggregation

Why Every News Site Should Put a Continuously Updated News Aggregation on the Homepage

My post on Drudge beating all other news sites on engagement was an aha for many, which is interesting because the lesson of Drudge has been around for a decade. But the lessons of web publishing are all so utterly counterintuitive that I suppose they take a while to sink

Aggregation

Drudge Report: News Site That Sends Readers Away With Links Has Highest Engagement

There are two main reasons why news sites are reluctant to send readers away by linking to third-party content. First, you shouldn’t send people away or else they won’t come back to your site. Second, a page with links that sends people away has low engagement, which doesn’

Innovation

GateHouse Media Seeks to Disrupt Print-Only Batavia NY Newspaper Market With Online-Only Innovation

Newspapers face the challenge of ensuring that their websites don’t cannibalize more lucrative print audience and revenue — even as more and more people get their news online. Then there’s the challenge of shrinking editorial staffs having to put out both a print paper and a website. It’s

New Media

Connecting The Dots Of The Web Revolution

For several days my brain has been connecting the blogstorm over AP trying to dictate how much of their content can be quoted on the web with the “quote” that Nick Carr lifted from one of my blog posts in his Atlantic article — I finally figured out why. The problem

Google

What Magazines Still Don't Understand About The Web

Since I already drilled a nerve with What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web, which is on its way to becoming one of my most linked posts ever — and since everyone loves a sequel — I thought I would do a follow up for magazines. The lessons, of course,

Google

If Your Users Fail, Your Website Fails, Regardless Of Intent Or Design

On the web, in the age of Google, design has no margin of error, and there are no stupid users, only inadequate designs. Those were the main points of my critique of newspaper websites generally, and WashingtonPost.com in particular, which to be fair, apply to all online publishers, and

Newspapers

What Newspapers Still Don't Understand About The Web

Why is Google making more money everyday while newspapers are making less? I’m going to pick on The Washington Post again only because it’s my local paper and this is a local example. There were severe storms in the Washington area today, and the power went out in

Media Economics

The Challenge Of Non-Local Newspaper Advertising

Newspaper brands like the NEW YORK Times, WASHINGTON Post, BOSTON Globe, etc. face a unique challenge in the online media age — how to value non-local readers. I received this offer in the snail mail this week from the New York Times: As I observed previously with my critique of the

Aggregation

Is News Coverage On The Web Becoming Like Consumer Packaged Goods?

The more I think about the issue of redundant news coverage on the web, the more I’m both perplexed and fascinated. Read the following on Facebook’s announcement of Facebook Connect — seriously, read it all: Can Facebook Build a Better Passport It didn’t take long for Facebook to

Media Economics

The Declining Value Of Redundant News Content On The Web

Microsoft withdrawing its offer to buy Yahoo is a sufficiently large story to demonstrate the problem of redundant news content on the web. Google News is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of this story. To get a better sense of why it’s a problem to have 2,000

Google

How Search Has Transformed News Consumption On The Web

We all know that news consumption is no longer passive, whether it’s reader comments on a blog post or news article, or individuals starting a blog to have a voice of their own — the evidence is everywhere. Less evident is how search has fundamentally changed how we consume news.

Aggregation

JPMorgan Buys Bear Stearns: Following A Breaking News Story On The Web

Nothing like the biggest business story in recent memory — JPMorgan buys Bear Stearns for $2 (a share) — breaking on a Sunday to bring into sharp relief the difference between news on the web and news in print — not to mention differences in how news is presented on the web. What’

Digg

Radical Idea For News Sites: Show What's New On Your Homepage

What’s the most obvious sign that a traditional news brand is merely reproducing online what they do in print, instead of publishing in a way that makes sense for the web? They way news is organized on the homepage. Let’s compare three news site homepages — TechCrunch, Digg, and

Book Publishing

The Evolution From Linear Thought To Networked Thought

I was thinking last night about books and why I don’t read them anyone — I was a lit major in college, and used to be voracious book reader. What happened? I was also thinking about the panel I organized for the O’Reilly TOC conference on Blogs as Books,

Online Advertising

WSJ.com Remains A Paid Site And Bets On The Value Of Its Niche Audience

Of all the reasons given why Rupert Murdoch decided to keep the WSJ.com paid subscriber wall in place, the one that I find most interesting is that advertisers are willing to pay a premium for WSJ.com’s audience. If the WSJ went free, it would undoubtedly increase its

Online Journalism

The Only Way For Journalists To Understand The Web Is To Use It

Reading Colin Mulvany explain how he’s come to understand the dynamic nature of online content distribution through his own experience blogging, and Howard Owens advocating that this is why every journalist should start a blog, I realized that the problem isn’t just a lack of understanding about blogging,

Blogs

The Scourge Of Blog Comment Spam

Let me begin with an open appeal to Akismet, provider of comment spam protection to Publishing 2.0 and many other blogs run on WordPress: Howard Owens is NOT spam Every time Howard Owens leaves a comment on Publishing 2.0, it gets caught in the WordPress Akismet spam filter.