The first time you visit ESPN.com today, you’ll see a large auto-play video ad that introduces you to both the redesigned site and Ford’s new F-150, which kicks up mud on the sports anchor.
Certainly cuts through the clutter from an ad perspective, but some folks, like VentureBeat, were a little annoyed. “With this redesign, they have crossed a line which I expect other sites may try to cross as advertising revenues dip in the weak economy,” writes MG Siegler, who disliked the start screen as well as the ad positions on the home page. (My own opinion: ad integration in sports comes the territory.) Advertising aside, the new ESPN.com features a big 16×9 content area that also converts into a video player, a customizable scoreboard across the top of the site and the ability to personalize your headlines in a tab on the home page. So in other words, you can customize ESPN.com to emphasize your local teams. (Full dislosure: I work for msnbc.com which is partnered with NBCSports.com.)
The New York Times has been among the prime examples of media organizations that refuse to call torture what it is: torture. The euphamism that the Times and other traditional (and cowardly) media outlets have been using has typically been “enhanced interrogation techniques” — despite the fact that at least one of those techniques, waterboarding, has been the basis of our own government’s war-crimes cases against others in the past.
Today the Times moves the ball slightly toward the correct goal line. In an online posting about the naming of several key Justice Department officials, reporter Eric Lichtblau writes of “practices bordering on torture.”
This borders on accuracy, and is an improvement. One of these days, the newspaper may actually use the correct word without equivocation.
One of my new favorite bloggers, Martin Langeveld, mentioned one of his favorite new bloggers, John Thornton and his Insomniactive, where the Texas venture capitalist spouts off smart opinion and analysis of the newspaper industry. Great stuff; add Insomniactive to your RSS reader if you care about newspapers.
I was wondering how Thornton’s blog could have escaped my radar, but it looks like he only started posting stuff on media and news topics in late December 2008. So I guess I can be forgiven.
Along with Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog, now you’ve got an excellent duo of bloggers documenting the financial side of the newspaper industry’s spiral downward. I think Thornton is clearly the most pessimistic, and seems to think that the newspaper industry is headed toward a future of non-profit journalism. Also:
“You see, the online news outlets of the future are shaping up to be -– and it grieves me to say this –- a bunch of grubby, cruddy, marginally profitable little businesses. …
“Can some of these things make a little money? Sure, why not? It’ll be sort of like a Mad Max movie, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road -– after the nuclear holocaust, plenty of assorted post-armageddon, beady eyed-sole proprietors with shopping carts and automatic weapons will do just fine — cockroach-like, and speaking in the broadest of relative terms.”
OK, maybe that’s too stark and depressing for you. Don’t read Thornton. Keep your head in the sand. … I’ll be reading, and I hope he sticks with news and media topics for a while.
This from Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian: "It must be obvious that the planet cannot sustain 6.7 billion people
living as does today's middle class in North America and western Europe
- let alone the projected 9 billion world population in mid-century.
Either a large part of humankind has to be excluded from the benefits
of prosperity or our way of life has to change."
So, let's try and answer that question honestly. Are you planning (and therefore by implication are you pushing your elected leaders towards planning) to radically change your way of life, voluntarily becoming in material terms very much poorer? Or are you planning (etc) to leverage your current political, economic and above all military advantage to make sure that some other portion of humanity gets excluded from the benefits of prosperity? Honestly...I'm going for option 2. The alternative is trusting everyone else on earth to match what sacrifices I make for the common good and I don't fancy my odds. Looks to me like a big - indeed the biggest, humanwide - collective action problem, an enormous tragedy of the commons played with energy sanctions and, ultimately, nuclear weapons to preserve a way of life that even if we are all willing to give up we have to trust everyone else to be willing to give up too.
Cheery stuff for the New Year? We've all read bleaker today already. Happy 2009.
A lovely review of the Folger Shakespeare Library show on the birth of newspapers by Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post has some gems:
If you learn about the world primarily from newspapers, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition documenting the birth of journalism in the Renaissance will be a wistful affair. It’s like looking at baby pictures of a distinguished old relative who is now on life support. Look how vibrant, how youthful, how full of vinegar the old man was. Once upon a time, before the plummeting circulation, the shrinking ad revenue and the highly leveraged corporate owners.
But if you get your news primarily from the Internet, there’s nothing sad here at all. New media is new media, whether it’s scurrilous pamphlets distributed by hand, or partisan Web sites that spread their happy mischief through the wireless ether. The forms, the tone, the types of personalities who gravitated to journalism when it was new seem fantastically familiar in our own anarchic and newly democratized age of the World Wide Web.
Kennicott susses out these themes through the ages:
When John Taylor, a bargeman and alehouse keeper turned journalist, published an edition of his Mercurius Aquaticus in 1643, he included a complete reprint of a rival paper, the Mercurius Britanicus — followed by a point-by-point smackdown of its contents. This was “fisking,” 17th-century-style: a form of argument beloved by bloggers who cut-and-paste something that offends them and then interlard it with commentary.
The extra margin space included in a 1699 issue of Dawks’s Newsletter was meant to allow readers to write notes and commentary before passing the paper on to someone else. Web site designers may think that posting reader comments, which all too often devolve from sincerity to silliness to bigotry and ad hominem attacks, is a brave new invention of the interactive world. But interactivity is ancient. It’s at least as old as graffiti, and often just as useful.
There’s also a slick swipe at cable news, but I won’t ruin the punchline.
: I was going to buy a copy of the exhibit book until I saw that they charge $10 for shipping. Damned print.
Meanwhile, and here is the rub, necessary online innovation is being stifled. There is a lack of genuine inventiveness about how to forge a new form of journalism, because companies are too focused on dealing with commerce. Many regional and local paper websites are so clunky that they cannot hope to gain new audiences, let alone retain the current ones. Staff required to "service" print and web on a 24-hour basis are not given the time and space to experiment and there is precious little encouragement from managers who are interested only in bottom lines.
Similarly, many national paper websites are chasing ratings rather than innovating - in the long term, building trust and credibility is far more important. The importance of online journalism cannot be stressed too often. It is foolish to call it the future because the future is now. ...
It is also sobering to realise that even if a national paper were to close - whether the Independent at one end of the market, or the Daily Star at the other - rivals will not benefit much. When Murdoch pulled the plug on Today in 1995, when it was selling almost 600,000 a day, the majority of readers vanished into thin air. Now, of course, they will vanish into cyberspace.
The fight that counts in 2009 is the one for online eyeballs seeking news and informed comment, not for the passive audience handed a freesheet with the minimum of journalistic merit or public benefit.
Peter at Video 2 Zero wrote a provocative post, with data — Ideal length for web video — a couple of weeks ago. The gist is, fewer people stick with an online video to the end if the video is longer. Longer than what, you ask? Just longer. In general, people open a video, start watching, and then begin dropping off.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s the same way you act when you open any Web page — you look or scan or read until you feel like you’ve had enough. Then you leave.
I don’t think this is any different from the way people read printed newspapers. You start, and eventually your attention wanes, and then you quit.
Now, before you start arguing — yes, sometimes I have searched for exactly that information (that video, that Web page, that story, etc.), and then I am likely to stick with it to the very end. So your fascinating video, or text story (about the cause of a plane crash, or the rescue of some avalanche survivors, or the future of our 401(k)’s) might be long, but I am already committed to it, and I am predisposed to watch (or read) the whole thing.
Most things that we encounter online do not meet that criterion. Most things we encounter online are not the exact thing we have been searching for.
So we sample. We take a little taste and move on to the next thing.
A 17-year-old recently told me that sometimes she starts looking at YouTube and somehow, before she knows it, three hours have gone by. “Really? Three hours?” I asked her. “Seriously,” she replied. But you know darned well she did not watch every video she opened to the end. YouTube is a place for sampling, tasting, surfing. It makes it really easy (and irresistible) to have another, and another, because of that “Related” box on the side.
I take two lessons from this:
Don’t take that to mean I want to dumb things down. I do not. But the array of information has to become smarter (like YouTube’s arrays), and the complex (long) pieces must be reconfigured into smaller pieces, to adapt to the sampling behavior of the audience.
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