The Rake Magazine

Tag: newspapers

  • Lost in Translation

    I guess I find most reports on online media interesting, but I thought this MediaPost email was spot on:

    by Kory Kredit, Thursday, April 24, 2008

    What is the value of an established print media name? Let’s take a
    simple test to find out. Which of these URLs do you recognize?

    ·
    www.desmoinesregister.com
    ·
    www.eastvalleytribune.com
    ·
    www.drudgereport.com
    ·
    www.perezhilton.com

    For those of you who claim to recognize the first two, you are either
    lying, or you have lived in both Iowa and Arizona, as I have. While
    both the Des Moines Register and the East Valley Tribune are print
    newspaper companies that have been
    in existence for decades, you’ve probably never heard of them or
    visited their Web site unless you live in those metropolitan areas.
    Even if you do live in those regions, the chance that you’ve never
    visited one of these sites
    increases as your age bracket skews younger.

    Ask any college-age or 20something man or woman where they get their
    news/information/gossip, and he or she is increasingly likely to cite a
    pure-play Internet site like DrudgeReport.com, PerezHilton.com, a
    favorite news aggregation site
    or RSS feeds before listing a local print media outlet.

    While national newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today are growing, local newspaper sites are loosing market share to pure-play Internet sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, as
    well as aggregation sites like newsvine.com and topix.net, as reported in a 2007
    study     from The Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.

    This raises a perplexing question for local newspapers, which are more
    and more reliant on their Web sites for advertising revenue to either
    supplement or replace decreasing revenues from their offline product.
    Does a traditional media
    brand name (i.e. Seattle Times, Kansas City Star, etc.) provide
    significant value to an online audience, or does its value get lost in
    translation somewhere between the printed word and the 19" flat-screen
    you’re currently staring
    at?

    As circulation rates and ad revenues drop across the board in the newspaper industry (ad revenues in 2007
    plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006    ),
    the brand recognition of the local newspaper drops along with it. It
    has also proven increasingly ineffective to try to apply the
    traditional offline business model to an online news site.

    Gone are the days when the local newspaper was the self-appointed
    guardian and exclusive voice of news and information for the masses. In
    traditional media, the journalist and the media outlet handed down the
    news to the public and that
    was typically where the story ended, with the exception of the filtered
    and approved-for-print Letter to the Editor that might follow in a day
    or two.

    In the Internet age, news is now a "shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer,
    according to Jonah Peretti    ,
    founding partner of The Huffington Post. To be successful, Internet
    news and media require an ongoing conversation, multiple methods of
    engagement, the addition of user-generated content and a wide variety
    of opinions and views.

    Today’s savvy online consumers also want control over what they read.
    They want to customize their entire experience for their personal
    preference. Not only do they want to choose the stories that are
    relevant to them, they want to
    modify the layout of the site and the navigation to suit their needs,
    as they can on sites like newsvine.com, topix.net and netvibes.com.

    In an effort to recapture some of their local readers on the Web,
    newspapers might consider abandoning their traditional print brand
    online, reinventing an entirely new media brand for the Web. This
    allows a great deal of autonomy to
    operate — much the same as an Internet company, not a newspaper
    company with a Web site.

    The challenge that lies ahead is whether or not traditional newspaper
    companies can become agile enough to adapt to this new paradigm. Can
    they leverage their most important asset, which is their depth of news
    and information at the local
    level, and deliver it in a way that engages and interacts with readers,
    giving them more control over the experience?

    Simply relying on their offline brand recognition to draw readers to
    their Web site will prove to be a losing strategy as readers continue
    to gravitate towards pure-play Internet sites that cater to the
    preference of an ever-savvier online
    audience.

    Can newspapers adapt quickly enough to remain relevant — or are they
    doomed to become this century’s version of the telegraph machine?

     

  • Can Behavioral Targeting Regulations Balance Privacy and Free Speech?

    How do you feel about ads being served up to you according to your web surfing history? On one hand, it only goes to prove Big Brother is watching (as if we didn’t know that). On the other hand, the ads you see are more likely to suit your interests, which might not be a bad thing in the long run — unless you’re surfing a lot of porn at work. 

    Here’s an email I received on the matter from MediaPosts’s MediaDailyNews. 

    Monday, April 14, 2008 by Wendy Davis

    It puts civil libertarians in a difficult position, but the fact is
    privacy rights and freedom of speech often end up colliding with each
    other. Newspapers print pictures of people who don’t want their photo shown,
    political campaigners ring people’s doorbells seeking votes, and Web
    sites post the purchase price of home sales. Generally, these
    activities are permissible in the
    U.S., because First Amendment freedom of speech principles outweigh
    whatever privacy interest people think is being compromised.

    On the other hand, courts have also upheld restrictions on speech —
    especially ads, considered "commercial speech" — in the name of
    protecting people from intrusion. Consider the do-not-call list. The
    Federal Trade Commisson had to
    defend the registry against a First Amendment challenge in federal
    court and, at one point, was banned from creating the registry.
    Ultimately, the 10th Circuit decided that the agency could go forward
    with the registry, but this outcome
    wasn’t certain when the case first began.

    Now, this clash is coming up again with behavioral targeting — serving
    ads to people based on their Web-surfing history. The Newspaper
    Association of America late last week filed comments with the FTC
    arguing     that any rules impeding newspapers’ ability to serve ads to readers would violate newspapers’ First Amendment rights.

    Courts have long said that the ability to advertise is a First
    Amendment right, but there’s obviously far less precedent about whether
    serving ads based on people’s Web-surfing history violates other
    rights. Privacy advocates are calling
    for limits, saying that at a minimum, companies shouldn’t deploy
    behavioral targeting without consumers’ consent — with some advocates
    arguing that consumers should explicitly consent via opt-ins.

    Much of the legal restrictions might end up turning on whether people
    have a reasonable expectation that their Web history is, or should be,
    confidential. On one hand, everyone who stops and thinks about it must
    surely know that all clicks
    leave a digital trail. At the same time, many users simply can’t fathom
    that anyone else — ISPs, ad networks, etc. — actually collects that
    information, much less analyzes it and then sends ads based on it.

    Of course, one way Web companies can help insure people know that
    clickstream data is being collected is by posting clear, easy-to-read
    privacy policies. And, under the circumstances, asking people to
    consent to behavioral targeting,
    either by opting in or not opting out, doesn’t seem like the kind of
    restriction that would necessarily violate the First Amendment.

  • Boned

    Noam Chomsky says a well-informed
    populace is a necessary ingredient to any democracy. In other words,
    we’re boned.

    Newspaper readership is down,
    and showing no signs of reversing the freefall. And since
    they’re not reading, Americans are forced to rely on such reliable
    political indicators as gut instinct, party affiliation, and the ever
    popular "he’s kinda cute in a presidential way" vote. Even more
    frightening, any attempts to address the problem have only compounded
    the issues.

    Here in Minnesota, redesigning
    our leading paper to include coloring
    pages     (sponsored
    by Crayola, naturally) hasn’t done a whole hell of a lot to improve
    the landscape, as evidenced by the recent layoffs (which Sid Hartman’s
    "close personal friendship" with Lovecraftian Powers have shielded him from, to date) and
    consolidation. Of course, this is further evidenced by the fact that C.J. still writes
    a gossip/grammar column
    for the Star Tribune, no one actually reads the City Pages for anything
    but restaurant
    tips    , advice on safe B&D play, and where to find the
    aforementioned B&D play    ,
    and the
    Pioneer Press    ,
    well, the Pioneer Press is in St. Paul. I hear they have hockey there
    these days.

     

    But what does this mean? What doom and plagues could something as innocuous as poor
    newspaper readership and content as fluffy as Anne Hutchinson left in the dryer for a day and a
    half bring down on our tranquil Midwestern existence? At best – a
    zombie apocalypse. At worst…a future in which Katherine Kersten serves
    as the Star Tribune’s first ever Page 3 girl. The truth is likely somewhere in
    the middle of these bleak predictions, but do you really want to risk
    it?

    Granted, I’ve already engaged
    in three of the five cardinal blogger clichés (bonus points to anyone
    who can name them in the comments below!), so I’ve probably already
    blown my wad of credibility into the digital Kleenex that is the Internet,
    but for the next week I’ll be doing my best to stave off the impending
    holocaust of the walking dead and mind-rending photography by taking
    a fresh look at the news of the day and providing some analysis. Or
    at least offer completely unconstructive viewpoints and commentary.
    And since I have nothing but disdain for Democrats, Republicans, Anarchists,
    Green Party members and those wacky Independence Party hosers (they’re
    Canadians, right? Only Canadians would put forth him as a gubernatorial candidate), I don’t
    have to choose my targets carefully. Or even aim, really.