9 Comments Add your own

• 1. Dan  |  August 19th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

  Local brands are important for local news.
  For local news I go to seattletimes.com, king5.com,
  komotv.com. The only difference between what I do today and what I did a few years ago is HOW I get the news. I get it from the same sources though.
  I used to get a paper delivered until 4 years ago,
  but I still read the Seattle Times everyday, many times
  a day online. I still look at some reporting by KING
  and KOMO, but I don’t watch their local newscasts
  anymore.

  For national news I go to national brands like cnn.com, nytimes.com or I use my RSS reader to show me the latest stuff from 100 different places.

  What’s different about me from what’s happening
  with everyone else? Seems like I’m the same.
  The obvious changes are happening and have been for a few years. We need studies to tell us?

  Dan

• 2. fleetwood mack  |  August 19th, 2007 at 5:09 pm

  What makes Jarvis “must read?”

  What made Jarvis?

  Is loud and argumentative all it takes?

• 3. discreet_chaos  |  August 19th, 2007 at 11:52 pm

  As usual and from my point of view, Jarvis is giving ivory tower, pat and easy answers that have little relationship to the real world.

  If you start with his bullet points, first up, you see the bit about distribution and aggregation.

  I agree that having a story on Digg will increase readership of that particular story, but this website recently featured an entry which said the same about Drudge (8/6) and in the comments, Michael reiterates something that’s found on the third page of the LATimes article; A link from Drudge spikes traffic, but it skews the metric for advertising sales, or as someone says in the piece, “advertisers want local readers, not the national audience Drudge delivers”.

  Not every local story can get big numbers from Digg or be featured on Drudge because they are local stories and are of little interest to a wider audience.

  As for local bloggers with a focus on news and current events, they already link to the original source, so additional distribution would be dependent on their growth. Personally, I rarely feature purely local stories on my own blog, but after the recent Minneapolis tragedy, there was an AP piece that went around about a bridge-watch solution being developed by Los Alamos National Lab and because they had a press event, the Albuquerque stations had video of the tiny helicopters in action, so I tied the two together in a quick post. I’ll also do the same, if a local story is funny or has national implications, but I don’t run a local blog. Those who do, on the other hand, they already feature daily links to stories from the local media.

  Then, he goes into a thing about “widgets”;

  Back in the early days of RSS, internet[dot]com offered a directory of magazines and news outlets, who had little boxes that you could put on your website. My interpretation of the NYTimes site is that they still offer such a service, but just as in the 90s, I’m yet to see many in the wild.

  Perhaps, the Albuquerque Journal or the Virginian Pilot could put together a widget, but I don’t anticipate that many people would install the things and the numbers would be even fewer for any of the twice-weeklys that are within either of those larger paper’s markets. Here in my small town, we have two local news-specific blogs and though they both link to our smalltown papers, I’d venture that most of the people reading these blogs, also regularly read the papers or visit their websites.

  Oh, and Microsoft’s “Active Desktop” wasn’t a success, so though there may be who would install boxes on their desktops, but their numbers are very few.

  As for aggregating the content of competitors, I realize that there are some people in this forum who argue for such a thing, but it’s really a non-solution.

  Let’s say that Channel 9’s website also contains stories from Channel 5 and vice-versa. What that would mean is that instead of my visiting two websites for local news, then I’d only have to visit one and whichever, I choose would be based on my own personal preference because all the news would be the same.

  Once again, speaking for myself: I watch one station’s late news and I visit the websites for it and all of their competitors on a fairly regular basis. I also regularly visit the website for the two twice-weeklies in my town, the twice-weekly for the next town and both of the Albuquerque papers. If everything local was aggregated in one place (and if I were to forget about Topix or that little box on CNN[dot]com), then instead of regularly visiting seven local news sites, I’d only have to go to one and though that may be convenient for me, it does nothing for their bottom lines.

  As far as the rest of his bullet points: News outlets are in the business of reporting, and by getting exclusives or sponsoring any number of community activities, they’re already catering to and servicing their local markets.

  The problem is (if there really is a problem) that there’s always been a limited market for non-event news and because we now have access to so many alternatives and some headlines just waft through the air — More and more outlets are just divvying-up the same sized pie.

• 4. !  |  August 20th, 2007 at 7:00 am

  “advertisers want local readers”.

  why wouldn’t you sniff ip addresses and utlize an ad network so when YOUR local audience ventures 1/2 way around the world they are then served LOCAL ads over foreign content? and vice versa. the days of your LOCAL audience being captive to YOUR signal is over.

  somebody’s gotta think a little differently.

  and it’s only going to get better.

• 5. discreet_chaos  |  August 20th, 2007 at 7:43 am

  ! - Does such a network exist?

  It seems to me that it’d be easier to just say “wow, we’ve been dugg or drudged” and just keep going with your business. After all, I’m sure everyone would like it, but until there’s some large consortium with the ability to sniff and sell something other than AdSense, then it’ll remain just a nice thing and not a part of anyone’s model.

• 6. !  |  August 20th, 2007 at 7:57 am

  i think having adsense work in this fashion says “yes, a network exists” pretty damn loud.

  now, do the same with video ads. it’s a natural progression.

  hmmm, that new fox deal might be on to something, eh?

  and pureplays will be sitting on their hands too.

  i don’t mean to sound like the smartass i am, but this idea of waiting till someone else creates a network to try it smacks of the three highschoolball attempts mentioned earlier… they’ll all pile on. most of them too late to have a serious impact.

• 7. discreet_chaos  |  August 20th, 2007 at 8:33 am

  Adsense will let the advertiser geographically target their ad, but it has no such setting for the publisher because that’d mess with their whole relevancy score equation.

  And, yes… The newspaper chains, myFox and companies like IB could easily put one of these ad networks in place and have it limited to their sites, but I’m sure a lot of their stuff which is diggable may already be distributed across their network and it really wouldn’t help the independents, anyway.

  As you imply uptop, the future is going to be different, but it doesn’t do much for the here and now.

• 8. !  |  August 20th, 2007 at 8:37 am

  thanks, always enjoy your pov

• 9. katydid  |  August 20th, 2007 at 8:54 am

  Jarvis’ kid doesn’t read newspaper sites because he’s a kid.

Leave a Comment

Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed