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Wired has a neat multimedia slide show that takes us inside the industrial design process. Design consultancies start with a series of “contextual inquiries” to see what’s going on in the target consumer’s work or home environment. Identifying a need for innovation is the first step to innovation.
Add comment November 23rd, 2007
Comscore has recently issued a report that shows Google making big gains in search in the past month to 58.5 percent in share, outdistancing all the other big search sites by a long shot, all of whom happen to be growing. Another Comscore report shows that Yahoo beat Google with the most unique visitors in the same month. Credit Suisse has set an astronomical $900 price target on Google, a new Wall Street high, on the basis that Google is set to monopolize search, while Yahoo is currently trading in the high twenties, at an equivalent or lower price than many newspaper stocks.
4 comments November 23rd, 2007
First of all, TechCrunch UK says “an unconfirmed rumour has reached me via a reliable source,” so take this with a grain of salt. But the thinking is News Corp. would buy the social networking site LinkedIn as a recruitment play. (LinkedIn’s best feature shows you jobs that you may be interested in from people who are connected to you. If you want to apply, just use your connections. Isn’t that how people get most jobs, anyway?) And, of course, LinkedIn is a different audience than News Corp’s MySpace.
I was attending a business event in Seattle last week when the speaker asked people in the crowd to raise their hands if they had profiles on LinkedIn. Two-thirds raised their hands. And from my perspective, that’s a problem. People have friends lists that are so long — everyone with your business card wants to be a friend these days — the usefulness factor is severely diluted. So I now spend almost all of my social time on Facebook. I do, however, like the social approach to recruiting on LinkedIn — if the price is right.
1 comment November 22nd, 2007
The CW show Gossip Girl isn’t doing very well in the ratings. In fact, it doesn’t even crack the top 100 shows. “I can honestly say I don’t check the ratings after the show airs,” said Josh Schwartz, the show’s founder. So why hasn’t the show been canceled? You guessed it — it’s wildly popular online, even outpacing The Office on iTunes. Fans sites are everywhere. And when you add DVR ratings to the mix, it’s the most-watched show by teenagers. “It doesn’t give local affiliates much of a lead-in, but that is something we have to get used to,” explains AR&D’s Steve Safran. “When people use a DVR, there are no lead-ins. When you download a show, there are no lead-ins. For websites, there are no lead-ins. So after a while, the whole concept of a lead-in just… goes… away. Local news truly has to stand on its merits now.”
17 comments November 21st, 2007
I love this line, taken from a job posting for AOL: “Should know how to identify who an audience is and what they want, not from stacks of market research and focus groups, but from watching live engagement of content.”
This is a big missing link at many local newsrooms and journalism schools today. Yes, an online news producer must balance journalism with popularity, but the distinction here is anticipating instead of reacting. Reacting is moving a story into the lead position because it’s popular. Anticipating is understanding how users interact with content (via your traffic stats) so you can make better decisions. This is especially important when you consider that most stories that appear on newspaper and TV sites were assigned and written with newspapers and TV in mind — not the web. Sometimes these are very different audiences and they are certainly different approaches to communicating a story. In the end, our goal is relevancy. And learning from “live engagement of content” is a great way to get there.
6 comments November 21st, 2007
As we’ve been following the launch of the Amazon Kindle here at Lost Remote, here’s an interesting post on the NYT Bits Blog that defends the Kindle against a blogosphere backlash. “A lot of people are writing off Amazon’s Kindle book reader much too quickly,” writes Saul Hansell. Clearly not the reaction Amazon was looking for when it fussed and fretted over the launch for a year. Meanwhile, with a significantly smaller buzz-building campaign, two combatants in the e-publishing world, magazine maker Zinio and rival Texterity, have both bowed e-reader software for the iPod Touch and iPhone, which we all recall had one of the greatest launches in consumer electronics history.
Also: Jeff Bezos interview on Charlie Rose (thanks discreet_chaos!)
5 comments November 21st, 2007
Michael Arrington takes note of a interesting patent that was granted to Google earlier this month, titled “Customization of Content and Advertisements in Publications.” Bloggers have been speculating that Google could use the technology to offer users the ability to create and print their own customized magazines from Internet content, complete with customized advertising. The patent filing contains several insightful observations in the print magazine business model, which Arrington points out as flaws.
1 comment November 21st, 2007
NBC’s face of news for years spoke to a group this week in Washington, and he said he imagines the printing press will be gone within 10 years. Tom Brokaw was promoting his new book when he made the comments, according to Business & Media Institute.
“I was at The Washington Post earlier today,” Brokaw said. “And in the lobby they’ve got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is … 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic paper roll that comes when they run out of paper and the ink is recharge and I looked at all that and I thought – ‘Ten years from now, will it be here?’ I don’t know. Probably … if you would do a hardcore analysis – probably not. It’ll be probably digital 10 years from now.”
Brokaw added that he believes there will still be a demand for journalists to interpret information. “There will never not be a need for professional people to take complicated information, put it into a form that viewers and readers will need to know and want to understand,” he said.
1 comment November 20th, 2007
ABC.com’s new webisode series, Lost: Missing Pieces may shed some light on how the studios may structure an online compensation model for television writers. The deal — which is carefully worded as a one-off agreement — pays the writers $800 per webisode and a 1.2-2 percent residual on licensing fees. “I think it is a pretty good model,” Lost writer and executive producer Carlton Cuse said last week. “What it shows is that there is basically room for a partnership between writers and the studios in a new medium. It’s where I wish we were headed instead of being stuck in this standoff.” Interestingly, the WGA told the NY Times that “in general terms” the Lost deal is the pattern the Guild is looking for in negotiations, but with more financial upside. As always, it all comes down to money.
Add comment November 20th, 2007
It isn’t unusual of late to see a newspaper owner report a dip in profits, but it is somewhat abnormal to see reports of a decline in online ad revenue. McClatchy said total ad sales declined 9.9% in October. Online ad revenue dipped 4.1 percent to $14.6 million from $15.2 million, according to the AP.
Meanwhile, the NAA said online ad revenue for newspapers grew 21% in Q3, representing 7.1% of total ad revenue on average.
(Disclosure: I compete against a McClatchy newspaper as part of the day job).
2 comments November 20th, 2007
An interesting article in BusinessWeek points out that as more professionally produced content comes online, user-generated video is becoming less interesting to viewers, and accordingly, advertisers. Way back when Viacom sued YouTube to protect what was thought to be widespread infringement on their copyrighted material, YouTube’s self assessment indicated that the majority of their content was not pirated. Now that more professional producers are getting into the act, online video and social sites such as Bebo who recently opened up their pages to big media companies, are raising the bar to lure and engage viewers longer as the big media companies themselves are launching their own sites to feature their productions.
“People would rather watch content that has production value than watch their neighbors in the garage,” says Matt Sanchez, co-founder and chief executive of VideoEgg. ManiaTV recently canceled its user generated channels altogether, saying the 3,000 channels didn’t pull in enough viewers and that 80 percent of the users were going to professional content that featured celebrities. Maybe Amanda and ZeFrank retired at the right time.
15 comments November 20th, 2007
- NBC will launch Celebrity Apprentice with Tiffany Fallon, Jennie Finch, Tito Ortiz, Piers Morgan and Nely Galan. (OK, and Trace Adkins, Stephen Baldwin, Lennox Lewis and Omarosa). The show debuts January 3rd.
- NBC is joining CBS in looking to mixed martial arts to fill timeslots.
- CBC officials say that American networks have showed interest in several Canadian shows like… Little Mosque on the Prairie (no joke).
USA Today has the list of all the reality shows coming your way.
10 comments November 19th, 2007
The Seattle Times’ James Vesely turned in a must-read editorial Sunday.
So far, for newspapers, the Internet has not been monetized enough to carry the capital and human financials of the newspaper city room. The three-legged stool of newspaper profits — classified advertising, big circulation and low-cost paper — has been replaced by “Star Trek” Scotty’s single transporter beam of information, a single beam of narrow interests, now you see it, now you don’t. It can make a story appear out of thin air…. I see Craigslist as a negative-editorial product. Why? Because it claims the profits normally shifted to the newsroom…. Media companies, especially newspapers, are by default nearly the lone agents of the democratic form of government.
This is the burden of the newspaper model. People generally buy the paper for the news, but that news is made possible by the cash put off by the classifieds. The news product is subsidized by an unrelated part of the paper. TV hasn’t felt the same crunch (yet) because the ads in the 11pm news pay for the creation of the broadcast.
Vesely says papers don’t know “when profits are going to return, or how.” I’ll submit that the profits are probably gone for good. While a free media is essential - whether it be on TV, the Internet or on a printed piece of paper - organizations that hold onto an old model are destined for the trash bin along with the very paper they put words too. Those newspapers that are looking at other ways forward have a future - but with much smaller staff sizes and fewer layers of management and non-essential people, and probably by “printing” their content to something other than newsprint.
Adds Devin, in comments: “For all their complaints about craigslist eating their lunch, you would think that they would take a few moments to analyze what makes that site so popular and then copy it.”
12 comments November 19th, 2007
Current TV is just two years old, and it’s still growing. Al Gore told a group while receiving an award for the channel that the network will be expanding to reach a total of 57 million households next week, including some areas outside of the US. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gore hailed the successes of his channel so far in attracting younger demos, calling it arguably the fastest growing cabler in the country. He put special emphasis on the popularity of viewer-generated content, and even viewer-generated ads, which make up some 30% of screen time on the service.
5 comments November 19th, 2007
With 81 percent of the vote, WGA East members of CBS News have voted to strike. The 300 or so employees work as writers, assignment editors, desk assistants and graphic designers for the CBS network as well as owned-and-operated stations in New York, LA, Chicago and DC. The group has been without a contract for two years. Now the strike has to be approved by the negotiating committee and the WGA before it can take place. CBS News, meanwhile, has said that a strike would not interrupt its broadcasts.
1 comment November 19th, 2007
We love redesigns here at Lost Remote (we even got motivated and did a little redesigning of our own over the weekend). Today’s new design comes to you from NYDailyNews.com with “more stories, more sections, more discussions, new videos and clearer navigation.” Pretty sharp, IMHO. (Thanks, DW!)
1 comment November 19th, 2007
First Second Life, now Twitter is featured on CSI on CBS. (Via Fimoculous)
1 comment November 19th, 2007
Howard Kurtz delves into culture and prospects of the San Jose Mercury News. With half the staff of a few years ago and more cuts looming, the paper has been sold and resold and still has to find a direction that will meet the goal to slash the print edition further and shift two-thirds of the remaining staff to the Merc’s Web site, where only 10 percent work now. Kurtz notes that every paper in America is playing some version of this tune, but the effort in San Jose “may be the most ambitious — or the most desperate” of them all.
2 comments November 19th, 2007
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