The Eyes Have It

The New York Times had a small piece today on intrepid - and "always-on" - citizen editors on the Web uncovered a faked photo on the Website of California Congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian.

First reported in Talking Points Memo, Kaloogian had accused "mainstream media" of not getting out positive stories about Iraq - and proceeded to show a photo of a street corner, complete with fashionaly-dressed people and bustling businesses.

Trouble is, the pic was really of a street corner near Istanbul, which the candidate and staff had visited last summer. Seems there was a mixup of the photos from the two trips.

Niether liberals nor conservatives have a lock on truth, but it seems the network is beginning to provide "always-on" fact-checking- a very good thing, no matter where one is on the political spectrum. Open source information has arrived.

Gotta Love The Information Revolution

The Wall Street Journal today (reg. required) has a small piece - fluff, really, in their (excellent) Personal Journal section - about services coming online to allow us to see available parking spaces at our destinations. And not just see them, but reserve one for ourselves when we get there. They'll be available via the Web or cell phone.

Now that's truly useful information. It won't be free forever - although municipalities will certainly want to do it; will that make public structures and metered spaces more popular than lots who charge for a reservations service? The shakeup of those who control information continues.

Broadband Propels Online News Readers

According to a new Pew report, the penetration of high-speed access in homes has led to a mushrooming of online news readers - up to 50 million on a given day, a huge increase over just four years ago.

If you can pull yourself away from one of those online news sites, the report is well worth reading.

Content Atomization

We've talked with clients for some time now about information products being a wrapper of discrete "bits" - take model-train news, model-train features, and model-train classifieds, slap a cover on them, and you've got a publication or Website or podcast about model trains.

And bits of information are modular - take that bit about model-train news, add model-airplane news, and model-ship news, and you've got a different publication - Modeling News.

News organizations have a great opportunity to mix and match all their bits of information (and across media: text, images, video, sound) to "publish" literally thousands of information products. All that's required are the tools to make it happen - capabilities that are often referred to as "personalization features."

There are many examples of the popularity of atomized products: consumers can easily buy one song from iTunes, readers can choose 1 or 100 RSS feeds at a time, TiVO allows viewers to record or watch what bits of shows they want...the list is long (although newspapers are notable laggards).

And as we noted in an earlier post, telcos seem to be positioning themselves to build business models around "per-bit" pricing. Once the commerce backbone and model meet product features, it won't be long before people who download songs will pay for those songs on a per-bit basis and those who read articles will pay less, again based on the total data load.

The question will be: What will happen to free? And how will the ad-driven business models, like Yahoo's and Google's, be affected?

Testimony about the interaction between the newspaper and readers, and between print and web

The Internet is radically changing the media landscape. We are moving from media monologues to conversation. The media outlets, that are not going to become facilitators, have little chance to transform "their carriage factory into a car business" as my friend Francis says.

Some daily newspapers worldwide have started blogs. With more or less success. Olivier Vault, head of multi-media for the French daily newspaper the Alsace, describes an interesting experiment of an interaction between the newspaper and readers, and between blog and print:

"Saturday March 4
A snowstorm covers Alsace and Franche-Comté (north-east of France). The worst storm for the past twenty years, with 50 cm of snow in the course of the day (and the night).

Sunday March 5, 8:53 AM
A post on the blog of our newspaper the Alsace (here in french) asks readers to send their snowstorm photos by emails.

Sunday March 5, 10:00 AM
A post on the blog gives a progress report on train issues. An update is made around 5 PM.

Sunday March 5, 12:00 PM
Because of the snow, only 30% of the subscribers have been delivered. To compensate, the web site becomes entirely free and a post on the blog promotes this free access. Consequence: +89.4% of pages viewed, +45.6% unique visitors compared to the previous Sunday. But obviously, the news also played its part in this increase.

Sunday March 5, 6:30 PM
We have received more than 200 photographs. 150 are published on the blog.

Monday March 6, 6:00 AM
In the print version of the newspaper, a page (see the image at the top) includes some photos from the blog, in a special section of eight pages devoted to the snowstorm.

Wednesday March 8
Second special page with photos from the blog.

Thursday March 9
We have received more than 700 photos. More are still arriving... The weather encourages us to renew the experience by asking readers to send us photos of the starting floods...

Friday March 10
Launch of an on-line photo album service (here in French).

Saturday March 11
Publication of a sixteen page special section covering the events. Two of them are exclusively built with photos from the blog. Other photos from citizens are used on other pages in this special section."

Here is a good illustration of the complementarity of web and print. It is also a good example of interacting with the community. Nothing very complicated. Right?

PS: do not hesitate to share your experiments with us. These pages are yours.

Big Telcos Now Look to Support Municipal Wi-Fi

The Wall Street Journal (Regisration required) reports today that large telcos, who until now have been waging war against cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco and their plans to introduce free or low-cost high-speed wireless connectivity, have done an about-face and are now bidding on projects in this burgeoning sector.

The move, which will likely slow or end the telcos' efforts to get state legislatures to ban municipal wi-fi as "unfair" competition to private efforts, is in direct response to other players - Earthlink, Google, and regional firms - winning contracts with the cities and towns to build out and maintain the networks. Here's the money quote:

"AT&T...isn't anxious to offer a cut-rate or free service that could siphon off some of its DSL broadband customers, analysts say, but would rather cannibalize its own business than watch someone else snatch it away."

As good as this could be for consumers, bringing down subscription rates for access, will this only increase telcos' efforts to recoup any losses by charging content providers for data they send over the telcos' networks? Stay tuned.

Daily newspaper brands: advantage or inconvenience

Are daily newspaper brands an advantage or an inconvenience? I acknowledge, I do not have the answer. Even if I would like to say that they are an advantage. This question is indirectly the subject of the French journalist Gilles Klein's post on his blog Le Phare (the lighthouse).

Gilles reports the initiative of the websites of two French national newspapers, liberation.fr (here in French) and lemonde.fr. They asked their readers to send photographs via MMS (cell phone) or email. The newspapers wanted photos about the protests organized by French students and unions regarding a new job law -- CPE -- making the hiring (and the firing) of young people easier (more about it here). Almost no photos have been sent. "The young people do not seem to want to send their photographs to newspapers which perhaps they do not read. They rather post them on Flickr. Type the word "CPE" this morning you have nearly 1,400 photographs", writes Gilles.

Jules, one of Gilles' blog readers, comments: "the success of Flickr and the disinterest for the initiative of Le Monde and Libé show one thing: the disavowal towards the intermediaries of any kind. We do not need more intermediaries to select, choose, etc. It is time for "disinter-mediation"... "

Jules is undoubtedly close to right. But to respond to an initiative, it is necessary to know the existence of it. And sadly, the "young people" undoubtedly did not know that they could send their photos to these two media. Why? Because, as Gilles suggests, they read little to none at all of the print or digital version of these two French national daily newspapers.

But, should they give up trying to attract "young" readers? The answer is no. And for this reason, these initiatives should be supported. Let us hope that they will have many other initiatives such as the one above. But they only have meaning if they are part of an overall strategy. And strategy is not the strength of the daily newspaper organizations.

Maintaining these brands is not going to be easy. Young readers seem to find the answers to their daily information needs elsewhere (free daily newspapers, Yahoo!, etc). Do the newspapers absolutely have to create new brands in order to reach other target markets?

The British regional press, for example, gives the beginning of an answer. It is increasing the portfolio of products. In Newcastle, the total number of media targeting different types of consumers (readers and advertisers) went from 14 to 45 over the past 10 years. Steve Brown, regional managing director of Newcastle Chronicle & Newspaper and Gazette Company Media, declared: "We have become extremely good at identifying new ways to reach specialist markets and are continually innovating and launching new products" (read more about it here).

What do you think ? Do daily newspapers have to create products under new brands in order to reach new readers... and advertisers?

Spaghettisphere

AM NewYork today reports that there are more than 6250 blogs in New York City alone.

Can you really find what you want in all this spaghetti? At least in the old days, we weren't confronted with all information in one place; we actually had to get off our keesters and go to...a library, say (anyone remember The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature?). Or a museum. Or a movie house.

Now, it's all in front of us, leaving hundreds of thousands of content creators - from movie studios to Uncle Joe and his blog - clamoring to get us to read them, and all of us looking for ways to find the meatballs in all the spaghetti.

Is Google the answer? Tagging?

Don't have time to answer, sorry - have to go read some blogs.

AT&T, BellSouth, and Carrier Economics

So as AT&T positions to grab BellSouth and become Godzilla to Verizon's Mothra, the finer points of carrier economics are in the news.

The New York Times has a story (Reg. required) today about moves by carriers to end "open access," the unstated agreement in place since the Internet went commercial more than 10 years ago, that all content would be carried equally.

But if cities go ahead and offer free high-speed wireless access, carriers will lose all monthly access income, and a volume model will arise: If you download a lot of video or music, you'll pay a lot; if you surf sites and send email, you'll pay a little.

Isn't that more democratic than having us pay a huge monthly fee for what is, at its core, a basic public service? Or will cities have to raise taxes to maintain and keep secure those wireless networks?

"Where Do You Get Your News?"

Outsell, an information-industry research firm, has just published a handy roadmap for media execs - research about news-gathering habits of 2800 Americans, by age, income, and more. We believe these results are another indication of the shift of most Americans, especially youth, to online and interactive sources.

The summary chart below (click for a larger version) shows some clear conclusions: Only older media consumers still look to deadwood papers as their primary source of news; radio is holding its own in the 30-49 group (likely because this group represents the bulk of workers, and workers commute); Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL (GYMA) have grabbed a significant share of those below 40 (and as subway systems go wireless, will likely do further battle for commuters' mindshare); the number of magazines in certain subject areas will decline in the coming years, as its audience shrinks as print newspaper's does; and - surprising to some but not to others - that the Internet has become the mass-media product that print newspapers used to be, reaching youth and middle-aged readers.

We'll be writing more about this study in the coming days.

Burst Media Release Study on Sports Information Habits

Burst Media has released a study to shed some light on how readers get sports information - with few surprises.

Before 9 a.m., when most of us are commuting to work, sports readers are evenly split between newspaper and online sources - 23 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

From 9 a.m.-4 p.m., Internet sources are tops, garnering 35 percent of the audience. And in the evenings, television reigns supreme, with a whopping 45 percent of the audience - ESPN must be ecstatic. If there's a small surprise, it's that online sources can only claim a 20-percent share at night - this, despite high-speed penetration in homes the past few years, and all the hoopla about Web 2.0. That said, more than three-quarters of the 6700 respondents say they use the Web at least occasionally.

And what do they do online? The clear lead activities are getting scores (52%) and reading articles (43%), while only around a 1 in 4 or 5 go to professional-team or college sites. Beyond that, the numbers really drop off: Only 13% get fitness information, 13% contribute to blogs and/or community content, 12% visit fan pages, 10% research purchases, and 9% are involved in fantasy leagues (now maybe there's a surprise; we'd have thought that number would be much higher).

5W Mignon Media and L'Equipe Launch Rugby Magazine

Exclusive:

Here is the cover of the new French weekly magazine focusing only on Rugby, just launched by Group l'Équipe, owner of the famous daily sport newspaper L'Équipe (site in French). Giving rugby fans and enthusiasts news, features, and the inside scoop for the entire rugby world, it will be published every Thursday, starting tomorrow. Look for a companion Website soon.

5W Mignon-Media team, led by Jeff Mignon and Elisa Riteau, helped with strategy and design for both the print and online versions.