JG etc.

Great post by Matt McCalister from his experience with a publisher at the Syndicate Conference.

I was speaking with a publisher of a big media company at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco and sharing my excitement over the Open Content session with the Washingtonpost. His first question was, “Where’s the revenue model?” I was surprised by the question…not because I didn’t have an answer but because that was his first question. He didn’t see that this was a good idea and threw out the time-tested dismissive challenge to new ideas, “That’s fine, kid, but we’ve got mouths to feed here.”

The concept that a publisher should do whatever possible to give his readers what they want is idealistic to him. The revenue model is what rationalizes his decisions, not the wants and needs of his readers.

Ithink what Matt really wanted to tell this guy is that for the most part, you’re screwed. Now this might not happen immediateley, but come on, the ideaoligies of so many of these publishers are light years behind. And remember Matt works for $60 billion backed Yahoo, not some Web 2.0 startup.

But the economics don’t add up for the old school revenue-ists. There are more and more people creating content and publishing it on the Internet every day. Groups of people are forming around issues and topics spontaneously. More and more tools are learning how to aggregate content and facilitate dialog amongst people. The supply of information and sources for it is far too great to satiate the demand. And even if the supply of really really good and highly relevant information is low in your little market, you command less and less ownership of your audience’s attention.

Translation: There goes your bonus Mr. Old Media Publisher. Now there is more than one dog and pony show in town.

In nearly every meeting I’ve had at Yahoo!, the driving force behind every decision is the question, “What do users want?” People often disagree on the answer, but Yahoo! knows that you lose when users aren’t satisfied. Somebody else will satisfy them, and they will leave.

What you have is media companies are going to continue to lay people off. Journalist, who should be paid very well, will suffer to find a job. How will journalist be rewarded in the digital media age? It isn’t fair or practical that any good journalist will just start a blog and throw some adsense in between each post. That being said, someone does need to shut down these free newspapers that dump trash throughout cities and have no editorial substanse other than potentially helping their advertisers with additional PR.(Can we please put the SF Examiner out of business?) Or the telephone books that are stacked up around the city because guess what, people hardly use telephone books anymore. I’m still suprised by people that are upset by the inconvience of online ads, but they have no problem with the SBC door hangers or 0% interest credit card offers in the mail everyday. Has anyone done a study too find out how much waste is created by this? And why do I have to clean up after big moneys trash? It is too bad that digital media is going to put a lot of talented people out of jobs but unfortunately they are a offshoot of a larger problem. For too long we have dealt with inconviences that digital life has now created a better answer too.

From Black Rim Glasses……

Newspapers are founded on the notion that they are the tree and we are begging for the fruit. Attempt to get the fruit off the tree and its rotten. Blogs, alternative press, decentralized news or whatever you call it is rhizomic. It shoots its roots out, making new plants at will, spreading in a non-linear fashion to the point where amputation serves no other purpose than a temporary barrier to eventual spread.

Scott Rosenberg……

It’s not a happy picture. I still read two newspapers a day, but I’m in the field, and I know there’s no chance my kids will. As Menn’s piece accurately recounts, these changes are rolling through the Bay Area first because we’re the advance guard of the transition from print news to digital delivery

So Mr. Publisher there is no true black and white model that you are looking for. You can either get on the bus or stay on the sidelines. Regardless, your margins and monopoly on information are gone. And that is a good thing.

Scott Rosenberg…

I told Joe that the newspapers I grew up loving and that I worked for during the first half of my career represent a model that we’ve taken for granted because it’s had such longevity. But there’s nothing god-given or force-of-nature-like to the shape of their product or business; it’s simply an artifact of history that you could roll together a bundle of disparate information — news reports, stock prices, sports scores, display ads, reviews, classified ads, crossword puzzles and so on — sell it to readers, and make money.

Today that bundle has already fallen apart on the content side: there’s simply no reason for newspapers to publish stock prices, for instance; it’s a practice that will simply disappear over the next few years — it’s sheer tree slaughter. On the business side, it is beginning to fall apart, too. It just makes way more sense to do classified advertising online.

3:29 in the morning and rambling…………..