Is The Article Like The Song Or The Album? Deconstructing The News #futureofnews #wjchat June 9, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in Journalism.add a comment
Painters create paintings, musicians create songs, authors write books, developers create systems, entrepreneurs create companies and…journalists write articles. Well, maybe not. Some people are questioning this assumption.
When a disruptive technology comes along it always changes the legacy medium. For example, the invention of the camera forced painters to rethink how they could add value and that led to impressionism, abstract art and other wonderful forms of creative experimentation.
When digital music arrived, it destroyed the concept of an album which started with the 33rpm vinyl format and carried on into CD.
But digital music did not deconstruct further, the song remains the unit that is produced & consumed.
In the news business, the album is the newspaper or the TV/Radio channel. Apart from a few loyalists among the older crowd, online news consumers are not brand loyal, they click around to get what they want. But the article is still the dominant unit.
Blogging did not change that. Bloggers may write shorter articles, because they have to churn out 4 posts per day. Bloggers may call them posts rather than articles. Bloggers may have found the Publish key a huge liberation from the Publisher’s rejection letter. But, call it what you like, Bloggers still produce articles.
But Twitter may have changed things. Twitter is so fundamentally new as a medium that it challenges older assumptions. A Tweet is emphatically not an article. You can derisively dismiss Tweets as “brain farts” and a lot of them fit that bill. But in the news business, Tweets are one type of “news fragment”. I don’t know what else to call them. Some of these news fragments can become the constituent pieces of an article. That is what all the curation tools are trying to do, assemble Tweets into stories (which are built into the article form factor).
Compare this to other media that deliver creative work:
- the fragments in a song are things like the bass line, vocals etc.
- the fragments in a painting are things like paint and canvas
- the fragments in a book are things like paragraphs and chapters
In those media, would you be interested in consuming the fragments on their own? If you are a creator, maybe. If you play the bass, you might want to isolate Jacob Pastorious’s bass lines from Weather Report to learn from them.
That is the problem we have in the news business. Millions of people love writing. That is what made blogging such a phenomenon. I get it, I love writing. The act of creation is a pleasure. The act of consumption is OK, but not as much fun as creation. So when we see those news fragments, we become fascinated.
When people who are not involved in media and technology ask me why I am fascinated by Twitter, I usually talk about following the early days of a massive story. I was totally glued to Twitter #jan25 when the revolution was happening in Egypt. I have always been fascinated by revolutions, I have lived in the Lebanon and I am fascinated by the news business. So this was exciting to me on many levels.
But as soon as Nick Kristof got to Cairo, I was happy to just read his articles as well as anything by other journalists who really understand the Middle East like Thomas Friedman.
I can also envisage that somebody who is obsessively interested in all things Apple related, they want to drill down to the fragment/source. But how many subjects can we be obsessive about? How many subjects do we want to be “news prosumers” in?
I think the article will remain, like the song and the painting, the primary unit of production and consumption. Journalists, bloggers and what we might call “news prosumers” or “news fanatics” might want to delve deeper into the individual fragments, to go direct to the sources.
That use case, the news prosumer, needs to be catered to. It is really a filter/check box indicated whether you consider yourself an expert on that subject. The expert will get all the latest stuff in reverse chronological order, getting the fragments direct from sources (using their own insights and knowledge to filter out the junk). But methinks that is a minor use case. Those of us in the news business might think it is a big use case as we fall into that use case category, but that is a classic mistake. Also, I think that most mainstream media attempts at doing this will be rejected by the news prosumer fanatics, who will always want to delve direct into the fragments direct from the sources.
In conclusion:
The article like the song remains the same, even while the container (newspaper/channel/CD) is threatened.
Groupon IPO: Can Andrew Mason Skate To Where The Puck Is Headed? June 5, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in IPO, Online Advertising, Uncategorized.add a comment
Most commentary is negative. The current financials look pretty awful. Even worse, the current value proposition to merchants does not look sustainable. They are basically pitching a loss leader. Every merchant understands a loss leader. But if the loss leader does not lead to profitable clients it is just a loss. As the old saying goes ‘it is easy to sell a dollar for 99 cents”.
The positive spin is “the numbers looked awful for Amazon as well, look at Amazon now”. Its a bit like saying Google had no idea of how to make money when they launched but look at Google now.
So is Andrew Mason as smart as Jeff Bezos?
Amazon’s ability to invent the future is extraordinary. They did it first for e-commerce. Even more remarkably they did it again with Amazon Web Services (AWS) when the reinvented the hosting business and created the Infrastructure As A Service category.
The answer of course is, we don’t know. Investing in Groupon is investing in a massive market that is in the process of fundamental change AND investing in a great entrepreneur. I have no idea if Andrew Mason is a great entrepreneur, only time will tell. But I can see the massive market that is in the process of fundamental change. So can Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Craigslist, Apple, Microsoft as well as legions of Groupon clone startups.
The market opportunity is so massive that Groupon is totally right to choose a “go big or go home” strategy. This is a network effects game and the winner will be a huge winner.
At stake is the $150 billion local advertising market.
Actually, at stake is the whole evolution of the online advertising business. That is why Google was willing to pay $6 billion. That is why the Google acquisition fell apart on fears that the deal would fall prey to Anti Trust action. (Don’t fall for the “brave entrepreneur walks from $6 billion offer” fairy tale).
Here is why:
At stake is the whole evolution of the online advertising business.
Advertising has evolved to address the famous line “half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half” through 4 different versions:
* Version 1, pre Web, “we cannot tell you who is looking at the ad”
* Version 2, CPM, we can tell you who is looking, but we have no idea if they are interested
* Versions 3, CPC, we can tell you how many showed interest by clicking, but we have no idea if they will buy anything”
* Version 4, Groupon aka CPA aka Cost Per Action or Cost Per Revenue. In Groupon’s current iteration, the loss leader 75% off list price deal (50% off to the consumer), the vendor is telling the advertiser/merchant “we can tell you how many people will buy the loss leader, we cannot tell you how many will return as full paying customers later”.
Of course, a loss leader proposition is unsustainable. If that is all Groupon can offer, run, don’t walk from this IPO opportunity. But if you think that their loss leader proposition is their foot in the door to the next iteration of commerce/advertising, they could be an Amazon scale company. And you never got a chance to buy Amazon stock on the cheap and you probably never will.
The losers in this next iteration of commerce/advertising are obviously the yellow pages print advertising books that land on my porch and get taken straight to the recycling bin. But they are already dead, the funeral notice just did not get posted. And like the AOL dial-up subscribers, inertia is a wonderful thing!
But the other losers are all those invested in CPM and CPC. They won’t go away but they will be impacted by a proposition that is fundamentally more attractive.
So where is the puck headed? Actually I indulged in some science fiction speculation about what Twitter could do with Twitter Annotations (they dropped that ball). This is about a future of ecommerce that is real time, mobile and social. Foursquare and Loopt are also in this game from another direction.
In the future we are likely to see consumer agents negotiating with multiple vendors via exchanges that get a cut of the action. No, that will not be a 50% cut of the action. Think more like the less than 5% vigorish that payment vendors take. Merchants are incredibly margin aware, they will fight tooth and nail with Amex over 1%. But at the scale we are talking about, 1% is a really, really good business – that Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Craigslist, Apple, Microsoft all lust after. All the Groupon clones are simply acquisition bait for those behemoths. The question is does Groupon have a shot at getting into the behemoth class. That comes down to “is Andrew Mason like Jeff Bezos in 1996?”. He looks the part but only time will tell.
