Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

The Promise of Hyper-local News Sites

Advertising, Internet, Journalism, Newspapers | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Sep 09 2010

More than 20 years ago, right out of college, I worked as a stringer for a chain of news weeklies in Westchester County, New York.  I was assigned to report on the regularly scheduled sessions of town and village councils, as well as various government boards.  Some meetings lasted hours, often ending well after midnight.  On a few occasions, things dragged on thanks to inane bickering among a few board members with personal scores to settle.  On the whole, however, it seemed that our locally elected representatives were taking great care to make sure they got right the minutia of zoning, planning and other matters affecting their municipality’s fiscal stability and quality-of-life.

From that experience, I took away little in monetary compensation. I did gain the glory of my first byline, as well as a fat portfolio of clips.  I was also able to provide a few thousand of my neighbors with news of value to them, the non-controversial, but relevant information that would almost never find a place in the pages of the larger dailies.

Today the Internet continues to wreak havoc with the traditional newspaper model.  Publishers continue to reduce editorial staffs, as well as cut reporters’ salaries and benefits, due to disappearing ad revenues.   In order to make a living wage, some journalists have left the business for good.  As budgets are reduced, there are justifiable fears that content designed to entertain and incite will push out the type of dispassionate, in-depth journalism that serves the public good.

‘Creative destruction’ is used to describe an industry experiencing painful restructuring.  The term sounds cold-hearted.   But it’s hard to assess what this tumult will produce in 5 or 10 years time.  There is certainly one development that looks very positive – the emergence of hyper-local news sites.

Organizations such as Baristanet.com and Patch, which last year was bought by AOL, have established networks of hyper-local news sites designed to empower entrepreneurial and civic-minded journalists, photographers and videographers. Both organizations focus on underserved communities, providing extensive reporting about happenings at the neighborhood level.  Patch is particularly ambitious.  It now operates about 100 sites in 10 states, and AOL has plans to invest $50 million in order to launch about 500 more sites by year’s end.   Thanks to the Internet’s low publishing costs, hyper-local news sites can provide a volume of micro-level coverage not previously offered by dailies and weeklies. The question remains whether there are enough advertising and other revenue sources to make this model viable in the long run.

Hyper-local news sites may not be a replacement for traditional newsrooms, but they seem able to serve the public good in a way that the news dailies and weeklies of yore never could.

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For Some, A World Wide Web That Never Was

Broadband, Internet, Mobile, Music, Online Video, Radio | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Aug 24 2010

Chris Anderson, Wired’s Editor-In-Chief, and Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair columnist and Rupert Murdoch biographer, recently wrote dueling columns in a special Wired feature called “The Web is Dead.”   For his part, Anderson described the World Wide Web’s diminishing role as the all-purpose gateway to the Internet.  Other Internet platforms and devices, including mobile, have become the preferred means of online access.

The piece speaks for the United States and probably reflects trends in many other developed countries.  A decade ago, especially in the United States, the Web was synonymous with the Internet future.  Today the terms “Web” and “Internet” are used interchangeably, although the web is just one way to get on the Internet.  As Anderson points out, thanks to iPhones, iPads, Blackberries and other smart mobile devices,  a majority of users’ online time is spent outside the confines of web browsers.  If the Internet is the Super Information Highway (sorry about the hackneyed metaphor), then the Web is becoming more like Route 66, a historic road that has since been bypassed by quicker and better ways of reaching their destinations.

The success of non-Web platforms has to do with an improved user experience, that is, the ability to get desired content more easily.   “Every time you pick an iPhone app instead of a Web site, you are voting with your finger,” Anderson wrote.  “A better experience is worth paying for, either in cash or in implicit acceptance of a non-Web standard.”

Of course, “The Web is Dead” title was likely meant to be more provocative than literal.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say the Web is waning, evolving into just another useful means of Internet access.

So if the Web really is ebbing in the United States and other developed countries, what about emerging nations such as India?

In a July 30, 2009 post, “India’s Flourishing Newspaper Industry and Its Internet Future,” I discussed how India may well follow its own path to the online world.  In India, where landline penetration is low, the mobile subscriber base was nearly 525 million in 2009, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, up from 234 million connections at the end of 2007.  In May 2010, the government auctioned off its 3G broadband spectrum, creating opportunities for carriers and content providers to offer an infinite array of revenue-generating Value Added Services (VAS), including music streaming, radio, videos and online games.

In July 2010, the GSMA announced that the number of global mobile connections has surpassed the 5 billion mark. As 3G is adopted around the world, there could be hundreds of millions of people enjoying their first taste of advanced Internet connectivity without ever having surfed the Web. For these users, perhaps the Wired article might aptly be re-titled, “The Web: You Can’t Die If You Never Lived.”

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Gulp! Avoiding Being Hooked By Bad People – or Bad Information

Internet, Journalism, Media | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Mar 05 2010

You may consider yourself too worldly to fall for a phishing scam.  But be honest.  Chances are that some time in your internet life, overwhelmed by the daily barrage of emails and other messages, you let your guard down.  That’s when you received an authoritative-looking email with a link you clicked on in haste, only to learn you were tricked by a cyber-criminal seeking to take control of your computer and/or steal your valuable personal information.

If this has never happened to you, then you are most savvy.  Or maybe lucky.   Care to test your level of gullibility? SonicWall, a company that provides secure network solutions, has a 10-question quiz you can take to see if you can tell the scammers from the mere spammers.  According to the site, only 7.4% of those who have taken the quiz have scored a 100%, so if you don’t get an “A,” don’t feel too bad.

But in addition to being taken by bad people, how good are you about not to be taken in by bad information?  If fending off phishers is difficult, consider how hard it is to sift through the countless news resources – broadcast and cable networks, newspapers and magazines, email newsletters, blogs, tweets, comments, and on and on.  Even the most respected, best- intentioned members of the fourth estate can sometimes, if inadvertently, misrepresent the reality involving a particular issue or story.  And while the blogosphere and comments boards offer democracy the greatest forum in human history, the conversations often have less to do with sober scholarship and due diligence than with emotional and even juvenile partisanship (partisanship in the broadest sense of that term).  Even the most discerning information consumer will at some point, due to data-weary vulnerability, accept something as fact when it should have been treated with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The tools that make it so easy to disseminate inaccurate and distorted information also enable simple double-checking of facts.  So while it’s easy to get caught in the frenetic pace of an electronic news junkie, it’s also simple enough to step back and carefully consider an article or statement that’s been presented as truth.  Just as one might use the web to authenticate or debunk a phishy-looking email, one can conduct a Google web and news search to bring up a wide range of well-documented results covering a seemingly infinite range of topics.

There are also numerous sites dedicated to fact-checking.  One such site is, in fact, called FactCheck, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, which tests the validity of assertions made in the world of politics.   Another, Snopes, has become popular for verifying or discrediting urban legends across a wide range of categories.

So the next time someone tries to play on your emotions, whether with a scary looking email pretending to be from your bank or a terrifying-sounding message masquerading as the truth, don’t forget the power of the Internet to shine a light on the reality of the situation.  It can’t hurt to get information from more than one source.

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India’s Flourishing Newspaper Industry and Its Internet Future

Audience Demographics, Internet, Journalism, Media, Newspapers | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Jul 30 2009

Imagine that in 1979 U.S. newspaper publishers somehow had had access to a time machine that revealed how the advent of the internet would impact their business 30 years hence.  What steps might they have taken to ensure continued profitability in an age of instant, free access to information?

In a sense, India has such a time machine in North America and Europe.  According to a recent article in Foreign Policy, the newsprint industry in India is expanding so rapidly that it resembles the heyday of newspapers in the United States, which was about a century ago.  Back then there was enough demand in New York City alone to support 20 daily papers, one scholar notes. Today, the article quotes a government report, India has more than 62,000 newspapers in circulation, and that number is expected to continue to grow.

Rising income and literacy rates are driving this dramatic increase in print readership in what is the world’s largest democracy. Another key fact: the Internet has yet to become a major player.

According to internetworldstats.com, as of November 2008, there were 81 million internet users, a penetration rate of 7.1%, and as of March 2008, just over three million with broadband connections.  A 2009 study by Akamai Technologies reported that India “has an average internet connection speed of just 772 Kbps compared with the global average of 1.5 Mbps.”

Those numbers may seem small now, but in a country with a fast-growing middle class, widespread broadband adoption seems inevitable. Are the consequences of such adoption, as experienced in the U.S., also inevitable for the Indian news publishing industry? Or can news publishers in India learn from the missteps of their U.S. counterparts?

Harjiv Singh, Co- Founder and CEO, International, of Gutenberg Communications, a global agency with offices in New Dehli, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, said it’s important to remember that there’s a clear link between democracies – whether it’s in the U.S., UK, France or India – and a vibrant media industry

“India is clearly at the cusp of a phenomenal growth phase in its economic cycle,” Singh said.  “It will at certain times leapfrog ahead in terms of technology and at other times forge its own path unique to its needs and aspirations.”

“It will be interesting to watch how India’s media industry evolves given that it has the world’s second largest population,” Singh added.

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The Media and the Message

Branding, Free Content, Internet, Paid Content, Social Media, Television | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Jun 09 2009


I recently attended a digital media event in which a panelist, a video producer, disagreed with Marshall McLuhan: the media is not the message; the message is the message, the panelist said.

Even if you’ve never heard of McLuhan, chances are you will recognize the reference. The Canadian scholar made up the phrase at a time when the new medium of television had all but secured its dominance as a message delivery platform.  Alternately brilliant and inscrutable, McLuhan’s controversial media theories got industry experts to think in a new way about the impact of technologies on people’s behavior – and on content itself.

McLuhan categorized different media as “hot” and “cool” according to the extent of sensory interpretation required of the consumer. Radio and newspapers were deemed hot because the information is presented fully formed, needing little sensory interpretation by listeners and readers.  Television, on the other hand, which in the 1950s and 60s offered a low-resolution, black-and-white image of inconsistent quality, was cool (and by that McLuhan didn’t mean ‘boss’).  Television required greater involvement of the viewer’s senses to ‘get the full picture.’

Back to the panelist’s point and what it has to do with the name of this blog.   Media has come a long way since McLuhan’s time.  There is an endless array of high and low-resolutions screens – HDTV, IPTV, mobile devices, portable readers, iPods, PCs, IMAX theatres and more. This variety offers new opportunities and challenges for advertisers, content publishers and influencers.  With so much content competing over so many platforms for the attention of a greatly disaggregated audience, quality, as defined by the beholders, will be an essential differentiator.  As the old saw goes, content – that is, good content – is king.

But the nature of the platform – the media – as well as context matter, too. For example, what demographic prefers what type of video and at what length?  How should a message or brand be shaped to leverage the power of a particular medium?

When it comes to video, conventional wisdom on this topic seems fleeting.  Online was thought suited best for user-generated video-snacking, an association that didn’t appeal to advertisers; then came Hulu and viewers started consuming full-length television episodes.  NetFlix’s Watch Instantly function will now be available through the Vista Media Center; and internet-ready televisions were front-and-center at this year’s CES.  Will this cause more filmmakers to consider direct-to-web features? Will advertisers now reassess online video or will the shrinking traditional television audience share still represent the biggest bang-for-the-buck?  Will users who are accustomed to free be willing to pay for premium content?

Hopefully this blog will serve to initiate discussions on these and other questions, as “The Media and the Message” will endeavor to explore a broad range of media-related issues involving monetization, content creation, messaging, branding and more.

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