Selasa, 20 Desember 2011

The social media bubble may burst, and more predictions for 2012


Nieman Journalism Lab

Posted: 19 Dec 2011 11:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is journalism professor Carrie Brown-Smith, an up-and-coming young academic based at the University of Memphis.
In 2012 we will see a growing gap between newsrooms that are innovating and those that are…not.
2011 saw a number of promising examples news organizations going beyond "digital first" platitudes to actually trying things and making it work, and I'm optimistic we will see this trend continue. For example, The Journal Register Co.'s open newsrooms and other efforts garnered a fivefold rise in digital revenue in just two years; the Chicago Tribune continues to hire news developers to work with reporters to build new tools for making sense of and accessing information; the Wall Street Journal has had surprising success with its investments in online video, earning $200,000 in revenue per month. However, other newsrooms seem to be going in the opposite direction, continuing to lay off staff and limit their ability not only to innovate but even to maintain bare-bones levels of basic reporting, including 165 recently let go in Tampa and ongoing attrition at various Scripps properties, which included the kind of digital staffers, like an online video producer and a programmer, that one might expect to be especially crucial to moving forward in the digital space. I expect we'll see this gap between digital news haves and have-nots widen, perhaps hastening the demise of print in some markets.
2012 will be a good year for local television.
As some metropolitan daily newspapers continue to slash their already drastically-reduced staffs, they no longer have quite as commanding of an edge in reporting muscle over their broadcast counterparts. In addition to the election-year advertising boon, local television, with its recognizable personalities, also has a clear opportunity in the digital space. For example, in Memphis, where I live, the Commercial Appeal recently launched a more aggressive paywall than the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, which can't be bypassed via Google or social media; shortly after doing so it laid off its social media editor. Broadcast reporters in our market have already generally been more proactive in their use of social media to share stories and interact with the audience, and the door is now open for them to increase the public's reliance on them for [free!] news and information.  Of course, given the documented propensity of local television news to focus on crime over matters of local substance; this is not necessarily a good thing from the perspective of quality journalism, but it may be inevitable nevertheless. Even serious news junkies like journalism professors (ahem) find themselves turning more often to the sources that appear in their social streams and don't require a credit card to access.
2012 *might* see a bursting of the social media bubble, or at least convince us that it is harder game to play than we thought.
This might seem odd coming from an avid social media user who developed two new courses on it for our journalism department and who even has been christened with that dreaded "social media guru" title on more than one occasion (ack). And assuredly, I do think social media is an incredibly important tool for news organizations to use to promote their content, improve their reporting, and engage their audiences; I'm especially hopeful that it can help journalists diversify their sources and audiences, given that African Americans use Twitter at twice the rate of whites and other similar stats. But despite all of our excitement over its potential, I'm beginning to wonder about how big of a community can be meaningfully maintained online and how this affects news organizations.  For example, many early Twitter adopters such as myself report that their rate of responses, retweets and click-thrus have declined over time. I suspect this may have less to do with any change in behavior on our parts or that of our followers and more to do with the fact that the Twitter universe is now so large. Already overflowing streams are flooding. The likelihood that even your most interested followers will even see a tweet is ever lower. In order to develop engaged and loyal communities on social media, news organizations are going to have to work harder and smarter and try to find solutions to Shirky's "filter failure" problem.
Journalism schools will increasingly step up to the plate to play a leadership role in journalism innovation in 2012.
While I and others have long lamented how out of touch the Ivory Tower can be, I think we are seeing more and more examples of journalism schools finally stepping up to the plate, as Geneva Overholser of the University of Southern California and others have long called for. Even at smaller, less wealthy programs like mine, we are starting to teach entrepreneurship and helping to fill holes in the local news ecosystem with hyperlocal reporting. Faculty members of all ages are getting excited in ways I haven't seen before about the potential of tablets, and I predict this will raise their game as teachers that will emphasize the importance of mobile and publishing in new platforms.
The co-op model is one to watch in 2012.
I read about it here on Nieman Lab, and this is one of the most interesting ideas I've read about in the future-of-news space in quite some time. I'm interested to see how it plays out.
Posted: 19 Dec 2011 09:00 AM PST
I’ve thought that perhaps a panel of product creators could give awards to journalism that really captures the spirit of technology. The goal would be to move away from the lone inventor myth and see tech projects as more like film production or a even more apt, a TV series. Software is a process. It’s not like Starry Night, as Joni Mitchell said, but it’s not like a song either. It’s like Breaking Bad or Dexter or Boardwalk Empire.1
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Today, it’s web pioneer Dave Winer, a man key to the evolution of many of the publishing technologies we use online today, and currently a visiting scholar in journalism at NYU.
Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard has asked me to contribute a piece for their end-of-year roundup. I did one last year. I guess we were thinking about paywalls then. It’s not such a hot topic now.
At the end of this year I’m thinking about the need for proper criticism of software, alongside other arts like theater, movies, music, books, travel, food and architecture. It’s finally time to stop being all gee whiz about this stuff. Tech is woven into the fabric of our culture, as much as or more so than the other arts. And it’s headed toward being even more interwoven.
We all need this, on all sides of the art. As users and creators. There’s very little understanding of how we work. That’s illustrated perfectly by the Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs. We now see what a disaster this is going to be, from the future-historian point of view.
If I could nudge the editorial people in a new direction, this would be it.
Let’s advance the art of technology criticism.
PS: I’d also like to see J-school students learn how to manage infrastructure.
Notes
  1. And when a developer sells out and the acquirer shuts the service down, it’s like Deadwood, leaving the users in a lurch, wishing to know how it turned out! :-( Ian MacShane: “You’ll never know what the fuck really happened.”
    Joni Mitchell: “That’s one thing that’s always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that’s it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ You know? He painted it and that was it.”
Posted: 19 Dec 2011 06:00 AM PST
We already see versioning strategies at work in the "metered" programs operated by a growing number of papers, including the Financial Times, The New York Times, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Readers lacking a willingness to pay get limited access to the papers' sites for free. Readers who value the content more highly, and hence are willing to pay for it, subscribe for a fee to gain unlimited access. And readers with the greatest willingness to pay shell out even more money to receive both the print edition and unfettered online access. Appification provides an opportunity to create many more versions of the same basic content and deliver them to different customer segments. In 2012, we'll see versioning strategies become not only more common in the newspaper business but more intricate, sophisticated, and lucrative.
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
To kick things off, it’s Nicholas Carr, the veteran technology writer, whose most recent book — The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains — was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.
For years now, the line between the software business and the media business has been blurring. Software applications used to take the form of packaged goods, sold through retail outlets at set prices. Today, as a result of cloud computing and other advances, applications look more and more like media products. They're ad-supported, subscribed to, continually updated, and the content they incorporate is often as important as the functions they provide. As traditional media companies have moved to distribute their wares in digital form — as code, in other words — they've come to resemble software companies. They provide not only original content, but an array of online tools and functions that allow customers to view, manipulate, and add to the content in myriad ways.
During 2011, the blending of software and media accelerated greatly, thanks to what might be termed the dis-integration of the internet. The old general-purpose web, where everyone visited the same sites and saw the same stuff, is rapidly being supplanted by specialized packages of digital content geared to particular devices — iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Kindle, Nook, Xbox — or to particular members-only sites like Facebook and Google+. Not only has the net left its Wild West days; it's entered the era of the gated suburban subdivision. As part of this trend, the open, HTML-based website is being replaced, or at least supplemented, by the proprietary app. In app stores, the already blurry line between software and media disappears altogether. Apps are as much content-delivery services as they are conventional software programs. Newspapers, magazines, books, games, music albums, TV shows: All are being reimagined as apps. Appified, if you will.

Appification promises to be the major force reshaping media in general and news media in particular during 2012. The influence will be exerted directly, through a proliferation of specialized media apps, as well as indirectly, through changes in consumer attitudes, expectations, and purchasing habits. There are all sorts of implications for newspapers, but perhaps the most important is that the app explosion makes it much easier to charge for online news and other content. That's true not only when the content is delivered through formal apps but also when it is delivered through traditional websites, which may themselves come to be viewed by customers as a form of app. In the old world of the open web, paying for online content seemed at best weird and at worst repugnant. In the new world of the app, paying for online content suddenly seems normal. What's an app store but a series of paywalls?
Appification opens to newspapers the powerful marketing and pricing strategy that the Berkeley economist (and now Google executive) Hal Varian dubs "versioning." Long a cornerstone of the software business, versioning is the practice of creating many versions of the same underlying informational product, packaging them in different ways, and selling them at different prices to different sets of customers. A software maker, for example, may give away a bare-bones version of an application, sell a version with more features to mainstream consumers at a modest price, and offer a high-end version, perhaps combined with added services, to professional users at a premium price. As Varian explains, "The point of versioning is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay. Consumers with high willingness to pay choose one version, while consumers with lower willingnesses [sic] to pay choose a different version. The producer chooses the versions so as to induce the consumers to 'self select' into appropriate categories."
The orthodox view among online pundits has been that paywalls and subscription fees won't work for general-interest newspapers, that people simply won't pay for a bundle of news online. Last year, media blogger Jeff Jarvis dismissed The New York Times' metered plan as "cockeyed economics." Earlier this year, Nieman Lab blogger Martin Langeveld opined that "newspapers are slowly digging their graves by building paywalls." It seems likely that 2012 will be the year when we stop hearing such gloomy proclamations. Well-designed versioning strategies, spanning various devices, formats, functions, content bundles, and access plans, will provide smart newspapers with new ways to charge for their products, in both digital and print form, without sacrificing the unique opportunities presented by online distribution. That won't mean the end of the industry's struggles, but it does portend a brighter future. And that's good news.
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