Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 65

News(paper)

Friend Michael Rosenblum forwarded word that the Star-Ledger in New Jersey was just nominated for seven local Emmys for its video work. Bravo for my old friends there and for Rosenblum, who trained them .

I remember when my old colleague Jim Willse, then editor of the Ledger, told me he wanted to get the paper into video and I begged him not to do what other papers had done: turn out pale copies and unintentional parodies of local TV news, something that deserves no emulation. I introduced...

Marketing's next

Meredith, the magazine publisher, is taking on functions of ad agencies, as the Wall Street Journal describes in detail today. It's a smart move by Meredith and it's inevitable as we shift from selling scarcity to selling service to marketers. Meredith is taking on the functions of a creative agency. In a networked media ecosystem, I also think that media companies will take on the functions of the media-buying side.

See also this piece arguing that a company should invest not in marketing...

Demand Media's advisors

Demand Media just announced the formation of an advisory board; Staci Kramer has the details at PaidContent. I was invited to join but decided to decline. I've been saying a lot about Demand — sometimes disagreeing with the common and negative perception that it is a content farm, arguing that we should not miss the key insights and lessons in Demand's model (first, finding new ways to listen to what readers and the market want and letting that be its assignments and second, cutting content c...

Italy endangers the web

Italy is endangering the web. It convicted three Google executives for privacy violations for a video that was posted on YouTube that Google took down when it received a complaint. By holding Google liable for the actions of a user, the Italian court is in essence requiring Google and every other web site to review and vet everything anyone puts online. The practical implication of that, of course, is that no one will let anyone put anything online because the risk is too great. I wouldn't...

Media's evolving spheres of discovery

Here's another in an occasional series of posts to "> that try to examine, explain, and illustrate the new structure of media. This one looks at how we discover content now.

Back in the day, a decade (to 50 decades) ago, we discovered media — news, information, or service — through brands: We went and bought the newspaper or magazine or turned on a channel on its schedule. That behavior and expectation was brought to the internet: Brands built sites and expected us to come t...

Paid Content on paid content

Paid Content is holding a conference on paid content. I'm there. Sigh. No surprise that I think this is too much focus on one model and meme.

At the start, James McQuivey of Forrester says: "People don't pay for content and they never have… They have always paid for access to content. In the past, access happened to be gated by analog constraints." We correlated the form – the gate – with the content. He argues that we are paying more for access but didn't pay for content. "Media have always ...

OD on me

I'm talking too much.

For the rest of today (Friday), you can get free access to webcast I did yesterday for What Would Google Do? Warning: 90 min.

Here's video of a talk I did not Beta, likely to be my next book.

Here's a panel I moderated on teaching entrepreneurial journalism.

Here's the latest Guardian Media Talk USA, with Natalie del Conte and Fred Graver.

And here's the latest This Week in Google with a good discussion of Buzz with Leo Laporte, Kevin Marks, and Jyri Engström.

And, yes, ...

Helping news be news

Google News has just open-sourced its code to create what it calls Living Stories. What this really is, I think, is Google's attempt to take editors to school on content presentation in our new world.

The article, I've argued, is outmoded as the building block of news. The new atomic unit(s) of journalism needs to reflect the transition of news from a product to a process. It needs to gather updates and corrections on a story. It needs to put that story in context and history. It needs to...

Next to the gallows: Newspaper coupons

The best reason that some newspapers have to stay in print — at least a few days a week — is to distribute coupons and circulars (free-standing inserts, or FSIs, in the jargon). But as newspaper circulation declines below critical mass and as digital means of delivery of coupons and bargains catch on, the FSI line of business is the next to fall over the cliff for papers.

Rick Edmonds at Poynter writes about an NAA study that says the coupon business for newspapers is under siege. Meanwhile, ...

Buzz: A beta too soon

As soon as Buzz was announced — before I could try it — I tried to intuit its goals and I found profound opportunities.

Now that I've tried it, reality and opportunity a fer piece apart. It's awkward. I'd thought that I had wanted Twitter to be threaded but I was wrong; the simplest point quickly passes into an overdose of add-ons. Worse, Google didn't think through critical issues of privacy — and it only gets worse (via danah boyd). I won't go as far as Steve Rubel and some others, who...