Collate Info from Spy Agencies -- the Way Marketers Do

This Holiday Season, as we all dish on whether we will be forced to go commando on flights in order to prevent any more undie bombers, or whether we will inflict terror on poor TSA agents by parading starkers through body scans, I can't help but wonder why our spy agencies aren't enlisting the same tools marketers have at their disposal.

For instance, folks at Nielsen's Buzz Metrics and Evolve 24 have been collating what people say and do in media and blogs, with how product sales and/or stock prices will perform. They ingest literally millions of articles and blog posts every single day, parse by clients (and their competitors), and look for sentiment toward each subject. They then can predict, with a fair degree of certainty, the outcome of key performance indicators. By semantically analyzing and collating "buzz" about brands -- can't these same agencies do this with "chatter" about targets?

Maybe I am missing something here, but if Amazon has powerful relational databases to know that if I bought a Sony Minicam a year -- I just might want a tripod this year, why can't our spy agencies put together that studying Arabic in Yemen + attending a highly-watched Islamic Center in London + buying a ticket (extra points if paid with cash) + traveling with no baggage on a trip to the US (Detroit, I might add, where the average temperature is below freezing -- did he even have a coat?) -- adds up to "likely candidate to blow up a plane?" At the very least, he deserves extra screening. (I cross at the US/Canadian borders at least monthly and have found some very well-skilled interrogators who ask off-handed, yet key questions focused on my rationale for crossing: what will the temperature in Montreal be this week? Who pitched for the Yankees and Blue Jays? If I don't have an answer -- I should be pulled over.)

While screening air passengers to that level of detail may be difficult (if keeping the airline industry aloft is at all a goal), certainly we should be able to winnow the list from the millions who fly to the thousands who deserve extra scrutiny. Where are the econometricians, the semantic analysts, the library scientists that do Boolean queries?  Maybe the TSA needs a CMO to show how to really build a profile that is predictive.

A season to believe in miracles ... Newsrooms will hire again!

So sayeth E.W. Scripps' CEO Rich Boehne in address at the annual UBS Conference. Boehne described current news offerings as suffering from "a plague of sameness," (McNews, anyone?) and asserts that better quality can broaden the audience. Scripps, which owns 10 stations, is hoping it will be the beneficiary from "a great consolidation opportunity" as weaker competing news stations drop out.

'Tis the season to be cheery as more competition fails.

Tip Jars for Content

It's no secret that news sites are having a difficult time figuring out the monetization of its news online. Goes back to what I have always contended -- people pay for service -- not content. We pay for the service of our news being delivered, we pay our Internet provider a monthly fee and we pay our cell-phone carrier for the service. (We even pay for water that comes in a bottle -- but watch us howl if someone put a lock-box on a water fountain.)

This doesn't bode well when the content provider is not the service provider, aka the newspapers with their online news. The Miami Herald took what many in the industry believe is the equivalence of passing a hat by asking for donations to continue its breaking news coverage. Cheeky bloggers wrote that the mighty Herald had stooped to asking for handouts. Headlines mocked with Brother Can You Spare a Dime. Others like Steve Outing, blogger for the Poynter Institute, approved the move but said it was too subtle (the graphic appears at the end of stories - he suggests a window after a certain number of articles are consumed), too difficult (credit card only -- no PayPal!) and too open-ended (send whatever you want). Outing urged a more blatent, targeted and convenient approach, such as Kachingle (Outing, himself, uses Kachingle) which is sort of the United Way for supporting bloggers and journalists. Pay once and Kachingle doles it out.

Outing makes very good points, particularly in suggesting easier methods of pay. Fundraising 101 says to suggest payment amounts. If the Herald is hoping for $40 per reader, then they ask query should be something like $20 $50 $100 and other. (Museums have a pay-what-you-want model - -but normally for a single day a week -- while charging for other days.

There may be little precedent from other media for the Herald to draw on -- except perhaps from Wikipedia which raised $3m in this fashion. Still, to ease the queasiness, perhaps content sites should look at the financial models of museums -- which rely on annual memberships to fund events and attractions. Bundle content, a discount book and a free map. Suddenly, content sites are selling a service, which people seem to value inherently.

P&G's Content Marketing Serial Folds

This week, Proctor & Gamble announced its long-running serial, "As the World Turns" air its last episode in September 2010. The announcement marks the end of 73 years of creating content - to sell product. Specifically, soap. Which is how P&G coined the name "soap opera." P&G realized that if they produced addicting content, they would build a loyal following who would also hear their product pitches.

The times they are a changing -- but using content to sell product is not. P&G has the art of serving up content to increase audience loyalty mastered BeingGirl.com and Home Made Simple are two web community sites that unabashedly splash the P&G logo and product around. According to Josh Bernoff, analyst at Forrester, "Procter & Gamble's BeingGirl.com, an online community for adolescent girls, is four times as effective as a similarly priced marketing program in traditional media. Initiatives like BeingGirl.com require a long-term commitment," he added.

While the daytime serial has not yet translated to the Web (apparently the costs are prohibitive), rest assured that P&G will continue to be in the content business -- as much as they are in the soap and personal products one.

Days Late & Business Week is for Sale for a Dollar

McGraw Hill is shopping Business Week and the talk on the streets is that the 80 years of content will be available for a stunning $1. That's not a typo. That is one dollar (I am assuming US). So what gives? Isn't the archives of 80 years worth a heckuva lot more than $1 -- as well as the subscriber list of nearly a million names?

I spoke with Reed Phillips, Managing Partner, Philips DeSilva who helped unravel the challenges that print companies like McGraw Hill are facing. "The assets are certainly worth more than a dollar," he agreed. "The problem is the losses are far outweighing the positives." Anyone who buys Business Week would take on the liability of servicing nearly a million subscribers -- "from whom McGraw Hill has already taken the cash." He estimated that servicing alone costs roughly $30-40 million. Additionally, the company lost nearly $90 million in revenue in the first half of this year alone is part of the tale.

"If it was easy to fix, McGraw Hill would have done it," he added.

Maybe so, but loving a challenge, here is what I would do if I had the opportunity.

Make sure all content was digitally available
I don't know whether Business Week's entire archive has been digitized or not -- but would invest to make it so.

Semantically Index All Content
By linguistically analyzing and enriching all content, I would have a better understanding of just what that 80-year archive contained:

• Number of pieces of content under a given topic
• Word count for each article
• Tone of every article by Organization

By the way, I would semantically analyze the comments too.

Relate & Link
Similar content should be easily linked so editors on the back end can find and package it, while readers on the front end can consume it. Business Week is thick with content -- just make it a little easier for people to find related information.

Assess My Content
Is my content heavy in one vertical? Weak in another? Which stories are beneficial to my key advertisers? How can my content help businesses make better decisions? After doing a census, I'd look at ways to monetize that content through licensed reprints, targetted advertising, business search.

Churn My Subscribers
As subscriptions lapse, don't renew them -- at least not the print version. If it costs $40 million dollars to service subscribers -- and lord knows the costs for billing, circulation, marketing, and all the internal support for all those staffers ... scaling back to deliver only digital may be the most sane thing to do.

Would that all of this fix all the problems at Business Week? Possibly. Somehow a day late and a dollar short comes to mind.

Intellectual Property, Links & Moats

Riddle me this: What do high-end furniture manufacturers and newspapers have in common? They both are terrified that the Web is ruining their businesses, so their response has been (to want) to build a big moat around their intellectual property. Yikes! are those water moccasins and alligators in those moats?

Seriously, both groups hate the Internet for what it stands for: business interruption, paradigm upheaval and an inability to figure out how to monetize the new economy -- while standing still and pouting.

Both these businesses, and you can throw in the music publishers, fashion designers, software creators and any other industry where the product (or a representation of it) can be shared digitally -- and where the distribution channel has more perceived valuable than the content itself.

Let me write that again: the distribution channel was perceived to be more valuable than the content itself. What in the world do I mean by that? Well ask Sony -- which had its tentacles into deejay playlists and decided which songs it would promote and which it would bury. Since the corporations had such a chokehold on distribution, artists and inventors were forced to virtually hand over their intellectual property – in hopes that someday their ship would come in.

If the artist’s brand begins to flourish – the power of the channel begins to diminish. The iPod democratized the music industry by allowing the brand and consumer to connect -- further weakening the channel. Despite the fact the music industry is hotter than ever -- the distributors bitch and moan -- and they should! Where else are they going to find plum jobs for merely managing reports? The benefactors now are the musicians -- and Apple!

In newspaper and magazine publishing -- the ideas now available on the Internet make the newsstand immaterial. In fashion and home furnishings the designs can be copied by knockoff artists. And both groups are up in arms and pulling up the drawbridge - and wanting to break links! But what none of these groups realize is that the brand itself is what reinforces the value of the intellectual property. Investing in the brand is what offers protections -- not moats, nor misguided suggestions by judges to disallow linking to protect thought.

There is an opportunity now for the creator to have a direct relationship with the audience. So while the channels weep and moan for being kicked off their perches, indie artists, bloggers, authors, even furniture designers are able to find ways to reap new rewards. Yes, eventually new distribution channels will evolve – although chances are the business model won’t be as ‘feudalistic’ as before; with corporations owning the intellectual property and controlling every aspect.

In the meantime, for the publishers, brand manufacturers, musicians and all other intangible creators out there -- assess what the public will value – and associate your brand with that. The money will follow.

Open Letter to Eric Hippeau

Dear Mr. Hippeau:
Kudos on the new role as CEO of Huffington Post!

Have been a huge fan of Huff-Po for almost two years now, although in the last 12 months, the site has gone from a once-in-a-while nosh to a 10-times-a-day fix. (I couldn't wait to find out what happened to Mark Sanford, really. It reminded me of the time the Atlantic City mayor went AWOL -- turned out that was just because the feds were closing in on him for impersonating a military person of importance. I, myself, was convinced Sanford ducked into rehab; the whole Argentinian affair just seemed a bit too exotic for such a vanilla-looking guy.)

In any event I read where you don't feel a need to "fix" the HP -- you merely want to grow it. And according to Ad Age -- a Venture Capitalist with a publishing pedigree -- is just the person to do it. Still this is the Digital Age, and I thought you might be open to a few suggestions from a digital media specialist who happens to be a fan.

First, I love the curator approach. And you have to wonder why all these media companies out there that own a gazillion titles couldn't have done the same thing. Oh yeah, I remember why. They didn't want anyone else to represent their news. 'Nuff said.

Second, I would like you to thank Godz & whomever found Jason Linkins. His willingness to scribe/stomach the Sunday morning bloviators has saved me so much time -- I was able to create this new blog!

And, Nico Pitney. Seriously, Pitney has a rare passion and connection with people. His coverage on Iran -- with his tenacity for gathering tweets and emails from around the globe may be the finest example of reporting today. He hasn't turned cynical -- yet. Take some of that $25 million and make sure he has enough cab fare to get to White House Press Conferences in time. The big boys won't move out of the way for him next time, now that they know a) he will really get tapped by the President to ask a question and b) and Pitney will be smart and respecting enough to ask a real grown-up question.

Now I have a few minor nits. Headlines, like today's hed: "Obey Accused of Pushing Waters." Now when I read the article, it really didn't deliver the goods. Maxine screeched "you touched me first," (which sort of suggests she broke the close-talking shield and may have touched him. Granted the thought is stomach turning, so let me get back to heds). Too often they are:

1. salacious
2. misleading
3. flat out wrong
4. all of the above

Look. There are enough scandals around that your copy writers should not feel the need to create news when none abounds. If they have a great hed -- tell them to put it in a drawer -- and wait five minutes and either Jon & Kate or David & Maxine will allow the hed to be relevant. You have one chance to make a good impression -- keep baiting with headlines and not delivering and you will pay a price eventually. Consider mining your comments, people call out when they feel they are being used as a tool.

Tagging. Now I know your writers do a great job. In fact, the beat all estimates by the scores of editors with whom I have spoken, who lament that they can't get their writers to do more than 3 tags. But maybe you need to broaden the categories for them. For instance, the tragic deaths of John Travolta's son and actress Natasha Richardson were announced under the category of Entertainment. There is something really disconcerting about seeing that word above the story of how a slight fall on the bunny hill killed a beautiful actress.

Now, I'll leave it to you whether you think that any article, video or photo that has Michele Bachmann in it should ever be on the main site, let alone categorized as Politics. Personally I believe she belongs on 23/6.

Search. I get it that you want to be the most current anthology available. However, sometimes I want to find that article that I saw on your site that I never would have found since I don't read The State, and I would like to have some chance of finding it again. The Google search is anemic, and there is so much technology out there to make it better!! (Trust me, I speak on this subject all the time. People inherently want to find things -- and search can be such an exercise in futility!)

Oh yeah, one more thing. This isn't a nit -- but a suggestion none-the-less: Have fun with your new role and continue to innovate. The rest of the media world is/should be watching.

Best regards,

Diane

PayPal for a Free & Open Media

The future of newspapers -- is not really something I lose sleep over. The better concern should be: The future of a free and open media. The media that is supposed to be the checks and balances to the government (instead of shills). With media jettisoning news creators -- read that: bonafide journalists, the question is: who will do the work? Better still: who will pay them to do the work?

The New York Times had a front cover story of a Pennsylvania VA Hospital that didn't have safeguards in place so that a rogue doctor was able to botch about 90 routine prostate procedures -- errantly putting radioactive seeds in bladders and rectums to consign his patients to a life of misery. The article ran easily 5000 words -- and probably took hundreds of hours to pull together. That's one mere example of good reporting -- and doesn't take into account the hundreds of thousands put in by good journalists all over the country safeguarding our democracy. Who will pay for this? Syndicated columnis Aaron Harber presents some very timely and well-thought out suggestions on the future of news gathering.

Let's face it, the commercialization of the media has not been a panacea. Not much is open nor free when media owners squash or skew stories because it may offend an advertiser. (You are naive if you think this doesn't happen.) Still, most of think of news coverage as a de facto right -- and expect to have people committing hours of their life tracking down the truth for us. But are we willing to pay for high quality reporting?

What is the value in the news gathering efforts -- listening for leads, reaching out to victims, researching backgrounds, interviewing countless sources -- many of whom can't keep facts straight, delving into databases -- to then sit down and right a 5000-word piece? (And that is 5000 words that follow rules of grammar -- no smilies and no abbrev.) How do we subsidize what might have been months of work for our behalf?

In watching this Iranians struggle to find the truth we can see first hand the value of news. But of course there is an intense distrust of our own media -- which may have been made worse by Vanity Fair's Matt Pressman's navel-gazing attempt to get at the "truth." The deal is there is a very good chance that our gravy train will end; that there might cease to be major corporations willing to pay staffs of people on average upwards of $50,000 a year to report on abuses and scandals. And when that happens, we may find ourselves helping to support passionate activists like Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, an Iranian emigree, who is fully dedicated to getting out news about her native country -- and who lives on the PayPal donations of others -- in the home of her parents.

"Content" is in the Eye of the Beholder

Interesting column by Burst Media's CEO and President Jarvis Coffin on the impact of ads when placed with relevant content. Burst Media is an online ad network that serves the "Long Tail-type" publishers -- the smaller, niched sites that tend to attract more passionate followers. Full disclosure, my site, Pure Contemporary has been part of the Burst network for several years. Coffin was citing a recent Conde Nast study (reported in MediaPost) that highlighted that people remember ads better if they are in viewed in conjunction with contextually-related content. And thus, Coffin states, content is king.

The study also revealed that people seemingly tend to tire of ads more quickly online than in print -- that is if they even notice them at all. (Which is a particularly nice piece of by-the-way-information to know if you have print space that you are trying to peddle!) In fact, the numbers were really not friendly to online: According to data released earlier in the year by Condé Nast and McPheters & Co., 63 percent -- of banner ads were not seen by Web users: Respondents' eyes "passed over" 37 percent of the Internet ads and "stopped" on slightly less than a third, McPheters found. The recall rate was much higher for print and tv.

Since most studies can be looked at from different angles, Coffin had an interesting theory, which I buy. He surmised that perhaps the online world is a victim of its own success: the fact that we so highly target ads that those same dang ads seem to follow us from site to site because those ads have been so tied to us as individuals and our behaviors!

I had two other thoughts as well. 1) Aside from Apple's page-dominating advertising banners, online ads are beyond ho-hum. Back in the day, ad agencies made their money creating creative -- the :30 spot and the full-color ads got the ka-chings going. Very little of those creative juices seem to be spent online. And, 2) content is king!!! But i don't take such a narrow view on what content is.




Since there is plenty of research that supports contextually relevant content increases recall, why are marketers limited to only a banner ad to market their wares? For years, the conventional wisdom has been that only media companies can produce content -- since they are the producers of news. And everyone know that news is content. But, news is not the only form of content. And this is where I drag out my soapbox and remind everyone that: If you have a website that attracts more than your mom, spouse and kids, then guess what? You are a content producer.

Not convinced? Well how about this. If a person is looking for work, the jobs listings are content. If they are looking to go out, restaurant directories -- and proximity to the reader, are now content. Looking for a flat screen tv that will fit not stick out more than 3" -- than guess what, BestBuy or Amazon are now content. All of these examples are types of content that would be traditionally categorized as ads.

Media sites and marketers need to put their chocolate and peanut butter together and make some yummy new content than can be contextually relevant to the media site's news -- and now give readers some recall that has a punch! On Pure Contemporary we offer product catalog pages -- controlled by our marketers -- that are contextually tied to real legit stories. Both the "legit stories" and the catalog pages are both considered content to our readers!!

Content may be king, in fact context may be even more kingly -- but contextually relevant content is, to some degree, in the eye of the beholder.

The 4-1-1 on Twitter as a 9-1-1 Interface

Is Twitter the new 911? My twittering debut was in December 2007 after reading a post by a Poynter Institute columnist suggested that twittering was a great tool for journalists. My opening salvo was neither memorable nor liberating, and my tweets were fleeting. I was merely going through the motions to research this new communication device akin to an ethnographer wishing to fit in with her subjects. How this would assist me in finding leads was lost to me, I certainly didn't have time to just watch responses. Further, I found it weird that total strangers wanted to follow me -- and wondered if I should be prepared to take out a restraining order.

But my attitude changed in April 2008 when an American student was detained in Egypt. With 132 characters to spare, he typed ARRESTED, and his cadre of followers sprung into action, creating a global response team that extended from the United States Embassy to the University of California Berkeley to spring the 29-year old -- who had only sent his first Twitter message a week before.

Twitter, as everyone under 35 knows, is a community-based tool that allows people to broadcast messages to their followers – 140 characters at a time. The short bursts are perfect to stay up to speed via cell phone text messages, and are the darling of teens looking to find their peeps in shopping malls.

Or so I thought. The Egypt episode was an ah-ha moment that spurred a real interest in Twittering. The power of narrowcasting was more evident. My real conversion came in May of this year when Kwanza Hall, an Atlanta councilman, saw a woman in distress and tweeted:

Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson st. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet

Since he is running for mayor his followers are many and they in turn called 9-1-1. He stated he tweeted versus calling the emergency response system, because his cell battery was low and was afraid of losing the call while on hold. Apparently, weeks earlier, a home in Atlanta had caught fire and managed to burn to the ground while witnesses listened to Musak. Unless the fire chief is Twittering, not sure how to get around this

In the state that bans gay marriage, San Francisco Mayor Gaven Newsome married Twitter with its 3-1-1 system. Three-one-one is the communciation system put in place to take the burden off the emergency system -- but still allowed the community to report things like car-eating potholes. The San Francisco call center will use CoTweet to manage and track tweets to its SF311.

At Gilbane I spoke with social media guru Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester, who is a strong believer in Twitter as an emergency response interface. "The challenge with Twitter is the network," he told me. "It isn't reliable. However, it can be a great tool to interface with a city's disaster planning and response."

The nightmares of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina exposed the frailties of communications networks and the disastrous consequences that occur in their absence. Twitter might only be in its infancy, but it has proven that any one of us is a mere 6-degrees of tweets away from help in life-or-death situations.

Semantic Metadata & Sagacious Serendipty

I sat in numerous conferences at the Gilbane conference in San Francisco last week listening to and, preparing to speak on, search. Personally I want to see this word retired, as it conjures up phrases like “…in vain,” “desperately seeking,” and images of poor Diogenes schlepping around Athens with his lamp and cynicism. Or, closer to home, the time I had to find 40 pairs of white tube socks, seamless, for a snowman project for my son’s class (during a snowstorm no less). Since that “in vain,” “desperately seeking” experience, I only volunteer to bake brownies.

But I digress. Now don’t get me wrong; I am not one of those protectionists that is against sharing content. Personally I think sharing is a good thing. What I am against is the word search itself. Because which of us wants to search anyway? I’d rather be finding things, like the $100 bill on the sidewalk outside the OTB located around the corner from my apartment. Or the brand new earring I had lost – and found – outside my car door. Find is about that Eureka! moment; that culmination of both relief and joy that comes with discovery. While search to me is futile and thankless toiling.

Public site search for the most part makes me crazy. Like the time I went to a city’s business site to look for someone – and for whatever reason was inexplicably given people with the same name located from other cities and states. Upon further digging, I “found” the person I was looking for on the site. The search tool just didn’t filter the results by the geographic location I was actually in. It just pulled people with the same name and vomited it out results. Well really, how interested are you going to be in something that was just vomited at you?

Physical-world architects have long known that site satisfaction and return visits are highly correlated. That people explore their environments encumbered by whatever stresses in their lives: are they late for a meeting? in dire need of a restroom? Do they have specific destinations in mind – or are they out for a stroll and will respond to whatever catches their fancy? The physical world uses many different types of sensory cues to guide people.

The digital world is more limited when it comes to sensory cues -- but there is a way to create a framework to allow people greater site satisfaction and discovery. The key is Metadata. As my friend Ali Rahman says, “metadata provide a big picture and a detailed view of your information. Now we are not talking about generic, run of the mill metadata. The type that says the type of file, the date created, modified, type of format and so on.A ccording to Kent State's College of Library & Information Science, that type is called Administrative Metadata.

No, the type of metadata I am talking about is more Xtreme, if you will. The academics at Kent State call it descriptive metadata, while the folks at Nstein prefer to call it semantic metadata (semdata??). It is metadata that is generated using a multi-faceted approach of computational and linguistic analysis. It not only extracts meaning from documents – but also embeds the synonyms, summary, categories, even the tone, in order to create a linguistic fingerprint. This linguistic fingerprint can then be matched against any other linguistic fingerprint – to find like pieces of content.

Having this metadata means you can create interesting ways to guide people through the site. Go back to the shopping mall metaphor: The mall maps group stores by category – such as women’s shoes -- look at the map, check where you are -- and voila! you are on your way. In the digital world, commerce sites do a super job faceting information so that a person can be guided right to the shoe they want to buy, allowing people to search by Color, Brand, Size, even Heel Height!

But commerce sites are easy – as that data is fairly structured since information is normalized and sitting in fields with headers that say “heel height.” Prose and rich media are considered unstructured, using synonyms and inferences, and as such, are much harder to correlate. Semantically analyzing and enriching content allows sites to marry content – even if those words are not explicitly used! This allows content to be packaged together so people can find what they are looking for without breaking a sweat.

Serendipity is often referred to as an accidental discovery -- but in science, serendipity is linked with sagacity which presupposes a framework that facilitates discovery. The use of semantic metadata provides a matrix of "triggers" from which people are now able to have more meaningful explorations -- leading to those highly coveted finds.

Take it from Diogenes: search just doesn’t guarantee that you will locate what you are looking for.

Reader, Visitors, Users ... Oh My!

What to call your followers? Software had users, newspaper readers, television viewers, radio listeners, then came convergence and the 'Net and we couldn't figure out what the entity that traipsed from site to site should be called. "Readers," affirmed newspapers, "Visitors" chimed broadcasters -- a term more universally adopted with the advent of Online Ads and the Unique Visitor metric. And CMS vendors, which sold software to its customers -- some of which required clients, so they could reach their users.

So it is stunning and shocking to have The New York Times, suddenly shift gears and rename its followers to the more cyberian "user." According to Derek Gottfrid, senior software architect and product technologist at The Times, speaking at a Ad Age's Creativity and Technology Conference, readers evoke passivity. The new consumer of the Times, with its open interface is invited to be more active, developing applications, and "using" the site.

I have an issue with Users as they sound like Takers -- and with content free, that may be apropos. On the other hand, folks that are Using, often end up paying for their addictions, so perhaps, in the end, the name change is good.

New Century, New Non-sense

Newspaper executives met in Chicago this past week to bemoan their collective debts, declining revenues and inability to figure out how to make money on the Web. The event was organized by the remaining staffers of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) and according to an agenda obtained by the Associated Press, was called "Models to Lawfully Monetize Content." Purportedly, a anti-trust lawyer was present to warn participants when they were drifting too close to the collusion line.

A day or decade too late and a dollar short, they have apparently decided that they must charge for content, despite the fact that there are few examples out there of companies that have had success with it. I know, I know, the Wall Street Journal charges -- yes, and as Jeff Jarvis points out those fees are expensed by corporate credit cards, not home subscribers. Still what else is a dying news-on-pulp company to do?

The EditorsWeblog saw the summit as a good thing, since the fact that they are kibitzing is a sign that care and thought are going into changing any business models. I am afraid I don't share the same enthusiasm. In April 1995, 8 major newspaper publishers formed the New Century Network (NCN) to create a gated information community -- one sign in would allow access to all the great content that those companies spewed. Each one ponied up a million dollars, and then started bickering on which browser to adopt. Unbelievably they insisted on a proprietary browser versus the open Mosaic. At the end of three years, they had figured out a way to squandar $26m.

I remember the timing well as I had just formed the Interactive Division for New Jersey Press -- and my first official decision was to not join NCN. I spent the million figuring out how to build a statewide Internet dial-up network and news portal instead.

To attract a mass audience -- you need masses -- which you don't get using proprietary interfaces, just ask AOL, CompuServe and all the rest of the bulletin board systems that have come and gone.

But the industry has always been less about providing access and more about protectionism, which in many ways is both ironic and paradoxical. The news industry used to represent "the free press." With free not being a modifier meaning without value, but rather, without restraints. That one needed to jump through hoops to gain access to the news is another issue.

The industry failed with its last century network because it failed to understand technology and how people adopt to it. The industry will fail with this century's network -- because it fails to realize that it is no longer the only news source. In fact, it stopped being the only news source when it took its eye off the ball of serving the community with news -- and started trimming costs to please shareholders. Newspapers commoditized their own products when they resorted to stringers instead of beat reporters; when they opted for wire copy instead of creating new. And the shareholders were relentless. When the coffee and the excess bureaus had been axed, it was now time to trim marrow.

What is it now that people would be paying for? Bloggers and citizen journalists are scooping the pros -- who are now restrained from following leads because it may annoy a corporate "benefactor." Being cautious is good, being solicitous is not. For news organizations to succeed online they must provide value -- and I don't see how circling the wagons is going to do anything but dim their prospects faster.

Disintermediation: Opportunity & Analysis

"The Media should charge for content," so sayeth pundits about news sites.

Should is such an interesting verb that stretches from mandate to polite suggestion. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers (in order): to express condition, obligation, futurity, what is probable or expected, and finally, to "express a request in a polite manner." The pundits no doubt are more than suggesting, and are obliging that the media must charge for content.

Really, I would venture that media companies are not actually adverse to charging for content, but since most haven't since their initial foray onto the web, can't figure out how to do so without committing suicide. (At the recent min summit, Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller was urging his fellow publishers to lock up their content behind a paywall!) Despite that, Rupert Murdoch is said to be establishing a strategic team to figure out how he can charge for his print properties. And The New York Times is toying with a few different ideas. Of the two mentioned (metering content consumption and charging for overage vs. creating a membership community) I am partial to the community idea which is the model used by museums.

My friend Michael Chwastiak sent me a link to Jason Pontin's prescription for saving publishers. I have read and re-read his (long) missive several times to cull the best points: you can charge for content that is uniquely intelligent and editors, nay, publishers, need to re-examine the needs of the audience. As I have written before, editors forget that as one generation passes the next generation may not have the same values and needs. Indeed, one fundamental change that has occurred is disintermediation. As readers can freely communicate with each other and vendors -- the role of media as gatekeeper has diminished from its historical role. But that does not mean the role of journalist/editor has ceased to be important.

Rather the role has evolved to be more of an analyst than merely story teller. With hundreds of comments and opinions at the ready, the new value is in interpreting that data. Synthesizing the thoughts of bloggers and commenters into content "reports" would provide more value than merely regurgitating another wire story.

This is the monetizable model that works for business intelligence companies and this is a model that should work for many media companies.

Tale of a Small Town Retailer

My 80-year old father started up a contemporary furniture boutique in 1959, and has weathered the cyclical and catastrophic ups and downs of his local Buffalo, NY, economy -- particularly the 1970s when Buffalo dropped from a top 20 metro market to a top 50. That slide represented population -- and dollars lost. Never large enough to expend huge dollars in advertising, he reached out to neighboring Toronto and Rochester by placing ads in the local YellowPages.

His turning point was the web. In 1995, his son-in-law John Kenyon and I put his store on the web, and for the next 13 years, the online drove the success of the store. The last 12 months have been a tough one for a luxury retailer -- although ironically enough, the local economy is doing pretty well. So online sales are down, and not wanting to stand still, the family business is looking to put a satellite store into a local shopping mall which attracts nearly 20,000 a day, 20 percent Canadian. The purpose of the store is to be a representative outpost of the larger, more secluded location.

The objective of this post is to show how real-world retailers, small business owners who represent employment for more than 50 percent of the population, are grappling with high costs of advertising and declining margins. When we in the media industry get together to pontificate -- we forget about this half of the equation: the small business owner.

In the past it made better sense to go for the long-ball, as these folks could be a pain in the ass to service, since they money they spend is usually their own -- and they are more emotionally tied to results. However, with the winds of change, the ball ain't sailing out of the park like it used to and media is forced to figure out how to serve that other half. But here's the thing, that other half doesn't feel they have a lot of viable, affordable and effective options when it comes to getting their messages out there. My dad's business is lucky; he had a son-in-law who understood the vision of the 'Net and a daughter in the digital business and the combination yielded a top-notch site long before others thought to get an email address. Many others his size didn't have the vision or know-how.

For newspapers and magazines to thrive on the web, they need to figure out how to serve this end of the market: the folks who would rather spend $500 a day to open a second location to reach 20,000 people daily -- because they aren't sure that $150,000 in advertising will yield the same results.

FT's Newssift: Power of Metadata Exposed (Finally!)

There is so much to celebrate with the Financial Time Group's debut of Newssift. Like a debutante at her coming out ball, Newssift turned heads and received appreciative glances. The question is will the market step up and marry itself to the new business search engine (a flirty glance is one thing, parting with actual dollars is a real commitment). The site, which is currently in beta is free -- for now. The goal of FT is to get visitors to consider the site their home for business intelligence -- after parlaying subscription dollars.

The real beauty of Newssift is in what you can't see: The metadata generated by semantic analysis. Yes, the interface offers visitors a very simplified mechanism from which to find the information they need. But it doesn't matter how sexy the interface or powerful the search engine (in this case Endeca) if the metadata extracted is not linguistically and computationally sound. As the online media expert for Nstein Technologies, I've been aware of this project for some time -- and am thrilled with Nstein's role in generating this rich metadata -- and am further thrilled that my job of educating others to the value of semantic search - is being made so much easier with Newssift's launch!

Unlike most search engines, which basically start with a blank slate and require users to type in a phrase, Newssift anticipates that a reader might be interested -- in what others are interested in. A data table presents top news of the day -- broken down by People, Places, Organizations, Business Topics & Themes. Readers can select one of those parameters -- or use the search bar to type in their own queries.



Now here is what makes Newssift unique. Like the name suggests, readers can continuously sift through information until they find the pearls of wisdom they are looking for. Each time a result is displayed -- readers can refine their search (mine down) using the table or the search bar. This may be one of the best instances of having these two querying mechanisms coupled to work together - because both are searching the metadata! (Too often the two methods are exclusive of each other.)

The result is that the interface provides a type of funnel to the information desired. The constant changing of the column parameters allows people to see what other information may exist -- enticing them to read things they may not have even considered. This process is critical information publishers for several reasons:

1. The process itself means people will likely stay longer and consume more pages. (Robin Johnson, CEO of Newssift, told me that early metrics showed a 3x increase in page stickiness -- all through contextual linking).
2. People don't know how to find information -- because they don't know what question to ask! (A fine list of why search engines are typically broken here.)
   
3. Seredipity is brought back into the equation. I may want to find out what's new about Swine Flu, and when I see Italy as an option -- it may entice me to discover what the Italian slant might be.
   

This initiative was in the works for nearly two years. And if you have ever hatched a brand new business within the walls of an old stalwart one, you know it is no small task. Johnson and his team not only had to create a business model that worked -- but they had to assemble a team of vendors like Nstein, Endeca and Lexalytics who could see the vision, adapt to the clients' needs and make the whole thing crystalize.

Newssift has accomplished much just by just package news in a faceted format that will entice many to dig deeper and in backing up this form with semantic metadata to make sure that the most relevant information is provided. I don't have a crystal ball, but my sense is Newssift will become a shining example of how information can be found, explored and digested -- putting to rest forever the idea of mere search.

A-B-C Revenue Generation: Do the Little Things Well

In baseball, lots of singles and doubles are more prevalent than a grand slam. More games are won with what former Yankee's Manager Joe Torre called "A-B-C baseball," a reference to doing all the little things right in the game.

On a hunch, while at the min day Summit in New York, I bumped into Hanley Wood President Peter Goldstone, and asked him what percentage of ad sales came from grand slams (major accounts). "Great question," he said, "we're doing an analysis right now and more and more it is the smaller accounts -- no doubt we need to do much more for this audience." Philippe Guelton, COO of Hachette told me it was dependent on the title, with Car & Driver supported mainly by eight large accounts, while the ratio was flipped for shelter magazines.

As large ad expenditures ebb (hopefully for just the short term), it is A-B-C baseball that will increase web revenues. But setting up an ad department predicated on selling grand slams is not the way to get there. "We had to reduce the cost of sales," explained Jeff DeBalko, Chief Internet Officer for Reed Business. "We can't be flying people around the country for $30,000 accounts."

Look for inside sales departments and self-serve ads to be the new norm, with many of the execs telling me that they are looking to set up directory listings. The key, said Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Forbes.com, is to look for ways to monetize differently. "Move your brand to the web," he told the audience, "not necessarily your product."

It's Mine -- But Not Just Mine Alone

Was on vacation last week, so just opened Mine, Time's new effort to give me news I will peruse.

The slim magazine features a silky matt cover and a compilation of stories decided by choices I made of whether I prefer sushi or pizza (both) or dinner with Socrates or Da Vinci (I can't remember my choice). Whatever I opted for provided me with an article from Travel& Leisure, Real Simple, Food & Wine, Time & Golf magazines. Each story maintained the brand of its parent -- so formating jumps from a serifed font, to non, back to serif, which was odd feeling. I understood what the marketing team was thinking, but it felt less like a magazine directed to me -- rather than a sales book for the brands.

I Googled one article, "South Africa's Beautiful Wine Country," and was stunned that the story was over two years old. I wondered if the nine restaurants listed were still even in business (in which case, that would be another story, "Restaurants Live Longer in South Africa."

The sole sponsor for the project was Lexus, and one ad touting it's Navigation System personalized "my ad" by inserting "fine food," "bistros" and the name of my town. I only know that these words were inserted because inexplicably they changed they shaded those words in the copy. Looked contrived.

I'm not saying this wasn't a good idea -- indeed I give huge kudos to Time, American Express & Lexus for being so innovative. Indeed the buzz it generated and the fact that I spent hours reading every morsel and dissecting what I was reading certainly surpassed the mere seconds people otherwise might spend on a page.

Yes, there were some glitches, mailing, stories chosen, old stories, and questionable decisions on layout and creative. But the bigger story is that the trio were willing to try something new, to get people excited. And in that regard, Mine is a huge success.

Quick Notes

• Bad news follows good for the New York Times, as it reports losses of $75m. Guess that is $15m per Pulitzer.

Schmidt's Advice to Publishers

I was stuck at home with the flu so couldn't get out to the Newspaper Association of America's conference in San Diego. Bad one to miss. Most of recent years' events would have tested an insomniac's affliction, but this year, Eric Schmidt was brought in as a headliner to kick some -- er, motivate publishers to seek new ways to reach out to readers and focus on, wait for it, advertising.

Now, really, that is priceless: The 10-year old Internet prodigy telling the century old media scions a thing or two about audience development and making money from eyeballs. According to my friend and Nstein colleague, Christopher Hill, who bore witness to Schmidt's carefully chosen words in his closing keynote, Schmidt attempted to move the dial from foe to friend, appealing to publishers' egos by calling papers trustworthy and curators of the public record. He almost sycophantically exalted the printed form versus the web presentation. Simultaneously he wove in bits on cloud computing, networking and data mining. All of these strings were tied up with the meme of innovation. With these technological tools and newspapers' strengths for story-telling, he gave advice on how newspapers be more relevant -- and make money. But the fun began when the Q&A started. Someone asked Schmidt to speak frankly about what newspapers have done right -- and what would he do if his 'fantasy' came true and he woke up to find himself a publisher! He praised them for getting onto the web back in the 90s. Then he took a circuitous path to a direct hit: "What have you done for a second act?"

He said that first and foremost he would try and figure out what his reader wanted. Ha!! Those words transported me back to 1995 -- when we were launching two new "ezines" for IN Jersey's portal: The Surf Report and Neo. The duo were unapologetic in its embrace of Gen Xers who shunned pro-sport coverage (a staple of newspapers) in favor of X-treme action like surfing and (snow & skate) boarding. Our coverage was superb (yes we used real writers) and our national and even international following for both were robust and enthusiastic. At the time we asked our sister dailies if they wanted to repurpose our efforts in print. I might have just as well asked them if they would like to pepper their food with cockroach feces.

Newspapers thought they could shovel their product from their editorial systems to their web content management systems, and all would be right with the world. Any attempt to create content outside the bastion of the newsroom was met with contempt. There was no room for innovation for a newsroom back then. Neither in how they presented the news online - nor in their understanding of what was news.

While everyone blames the Internet for eroding print sales, could it be that the real problem was that newspapers didn't adopt coverage to their changing audiences? As if playing hot potato with NFL and MBA coverage "no, really, you take it" the major tv networks realized they just couldn't get the fan following particularly in the 18-35 audience -- and cut back accordingly. And that was a decade ago. And yet, papers devote proportionally massive real estate and man-power to covering pro sports, yet are derisive when they cover surfers who "flaunt the laws, and surf during rough weather." Just whom are they appealing to?

Last month at NAA's MediaExchange, Chris Dorsey, Digital Media Sales Director for Forum Communications paper in Fargo, ND was on a panel on contextual advertising. Dorsey was explaining how contextually speaking, Fargo is a cold place, and what is of interest to his constituents is what to do when it is cold -- or when the river rises. Beer blasts and drying up wet basements. So Dorsey created a home-page product called "Marketplace Offers." For $149 a month, businesses can advertise Ladies' Nite Specials or offers to remove mold. Every listing has a print or mobile response -- all facilitated by the paper -- a vendor doesn't need to have an IT staff at the ready to do this. Readers can subscribe for daily emails of specials. This morning's count: 125 business offers, or nearly $20,000 in monthly revenue for something with that should be exceedingly high margin (self-serve sales origination page).

This is what Schmidt was talking about. Know your audience and create a service that reaches it. Don't try and lock your content behind a paywall -- unless you cover a niche market and have created value for that information. What information do people find valuable? Is it alerts to buy a new car or to be notified of job opportunities?

The lesson is not just for newspapers, but magazines, bloggers, ecommerce folks, anyone. People pay for that which they perceive to be valuable – whether it is a lead, a job tip, where the ladies' night specials are -- or how to dry a wet cellar.

Ad Placements -- Contextually Speaking

In the biz we call it "make goods:" when an error or omission with an ad calls for the publisher (or broadcaster) to make an adjustment. An example would be running a car ad next to editorial about a car recall. In fact, in print, there are proof readers who are responsible to catch just those types of errors.

The online world is a bit more dicey, as ads (or even editorial) are usually served dynamically, which is how the Drudge Report had this unfortunate combination of a gun promo above the tragic massacre in Binghamton, NY. So if proof-reading is not the answer, how can online publishers safeguard themselves from this type of truly disastrous positioning?

The key is to be able to contextually understand the nature and tone of a story. General Motors would no more want its advertisements next to a story of its current economic malaise than it would next to a recall article. One solution would be to have the editors tag the story as being negative or positive. It's a great idea but limited in practicality since stories may run that are from wire services, stringers or archives where tags would be limited. Further, it's debatable whether editors would take the time to tag (accurately) anyway.

A better solution would be to automate the process of tagging and create metadata by semantically analyzing the content; using a taxonomy for categorization and sub-classification, authority files for entities and analyze by tone and sentiment. This would prevent specific categories of ads from running on certain types of stories. True, the challenge is made more difficult if the ads are being served from a network. However, this should be an easy programming work around.

If I were a brand advertiser advertising online, as part of my risk management I would want assurances that my ad would not run under conditions that might damage my brand's reputation. Or else I would want a make good.

So Look Who's a Publisher Now

Content marketing guru Joe Pulizzi joined me on a webcast I hosted for Nstein in early month on a burgeoning marketing sector: content marketing aka custom publishing. The webcast was part of the monthly Double-Down on Digital series Nstein is offering this Spring on how publishers can tap into new revenue streams -- providing they have an agile digital content supply chain.

Content marketing is a subject that fits this blog so perfectly as it answers the question of "so just who is a publisher?" The answer is: anyone. Anyone with a story to tell and a means to tell a story. Case in point, the uproarious viral video series by JetBlue targeted at corporate big wigs whose wings have been - ahem -- clipped. The series is clever, timely and positions the company beautifully.

More conventionally, brand advertisers rely on print for custom -- which has now extended to newsletters and the Web. Some do it up big, like Proctor & Gamble's teen site Being Girl. The site is loaded with frank, age-appropriate content geared to girls entering puberty and through their teens. Launched in 2000, the site receives more than 3 million monthly visitors from around the globe and is customized for 44 different countries.

I spoke with Bob Arnold, the global being girl digital marketing manager for BeingGirl, and asked him about the site, his audience and the content. Arnold said the site seemed like a natural fit, given the company's depth of knowledge on FemCare. The entire site is produced in-house by P&G staffers and the "editor-in-chief" role seems to fall on the shoulders of Iris Pregger, PhD in women's health studies. She and her team scope and write the age-appropriate content for girl. Indeed Pregger has a column "Ask Iris" that Arnold says "receives a couple hundred questions a week."

The articles are informative, although obviously tilted toward product. I asked Arnold how hard it was to navigate the balance of information versus corporate stewarship. "For us, we wanted to make sure we provided a value -- and shape business behind that," he said. "If you make consumers first, ultimately they will reward you." The real eye-opener for Arnold, who does not portend to be a publisher, was that this market was so under-served. The other issue was dealing with a seemingly day-to-day morph of his audience. "In this day and age [teens] attitudes and tastes change rapidly, and it challenging to keep up with that," he said.

BeingGirl's success doesn't surprise Pulizzi who sharpened his teeth in custom publishing when he was head of that division at Penton Media. His mission was to corral the advertisers who wanted to communicate directly with its customers through entertaining or informative content and bring them into the Penton Content Supply Chain.

According to Pulizzi, most companies don't take the P&G route of creating this content inhouse. "They really don't want to be pubishers, they don't have the will, the expertise or the knowledge," he explained. Advertisers are looking for help, and publishers are uniquely positioned to provide it. "At Penton, we were really good at telling a story and we wanted to grab a slice of that content marketing pie," he explained. At Penton custom publishing brought in about 20 percent of annual revenues. "Advertisers are going to get this done -- the question is who will get they turn to?"

Rocky Mountain Low

The decision by the E.W. Scripps company to close the Rocky Mountain News on February 26 -- a month shy of its 150th birthday was more evidence of a vastly troubled industry. The mourning in Denver for the favorite voices that were silenced, was the exact way I felt in 1982 when Cowles Media stopped the presses on the Buffalo Courier-Express. (That paper resulted from the union of the Buffalo Courier and Buffalo Express, whose vast archives extended back to 1828, and whose ownership included a guy by the name of Samuel Clemons, aka Mark Twain.)

1982, you might recall, is the year that economists harken back to, usually in the context of "the worst economy since 1982." Some numbers:

• Median houses: $83,000
  
• a gallon of milk: $2.24
• a gallon of gas: $1.30

Whether 2009 will win the dubious distinction of surpassing 1982 as worst year, there is no doubt that the perfect storm of a bad economy and changing technologies kills businesses and hastens transformations. What changing technology impacted newspapers in 1982? Hot metal typesetting (truly the very first movable type!) to phototypesetting -- also known as "hot-type" versus "cold-type." The cold type process eliminated the need for a skilled set of laborers who deftly created lines of copy for press. Adapting to the technology required negotiating with unions, investing in technology and dealing with the criticisms that phototype was a generation less than hot-type. (There would often be a blurriness that drove readers nuts.)

The other technological change that impacted the C-E was, believe it or not, television. The evening news on TV had seriously eroded evening newspapers, causing many of them to move into the morning slot -- such as the C-E's competitor, the Berkshire Hathaway-owned Buffalo (Evening) News. A decade of plant closings and subsequent exodus from the Buffalo area saw the population plummet and advertising shrink. Sound familiar to today's woes? The C-E had actually invested in cold-type but hadn't been able to implement it because of union constraints. And suddenly the voices of syndicated Chicago columnist Mike Royko and New Jersey's Jim Bishop were eliminated from the Buffalo news diet. Over the next decade many two newspaper towns shrank to one. Denver dodged that bullet for yet another decade before succumbing last month.

This traipse down memory lane is not to belittle the sorrows of newspapers today. Rather it is to show natural evolutions that occur following every technical advancement. Savvy papers moved from evening editions to morning, and savvier ones realized that they could use those presses they reserved for news to print commercially for others. Still the savviest will be those who follow the upgrade path available to them, and while it won't be easy, it is still a more graceful morph than, say, the horse and buggy to a car.

Yes, the models have to change, and yes the infrastructures have to change, and yes union contracts will have to be rewritten. But there is an upgrade path. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, all but out of the pulp business, is seriously talking about going all digital. It wouldn't surprise me if Hearst migrates its San Francisco Chronicle into web only as well. ImpreMedia's Hoy New York went all digital in January. The Detroit papers are both ceasing home delivery save for Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. They are evolving: losing their tales that are heavy to transport.

The next step is modifiying the notion of church and state. Notice I didn't suggest eliminating church and state, but modifying it. There is room for a little integration, a little cooperation. And how about democratizing news -- so that not just reporters determine what is news worthy. Perhaps the model will be to open up the gates for users to assist as field researchers, while a writer/editor follows up and fact checks. We all trust readers during catastrophes -- why not create a process for readers to assist in the newsgathering process? HuffingtonPost is popular for its voices -- and the voices it aggregates.

The Rocky Mountain low being felt right now will not be just an isolated event in the news industry. And we will look back at this time as a transformative one, as going all digital will not be a last-ditch gasp at life -- but a viable alternative. The voices that ceased in the '80s when the presses were stopped, were not silenced with the shuttering of the RMN, but have morphed into Inside the Rockies and I Want My Rocky, two new sites by former writers. No doubt the ownership and business model may change. So while yes, in 2009, just like in 1982, some organizations will be hastened to die, some will hang on, others will adapt -- and some pure-plays will be borne. "Without failure, the culture of risk fades. Without risk, creativity withers," says NYT Columnist Roger Cohen who points out that churn is the American way.

Or to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of newspapers is greatly exaggerated.

The Role of Newspapers? Be Relevant.

The role of the newspaper.

It's the Topic of the decade. As print flutters between being obsolete or merely deeply wounded, it struggles for relevancy in a world gone hyper-electronic. The days of delivering the news to a waking world at 6:30 am or to greet weary workers as they arrive home are long gone. The web and mobile phones changed all that a decade ago, but an obdurate industry and no less than four wallet-breaking "technical advancements" (cold-type, color printing, pagination, and the web) in the past four decades, has pushed the industry to its knees.

A Google search on "Future of Newspapers" presented 99,500 results. An even more pessimistic query of "end of newspaper" yielded 26,200. And if we think it is tough today, what will it be like a decade from now, when today's children, tethered to iPods and Xbox Live, do not have memory of newspaper's days as "Messenger-in-Chief?"

It was with this in mind that I approached my son's middle school English teacher to pass out a questionnaire I had created with his 6th grade students. He graciously agreed. The questionnaire had its failings and was in no-way scientific, although I have identified ways to improve it and would like to repeat it in a broader socio-economic context. In the meantime, it did provide a hint at what tomorrow's consumer of news might do.

I must admit that I went into this with a presumption that most kids would not even have seen a newspaper, let alone read one. I was wrong. Eight percent said that they had never read one -- and another eight percent said that they had read one once. Still 59% read a newspaper once in a while and 22% said they read them all the time.

I also asked kids to provide the definition of a newspaper. The answers ranged from the mostly obvious "like a big book with lots of articles in it," to the truly insightful: "a carrier for advertising" and, even, "a primitive form of t.v. that has channels that differ from each region."

But I wonder if, after the last couple weeks, their perception of newspapers changed. You see the middle school is Clarence Middle, the same Clarence where Flight 3407 plummeted into a house killing 50 -- five from our tiny hamlet. Clarence is a rural outpost of Buffalo, and while our population has grown considerably in the last decade, it really is quite removed both geographically (20 miles) and socio-economically from the rest of the area. So despite having moved here from the New York/New Jersey region over four years ago, I still didn't embrace the Buffalo News as my hometown paper.

My consumption of the News consisted of -- front page, op-ed and sports, with about a once a week check of the "Northern Suburbs" to see if the stringer for our area had filed anything. That changed on February 12th, when practically the entire 180-member News staff suddenly found Clarence, and I found my local paper. The coverage of the event was thorough -- and superb. The reporters not only covered the tragedy, but they captured the psyche of the residents here -- that we are essentially a commuter town. Many of my neighbors, like my husband and me, travel by air on a weekly basis. We all held our collective breaths as we waited for identification of victims -- with plaintive texts to friends -- "where are you?" or in some cases just, "hello?"

The reporters did, as they were supposed to. They told the stories of the victims in moving detail, and began to unearth a controversy that maybe flying the popular regional propjets into icy (shocking) Buffalo -- is not so safe after all. In fact, today, at 12:37 the News updated the front page to let residents know that a counter-demonstration was coalescing at the crossroads of the accident site -- to drown out some imbeciles hellbent on using today's memorial services to promote their poisonous agenda.

The News' TV Critic Jeff Simon was right when he said that the online News finally had come of age. He also pointed out the pitfalls of trying to be newsbreaking and accurate -- early reports said it was a US Air flight -- not a Continental one, while other media were reporting it was a twin-seater versus a commercial airliner. Accuracy, speed and thoroughness are sometimes at odds. And not to negate the contribution of the three local broadcast stations -- they did a fine job on the breaking news -- but they couldn't sustain the indepth coverage for the ensuing days when we, like addicts, hungered for more.

Juxtaposed to this essential coverage was the ad-hoc city that sprung up at the local library -- when more than 40 satellite news teams from all over descended. It was silliness watching news team after news team in their makeshift outdoor studios: lights, anchor and camera crew, all reporting the same thing -- a mile from the scene. As I was asked repeatedly, "where can we go buy sandwiches," I realized how irrelevant they were. They weren't local, they didn't understand the area, nor did they comprehend the concern of the residents, nor the fears of kids like my 10-year old who immediately grasped: "this could have been our house. It could have been you or daddy."

And while the industry and executives go neurotic over whether or not newspapers are still relevant, the answer is in their question. If they have to ask, then they are not. Choosing to load up editorial with wire copy, to report the same stuff as everyone else, is no different than the 40 news crews that took a camera shot of an empty road. Gutting a news room is insane and a clear path to irrelevancy. Your editorial is not only the hook into your community -- they are your marketers. They are the public faces to your constituents that remind us to pick up the paper.

Clearly, you can't build a business plan around having a tragedy in your community -- but the lesson should be that people will read what is impactful to them. When you have trained me not to read the local news more than once a week -- because you can't update more than that -- you start falling into that bucket of irrelevance. And if you really don't know what makes your newspaper relevant, I have a newsflash: ask a 6th grader.

Doubling Down on Doubling Down

Double Down on Digital. It's a mantra we are playing out at Nstein with our four-part webinar series that advises media companies on how to play the odds with digital -- for lucrative payouts. And whether it be coincidence, alliteration or we've done a helluva job getting the message out there -- everyone seems to be working "double down" into conversations. NYT technology writer Chris Lohr quipped at SIIA's Information Industry Summit last month, that the Times was doubling down -- selling off the building to invest in digital.

And disgraced financier now turned digital-everything-pundit Henry Blodget was heard to say "doubling down" quite a few times at the DealMakers Summit hosted by DeSilva & Phillips, which then prompted subsequent speakers to pepper their talks with the betting phrase; (to mix a metaphor.)

So alliteration aside, why is this metaphor so popular -- and how is it apropos?

In Blackjack, one doubles the bet with one card down when one has a favorable advantage over the House (usually a 10 or an 11). The payout is high and a knowledgeable play can mitigate (but never eliminate) risk.

Scribes use double down when scoffing at individuals who have dug themselves a hole (and seemingly keep digging to get out of it). In German, the military phrase flucht nach vorn translates to keep moving forward -- ostensibly despite the danger, and however doomed the mission seems. It is a strategy to salvage but the odds are not great.

Speaking of the homonym selvage, research turned up that one doubles down the edge of a hem - to give it strength and keep it from unraveling.

For a metaphor to work it must be non-literal -- and yet provide a resemblance to the situation at hand. In this case, we have doubled down on the non-literal references. With media owners shmushed between shareholders and bankers each demanding that their investments be shored up, they need to strategically double down, while mitigating risks, to help their companies salvage their fraying edges -- and keep their empires from unraveling.

Note to CEOs & Publishers: Choosing a CMS

I've been building and buying CMS' since 1995 -- and have seen the good, the bad, and the truly hideous. The number one reason people won't work with technology is because it is too difficult to use. They have their day jobs -- and interpreting the screens and workflow that are foreign to them ... well, people just won't do it. And they don't. And the technology is a big fat expensive failure.

The problem with a CMS is that CEOs don't understand that they are not merely a "getting-stuff-onto-the-web tool." The "S" in CMS stands for System -- not product. That system is supposed to unite the world of creating, collaborating, collecting and channeling content. The mentality that it is merely something that gets content onto the web is the reason so many sites are, well, anemic. And, frankly, the reason so many balance sheets are sickly. Traffic doesn't stick (nor return) to sites that don't anticipate readers needs.

Instead of being a seamless solution into the entire workflow, the CMS tends to be an ad hoc interruption into an already stressful day. It would be like having two homes, and having to carry everything you need from one home to the next. Pretty soon you buy duplicates of everything just to keep yourself sane. Your wallet is lighter, right? Or, you start focusing on one abode more than the other. Now the other is lacking. See how this doesn't work out?

It's also the reason why the pure-plays, the companies that are solely online are driving the innovations in the industry. They have created, from scratch, an entire digital content supply chain, without having to worry about the turf wars surrounding the various bastions in the traditional world. No, they have built a digital infrastructure that allows the ebb, flow and sharing of digital content. They don't necessarily have it all figured out -- but they aren't being anchored by a century old legacy system.

The challenge for CEOs who grew up on the traditional business side, is that they never worked the "Fry Station." In McDonalds, to move up the management ladder, a person has to work every role: cashier, fry station and cook the burgers. That notion of working your way up through every department holds true in most industries. That is what made you a great CEO. You worked the Fry Station.

However, for many, digital entered into our professional lives at the mid or late point of our careers. We are managing -- and now relying on something -- we just don't understand. And as such, we rely on others to guide us. That may or may not be a good move. So here are my guidelines for purchasing a CMS:

1. Work the Fry Station. Ignorance is no excuse for not obeying the law -- and its no excuse for managing your company. You can start out by creating a blog if you are too embarrassed to ask an underling to show you how to work the current CMS. But roll up your sleeves and get going. Create a post. Create it in Word and try to paste it into your blog. Try and update from your Blackberry. Create some tags. Change your mind. This little lesson will be priceless.
   
2. Trust ... but Verify. You hired a CTO to manage -- but does he or she have an agenda? CTOs are human too. Some like to build things so that they can have a bigger development staff. You have to ask yourself -- which business are you in, the software development business -- or not. Because let me tell you, building and maintaining a CMS is a fulltime job. As soon as it is built, it is obsolete and needs to be improved upon. Is that the expertise you really want to invest and cultivate?
3. Examine the Workflow. As I said before, the word CMS is a real misnomer, since it suggests a single product, instead of systemic approach to the 4Cs: creating, collaborating, collecting and channeling content. Look at each of these steps in the supply chain, and develop a system that works across the entire company. If you update here -- will it update there (automatically) -- or does someone have to remember to "move it to the other house."
   
4. Align CMS with Business Goals. In case I haven't been clear, a true CMS should not merely shovel stuff onto the web. List what you want to accomplish business wise: (hints: optimize operations, lower production costs, monetize assets) and align your system to your goals. This means taking a very hard look at Point 3 above.
5. Align CMS with Department Needs. A good CMS should touch EVERY department in your company, and across silos. Editorial will be an obvious benefactor of the 4Cs, as research, creation, collaboration and production should be seamless and make their lives easier. But Marketing should find that the CMS will be search engine friendly and allow ease in email marketing. Sales should notice that it is now easy to create new products and get them to market faster. IT should find that it is no longer dinged for every change that needs to happen on the web. Accounting should see operations cost decline and revenues increase.
6. Cut Your Losses. I get it. You spent a ton of money on your current system, but it's not answering your business needs. Go back to the two home metaphor: you can't get your money back, but you can stop spending resources on duplications. As my father loves to say, a loss today is cheaper than one tomorrow.
   
7. Build for the Future. You have no idea what the next great application will be. Who would have thought Twitter would take off? Or that so many viewers would flock to the CNN/Facebook collaboration during the inauguration. A system that does not allow "hooks" into new technologies -- or doesn't allow it without 9 months of labor -- just will not pass muster in a world where nimble is number 1.

But the biggest takeaway on all this is you can't manage what you don't know; you have to work the Fry Station. Who knows, you might enjoy it!

Time to Face the Music

I'm taking a break from writing on the fate of print for a while, because frankly, I've run out of words to describe "dismal, bleak, futile." Best give poor Thesaurus -- and publishers -- a break. (Mein Gott! With what their futures hold we best just pass out razor blades to the poor blokes and let them be done. Ooh, very bad joke: What's black and white and red all over ...)

In any event, let's focus on another victim of this century's Creative Destruction. That was the incongruous concept made popular by 20th Century Economist Joseph Schumpeter who trumpeted that innovation is the force that sustains long-term economic growth. The downside, he admitted, is that some established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power might find their values … diminished.

The Internet surely would have been Schumpeter’s idea of a Creative Destructor, as it – and its offspring of innovations have impacted every conceivable sector: retail, music, media and business information, to name but a few. All of these industries have found that shifting from a physical world (CDs, stores and print products) to a digital one has been made so much more complicated by the likes of Google, MSN, Yahoo and user-generated sites like YouTube, P2P downloading, FaceBook and Flickr. Listen to music executives bemoan the sharing of music – and you might forget that the industry has grown to $130B!

The challenge has been, ahem, to the middle men. The Internet formed a conduit between the creator of music and the consumers bypassing the Big Four Labels. Their Sturm und Drang regarding 21st Century musical rationalism would be amusing and if not for the draconian measures they have taken to ensure their monopoly. In case you missed it, what with the tanking of the newspaper industry, the Titanic voyage of the finanical industry, and the intense pressure on all of us to jumpstart the economy by doing massive holiday shopping, the RIAA decided, last month, to end its reign of terror on 13-year olds. Yes, it has decided that it would partner with the ISPs to go after music pirates. More on that when I parse through the legal language.

In the meantime, what does this mean to the music industry? Well, probably that some of the overpaid suits at the Big Four will now be let go, as less self-important people are needed to support the dying medium of CDs, which really, if you think about it is nothing more than a container. This unbundling of content, selling the parts for less than the whole, but where the sum of them exceeds it, is playing quite favorably with kids. Decontainerizing and unbundling content has meant new life for old tunes. Because for all the hand-wringing the music industry has never been healthier!

Yes, yes, sales of CDs are down -- but that doesn't mean interest in music is down. The problem is, the measurement metric has become obsolete. It would be as if we measured interest in transportation by the number of people who owned horses. The demand is, as in print, to put the content into a mutable format so that it can be available in any container an individual wanted (and to figure out how to charge for that service). Music itself has never been more ubiquitous. From iPods, to ringtones, to the music in online games -- music is vivacissimo!

The numbers are astounding: More than 45 billion downloads (albeit 95 percent illegal, still 45 billion!!). Last year's concert sales actually rose! At a time when the average ticket price was over $65. Too, how else to explain the interest in a 25-year old heavy metal band? AC/DC, which warrants its own channel on Sirius XM Radio, is one of my 10-year old's favorite bands. I know, because my 10-year old flicks to that channel in our car. And it hit me, that Guitar Hero introduced this classic metal band to a whole new generation.

Yes, the inustry is challenged: the measurement metric is obsolete, the business model is evolving, and sartorial executives can network with outplaced bankers. But clearly, the band plays on.