Microsoft withdrawing its offer to buy Yahoo is a sufficiently large story to demonstrate the problem of redundant news content on the web. Google News is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of this story. To get a better sense of why it’s a problem to have 2,000 stories about the SAME THING, I’ve reproduced about […]

Facebook Beacon, currently in the process of going down in flames, is a classic case of overreaching. So much has been written about what’s wrong with Beacon — blatant privacy violation, lack of blanket opt-out, failure to make it opt-in, gathering data from non-Facebook users — but I haven’t seen much about WHY they got […]

One of the many reasons why Techmeme is the leading tech news aggregator among tech insiders is that it aggregates traditional media brands alongside new media brands. No place is this more evident than the new Techmeme Leaderboard — the top 25 is a near perfect mix of media brands that are 2 years old, […]

The Federal Election Commission reaffirmed a decision from March of last year that blogs are media entities and are therefore exempt from FEC oversight, like other media. The exemption applies to blogs that are not “owned or controlled by a political party, committee, or candidate.” But here’s the problem with that — since publishing a […]

Two reports out today illustrate how the traditional media industry is working hard to prop up their declining business. First, as evidence of the decline, IBM released a study that says that the Internet is about to overtake TV as the principal medium in most households (via MediaPost):

It’s not surprising that someone finally unmasked the author of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs AKA Fake Steve Jobs. It’s not really that surprising either that Fake Steve turned out to be an “old media” journalist who’s been fooling all the “new media” geeks. It’s not even that surprising that a journalist at an […]

Nielsen took a big step towards accelerating the death of the page view by announcing it would rank websites by time spend on the site instead. But time spent is an equally problematic metric that assumes that more is better, which isn’t the case with web applications designed for efficiency, like Google search.

Blogs and other new media upstarts have taken a big bite out of the media attention pie, particularly in categories like tech, politics, and celebrity gossip. But People Magazine is a venerable media brand that appears not to be taking the threat lying down, according to Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore:

When I read about the private equity buyout of the ailing Chrysler group from DaimlerChrysler, it immediately reminded me of another buyout of an ailing legacy player in a fast changing industry being driven by successful upstarts — Sam Zell’s buyout of Tribune.

Thinking about it, I realized there are many analogues between what upstarts […]

So here’s my perspective on the Calacanis/Winer/Jarvis v. Vogelstein/Wired debate on how journalist interviews should be conducted — both sides are right and also wrong.

Blogging is conversation, yeah, blah, blah, but what’s so unsatisfying about these “conversations” is that too often they turn into linked monologues. Nobody actually TALKS to each other. Everyone just […]

Did NBC Universal and News Corp cut a deal to create content for the web? New production capabilities? New armies of web-only content creators? No. This is about creating a platform for aggregating and distributing existing content, which they already have too much of.

You’re looking at the new media business. It’s not longer about creating […]

We’ve all heard that page views are dying. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed pointed out a few weeks ago the problem with scaling an online advertising business based on revenue per thousand page views, an analysis which has now been picked up by the Dan Mitchell at the NYT. Jeremy’s analysis is correct, on one level, […]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.

The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused […]

A backlash against “new media” ideology and disingenuousness seems to be simmering at this year’s We Media conference. From Mark Glaser at MediasShift:
My personal definition of “we media” is the movement toward an empowered audience, who can customize their media experience and create their own media, leaving behind the old model of the mainstream media […]

According to SEO Todd Mailcoat, getting three stories to the homepage of Digg puts you in the top 1% of Digg users, and it takes “months” to build up a what Todd calls a “reputable” Digg account. Those statistics struck me as stunning, so I decided to dig into Digg’s top user data (which loads […]

I just got my hands on the new version of the Wall Street Journal, which is one column inch smaller — seeing the physically shrunk paper is jarring — it’s tangible evidence that newspapers are slowly fading into history. Much as I wanted to assess the new design — and I’m sure there is real […]

The much anticipated news site Daylife has launched — there has been much critique and analysis, which I won’t repeat — most of it has focused on Daylife’s functionality (including a harsh critique from investor Mike Arrington). Instead, I’m going to take a look at the content. Here are the top 10 stories:

1. Dems Take […]

Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner pushes back on Chris Anderson’s treatise on “radical transparency” in magazine publishing:

I don’t mean to be too much of an old-media-reactionary running dog. And some of the things he says make immediate sense. In fact, I asked all my writers and editors to start blogging a few months ago. (See […]

Chris Anderson of Wired has written what may be the most sober and balanced (i.e. ideology-free) assessment I’ve ever read of the upside and downside of 2.0 openness in publishing, or what he calls “radical transparency.” Here’s a sample:

3) “Process as Content”*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each […]

Has anyone noticed that the New York Times is completely dominating the tech blogosphere today? Five of the top eight stories on Techmeme today are from the NYT — and the #1 story is ABOUT the NYT:

All of the stories are indeed notable for one reason or another — here’s my .02 cents:

In Web Traffic […]

Has there ever been an industry that faced as much uncertainty and such low visibility as the media industry? Media executives have lately taken to throwing up their hands and declaring their uncertainty in public (all emphasis is mine):

In the next year or two the media world will begin to figure out what consumers really […]

Can anyone think of a content business — meaning a company that produces original content — that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled — Google, MySpace, YouTube — all platforms for content, but not producers of content. Compare those to original content businesses like Weblogs, Inc., […]

In the continuing (and, I predict, growing) audience measurement saga, Fred Wilson chastises Mike Arrington for calling comScore’s audience metrics “flaky” vis-a-vis Digg’s audience:

My guess is that Digg has something like 5mm monthly unique visitors worldwide. Not 20mm. The difference probably results from cookie counting, multiple browsers, and a few other factors.

Perhaps a better question […]

I was struck by this comment from a session on audience measurement at the Business Blog Summit (via conversationrater):

I don’t care about how many page views or visitors I really get. I care about getting the right visitors, the influential visitors, or the potential customer visitors. How can I tell who’s who?

Duh! But this truism […]

What’s more amusing? Scoble and New Media folks discover “engagement,” a term that the old advertising establishment has been “engaged” with for quite some time. Or, that hot and utterly hip video blogging has been caught up in a he said, he said spat over audience measurement. Welcome to media! These guys sound like a […]

Isn’t there an odd contradiction in all the thinking about new media? Individuals are now empowered to create content, to publish and have a voice without going through the old corporate hierarchy. You can blog and be heard, all for free, without asking permission. But what about brands? The assumption that online advertising will finance […]

There is now macroeconomic data to support the theory that Media 2.0 won’t be as profitable as Media 1.0 (from MediaPost):

In a break from historical patterns, the equities research team at Merrill Lynch says the rate of advertising price inflation now trails the overall rate of economic inflation. “Interestingly, advertising growth seems to be tracking […]

I thought it was some kind of late summer April Fool’s joke — MySpace is looking into starting a print magazine. That’s right, a PRINT magazine. Other commentators have already made the obligatory comparisons to bubble era magazines from Yahoo, Ebay, and infamously from Pets.com, and they’ve observed how increasingly Old Media MySpace’s strategy seems […]

A eulogy is a speech of praise, typically — although not necessarily — for the dead, which seems fitting for a post about the lingering charms and strengths of Old Media.

According to a recent survey, New Media still has a long way to go to earn the public’s trust, at least in the UK:

Respondents were […]

A debate has erupted over the definition of blogs and the value of blog “influentials” as drivers of advertising CPM rates, which is so Old Media in the particulars it’s really quite astonishing. Scoble challenges Windows Live Spaces’ definition of a blog and then plants this lightening rod:

What does Microsoft do when it says “we […]

Gawker’s Nick Denton has announced a restructuring, including a staff shake-up and the sale of two under-performing sites. Nick is a smart guy, and he’s clearly getting ready for the inevitable moment when the new media bubble begins to deflate — a “perversely countercyclical move” he calls it.

What I found most fascinating is the […]

I increasing believe that in order to survive and grow in a digital, networked, social, participatory world, media companies need to evolve into marketing services companies. Here’s what’s driving me to that conclusion.

Advertising took another significant step yesterday towards graduating from paid media placements (i.e. traditional ads). Ironically, it starts with a paid media placement […]

This year’s “Shoot Yourself In the Foot” award goes to News Corp’s Peter Chernin:

Chernin is a big believer in user-generated content. News Corp.’s MySpace is thriving. But he does not believe that there’s a vast backlog of great unmade TV shows and movies that cannot connect with audiences because of bottlenecks in distribution. To the […]

It’s official — Microsoft is no longer a software company. With the launch of adCenter, Microsoft will be joining the ranks of Google and other media companies:

“Ad-supported software services are an integral part of Microsoft’s plans to give consumers access to a broader variety of digital media, whenever they want and on whatever device they […]

The advent of web-based e-commerce fundamentally lowered the costs of doing business, increasing the scalability (and in many cases the viability) of thousands of small businesses. The introduction of micro-marketing through Google AdWords gave a huge jolt to this trend, making marketing scalable and profitable for these same small businesses. Two companies — Google and […]

Web 1.0 gave us “internet,” “HTML,” “email,” “hyperlink”, “online,” and, of course, “web.” Web 2.0 has given us “social media,” “citizen journalism,” “tagging,” “blog,” “podcast,” “Web 2.0″ (of course) — and the list goes on.

Web 2.0 is still in the wrangling over terminology phase — especially over Web 2.0 itself. Recently, there’s been some […]

If accurate news and information were a sausage, reading tech.memeorandum this weekend would be like watching it get made. “60% of Windows Vista Code Being Rewritten!” the headlines blared. No it’s not. What if it is? This can’t be true. What does it mean? Help!?!

It’s the those darned “non-credible journalists,” Scoble complains — and those […]

I’ve been very skeptical of Google’s Print Ad program since its inception. So I’m hardly surprised by the news from BusinessWeek that the program is a dud (thanks to David Utter for passing on the article):

Carl D. Haugen, president of BluePenguin Software, spent $3,000 on an ad through Google, which ran in the November issue […]

Nick Carr did a thought-provoking psychoanlysis of my original MySpace post (the one that caused such a dust storm). He argues that I shouldn’t have shied away for the morality of the issue.

What’s most fascinating about Karp’s post, though, is not his reaction to MySpace but his reaction to his reaction to MySpace. Having […]

I gave Reuters CEO Tom Glocer a bad rap the other day for sounding like he had New Media all figured out. Contrast Glocer’s rhetoric (we will be a “seeder of clouds”) to the down-to-earth realism of McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, reflecting on the recently accounced purchase of Knight Ridder:

Gary Pruitt, the chairman and CEO […]

So Dave Winer wants to stop blogging, and Mike Arrington says, NO, you can’t, because Scripting News belongs to “us,” the readers. Mike is half right — Dave does “own” Scripting News, but the blog has become an institution, like any other Old Media company. Dave suggested that he should sell Scripting News to TechCrunch, […]

So New Media is about conversation — but what is the point of conversation?

If it’s the never-ending blogger conversation about snarking, A-Listers, link baiting, traffic envy, ego bashing, etc. etc. then the point is to act like an algae bloom and block out the sun — witness tech.memeorandum today (it’s a Sunday).

But what about […]

A great synthesis of 2.0 thinking on new marketing paradigms for social media from, no, not a blogger or Web 2.0 evangalist, but from the president of OLD Market Research company Yankelovich Partners:

These days, the best way to get people’s attention is not to engage consumers with a brand, but to host or facilitate a […]

Media is about conversation and participation. Consumers can create their own media. Value is being created at the edge. You’ve heard all the New Media maxims.

The problem, as many people have stated many times, is that the more everyone participates in content creation and content interaction, the harder it is to navigate the sea of […]

Everyone in Old Media, and many in “New” Media (which isn’t as cutting-edge as it thinks it is), should fear the radically different media habits of the Digital Generation now coming of age. As Jon Fine points out:

Today’s teens are the first for whom self-created content competes with teen-aimed media like videogames. There are now […]

Blogs don’t matter. Web 2.0 doesn’t matter. Old Media doesn’t matter, and neither does New Media. So what does matter? — talent, insight, and, most of all, ideas. George Will makes this point elegantly:

The more journalism I read and do, the more convinced I am not merely that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas […]

It’s New Media brands vs. Old Media brands, according to Daniel Orkent, former ombudsman for The New York Times:

“The good news, I think – my fingers are crossed – is if the responsible, serious members of the so-called mainstream media live up to their own standards, when you see something by okrent.com and nytimes.com you […]

The Guardian wonders whether “massive media companies have a compelling reason to exist in an era of media fragmentation”:

The argument is simple: as global media conglomerates struggle to hold position against falling sales in publishing, a fractured TV market, music piracy and advertising migration to old fashioned billboards, what are these groups for? The market […]

The other day I suggested that bloggers need a “Chinese Wall” to separate their editorial and commercial interests, in order to avoid perceived (or actual) conflicts of interest. Here’s a memo from the world of Old Media — the trusty wall is crumbling under the weight of “product placement” (or the more insidious “product integration”), […]

Here’s a confession — before I started blogging, I never read blogs. These days, it seems I read little else, but it took becoming a blogger to make me a blog reader. Is it possible that bloggers are the only people who read blogs?

According to a recent Gallup poll, blog readership was either flat or […]

Bloggers are great at channeling outrage, but when it comes to their own affairs — or pet topics — they are uniquely defensive (I include myself in this critique). I’ve been trying to sort through the FON “scandal,” and the efforts to defend the bloggers involved has lead to some rather tortured explanations. Take […]

Old Media executives have been stepping forward lately to assert their will to survive — even thrive — in a New Media world. Only time will tell whether Old Media brands can indeed survive, but there is ample evidence of forward thinking and emerging digital strategy.

From Time Inc. president Ann Moore:

We will continue to look […]

It’s now conventional wisdom that the future of media is digital and on-demand — content creators no longer own the distribution channels. But the economic center of gravity in media has not shifted to reflect this change. The laws of media dynamics will force the center to shift — advertising dollars always follow the audience, […]

The citizen journalism movement is shaking Old Media journalism out of its complacency, but is it realistic to believe that citizen media can and should replace institutional media? I remain deeply skeptical.

Jeff Jarvis is out in force again today, smacking the “dinosaurs” of Old Media for not understanding the power of the people. As usual, […]

The news that Google is testing rich media supports the view that traditional brand advertising is not about to go away. Having wrung every penny from smaller advertisers with more transactional businesses — which are the ones that work best with text ads — Google is aiming now at the BIG advertisers who have […]

Tom Foremski answers “yes” to Dave Winer’s question, “is the publishing industry the new technology industry?” I think that is like saying the printing press industry is the old publishing industry. Web 2.0 applications, like the printing press, enable publishing — but they don’t define publishing. (A distinction that Tom makes.) And the current crop […]

I’ve made the point many times that the bloggerati and Web 2.0 fan club are complete outliers when it comes to media consumption habits. To illustrate this point, I conducted a little informal survey, taking aim at the latest hype over News 2.0. The survey was partly inspired by Om Malik’s quip that “News 2.0 […]

The reactions to Dan Gilmor’s open letter on Bayosphere have fallen into two camps — lessons on start-ups and lessons on the dynamics of citizen journalism.

These perspectives, while important, miss the critical question in middle — who will fund citizen journalism, or any journalism, for that matter? As Justin Fox puts it in his […]

Beneath all the buzz about Google re-taking the top spot as #1 Global brand is evidence of a worrisome trend for content brands, which supports the theory that Google is a brand killer. If you look at the U.S. & Canada results for the brandchannel survey across the last five years, you’ll see that content […]

The quality of analytic thinking in the blogosphere is too often marred by sloppy reasoning, lack of cogency, groupthink, unreasoned orthodoxy, and just plain laziness. I’m no master of analytic precision myself, but it’s something I care about and something I wish the blogosphere would care more about.

In fact, I think the poor quality of […]

RSS sucks. I’m with Paul Kedrosky. Let the technodweebospehere rain fire and brimstone. I could add to Paul’s rant, but instead here’s a Really Simple three-step Solution (of course, the real first step is admitting that you have a problem):

1. Call it “subscribing”

Everyone understands subscribing. You’ve got your email newsletter subscriptions, your premium cable channel […]

Who decides what’s worthy of your attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?

(UPDATE: Oy vey, this post is NOT about getting links, although it’s completely my fault that it’s been misread that way. […]

There may or may not be a Web 2.0 crash coming, as Steve Rubel has predicted, but there’s certainly blood in the water, with Yahoo’s earnings miss, Gather.com’s bad reviews, the demise of SearchFox, and the gathering buzz about an impending crash. Steve thinks a key factor is that “online advertising isn’t growing as […]

Despite all the buzz about the intersection of Buzzmetrics, Intelliseek, and VNU/Nielsen, I haven’t found anybody looking at it through the lens of Old Media, who knows what it’s like to have their market under the thumb of the dominant research provider, i.e. Nielsen.

The blogosphere is understandably excited that they’re finally going to get […]

Simon Dumenco’s Ad Age Column, A Blogger Is Just A Writer With A Cooler Name, misses a crucial distinction between blogging and writing — it’s technology that enables the conversation. Steve Rubel almost makes this observation by linking throughout his response to the column, but he doesn’t draw it out explicitly. Steve is absolutely right […]

The problem with the current debate over Old Media vs. New Media is that most people see it in binary terms — either Old Media dies and the web becomes a completely open marketplace of commoditized content (as Jeff Jarvis and countless others have argued), or consumers rebel and cling to the structures of Old […]

Many open web advocates would hold up Slashdot as an archetype of new media democracy. Don’t let those authoritarian old media editors decide what’s important — let the people decide.

Well, it turns out “the people” are really just a small cabal of dedicated (fanatical) users, with names like Zonk, CowboyNeal, and CmdrTaco who decide […]

There is so much wrong with the blogger view that the monoliths of old media will be brought down and consumers will bask in the glory of infinite media choice — discussing, creating, tagging, rating (meta-ing) each other’s content in one big solipsistic frenzy. Everyone can create media. Everyone controls their own media. Everyone is […]

At the heart of the digital media revolution is a burning question about the sustainability of the content creation business. The issue was recently stirred up by Lloyd Shepherd’s post on digitial rights management (DRM), further stirred by Doc Searls, and brought into critical focus by Jon Udell, who made the compelling assertion that […]

I just picked up a pile of magazines and newspapers from my mail folder and dumped them into the ever-growing pile in my office — I’ve had it. I’m canceling all of my print subscriptions.

Thanks to the RSS feeds from a select group of blogs on media (see the list at the bottom […]

Media proliferation and media saturation are well-worn concepts that describe the exponential growth in media outlets and the exhaustion (and utter confusion) we experience from the overwhelming choices. The growth curve in media steepened considerably with the advent of the Internet, but now with blogs, social media, Web 2.0, etc., the curve is nearly […]

You can’t blame print publishers for having a bad case of cognitive dissonance as they try to figure out the future of their business. Try digesting this:

From BusinessWeek, January 9, 2006, page 29 (for those of you following in print), Call it Gutenberg’s Revenge:

Upstart Internet publishers, helped by low costs that go with signing […]