New media watch update

Oct 5

Category: $$$

By Denise Ross

A sleeping baby is keeping me from Dennis Daugaard’s official campaign announcement, so let’s look at one of the plethora of events in the evolution of media and journalism.

Late last week, UC Berkeley’s J school hosted a summit on new media at Google HQ. (The venue just about says it all; it wasn’t, after all, at the San Francisco Chronicle despite its fairly great website.)

The best message came from an old media casualty:

The stakes of the digital media debate were underscored during the opening session as John Temple, former publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, discussed some of the missteps that led the nearly 150-year-old daily to close earlier this year. That closure left Denver, like most U.S. cities, a one-newspaper town.

One critical mistake was thinking of themselves as a newspaper instead of an information company, and viewing every new media initiative merely as a means to protect the core product, he said.

If the company had instead monitored and responded to what consumers were doing online, the business might have invented a service like Yelp, instead of competing with it for ad dollars it used to own.

“We had all the advantages and we let it slip away,” he said.

Those still running newspapers would be wise to listen to Temple, but I don’t expect them to. The very concept of R&D at most newspapers (and I’m told TV & radio stations) is anathema. That would be spending precious profits - which long hovered around the 30 % mark - on the “non-revenue generating department,” as my old home at the RC Journal’s newsroom was referred to by those in charge. Even if attitudes and the MSM culture were to drastically change, those profits no longer soar at such lofty heights.

Instead, I’m reading with equal parts amusement and dismay about AP’s plans to embed a “tracking beacon” into its content and that of its members (ie, almost all MSM news outlets) - see hilarious graphic on the jump. (Apologies to my friends at the AP in Sioux Falls.) Meanwhile, here’s how Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab describes what AP is up to:

The point, of course, is to identify uses of AP and potentially member content that isn’t licensed. So if someone copied an article’s source code onto his own site, by hand or automation, the beacon would follow along and, according to the document distributed to some AP members, “send reports back to the core database each time the item is clicked on by an end user. The beacon will identify each piece of content, the IP address of the content viewer, the referring Web server and the time of use.”

That’s right - “the IP address of the content viewer.” The Nieman blogger also notes that the graphic (see it on the jump) unintentionally depicts a “faceless news consumer will be deposited into a toxic waste recepticle.”

The same blog post notes that AP spokesfolk aren’t being terribly clear about what they plan to do with whatever information they gather, but the anger and bitterness level amongst many ensconced in the upper levels of the MSM has been growing steadily. For reasons I can’t understand, I seem to hear most of the vitriol targeted at Google for its success at monetizing search.

It also appears as though the AP is searching for methods to block its content from anyone who doesn’t pay, a thoroughly effective way to lose most of your readership. They talk a lot about protecting copyright, which is a valid pursuit and which also completely misses the vast technological opportunities at any media organization’s feet. (ie, per the Rocky Mountain News’s Temple, “Maybe if we weren’t so busy snarling at all the new technology and those using it to good effect, perhaps we would have invented search-targeted advertising.”)

There’s no shortage of discussion of this topic online, but I’ve got to stop here. Click “CLICK HERE” below to see that graphic, which includes the cryptic, detached phrase “royalty settlement,” described on the Nieman blog thusly: