A few years ago at a symposium about blogging, Jeff Jarvis was moderating a discussion about commercial uses of blogs. To answer an audience member's question about whether or not having a blog on your commercial website can increase business, he turned to me, someone in the audience who Jeff knew uses this blog on this commercial site, and asked me if my blog had increased my business.

When writing a blog, you can ponder your words before writing them, but that isn't always an option when a moderator suddenly picks you out of the audience and ask you impromptu to answer a question he's been asked. I made a snap decision to be politic, so I told everyone that adding this blog to this site had tripled the site's traffic.

What I said was true; this blog has tripled this site's traffic. But what I didn't say was that none of that increased traffic had resulted in new business. It still hasn't. It's resulted in traffic, not business. I can't think of anyone who has hired me as a consultant because of something I've written here. Nor have I ever had a new client tell me that they've read this blog. I've instead been hired because of referals from other clients, speeches I've given at conferences, and articles I've written in trade journals; never because of this blog.

Indeed, blogging here has interfered with my business, as most pro bono efforts tend to do. Note that I say interfered with my business; I didn't say it hurt my business. But also note that I didn't say it helped my business. Blogging can help a new consultant's business because it can make prospective clients appreciate that he knows what he's writing about. But an established consultant who blogs can too easily give away advice or knowledge for which he could be charging clients. Furthermore, his blogging takes time away from more potentially lucrative marketing efforts.

So why am I blogging? Because the more knowledge that an industry has, the better for that industry, the better its prospects for the future, and (theoretically) the better for a consultant's business. Put another way: Brain dumps float all boats.

Nevertheless, my concern that blogging givies away my store and steals time from more lucrative work is one of two reasons why I've not blog much this year.

The other reason—since I'm addressing how blogging removes time for more important work— is that during the past 18 months, I've radically changed my opinion about the future of daily newspapers in North America. In what little free time I've hadthis year, I've been drafting what I intended to be an article about that, a 2007 follow-up to my 2004 essay in Online Journalism Review, What Newspapers And Their Web Sites Must Do To Survive.

However, my draft article has turned into an approximately 20,000-word treatise because I want to be self-contained and to establish that American daily newspapers are dying; why; what they did wrong when faced with cable & satellite television, topical magazines, and the Internet; what American daily newspapers should have done; what will replace them; and what some daily newspapers can still do to survive. I'd been hoping to publish this work in April, but haven't had enough free time yet to finish it. I hope to during August.

Blogging here takes time away from that. Moreover, any blogging I do now will be from the perspective of my changed thinking, a perspective that haven't yet explained. I think it's better that I publish the larger perspective before doing any day-to-day blogging.

However, some of my friends say, "'We understand that. But we're interesting in what you think about things that are happening now.''

Fair enough, I'll try. Between consulting assignments and writing that treatise, I'll try to find time each day to blog about a few things, even if it's only pointers to what trade news I'm reading. I'll post my longer essays and 'think pieces' on Corante's Rebuilding Media, but try to blog here more often. Starting today.

By the way, new-media still accounts for only about five per cent of the average American daily newspapers' revenues. I'm tired of their publishers asking me to tell them the easiest and quickest way that their newspapers can double that percentage during the coming year. They should beware what they ask, because the logical answer to their question is simple but not something I recommend:

A newspaper merely has to lose half of its print revenues during the coming year in order to double the percentage of revenues it earns online. And I know of a few newspapers that are inadvertently doing just that.

Well, maybe not losing half their gross revenues or turnover just yet. But quite a few major newspaper companies in the U.S. have seen their income drop by around 50 percent during the past fiscal quarter. The Tribune Company's Q2 income fell 58.7 percent. The New York Times Company's fell 59 percent. The Journal Register's 44 percent.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(Supermarket billboard, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain)

Imagine reading a news headline that declares 'The Majority of Americans Are Dissatisfied with Restaurant Cuisine" and a story about how the majority say 'vegetarianism is important to the future of American cuisine' and that macrobiotics will play a 'vital role.' Wouldn't this seem odd in a land of carnivores?

That's what I'd think, and if I discovered the source of the story was a press release stating...

A majority of Americans (55%) in organic resturants said vegetarism is important to the future of American cuisine and 74% said macrobiotics will play a vital role. Most respondents (53%) also said the rise of vegan cooking poses the greatest opportunity to the future of professional chefs in America and three in four (76%) said the vegetarianism has had a positive impact on the overall quality of American cuisine.

In the national survey of adults, 72% said they were dissatisfied with the quality of American food today. A majority of people attending a vegan conference who were polled on the subject agreed - 55% said they were dissatisfied, and 61% said they believed traditional food is out of touch with what Americans want in their cuisine.

So, what's this to do with online news publishing? Well, when I read headlines this week that said things like, 'The Majority of Americans Are Dissatisfied with the Quality of Journalism" and stories about how the majority say 'bloggers are important to the future of American journalism' and that 'citizen journalism' will play a 'vital role,' something smelled fishy to me. (Here's an example of such a story)

I discovered those headlines and stories were based upon a press release that said:

A majority of Americans (55%) in an online survey said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role, a new WE Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

Most respondents (53%) also said the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76%) said the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism

The survey results were released by Pollster John Zogby as part of a conference of media industry insiders hosted by the University of Miami. In the national survey of adults, 72% said they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today. A majority of conference-goers who were polled on the subject agreed - 55% said they were dissatisfied, and 61% said they believed traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.

I've no problem with that press release per se, but a lot about it seems too odd to be believable, plus the way it's been reported by others is way out of context.

First off, the Americans who are online (answering an online survey) aren't necessarily representative of all Americans. True, some two-thirds of all Americans are online; but did Zogby's poll factor the other third?

Second, how qualified are the online subset of Americans to declare what's 'important to the future of American journalism'? My Aunt Joan is online in Montana, and she's read newspapers, news magazines, and heard news broadcasts, but does that qualify this 69 year-old housewife to declare what's important to the future of American journalism? How does she know whatever will play 'a vital role'? How would she know if 'the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism'?

As for, third, how 55% of people who attended a WE MEDIA conference were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today and 61% said they believed traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, all I can say is: Duh, wouldn't anything else from that self-selecting sample be surprising? I'll bet that 80% of the people who attended the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today and 91% said they believed traditional journalism is in touch with what Americans want from their news.

A refrain in much of my writing this week is 'Don't Get Me Wrong.' I'm for 'citizen journalism' and blogging (I, who aren't a professional journalist, am doing those things right now). Buy hyping those things – either by claiming that self-selecting results represent the greater group or by taking survey results out of context – disserves 'citizen journalism' and blogging. If there's a need for accuracy and objectivity in mainstream media, then there's also a need for accuracy and objectivity about those who claim they're checking it. I fear that Web 2.0 is getting hyped as much as Web 1.0 was in its era. We don't need that.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here is the transcript of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's video interview with Washingtonpost.com Editor Jim Brady and BoingBoing.net Co-Editor Xeni Jardin about why Brady temporarily turned off PostBlog's comments function after receiving hundreds of abusive postings. The interview video is also available in two formats.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Media critic Brian Lowry of Variety examines traditional media' blogs and concludes, "Alas, these demographically motivated incursions by conservative old media into the online realm almost invariably reek of desperation, much like an aging hipster uncomfortably trying to squeeze into jeans from the young men's dept."

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

During the Editor & Publisher and Mediaweek magazines' Interactive Media conference in New Orleans, Jacob Weissberg of Slate:

"Newspaper editors publish a story once they think it is true. Bloggers publish a story to see if it is true."

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[UPDATE: Some blogs which have linked to this item call it my vision of the newspaper of 2010. Calling it that is inaccurate. I believe that e-paper devices will be in common use by 2010 and that consumers will use these device for reading books, magazines, business reports, grocery lists, homework, etc. But whether or not the newspapers industry will take advantage of this by 2010 and make newspapers available on these devices is very much an intangible. Perhaps a few individual newspapers will, but I now don't see much concerted work by the majority of the newspaper industry or its industry groups to prepare for these technologies.]

I believe that by the end of this decade we'll begin to see portable, flexible (capable of being rolled up and put into a pocket or purse when not in use), handheld, color electronic display for sale to consumers.

If that sounds far-fetched, please understand that the first generation of electronic paper displays from Philips can display B&W text or flickering video and can be rolled into a cylinder less than one inch (2.54 cm) in diameter, and that Philips will start pilot plant production of one million such displays next year. Technical improvements on these display have been swift, so I believe that further improvements will lead to color, high resolution versions during the remaining half of the decade. Nonetheless, Philips (plus Sony and other manufacturers) are already planning sales of those versions in an even shorter time.

These electronic paper displays will have a CPU and a battery (note that today's e-paper consumes a fraction of the electricity of contemporary LCD screens, allowing 3 to 21 hours on a charge, according to a report in Nature). The CPU and battery will probably take the form of a narrow cylinder bound along longest perimeter of the display, around which you can roll-up the display when not in use.

If these devices will contain a CPU and battery, why not also a wireless chip? The display will need outside connectivity and wireless is a better means for that than docking stations or plugs. GSM/GPRS wireless telephony chips have already become so inexpensive that disposable cell phones are on sale in Europe. Later this decade, broadband wireless (3G/UMTS) will be in use (it's already being implemented in Hong Kong, Korea, and many European companies). Why not a chip that combines 3G/UMTS, Wi-Fi (whatever 801.11 alphabet exists then), and BlueTooth. Moore's Law should reduce the cost of such of wireless chip to a reasonable level this decade.

And if this e-paper device then has wireless connectivity, how can news publishers or news broadcasters utilize that to automatically and routinely deliver their content into these devices to people who subscribe to those news organizations' content, without those people having to remember to download the content each day?

Until six months ago, I thought the only likely answer to that question would be by publishers sending their content into these devices via the wireless telephony subcarrier frequencies that now provide SMS and MMS. That solution is still viable. However, RSS feeds delivered via wireless broadband GPRS/UTMS, Wi-Fi, or even BlueTooth might be a viable alternative.

These wouldn't be today's plain-text, graphically empty RSS feeds. Instead, this future form of RSS would encapsulate publisher's or broadcaster's entire daily report in full graphical, interactive layout. This would include all hyperlinks to video or other multimedia. Imagine a hybrid of digital edition and website; all the graphical capabilities and layouts of the former, plus the interactivity and multimedia of the latter. Click the photo, see the video, etc. Click the links embedded in texts and related stories appear, etc.

If RSS can be adapted to encapsulate radio or video programming into Apple iPods (as is now beginning to be done), then future versions of it should be capable of encapsulating entire, hybrid 'converged' editions.

Automatic and routine daily delivery would eliminate one of the fundamental flaws about publishing news via the Web: A web site doesn't actually delivery anything; its contents instead away retrieval, which consumers have proven to do infrequently (the average online consumers retrieves it only 2 to 5 times per month, according to Nielsen//Netratings or ComScore Media Metrix). Like the automatic and routine daily delivery of a printed newspaper onto your doorstep or into your office, the newspaper (or broadcast) that you request would be automatically and routinely delivered daily into your e-paper device.

By automatically and routinely receiving an entire edition that is a hybrid of digital edition and website, rather than simply a website home page, the subscriber wouldn't need to deal two with another flaws of the Web: (1) having to download Web pages one at a time and (2) the HTML's graphical layout inferiority when compared to printed editions. By hybrid of digital edition and website, I don't mean a 2MB to 20MB PDF file embedded with hyperlinks, but a file format that is thinner than that.

[Update: tthe presentation of these editions' content — in other words, whether or not full graphics are visible — will be controllable by the consumer, not solely by the publisher as with today's printed publications. These editions also would utilize tagged files formats that flow to fit device screensiz, rather than be fixed size like today's digital editions or print editions. And the content in these editions will also be individualizable. I indeed don't see any reason why an 'edition' must necessarily be from a single publisher.]

This hybrid of digital edition and website wouldn't utilize Web banner ads. The major economic problem banner ads is that as an Web edition's popularity grows, so does that website's inventory of ad space that must be sold. For example, if the 60-page daily The New York Times somehow doubles its print circulation, the newspaper probably wouldn't begin printing an 120-page edition. It instead would probably continue to print its 60-age edition but begin charging twice as much money for an advertising page in it. However, if NYTimes.com someone doubles it site traffic, the website now has twice as many advertising spots to sell. It can't simply double its rate per spot, as it could with print. The economics of print ad rates operate according to the principle of scarce space, but the economics of banner ads operate according to the principle of surplus space. (This is the reason why NYTimes.com's ad revenues haven't increased 250X during the years that its site traffic increased that much.) The economics of electronic publication advertising need to brought back to the principles of scarcity.

This hybrid of digital edition would delivery interactive print ads. Neither the advertisers nor the publisher would need staffs to create or sell separate banner and print ads.

Electronically publishing an edition with a fixed number of pages (such as in a digital edition), ostensibly does that. Electronically delivering an entire edition intact also creates a package that websites don't offer, a service that will more likely motivate subscribers to pay something for a subscription.

These are only some of the ideas involved.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (4)

Since writing my posting earlier today about RSS, I've chanced to read the UK Association of Online Publishers' story about its forum last Friday entitled 'Making a success of RSS'.

That story is unfortunately an example of the hype and reportorial dynamics that I mentioned in my earlier posting.

It's headlined 'Email is dead: long live RSS!', probably because it quotes Drew Cullen, editor of the tech news site The Register, saying:

“Email has been downgraded as a publishing medium: spam has killed it off,” said Drew Cullen. RSS has become the preferred method of receiving content from websites. Rather than go to 20 favourite sites on a daily basis, RSS allows users to get all the headlines delivered together in one view, with the option to click through to the destination site if desired.

You'll notice that nowhere in the story does Cullen provide any data that e-mail has been downgraded as a publishing medium; that spam has killed it off; or that RSS has become the prefered method of receiving content from websites.

Has e-mail become downgraded as a publishing medium? The ABCe, which audits and certifies website usage statistics in the UK, will disagree — as will most websites that offer e-mailed editions. Those websites haven't experienced net decreases in their e-mail subscribership nor decreases in the pace of new subscriptions to e-mailed editions. Quite the contrary, those continue to accelerate.

Has spam affected or killed off users' desires to receive soliticited e-mail editions from trusted organizations? Studies by organizations and people ranging from Jakob Nielsen to DoubleClick to the Pew Internet & American Life Project have all found it hasn't. For example, Nielsen earlier this year reported that "In our 2002 newsletter usability report, I said about the future of email newsletters: 'There may be none. Legitimate use of email is at war with spam, and spam may be winning.' Although two years is a very short period in which to assess big trends, I now believe that this assessment was too negative. Email newsletters are so powerful that the best of them do have a future, despite increasingly adverse conditions."

What is the prefered method of receiving content from websites? Browsing is. E-mail is second. RSS is a distant third. Use The New York Times online as an example. (Forgive me for using a U.S. newspaper as an example when writing about UK newspapers, but I happen to have its statistics at hand and I don't know of any fundamental difference between U.S. and U.K. cases.)

NYTimes.com has been offering RSS feeds for almost two years now and has generated several tens of thousands of RSS subscribers. The Times credits its RSS feeds for generating between 1 million and 1.5 million site pageviews per month. Sound good?

Compare that to e-mail publishing. The Times currently has 3,603,981 daily e-mail edition subscribers. That's more than three times as many people who subscribe to its printed edition. The Times' e-mail publishing, according to a Harvard Business School study of e-mail publishing by the U.S. newspapers, generates 40 percent of the site's traffic. That would mean it currently generates more than 100 million pageviews per month for the Times, 60 to 100 times the traffic from RSS. At online publishing conferences, Times executives have called e-mail publishing one of their most successful online ventures and one that is earning lucrative ad revenues.

How good has RSS been for the Register? Cullen is further quoted in the AOPUK story:

Since I started using an RSS reader my web usage habits have completely changed,” said Cullen, “I now look at fewer web pages, so as a page impression, I’ve been lost. But I look at many more stories.” He went on to explain that, though The Register’s page impressions per user have actually decreased since introducing RSS, the site has actually attracted an extra 800,000 users per month.

Note what I've highlighted. The Register has attracted an extra 800,000 users through a mechanism which lets those users circumvent the pages on its site. This of course resulted in a decreased number of page imperssions per user. It also has resulted in generating hundreds of thousands of new users who don't see banners ads on The Register and from who that site can't generate any revenues. RSS has given The Register more server and bandwidth costs without any compensating revenues. What a great business idea!

The AOPUK story's headline, 'Email is dead: long live RSS!', reminds me of a similar headline 15 months ago by another tech editor who had said that his newsletters would be switching entirely to RSS and no longer accepting e-mail subscriptions. Guess who reconsidered and signed a new contract with an e-mail publishing vendor six months later?

RSS is an intriguing mechanism for disseminating content. It should be used in certain cases. But it shouldn't be used simply for the sake of using it.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tom Biro of theMediaDrop.com has compiled a list of U.S. 'newspapers' that offer RSS feeds. It contains:

Let's gore a sacred cow. Or lets let Frank Barnako of CBS MarketWatch's eponymous Frank Barnako's Internet Daily do it. The headline above tops the commentary leading his report on Wednesday.

"No one reads blogs," Barnako writes. Yes, Technorati is tracking 4 million blogs, RSS is no longer "a geek secret and now it's a bolt-on to My Yahoo!", and Blogads claims to be delivering 100 million banner ad impression per month. "All that may be true. It's just that after the presidential election, it appears to me that the only readers of blogs ... are bloggers! They are a good group. Educated and engaged. But they're also like mice in a rotating cage: running in place, bumping into the same old people." Examining Comscore's online traffic surveys, Barnako notes that, "when the most popular political blog draws less than 270,000 visitors on Election Day, you've got to ask, 'What's the point?'"

Those are fighting words to blogger fundamentalists and might cause some a knee-jerk reaction to accuse Barnako of 'not getting it' or perhaps of being a 'big media' guy simply because of the brand CBS behind his column. But Barnako gets it and has been for a long time. He's a blogger, a Web publishing pioneer who helped found USATODAY.com and helped found Helped found Quincy Jones' World Music Web venture), and has been reporting for CBS News radio network about online since before the Internet was opened to the public. Barnako concludes, "Bottom line: Political blogging is like Ralph Nader. Nobody pays attention."

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Earleir this month, Rich Skrenta of Topix.net wrote about the misconception about how widespead RSS syndication is among traditional online publishers.

"Only 7% of the sources Topix.net crawls have XML feeds. I'd estimate that only a few hundreds of the top 3,000 newspapers we crawl have RSS support. The rest we obtain with a news crawler which is good about finding articles on news sites, leaving behind the ads and navigation sidebars. It's low maintenance so we don't have to change anything everytime a site redesigns its html.

"Even for sites which offer feeds, we'll generally continue to crawl the human-readable version. We've seen sites where the RSS broke but no one at the paper seemed to notice, or cases where the RSS was out of sync with the human-viewable web content. By crawling both we get full coverage of the content available.

"There are approximately 1,400 weekly newspapers in the US, and over 2,600 weeklies. There are around 3,000 magazines, and thousands of radio and TV station websites. Not to mention the city government websites we crawl looking for local announcements.

"Despite the enthusiasm around RSS, there is a long way to go before the bulk of this content will be available in feeds."

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 03:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ClickZ yesterday paraphrases me as saying the argument for growing audience through RSS is dubious. It's an accurate paraphrase and the ClickZ article does report what I think.

I want to fortify it. There is nothing wrong with RSS. Look, I publish a RSS feed myself. I've been a speaker at many conferences about how to monetize RSS feeds. I'm proud to say that in early 2000, Editor & Publisher magazine quoted me saying that RDF (as RSS was then known) would revolutionize content syndication.

However, just as there is nothing wrong with RSS, there is nothing wrong with Betamax, steamships, postal mail, television, horse carts, or geek code (for those who don't remember that). The problem isn't the conveyance but what is conveyed and for what purpose.

When readership of the contents of newspapers and magazines has been steadily declining for 40 years, the problem is the contents not the conveyance. We already know that simply shoveling the contents of periodicals online won't reverse that decline. The problem hasn't been that the conveyance was newsprint but the contents.

Likewise, simply shoveling that contents into RSS won't reverse that decline. If the more compelling (i.e., multimedia) HTML format didn't reverse the decline, then a plain-text format like RSS won't either. The solution isn't to find new ways to distribute the declining content. The solution is to solve the problem of that declining content itself.

And it might also come as a surprise to some freelance bloggers who read the following: If content producers who are employed in teams can't make a living producing content as a team, then dire economics straits eventually force them to stop producing it. Ask anyone who once worked for the more than 300 daily newspapers that have ceased publication during the past 40 years, the hundreds of magazines that have done so, or companies like United Press International (the real UPI of old, not the current company that purchased that legendary brandname).

As the Project for Excellence in Journalism reported earlier this year, "If people increasingly substitute the Web for their old media before a robust economic model for the Web evolves, the economic effect could be devastating for journalism. Companies might begin to cut back significantly on their newsgathering abilities, as audiences abandon profitable old platforms in favor of less profitable new ones. The Net in this case might weaken, not strengthen, the economic vitality of news organizations and the quality of American journalism."

Substitute 'RSS' for 'Web' in that quote. Some bloggers might think that scenario will doom only corporate media, which 'We Media' will rise to replace it. But, sorry kiddies, the fact is that for every 'RatherGate' story in which bloggers force a correction in a corporate media story, there are literally tens of thousands of stories filed daily by professional journalists working as teams in newspapers or news magazines. When RSS has no business model, their livlihoods are threatened the way that the PEJ mentioned above.

The problem isn't a question of whether or not to use RSS (or any other way of disseminating content). Yet, using it without figuring out a business model for it is self-destructiive (the same with using it in the mere hope that a business model will someday appear).

Too much effort is being expended in implementing RSS without any business model. The solution will ultimately be to first fix the problem with the content, to make content that people are willing to pay for online, then use RSS as one of many ways to distribute it. [That ultimate solution lays in using XML and individualization. More about that later.]

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 09:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

That's online newspaper publishing pioneer Barry Paar's lament last week at MediaSavvy.

... They are desperately afraid of "aggregators" grabbing their headlines and treating them as wire services.

Why are they afraid of aggregators? I understand the rationale, but it doesn't really make any sense. They want you to visit their home page, which they view as the gateway to the rest of their site, every day, whether they have any news for you or not.

Barry's posting is instructive.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Public Relations strategist Steve Rubel, who currently serves as Vice President of Client Services at CooperKatz & Company in New York City, has launched Micro Persuasion, a weblog that tracks how weblogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Disrupting the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism, is a panel next Friday morning at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Admission is free. Panelists are:

In the printed and online editions, at the end of his opinion column about the North Korean nuclear weapons, The New York Times Nicholas D. Kristof adds:

After my reports from Africa about ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of Sudan, many readers have asked what they can do. I've put some possibilities on my blog, www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds, in Posting No. 344.

That's an excellent use of a blog by a newspaper.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the foreground, Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor, the turned head of an attendee we don't know, , and Gordon Joseloff of WestportNow.com and formerly of CBS News and UPI. That's me near the clock, commenting to the What is Journalism? session at BloggerCon II. Photo courtesy of Werner Vogels (click to enlarge it.)

Is blogging is journalism? What are the differences? If you want to know, don't invite speakers from either side. Instead, invite speakers who each are are both bloggers and journalists. They'll know the answers.

Round 1: Last Spring, JupiterMedia's ClickZ held a Weblog Business Strategies conference, which was attended by some 100 people, including software pioneers such as Dave Winer, Anil Dash, Dan Bricklin, Doc Searls, Bob Frankston, and David Weinberger, and by journalists such as Jeff Jarvis, Rafat Ali, Elizabeth Spiers, Jimmy Guterman, Rick Bruner, Christopher Lydon, Rebecca Lieb, and Tony Perkins. It had a focused agenda. I was lucky enough in it to speak, along with Jarvis, Ali, and Spiers, on its panel about Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms? We concluded that well-written blogging can be journalism. Spiers' work for Gawker.com and Ali's for PaidContent.org were excellent examples. Jarvis cited tests of blogging he planned for his company's newspapers. And I cited examples such Dan Gillmor, Andrew Sullivan, and the Guardian's blog. The question of whether or not blogging was journalism was already understood and answered. In many cases, the answer was yes.

Round 2: Last month, I intentionally missed Mediamorphosis, a symposium held by the American Press Institute, a news industry think that's trying ten years too late to rebrand itself as a center of new-media thinking for news. This symposium was well-intentioned, but I missed it for six reasons:

Bloggers attending the BoggerCon II conference Saturday at Harvard University's Law School voted that forming a trade association of bloggers and also giving advertisers better usage statistics about blogs are the two best paths toward generating revenues from blogging. During a session on Blogging as a Business, moderated by Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance Internet and author of the BuzzMachine blog, and attended by some hundred commercial bloggers or wanna-be's, generated a quite comprehensive Wiki listing of ideas how to make money and what is needed to make money from blogging. (Related to providing advertisers better usage statistics, Rick Bruner of MarketingVox notes in iMediaConnection.com that the demographics of bloggers themselves should already be attractive to advertisers.)

A separate, earlier BloggerCon session on Blogging in Business, moderated by David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined and of the Joho Blog, didn't find many businesses using blogs for commercial purposes and didn't think that many would for years.

The New York Times also reports about BloggerCon. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Nico MacDonald give an overview.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, the Newspaper Association of America setup a group weblog for attendees of its Connections online publishing conference and none of them used it. So what? Did anyone really expect it to be used?

Last November, a group weblog that the Online News Association provided to attendees of its annual meeting was heavily used. However, that was a group weblog for a meeting of journalists — people who like to write. whose jobs are to write, who like to report what occured. It should have been no surprise that the ONA group weblog was heavily used.

By contrast, Connections is a conference of general managers and marketing executives — people who aren't writers, whose jobs aren't to write, and who are usually tight-lipped about saying what's really going on. Why did the NAA expect those people would be motivated to report for a group weblog?

Perhaps seeing how heavily a group weblog was used at the recent ONA conference, the NAA decided to provid one at the Connections conference — the way that it also served soft drinks, carrots and dip, and Internet kiosks, as just another accessory? Maybe it also just wanted to be trendy and say that it too provided a blog?

Whatever the reason, the NAA forgot the old adage about how a conference organization should know its audience. Writers write. Managers manage. And the managers who attended the Connections conference managed to do quite well without a group weblog. No mystery why.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're a business or a person planning to launch a Web log for a product, service, public relations, lead generation, advocacy, product, service, public relations, or any other business purpose, MarketingWonk has published a solid, practical guide for you.

Business Blogs: How Successful Companies Get Real Results from Weblogs, written by Kate Kaye with help from Rick E. Bruner, cuts through hype and smoke about business use of blogs. Bruner, who I met when we were both speakers at JupiterMedia ClickZ.com's Weblogs Business Strategies conference this summer, sent me a review copy.

The 102-page guide, which MarketingWonk is selling for US$99, is packed full of fundamental advice about why and how to launch blogs for commercial purposes and how to run them. Kaye and Bruner see blogs as one of the most effective online marketing tools that a business (or even a professional individual) can have. Their guide discusses how blogs are used for corporate leadership, lead generation, customer relations, branding, and product & service management. Chapters examine:

• The Prevailing Models of Business Blogs
  
• A Guide to the Process of Setting up a Business Blog
  
• How to Promote Your Business Blog
  
• Advertising and Public Relations on Blogs
  
• Best Practices: Blogging Dos and Don'ts
  
• Legal Considerations for Business Blogs
  
• Blog Publishing Platform Review

The guide features 17 case studies from organizations ranging from Microsoft, Macromedia, Nokia, Sega, ESPN, Home Depot, Dr. Pepper, Jones Soda, Mattel, The WB television, Jupiter Research and the US Army, and also contains chapters with blog resources, bibliographies, terminlogy, plus the URLs of more than 50 other examplar business blogs.

Overall, this is the type of guide to commercial blogging that my company wishes it had written. We can heartily endorse it as the starter guide for any business or professional who that wants to start a blog. Indeed, even magazines and newspapers that are launching blogs could use its sage advice.

Business Blogs: How Successful Companies Get Real Results from Weblogs is the first business report to be published by MarketingWonk and we look forward to more good ones from it.

— Vin Crosbie

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We thank Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome, who today is attempting to clear up Digital Deliverance's "deep misunderstandings of the RSS feed and its accomplaying blog technology." He has been leading a charge that publishers should abandon e-mail publishing in exchange for RSS feed syndication. Because his opinions have been picked up by some mainstream publishing pundits, we think his misinformation has been hurting mainstream publishers. That's why we've been countering it. He now writes:

"An RSS feed allows micropublishers a place akin to a shop in the mall, while a traditional, static, website only gives them a store out on the edge of town. They still need to advertise the business in some way, location notwithstanding."

We now deeply understand that his previous article, Why RSS Will Kill E-Mail Publishing, was only about micropublishers and not about all publishers, something that his previous articles omitted.

We also now understand that because Pirillo calls them 'static', micropublishers must not be constantly able to update their sites. We agree that blog software makes a site easy to update, but we didn't previously know that regular Web sites can't be constantly updated. We've made note to ask Janine Warner to rewrite her instructional books on Macromedia DreamWeaver about that and we'll also alert the folks at NetObjects Fusion.

It's also good to hear that using RSS is the equivalent of "having a shop at the mall." We haven't heard that phrase since the early day of the Web, when having a Web site was like "having a shop at the mall." What doomed that metaphor then was the proliferation of Web sites. And that's already happened with RSS. For example, Syndic8 already counts more than 38,000 RSS feeds! Quite a huge mall!

Piriilo continues:

"Employing high-priced e-mail publishing firms will not change the fact that people don't want to see any more spam, period. They are getting sick of e-mail altogether. Just because a number of high-profile companies still do it doesn't make it right. You cannot forget the consumer in the equation when you're [developing] a marketing plan, and continuing to force-feed spam [to] people is no way to market any product. As well, while large companies are claiming big numbers of subscribers and no downturn, that's because when people are no longer interested in an e-mailed product, they most often don't bother to unsubscribe - they simply delete. So subscriber lists are no reliable indication of the number of people actually reading a publication."

We presume that the line "Employing high-priced e-mail publishing firms will not change the fact…" alludes to how two of our partners also run the e-mail publishing application service provider PublishMail LLC. Although they do currently serve six daily newspapers each with more than 100,000 print circulation, they also serves more than 100 weekly newspapers nationwide — a particularly penurious clientele that would never be able to afford high-priced firms.

Perhaps he's never been in a competitive business, but Pirillo apparently doesn't realize the fact that e-mail publishing vendors (and even e-mail marketing vendors) are in an extremely competitive businesses and their rates have been declining according to Moore's Law for the past five years. After all, if large numbers of e-mail were expensive to send, then spammers wouldn't be e-mailing.

Moreover, none of the examples we'd previously cited in other response to Pirillo used high priced firms. In fact, the ones we cited used in-house solutions or inexpensive but professional e-mail publishing application providers. The examples we previously cited focused on that professional angle: employing legitimate vendors who know how to solve the problems. We never wrote anything about high-priced vendors. So, his phrase "Employing high-priced e-mail publishing firms will not change the fact…" is a rhetorical red herring, an attempt to make it seem like the 'big boys' are picking on him and that his is the only solution for the average person.

Indeed …

Slamming and insulting small business owners because of their lack of big budgets, and suggesting they are somehow less valuable because of that, is not any way to make one's own advice any more valuable, either.

… is the same rhetorical device. Do notice that in none of our previous responses to Pirillo have we ever slammed, insulted, or disparaged any small business owners (indeed, Digital Deliverance is one) or questioned their budgets. His rhetoric merely attempts to distract your attention.

"…people don't want to see any more spam, period. They are getting sick of e-mail altogether. Just because a number of high-profile companies still do it doesn't make it right.

This apparently is meant to infer that firms like The New York Times, Financial Times, Economist, and The Wall Street Journal are spamming people. After all, those were the high profile companies we had mentioned. We weren't aware that a solicited e-mail of the top stories from The New York Times was a spam, but thanks to Pirillo we now deeply understand that it is.

"You cannot forget the consumer in the equation when you're [developing] a marketing plan, and continuing to force-feed spam [to] people is no way to market any product."

Ditto. We thank Pirillo for letting us deeply understand that organizations like The New York Times, Financial Times, Economist, and The Wall Street Journal are forgetting the consumer in their business plans and are force feeding spam.

"As well, while large companies are claiming big numbers of subscribers and no downturn, that's because when people are no longer interested in an e-mailed product, they most often don't bother to unsubscribe - they simply delete. So subscriber lists are no reliable indication of the number of people actually reading a publication."

We agree that this often happens. And, as we'd mentioned in our earlier responses to Pirillo, that is why the actual opening rates and clickthrough rates are more reliable indications of the number of people who actually read an e-mailed publication. We've said that all along. If someone has clicked through a link on an e-mail, the chances are they've actually read it.

"What is more permanent is that an RSS feed provides anyone who wishes to communicate with a large number of people the ability to do so, free of spam concerns, and with the assurance that the message will go where it's intended to go, unhampered by unknown, unforeseeable problems at the receiving end."

In reality, a RSS feed doesn't convey the entire content of a blog entry unless that entry was short. It instead truncates anything more than a few hundred words and the publisher hoping that readers will then clickthrough to the actual (blog) Web site. Spam on blogs is becoming an increasing problem, as the BBC and Wired.com each reported last month and The Feature coincidentally reported today. We're also pleased to see that veteran blogger Mitch Ratcliffe's blog is back online today after a week of having been knocked offline. (We learned about that from veteran blogger J.D.Lasica's new blog, who's old blog also went kaput on him a few months ago.) It's good to understand that there is an online vehicle free of spam and assured of operating unhampered by unknown, unforeseeable problems at either end.

We'd previosuly written that most consumers won't use RSS even if that technology is built into other software or even into the computer operating system, and cited the examples of how most consumers don't use the Usenet newsreaders were built into e-mail apps or the Active Desktop feed receiving capabilities that were built into the Windows operating system. Pirillo responds:

"The reason that aggregators will be used while Usenet and Active Desktop [are, comparatively,] not is that aggregators are easy to use and unobtrusive. You choose [only the] updates [that you find important], and that's what you get. Right now there is at least one aggregator I know of, Bloglines, that could be easily used by anyone who has been online before. (For reasons that should be obvious, RSS feeds are of no value to anyone without a computer and online access.)

"Active Desktop and PointCast gave me limited choices, along with a lot of stuff I didn't want, which interfered with my other work at the computer (and Usenet has always been a mystery to me). I've never been able to configure it properly, so I gave up on that a long time ago. They are both completely different than RSS aggregators."

So, "aggregators" (RSS newsreader software) will be used, although the easy-to-use and unobtrusive Usenet and Active Desktop softwares were not, because the aggregators are easy-to-use and unobtrusive? As for Active Desktop, it gives you only the feeds you ask, like RSS does. If Pirillo got anything he didn't want via an Active Desktop feed, that is because those feeds, like RSS feeds, send whatever their publishers wants to send. And we're sorry to hear that the decade-old Usenet system is a mystery for this techno-guru to use. Ditto his:

"Once my local newspaper gets an RSS feed, I'd probably look at it daily, too. I get an e-mailed update from one newspaper, but most often it gets deleted inadvertently, so I don't see that one very often, either."

Gotta' watch that Delete key! Nevertheless, we thank Pirillo for correcting our "deep misunderstanding" that his previous article, Why RSS Will Kill E-Mail Publishing, wasn't about e-mail publishing in general but only about how some micropublishers might consider also using RSS. As indeed we are.

If you're a micropublisher operating a site aimed at people who might be using RSS newsreader software, take Pirillo's advice. But if you're not a micropublisher or your site isn't aimed at people who might not be using RSS newsreader software, don't abandon your site's use of solicited e-mail publishing.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 07:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The second part of our article examining the feasibility of paid subscription blogging was published today by JupiterMedia's ClickZ.com. It also features the opinions of Hylton Jolliffe of Corante, Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits, Henry Copeland of Pressflex and BlogAds, and Nick Denton of Gawker, Gizmodo, and the recently launched Fleshbot.

The article elicited this response from one reader:

Hello

I love your piece - but what exactly is a blog?

Showing that you can't take anything for granted when writing an article about this subject.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Newspapers that provide blogs to a few readers are merely creating a few amateur guest columnists. That's not 'participatory journalism'. What is will be unveiled next Monday by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Called iCAN, the BBC Interactive's participatory journalism program lets any resident of a UK community raise issues, promote grassroot campaigns, find people with the same public concerns, and change things within their community or the nation. iCAN provides the hosting, advice, and the online tools and resource, and consists of two main components: self-service public forums that help people raise concerns and find others who share those concerns, and what the BBCi calls a 'democracy database' designed to provide the public with a wealth of information on grassroots campaigns and legislative processes.

For example, if a city council plans to close a local school, iCAN can help concerned citizens find each other, facilitate organization of anti-closing public meetings and protests, and learn how citizens of other cities have successfully stopped schools from closing. BBCi architected iCAN after an ethnographic study of real-world grassroots political campaigns. iCAN benefits the BBC by giving it fertile grounds for story leads; six BBC reporters, assigned to different regions of the UK, will watch iCAN for potential stories.

Matt Jones, one of iCAN's lead developers (who is now leaving BBCi to join Nokia in Helskinki) provides some background theory.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Brian Peddle of SavedByZero.org discusses possible ways to track readers of Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds. It certainly won't beat an e-mail subscriber list and e-mail open/clickthrough tracking as ways to know who reads your content.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Professor Jay Rosen of New York University's School of Journalism offers some interesting and contrarian thoughts about blogging & journalism.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cyberjournalists.net profiles Gordon Joseloff, a former CBS News and UPI foreign correspondent, who has used blogware to create an online news publication about his hometown of Westport, Connecticut. A very affluent community of 26,000 people, Westport has weekly and semi-weekly printed newspapers, but no dailies covering it well. Its residents' high per capita income means that a very high percentage of their homes have computers with high-speed Internet access. Joseloff's effort, WestportNow, is an example of how a professional reporter online can single-handledly create a serious news competitor to local weekly newspapers.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cyberjournalist.net reports on the ten blogs that the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, has launched.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

eMarketer today provides its usual good briefing skills to Perseus's survey of blogs, which estimated that there are 4.12 million blogs worldwide.

In that survey, the conclusion that got the most publicy was 66% of the surveyed blogs had not been updated during at least the past two months. Statistically, that represents 2.72 billion blogs. Some 1.09 million of those blogs were what Perseus called "one-day wonders" &$151; blogs that were setup by users but never used. Another 1.63 million blogs were abandoned after only 120 days. These high abandonment rates belie claims by blogging aficianados that three or four million blogs were in daily use.

However, the other data that surprised us were the average age of bloggers. Perseus found that 91 percent of bloggers were ages 13 to 29. Teenagers accounted for 51.5% of all bloggers. What is remarkable is that those age percentages don't follow the age demographics among the initial users of the Internet. During 1993 through 1996, the majority of Internet users were between the ages of 25 and 35 but with a sizeable plurality above the age of 50. That might have been because personal computers were expensive back then and weren't used by young people?

The almost lack of bloggers above age 39 is striking! Less than two percent, according to Perseus. This begs two question: Are blogs mostly used as journals by teenagers and young people? Why aren't older people, who do keep analog journals (particularly by retired people), also using blogs?

A third question might be, Have young people discovered something online that older people haven't yet? But we don't think that is the case.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We look at the prospects for paid subscription blogging, in our monthly Publishing: Free to Fee column published today at ClickZ.com. The second half of the column will appear there next month.

Posted by Vin Crosb