The Washington Post this week started an interesting conversation about what consumers will pay for news on the iPhone.
Instead of building a paywall like the New York Times, the Post is playing with a $1.99 iPhone app that gets you a full year of “customized access and offline reading.“
This marks a major shift in thinking — away from paywall desktop revenue models to the mobile phone, where in the iPhone ecosystem, many consumers are already comfortable making micropayments.
According to paidContent, the Guardian’s iPhone app was downloaded about 100,000 times from December to February. That’s pretty good for an app that sold for $3.99.
At $1.99, the Washington Post’s attempt to find a revenue foothold is admirable. “It’s not really so much about this from the point of view of a large revenue stream, but trying to gauge how our readers react to paying for content,” Goli Sheikholeslami, VP and GM for the digital ops at the Post told Nieman Journalism Lab. “It really provides us with a platform for experimentation.”
I recognize that I’ve been quick to dismiss Apple’s iPad; now I want one.
When I first saw the keynote by Steve Jobs, I thought to myself how lame it was — that really, the iPad is nothing more than a bigger iPod Touch or an iPhone.
I’ve come around to see that there’s more to that. In many ways, it is just a larger screen, but the iPad will give content publishers a new and far more interesting way to distribute and engage their audiences.
So what got me going? This video by Wired and Adobe. Check out what Wired wants to do with its articles on an iPad. Then come back and tell me if this doesn’t get you going.
And if you haven’t already heard, the iPad hits the shelves in the U.S. on April 3. It reaches Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.
A new post by Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins is highlighting an interesting (but perhaps not too surprising) trend regarding news consumption on Facebook vs Google News.
Facebook sends news traffic to:
The Weather Channel
CNN.com
Yahoo! News
MSNBC
People Magazine
Google News, on the other hand, sends news traffic to:
The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Washington Post
Reuters
CNN.com
Note the difference and possible conclusion: Facebook is great at directing news to broadcast sites, presumably for breaking news and live events; Google, by contrast, sends traffic to high reputation newspaper sites, presumably for the broader picture.
This data coincides with what the TV industry already knows: social media is helping to create an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to spend time online and on TV at the same time.
Case in point: NBC showed the Golden Globes on both coasts in the U.S. for the first time this year, in a nod to the symbiotic relationship between TV and social media; ultimately, people witnessing a live event want to be attached to each other.
Ahead of an expected election this year, a core group of influential journos in the Canberra Press Gallery have been tweeting their way on the campaign trail.
Julie Posetti at PBS’ MediaShift has a great post on the use of Twitter by Australian journalists to cover the ins and outs of what happens in Canberra. As part of her investigations into how Twitter is changing journalism, she’s found that:
Twitter is a new dissemination point for breaking political news
Collegiality is being fostered between tweeting political journalists
Journos are linking to long-form stories on their own companies, but more interestingly, also to their rivals
Journos are posting photos to illustrate the mood and feel of the situation
This is a fascinating prelude if you will, to the other upcoming election in the region — that of the Philippines on May 10th. It would be interesting to see how the coverage plays out on traditional media and social news. I suspect Twitter will play a large part in that.
I was recently at a Purple Thumb conference organized by Yahoo! (where I work) to discuss the changing media landscape and how social media could change the way this election is covered. One point that came up over and over again was that despite the variety of new social tools, traditional values are more important now than ever. That means the basics like getting the facts right, great story telling and covering both sides.
I can’t wait to see what political journos in the Philippines do with Twitter. If you’re a reporter in the Philippines, I’d love to hear from you.
Worries about information overload are apparently as old as information itself.
According to Vaughan Bell, a clinical and neuropsychologist at the Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia, and King’s College London, the alarm on information overload was sounded way back in — guess what — 1565.
He wrote in an article for Slate that the Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner commented almost five centuries ago about the overabundance of data, concluding it was “confusing and harmful” to the mind.
Hindsight, with a bit of humor, reveals that:
Socrates warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they would not use their memories”
French statesman Malesherbes railed against getting news from the printed page as it socially isolated readers and detracted from getting news from the pulpit
In 1936, the music magazine Gramophone complained that radio (then called “wireless”) distracted children from their homework and disturbed the balance of excitable minds
Media historian Ellen Wartella noted how “opponents voiced concerns about how television might hurt radio, conversation, reading, and the patterns of family living.”
I can’t wait for the next big media frenzy. Will the iPad be bad for your love life?
Ultimately, the point here is that our approach to new media technologies — though not unjustified — have always been exaggerated. Take a deep breath. Understand what’s changing in society, and deal with it. You won’t be the last to complain about how the internet is changing lives.
A new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism is shedding more light on what Americans do online. Some of the trends are surprising (the parts in italics are mine).
1. 61% say they get some kind of news online. That’s seven percentage points above radio. So, are online ads doing as well as radio’s?
2. The majority of consumers (57%) say they rely on just two to five sites for their news. It would be good to see how aggregator sites do on this trend.
3. The weather is still the most popular online news subject (81% of users) followed by national events, health and business. Notice how “local” isn’t on that list?
4. News consumption is a social activity. 75% of those surveyed said they get the news forwarded via email or posts on social networking sites. 25% have commented on stories, but only 3% have Tweeted about news.
5. News is pocket-sized and portable. The biggest use of mobile news: Weather (26%).
6. The personalized “Daily Me” news. 40% of users say an important feature of a news site is the ability to customize the news they get from it. Oddly, only 28% have actually done so.
David Schneiderman, the ex-CEO of Village Voice Media, has a fantastic piece in TechFlash about the current ecosystem we live in, and in particular the all-too-familiar view of the world after newspapers.
His forecasts aren’t as interesting as his concise summary of the current state of play. Here are the main points:
Web journalism is fast becoming the dominant form of news media
Nothing is ever final online
The best and most influential reporters are becoming brand names.
The distinction between news and opinion will continue to erode
I find the first point especially interesting. You can’t deny the fact that web editors and producers are counting the clicks, comments and page views that you leave behind.
This is worrying; in the last two years alone, there has a been a dramatic change in the way we write headlines (primarily to feed hungry search engines). There are more lists, more magazine-style coverlines. And all this at the expense of good, clear writing.
The definition of “news judgement” has changed. It’s no longer about what people need to know (and what you, the editor, know), but what people will find “interesting” — the definition of which is vague, but ironically, measurable.
Patents are nothing new in the tech industry; giants like Intel and Apple have played this card for years to deliver the goods that we’re now so familiar with.
But what happens when your activity online suddenly becomes a patent fight?
Facebook this week was granted a patent on — guess what — its Newsfeed.
A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items.
Can you imagine a social web experience in 2010 without a news feed?
This is a massive game changer as it take the fight straight into what everyone else is trying to do right now: help users discover relevant and interesting stories flagged through their primary filter — their friends.
As I wrote previously, status updates will be the most valuable consumer content in the next two years as a gold mine of insights into user behavior and preference. Facebook’s move to create a moat around this is troubling.
So is this the end of the line for other companies? Probably not. In fact, this could be a good thing. Since many of us hate the way Newsfeeds are presented, this is a fabulous opportunity for innovators to present social news in new ways.
If you were watching Twitter’s trends last night, you may have been wondering: What’s Marsha and Rana?
It’s more a “who” than a “what.”
Marsha and Rana, two Indonesian students found themselves at the center of the Twitter spotlight, not for academic accomplishment but for ongoing taunts and insults.
Rana, a junior high school student in Jakarta, started insulting BlackBerry users by calling them tacky. But Marsha decided to take on a bigger fight: She smeared public schools as sub-standard.
It wasn’t long before public school students flooded their Twitter streams attacking Marsha, retweeting one insult after another. Some users also created phony accounts in her name in a bid to fuel the rage. Marsha made it top of Retweet Rank in no time (her account @marshaaaw has since gone dark).
Wednesday’s surprising incident on Twitter is a reflection of significant trends in Indonesia.
First, according to a report by Sysomos in January, Indonesia is Asia’s biggest Twitter market. Interestingly, Indonesia didn’t even make it to Sysomos’ league table in June 2009.
Second, the growth of mobile phones has skyrocketed among students. And it’s not just the $50 Nokias — we’re talking BlackBerry smartphones, which are ubiquitous among students, homemakers and businessmen. The BlackBerry is practically a “community” phone that ties people and conversations together.
Twitter apps are also everywhere. They are light, fast and they work on practically every platform on phones. Tweets are spreading like wildfire.
Welcome to the new SMS — faster, easier and full of rage.
Call me unambitious, but I really don’t care about being Mayor. Neither do I care about collecting those Boy Scout badges.
However, I’m interested in how journalists can use Foursquare in sourcing stories and seeding dialogue.
It has the potential of being a good source of stories, no different from a good Twitter feed. It’s a channel for:
Transportation: Traffic accidents and which streets to avoid, airport chaos
Economy: Store closures, where to find the lowest gas prices
Political: Strikes, protests
Crime: Bar fights, break-ins
Trust me, it won’t be long before we start seeing stories generated by these tip-offs on Foursquare.
But one of the best uses of Foursquare and its GPS feature is in disaster coverage. In floods, earthquakes and other disasters, GPS location could make it easier to pinpoint emergency needs.
