News. Technology. Ramblings.

A private equity firm focused on media predicts broadcast TV will surpass newspapers as the largest ad medium in 2008 and three years later “total Internet ad spend” will surpass broadcast TV.

press release

Full report

Chart

Twitter is happy to proclaim it’s ready to replace the Associated Press when it comes to breaking news. Twitter users beat AP by nine minutes with news of this week’s Southern California earthquake. While the quality or depth of the work may not be comparable to that of professional journalists, many people enjoy immediacy and connectedness. Can nitch programs like twitter force traditional media sit up and take notice of what they have to offer? The vast number of notes coming from average people in such circumstances makes it difficult to follow what’s going on. But it’s worth following such developments to better understand the possible future of media.

Twittering is getting from mainstream media buzz from places like USA Today. When a movement gets attention from such places, it often means it is beginning to move out of the techie-junkie realm into the field of vision of your average internet user.

The social networking site growing so fast that it is wrestling with the problem of going down from too many users trying to access it. A good problem to have.

Twittering is sort of micro-blogging or perhaps Group IM (instant messaging). Like the status updates on Facebook, twittering explains what I’m doing right now in just a few words. Ten, 20, a 100 people may be signed in to get my twitters. This comes in handy at conferences and conventions, where you can tell folks, hey, there’s free bobble head dolls on the convention floor at booth 12 for the next 10 minutes.

Working on the same premise is 12seconds. You create video updates that are 12 seconds in length – a similar limitation to Twitter’s 140 character limit.

Classified ads in American newspapers are quickly evaporating. So far this year, they are off 25%. At the same time, Craigslist is booming. Housing ads are up 85% from a year ago. Rental ads are up 120%. Even real estate are ahead 70%. , Craigslist charges a fee for employment ads in 10 major cites and is considering adding eight more markets - with the goal of discouraging spammers, more than making money from it.

MediaStorm is a small company of just six people. But the “multimedia production company”s is having an impact on photojournalism by taking still images, video or audio tape, and then looking for a story to fit the material. After adding a narrative, you have a group of short chapters that do not follow any particular order.

Some of these efforts have gained quite a bit of praise from media critics and the journalists in the field. After they clips play, viewers can post comments, buy a DVD, download a transcript, etc. The aim is telling a good story and producing quality material rather than just “feeding the beast”.

Here’s a visual aid for feeling the pain in the newspaper industry of recent layoffs.  As management searches for a bottom, it is likely the cuts will be deeper than necessary just to make sure of a bounce back in the right direction. Problem is, until you find the point at which you are making a profit, you don’t know how deep the hole may be.. hang on for a bumpy ride.

There’s a bill in Congress that would provide protection for journalists from naming those anonymous sources they come up with from time-to-time. Former newspaper guy Carter Wood thinks it’s a bad idea and he explains why in a Forbes article. Wood suggests the law could be used as a cover for illegal activity. Whether the idea of a shield law is a bad idea or not, many people don’t realize there are no special privileges for journalists. There no extra set of laws to cover news gathering. If you trespass, ignore police warnings or hide information requested by a court, you can’t just flash a press pass and walk away.

Is having to go to just one place (Google News) for searching any news (Thanks or no thanks to RSS feeds) help live the news providers for long. We definitely have seen the ad revenue’s failing for most news agencies. And recently Wall Street journal assessed Washington Post’s online experiment a failure.

[Read more →]

USA Today founder Al Neurharth offered a defense of newspapers in the Friday edition of the paper. He tells us the print industry has a “bright future”. Neurharth bases this on a few circulation figures. What he fails to mention is that these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Neurharth gives circulation numbers for USA Today and the Wall Street Journal - but he doesn’t tell you how small those increases are from six months ago. The USA Today was up a whopping .27% while the Wall Street Journal is up a even bigger .3%. Overwhelming isn’t it? The mark of success has become, “See, we didn’t lose more than we lost!”

Neuharth fails to mention how things look for other newspapers. Here’s how much these major papers were DOWN from just SIX MONTHS ago.

• The Miami Herald -11% (-9% on Sunday)
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution -8.5%
• The Boston Globe -8.3%
• The Los Angeles Times -5.1%
• The San Francisco Chronicle -4.2%
• The New York Times -3.8% (-9.2% on Sunday)
• The Washington Post -3.5%
• The New York Post -3% daily ( -8% on Sundays)

And this is supposed to be good news for print? Neuharth actually brags about increases as little as 1.21% for some mid-sized papers. Instead of honestly addressing the problems facing the industry, he has responded by saying, “What problems?”

Is it any wonder newspapers are in survival mode with this kind of leadership?

NPR’s Marketplace ran a story this week called Newspapers seek new business models. The idea: Newspapers are no longer in the newspaper business but in the information business. Gannett’s attempt to generate new revenue streams is leading its reporters to spend time “updating a blog. Assigning videos. Writing TV scripts” and “producing glossy magazines”. It’s a multi-platform approach focused on hyperlocaism. But will it draw a crowd? Better yet, will it draw enough of a crowd to make money and keep the show on the road? Is it the future of journalism or just a another way to leak money - by assuming if you throw enough at people, something will stick? Until someone really gets the bottom line humming along, it’s just a interesting experiment.