Video is fast becoming the native tongue for the internet; problem is that Newspapers don’t speak it very well, if at all, however the TV-based news entities do, they speak it very very well and unless Newspaper sites learn to speak Video fast, they will get trounced.

As the Video form grows as the preferred method for online content consumption, the issue for word-based news entities – primarily Newspapers – is that they will quickly become disadvantaged. Initially, Newspapers websites had more of an advantage for providing great new coverage online because words and photos – their native tongue – are a natural fit for the content form that has dominated the makeup of News websites for the last decade.

This is now changing and will not be the case for the next decade. Moving forward video content will become the preferred form. YouTube is not just a phenomenon because it provided clips of cute cats, crashing skateboarders and other pop culture trivialities. All that did was get it attention; it’s moved on, now its library carries clips of news broadcasts, interviews and film scenes. So it’s also a phenomenon because it’s a natural fit for our visual dominate world-culture – this sort of system is an easy way to get a person across information you want them to see.

Internet punters are focused on snacking, engaging in the infoscan. They don’t necessarily want full lead-ins with talking heads, polished shots, locked off camera angles or fancy edits – they want the point.

I can mention a scene from a movie, a point from an interview or note a news event to friends or my online social tribe, putting it up on my Blog, Facebook, Twitter or in an Email, and more than likely I can link to it by finding a reference on Youtube, Vimeo or Blip.tv or the array of smaller such sites. However, referencing is only one part of the equation. News consumption is shifting. In this information rich world – the garden of info overload – scanning, snacking and quick reference access to information – what I term the ‘infoscan’ – are becoming king. In a visual dominate culture and with the growing trend of infoscanning, we will see video growing as the primary way to consume news.

This creates a real problem for news entities that don’t speak Video. Unless Newspaper sites move beyond their roots as a word-dominate culture and embrace video production – they will see their Users moving away, off to find News sites that gives them what they want. Video. TV-based entities have been working with Video forever, so production of such content is effortless for them, they are setup, skilled and equipped to produce such material en mass.

That said, there are some advantages that word-based news entities can grab hold of to gain an upper hand or a least stay relevant. Break the rules. Internet punters are focused on snacking, engaging in the infoscan. They don’t necessarily want full lead-ins with talking heads, polished shots, locked off camera angles or fancy edits – they want the point. Going back to YouTube and the ability to reference a video clip – what is actually being referenced is the point. The videos are short and the point is delivered quickly and in the form modern culture prefers – visual. Therefore, Newspapers need to morph, they need to move towards this YouTube-like format and not just dip their toes in, they need to embrace it and jump right in the deep end. This will gives them an advantage immediately, as the very idea of handycams and rough footage has TV professionals only bemoaning the loss of the art. Guess what, here is a reality check, people don’t care about art they care about getting the point.

Just as Newspapers bemoaned Blogging for the same argument – the art, before adopting them in strength, so too will TV-entities initially avoid the quick, rough video clip. It is in this window that Newspapers can take the lead. CNN is doing some of this with their iReport format but it is still walled off from the main site and it is UGC. What I am expounding here is not UGC, it is reporters going out with a Handycam and uploading from the scene – this is guerrilla footage – raw, first person and taken from the event – but it puts a User there and in-the-scene immediately. CNN and rest of their ilk will not being doing this anytime soon – because this is breaking the industry rules. Newspapers don’t have to worry about those rules – they can ignore them and by doing so take the lead.

Handycams and rough footage has TV professionals only bemoaning the loss of the art. Guess what, here is a reality check, people don’t care about art they care about getting the point.

'How to Use' for the MSNBC Inauguration Video Player (click to enlarge)

As a taste of the future of video consumption one only needs to take a look at the MSNBC Inauguration Video Player – the ultimate in providing tools for a User to ‘infoscan’. The video packaging provided a very clever ‘tagging’ interface, presenting UI which allowed a User to jump directly to a word referenced in the video piece – allowed them to get to the point. Even cleverer than this was the ability to highlight the video transcript and then embed only this part of the video into a Blog or Website. The product also points to a online video world which smoothly blends YouTube-like clips and referencing with News presentation. These types of tools are a preview of the new video future to come – and I am sure the likes of Google, Microsoft etc have similar things in their labs.

In this new landscape of online news production and news website, a media entity’s roots are more of a hindrance then of any benefit – even for TV entities. The online landscape is a great equaliser – online news is video, words, pictures – all at once – but video is now king. The competitive advantage then comes from identifying this and moving focus onto fast production turnaround of video footage, while building skills in weaving this material into compelling news posts that a User can infoscan and move on.

Posted by J.M. Attix

Further Reading:
The Big Video Debate: Rough or Slick? By Roland Legrand (Mediashift)

The media industry is now living with a Chameleon economic act – shifting its colours every few months – it is difficult to lock down a business model when the terrority is changing from moment to moment.

There are some core basic however they can do to at least begin the move to another economic landscape – one of these is accepting that people want to pay for content and media when, where, and however they want – not how the media industry wants to dish it up.

Scott Karp from Publishing 2 has posted up an excellent article on the new economic considerations the media must account for; in it he deftly outlines the issues facing the media industry – issues they that need to address, accept and act on if they are going to be relevant for the coming years. He points out two real world examples: the first, how he wanted to watch a movie but couldn’t find an online service that allowed him to spend his $5 (even his local video store was no help – it was a shell), and the second, he was helping rent a flat and got results via Craiglist not the Newspaper.

His assessment of the core problems is accurate; unless the media wakes up that its core economics have shifted – they will simply vanish; swallowed by other media entities that do ‘get it’.

I recommend you read his post in full as he makes some excellent points – one is in the summation; “New business models for media require entirely new exchanges of value — it’s not about finding new ways to balance the old equation.” So true, so true.

Posted by J.M. Attix

Internet advertising is not print advertising – blatantly obvious though this statement is, it packs more punch then its simple surface semantic suggests. Internet advertising and print advertising are different beasts, but it does not appear that this differential is making much of an impact on the gravity of what is occurring for the Media industries – Newspapers, Television and Film.

Internet and Print advertising do not share the same goals or operational models and this is a big problem for these industries – big because it will change the face of what we know as ‘the media’ in the future. With the decline in Newspapers, the decline of TV viewership and growing struggles in the Film industries – media entities are looking to Online as a way forward – and it will be – just not in the way they would like it to be. A business-as-usual approach will not carry as they shift across to this medium. The onset of the problems this presents for media entities is spread in urgency – with Newspapers closest to the gauntlet – however TV and Film are not far behind.

It needs to be understood – and accepted – that for all the discussion about Online Ad Revenue trying to increase and match traditional Print Revenue – guess what? It won’t – not in time for the changes that are occurring.These two advertising revenue models are different beasts and so the News media – and especially Newspapers – are going to have to come to terms with this difference. This lack of volume in the revenue return for Online is going to force same drastic changes. News entities will have to adopt, by force or embrace, Internet advertising as their only core revenue stream and this will trigger the onset of a massive restructuring for how they do both business and news production.

It is going to force the media industry to fracture into multiple layers for news-type gathering – each layer will have big players and little players. What are these layers? They are different operational spaces or ‘news-types’ – how these are gathered and disseminated will change. Examples of these news-types are: Hyperlocal, Regional, National, Global, Opinion etc

Internet advertising in the later future may meet or grow beyond the value indexes of Print Revenue, but I use the word ‘later’ deliberately; for in the now, its lack of equivalency in volume will dramatically change the landscape of how news entities operate

Under this framework – the operation structural and news gathering approach of the smaller, city and regional players will have to dramatically change. The smaller players will have to embrace new paradigms that will fly-in-the-face of their high-church position on news coverage and delivery; these include:

Web syndication – moving to complete usage of this type of syndication; this means shifting editorial decisions onto managing syndicated and internet content; not covering news or events when it can be sourced elsewhere; the embracing of the Vanilla News paradigm. Editorial decisions are still relevant, however they need to shift a level to editing of the range of syndicated and internet content available. This approach is all about recrafting content – vanilla content – into local shapes and angles that work for their immediate audience.

Hyperlocal focus – a stronger focus on producing Hyperlocal content; this would mean using smaller teams of journalists – for some places or coverage just one person; to cover off the local events and happenings often and frequently. The size of teams for this sort of stuff is not important – effectively covering of Hyperlocal events is. Most media entities – especially Newspapers – need to accept they aren’t the only voice for their city, state or nation and more importantly a range of new uber-news players are coming onto the scene who will dominate the coverage and production of news in the years to come – these ‘uber-syndicators’ will provide the infrastructure, source and channels for news gathering and transport – the smaller players will just become service entities accessing these news-information corridors and shaping and recrafting this content for their own use. Hyperlocal will be a new battleground for the smaller players as the big news is all covered off by the uber-syndicators.

Video, video, video – embrace online video and gather it from everywhere; this includes using online Video content – YouTube, Vimeo, etc for supporting news stories or telling them; providing better mechanisms for getting UGC video from your audience and building partnerships with other news entities and video sources to provide video ad-infintum. If content is king – video is the god of content. Video consumption online is increasing rapidly – it will be the dominate form of news consumption within the next 2 years. Our societies have moved to a visual dominance and so video is the ultimate form of this dominance – as broadband infrastructure and delivery expand and the costs of it decrease, video consumption will only scale in usage.

Internet advertising in the later future may meet or grow beyond the value indexes of Print Revenue, but I use the word ‘later’ deliberately; for in the now, its lack of equivalency in volume will dramatically change the landscape of how news entities operate: What this will lead to? A mature version of what we see now in it’s embryonic stages; a world where news is transferable and transactions of it take on persona’s which meet the expectations of that online entities audience. This model, which provides a landscape for new entities to re-craft vanilla news forms into different angles will provide a new face for News gathering and a new method for dissemination of the daily news.

Posted by J.M. Attix

Further Reading:
Urgent Deadline for Newspapers: Find a New Business Plan before You Vanish | By Knowledge@Wharton (Wharton)
Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs | By Richard Richard Pérez-Peña (NYTimes)

Blunt title – maybe – but its speaks clearly to the sentiment that Internet Users are promiscuous when it comes to the consumption of content, information and news. Me, you and Mrs Smith down the road, all of us are guilty of it – all of us are content sluts.

Effectively the core aspect that needs to be appreciated here is that Internet Users are without exception promiscuous in their usage of the internet – there is not a single news or information site that they ‘only’ visit to stay informed. The reality is, given this general principle of ‘content promiscuity’ for human interaction with the internet, Newspaper websites sites need to start accepting this as the rule rather then the exception. They are bound by the same principles of Netizen usage as all other sites on the internet. Simply put, Users travel to many sites to get their personal topology of news and information until they feel they have sated their need to be informed.

Newspapers of course are not the only News entity to own and manage websites – we have all forms in this area including Radio and TV, but the difference here currently is that Radio and TV are still holding their own in this usage shift – whereas Newspapers are simply counting down the days. This means they need to take action now as the luxury of time is not theirs to have. Whether you feel the ‘death of the newspaper’ is exaggerated, over hyped or true – the declining usage and revenue models cannot not be ignored and the pattern they paint is not rosy!

Given the roots of where Newspaper sites have come from, they could possibly be given some latitude for their oversight on trying to understand their new digital audience – except they have run out of time – the gun is loaded and point and the finger quivers on the trigger, and quite frankly they stand guilty of the same denial that has and continues to destroy the music industry – refusal to accept loss of control and that the landscape has changed.

Herein lies the real problem for the Newspaper industry – they forgot somewhere along the line that they are in the business of news not ink, print and paper

In the past to have the aim of being the primary or single news source for a Consumer – to have a core motive to promote brand loyalty for such an aim – to encourage them to only use ‘your newspaper’ – was completely acceptable because the business and sales model supported it – a model where the Consumer had to ‘purchase’ an actual real-world object, in this case a newspaper. But if we dissect this mechanics of what a newspaper actually is – we can reduce it to that of a ‘news-object’

Herein lies the real problem for the Newspaper industry – they forgot somewhere along the line that they are in the business of news not ink, print and paper. The newspaper is simply a news-object and when your business model for selling the news-object breaks down you should then adapt your business model and strategy to work with a different news-object. News websites are one of the new forms of news-objects.

The use of the plural here is poignant – as I have written about previously – the news industry is plagued by a massive shift in its product, that is the generality of news content, the dawning of ‘vanilla news’ and the fracturing of said content into many flavours (citizen journalism, blogs, social status updates, user comments etc) all these things now are presented and crafted as news via Friendfeed, Twitter, Google News, WordPress to name a few; it presents some huge challenges for an industry that went from full ownership and control of the news supply channel to news anarchy.

Putting aside this fracturing of new sources – News websites are still presented with difficulties if they continue to hold onto the idea that they can control the focus of their user-base. When the news-object was a newspaper – having to actually pay to own a news-object allowed established rules around Consumer behaviour to kick in, in-so-much as that most Consumers will not keep buying more news-objects then their initial first preference – buy one newspaper not many. However, now that the news-object is a website the rules change – so by taking out the ‘purchasing’ aspect in the equation for accessing News by a Consumer and combining this with the general Netizen’s ‘content promiscuity’ activity – it becomes very clear very fast that the idea of holding a single Consumer to your site alone for News dissemination is a complete fallacy and bound for failure.

Paid News content is also a fallacy for this very reason, unless you have the monopoly on production of a particular type of content – e.g. content for Starwars the WSJ – then you cannot ‘ever’ setup a situation for a Consumer to pay for your content online. Obviously the access to global and local news information is not a monopoly for Newspaper sites, let alone News sites in general – hence the failure to be able to charge for this information. The failure of paid models has everything to do with general internet usage and the internet’s eco-system of multiple redundancy for content and little to do with a failure by the Newspaper industry to only offer only paid options. Such a model is never going to work for a content source that is not under monopoly.

Therefore any efforts to continue on or build anew such models will continue to fail as they have already shown for previously strategies – Consumers do not want to be forced to use only one news site.

The internet has lowered the resistance barrier by which to access news sources making that access faster and on the Consumers terms not at the News producers. Newspapers need to accept this and work towards viable models that go with the grain in regard to this or simply continue to get splinters as they rail against it. Careful though or the outcome may well be be the ‘death of a thousand cuts’.

Posted by J.M. Attix

Further Reading:
Grasping at Straws by Mark Potts (Recovering Journalist)
Dailies go Darwin by Adam Reilly (The Boston Phoenix)

The Media industry is in shock – they have suddenly realised that they are in fact middlemen. In an era where more and more people can connect directly with what they want – being a middleman is less the ideal and best avoided. The media also face the dawning era of ‘vanilla news’ – a massive paradigm shift in news consumption by Consumers.

Their plight as middlemen has landed them square in the middle of the battle for relevancy – this battle has been raging for years as the Music Industry well knows and is not exactly new. What the Middlemen find problematic is that their authority and control is threatened by a new emerging environment – an environment that is toxic to their very existence. It is toxic because it allows then to be challenged in their authority and their control; the challenge for them is to maintain relevancy in world where people can freely access content without having to go through them; where they have been stripped of their gatekeeper status.

The reality is that the entire way the Media operates is changing and this will continue to morph into a new structural form – this new form is a paradigm shift in consumer usage and behaviour – mainly around how people access and engage with news content. People want news their way, a type of ‘my packaging’ that can be built from the multiple forms of news available. Consumers want, demand access to a type of plain old vanilla news which can be repackaged to suit their consumption methods.

The death of the Newspaper is just the ‘canary in the cage’ for a massive shift in consumer and public interfacing with News gathering. The basics of this shift is that the Media no longer controls the packaging of the news or the way by which ‘the People’ what to consume the news – people want to wrap and package the news in their own way, and importantly, this packaging is different for each person. This means providing information in vanilla formats – effectively a ‘vanilla news’ by which a User/Consumer/Reader can build the packaging of ‘the news’ in their preferred way rather then be presented with a packaging format the Media industry defines.

So what is ‘vanilla news’? Simple – raw news content that comes without the bells and whistles of presentation, brand or editorial control.

The newspaper has been decimated first and foremost, primarily because it literally represents this tired model of packaged news – unfortunately for the newspaper industry – it can only provide a single archaic option for news packaging -  the format of the printed page. This format does not allow for much, if any maneuverability in providing a Reader with the vanilla forms need to meet the new ‘my packaging’ paradigm as the emerging trend for Consumer news consumption – albeit still embryonic but developing fast and growing in dominance.

So what is ‘vanilla news’? Simple – raw news content that comes without the bells and whistles of presentation, brand or editorial control. News is already available in a vanilla form and RSS is the transport layer by which people are grabbing it. They are then using the myriad of tools available to them today for parsing this incoming ‘news” flow into a packaging that suits them – examples of these tools are YouTube, Social Networking spaces (Facebook, MySpace etc), Social Bookmarking (Digg, del.icio.us etc), RSS Readers (Google Reader, Newsgator etc), Aggregation Sites (Newser, Google News etc) and Twitter – each allows a person to craft the news into their own personal News packaging for them to consume as they wish.

It gets worse however, as the shift in consumption of news is also a danger for TV, Radio but especially News websites; – mostly the sites run by Newspapers. The bad news is that News websites are also squarely in the sights of this powerful shift and will also be decimated by the change that is occurring because they want to continue to define and provide ‘the packaging’ – the recent concession made by News websites to link to other sources – known as link journalism – actually is just the vanguard of the growth of the Aggregation toolset type for how people will be able to consume news.

For the Media to stay relevant it must embrace this new paradigm and offer a set of tools of its own. News websites need to move forward quickly, reinventing themselves into aggregation systems of news and information sources at the same time offering ‘editorial’ tools on their sites that embrace the new ‘my packaging’ paradigm shift. Such tools will give a Consumer the ability to craft and shape the news source into different streams of Editorial focus and opinion – doing what journalism and journalists have done well for many decades; provide informed focus on the aspects of news that can’t be simply gained by reading the vanilla edition of a news item.

Much has been written and spoken about lately with regard to the way Newspapers could/should save themselves – the bottom line is they cannot – their particular way of packaging news is the most archaic in this brave new world of custom news packaging and the expanding paradigm of ‘vanilla news’. But the death of this particular industry should be loud warning cry for the rest of the Media industry and those newspapers still standing, that now is the time to shift focus and embrace the change. If not, the plots in the media graveyard are dug and ready for the first wave.

Posted by J.M. Attix

Further Reading:
Mediapocalypse Now By James Poniewozik (Time)
Nielsen: Time Spent Down on Major Paper Sites By Jennifer Saba (Mediaweek)