Road Ahead

Matthew DeBord’s, Apple Will Change Cars posting at The Big Money web site foresees Apple’s IPAD as the forerunner of a touch screen dashboard, eliminating all the instrumentation except the odometer. For auto journalists he believes, “it could be a huge deal for the so-called “buff books,” magazine titles such as Car and Driver, Road & Track, Motor Trend, etc., because it will allow these glossies to program more dynamic content, including video, and still showcase cars with vivid photography in a format unbound from the desktop and not mixed up with the full-blown computing capabilities of most laptops.”

Wired editor Chris Anderson, interviewed by OnLine Media, said, “If you look at the Tablet in particular, the prototypes we are working on now are applications of traditional magazine-making techniques to a much more efficient distribution platform, and much more powerful presentation platform, with all kinds of multimedia aspects to it. It is designed to leverage our existing skills. You know — photography, design, editing, and control of the experience – the packaging of the ideas. These are skills we believe transcend paper, and the Tablet is the first opportunity we’ve had to show that.”

Photo By: Artiom Chernyshevich

That opportunity means added impact and that is where the future lies for Online Spin columnist Joe Marchese: “ ‘Scale’ is not necessarily as important as it once was. Advertisers coming from a world where ‘reach and frequency’ was a success metric need to realize that in this new world scale is out and impact is in.” In other words, buying billions of impressions online — where click-throughs amount to no more than a ’rounding error’ and the number of people who recall seeing the ad, let alone remembering the message in the ad, can hardly be measured on a logarithmic scale — is not impactful.”

Emotion is the key according to a new study by Innerscope, as reported by Karl Greenberg in Media Post. He says: “The firm found that while consumers’ overall emotional engagement with car and truck ads dropped from 2008 to 2009, some ads engaged consumers at high levels across brands and classes. And those ads had specific characteristics that were missing from ads with low engagement scores.”  What Innerscope CEO Carl Marci tells Greenberg about ads is relevant to auto writing and reporting, “Seventy-five percent of behavior, including engagement, is driven by subconscious responses. We are measuring unconscious emotional response to auto ad stimuli, and if the ads aren’t relevant, you aren’t going to be engaged.”

Still another informed look at web communications is offered by Craig Newmark, founder of CraigsList. From his piece in The Huffington Post: “Trust is the new black, as I like to say. The great opportunity for news organizations is to constructively demonstrate trustworthy reporting, and to visibly do so. News curation, that is, selecting what’s news and should be visible, that’s an equally big deal. …The successful news organizations of the future will pursue models for news curation/selection which is a hybrid of professional editing and collaboration among talented consumers.”

Helping readers weigh the output of crowd-sourced input is a new product from a start-up firm, Jodange, reported by Steve Smith in Media Post. “Thoughts, feelings and sentiments coming off the Web — that is what the technology is about,” says (Jodange) co-founder Larry Levin. The technology uses linguistic analysis to extract opinions from text, identify the sentiments expressed, the opinion holder and the topic. When combined together they produce, for example, the ‘Top of Mind Recovery Pulse’ which analyzes everything from news articles to blog posts and even Twitter tweets to surface and quantify attitudes.”

The push for pay walls guarding publishers’ content is gaining momentum world wide. Springer, publisher of Bild, Europe’s largest daily paper, joins Rupert Murdoch who promises to start charging to access his outlets around the globe. The $15 billon, 44% drop, in U.S, newspaper advertising over the first three quarters of 2009, as compared with the same period in 2006, has many large U.S. newspapers evaluating ways to charge for their digital offerings. (The trade Variety put up a pay wall this week).

Photo By: Zsuzsanna Kiliani

Springer’s plan, as described by New York Times writer Eric Pfanner, would have publishers and internet companies working together to create a “one-click marketplace solution” where Google and other Internet gateways would display links to content as they do now, but some of the items would include something new, a price tag.” Conditioning consumers to an online newsstand could mean a return to glory for digital auto magazines and their writers. Those that sell, prosper, those that don’t won’t.

A hitch in that plan is the amount of “free” information available provided by Google or other aggregators. The Germans would expand copyright laws to include excerpts as well as complete articles. To charges that it is “stealing content” Google has responded with what www.Eweek.com writer Clint Boulton describes as “an olive branch to newspaper publishers” – letting them limit the number of articles readers can view for free on Google News to five per day.” As to its search engine and excerpts, Google notes that publishers are free to de-list from its search engine if they are willing to forgo their take from link traffic generated by Google searches, currently at 100,000 clicks per minute. And, the sales boost for their advertisers from articles consumers read. Read the rest of this entry »

Google and Microsoft are “content kleptomaniacs” according to News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, as quoted in a report by Media Digest of an interview he gave Sky News in Australia. He also was quoted as saying he would ban search engines from his newspaper websites when he erected pay walls for them. The walls being necessary in his opinion, because there are “not enough advertising dollars to go around and make all web sites profitable.” . . . Google president Eric Schmidt sees future media as super fast, intuitive, largely crowd and social media sourced and advertising based, as reported by Jessica E. Vascellaro in, ironically, the Wall Street Journal Network.

Photo By: Joakim Buchwald

For automotive writers it would seem that advertising-based content would be better as long as car dealers and manufacturers pay to promote their products, locally and nationally. The premise being that auto editorial is needed to attract readers to the ads and sustain consumer interest in the products. . . However, Hewlett-Packard lab scientist Bernardo Huberman as quoted in Online Media Daily believes, “The value of information is giving way to individual expression as more people post on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.” He notes, “Our ability to pay attention to things is limited,” so it will become more important to look at ‘propagation of signals’ at social media sites to determine effective marketing strategy.” Which could mean, as AWcom interprets it, every reader an editor, selecting his or her own media input from a vastly expanded range of options.

This is only going to get wider and denser with new apps like www.Ulitzer.com offering “a ‘new media; social journalism platform which revolutionizes how we create, deliver, and consume content on the Web. Ulitzer authors can get started with their first article in a few minutes and may start a new “topic” on any subject or write a story and post it both to their Ulitzer author page and to any existing Ulitzer topic. The network effect of people using Ulitzer to communicate and collaboratively produce and categorize content is disruptive, bypassing traditional media and middlemen. Topics published on Ulitzer range from Greek Isles in the Summer to New Media via Personal Branding and Marketing & Sales.”

But wait, Kurt Cagle, managing editor of XML Today reminds us in Technology News, “The danger here is in failing to recognize that user-generated content does not necessarily just represent true facts, but also contains opinions, distortions, analyses and biased content.” Which brings into question the current popularity of crowd-sourced car reviews being promoted by Ford, Honda, Toyota and others. By becoming our own editors we will have nobody except ourselves to blame for what we get in the way of news and information.

“Trying to control the Internet is like gift wrapping a balloon.” British barrister Richard O’Hagan, commenting on his government’s inability to gag the Twittersphere. (Quoted in the Immediate Network’s Media Digest)

Photo By: Michal Zacharzewski

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission may be trying to do some gift-wrapping of its own. On December 1 and 2 the FTC will convene a two-day workshop titled. “From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”  “The concern is that a robust news-gathering operation does not fit into the economic models born from the Internet and cable news,” writes Kenneth Corbin in his blog for RealTime IT News titled “Policy Fugue”. He goes on, “If one accepts the premise that quality local and investigative journalism is a civic good, this is a problem.”

The FTC has already sent up a balloon with its guideline for bloggers which Wendy Davis summarizes in Online Media Daily, “Bloggers who review products given to them for free should disclose that fact in some circumstances, but journalists who write reviews for news outlets generally need not do so.” While guidelines, not law, the FCC states, for example: A blogger who “frequently receives products from manufacturers because he or she is known to have wide readership within a particular demographic group that is the manufacturers’ target market” is more likely to be required to disclose a free review copy.” Subsequently, Davis reported, ”Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg has told the Federal Trade Commission that its new guides for bloggers are unconstitutional and should be retracted.”

Rothenberg reasons “The same guidelines do not apply to traditional media and therefore violate the free-speech rights of bloggers and pose an economic threat to small publishers.” Some of the sting was taken out of the news when the FTC’s Mary Engle told Marketing Daily, “We will be focusing our efforts on advertisers, not on individual bloggers,” she said. “We know there are hundreds of thousands of blogs, only a fraction of which are involved in marketing anyway. We’re not going to be patrolling the blogosphere.”

Meanwhile Cory Treffiletti, writing for Online Spin, sees The Real Future of Newspapers following two separate paths and only one of them includes paper of any form – local news, always of value, likely will be on paper. While the second path that newspapers will follow is that of a trusted, credible source for the news and related editorial that can be distributed through digital methods and syndicated wherever the reader might be.