Road Ahead

Clouds of content are circling overhead and many experiments in making money by delivering that content to consumers are underway and for good reason.

Photo by: Flavio Takemoto

As Dan Coates comments in his Perfect Marketing column for Media Post: “While the Internet doesn’t quite represent a perfect market where individuals have perfect information and benefit from perfect competition, it’s much closer to perfection than ever before.”

It is not just the technology that is changing. Citing a recent study, by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Kantar (“The New Consumer Behavior Paradigm“) Coates contrasts Gen Y with previous consumers and says: “While other generations use these same (Internet) tools and technologies to make comparisons and guide their purchase decisions, they do so with the spirit of a convert rather than that of a true believer. Gen Y has never not had these tools at their disposal.” As well documented by declining print circulation figures, Gen Y is far more inclined to go online than open a newspaper or magazine.

Their reliance on the Internet makes paywalls promising despite contrary findings from surveys that undoubtedly included a high proportion of Gen X and Boomer respondents. That’s why Rick Edmonds surmises on Poynter Online’s Business Blog that the big players are getting serious about paywalls. He cites News Corp’s investment in Journalism Online and acquisition of the Skiff E-Reader from Hearst and Google’s development of NewsPass and a number of variations on the trend. Among the latter: MediaNews while seeking bankruptcy protection and Gannett while seeking solutions to floundering, staff-depleted and content-starved small dailies in its chain. Also noteworthy are Yahoo and AOL adding content farms, leading it was suggested to “an itunes of news.”

John Blossom, in his Shoreline Newsletter takes a less sanguine view in his review of most of the current paywall attempts but does offer high praise for one Internet innovation that also seems to offer opportunity for auto writers. It is Main Street Connect. It puts the focus on new ways to include local merchants (car dealers?) and community members in the editorial mix.

Whatever evolves, Coates’ conclusion seems a certainty: “Gen Y is at the beginning of the arc of its economic power. What we see today will be rapidly extended and expanded beyond our current context as technology evolves and the largest generation in American history begins to participate fully in the economic activity of our society.”

“Thanks to the Internet, people probably read more good journalism than before,” writes Andrew Rice in his May 16 New York Times piece on, Putting A Price On Words. “In fact,” he continues, that’s precisely the problem: the sheer volume of words overwhelmed a business model that was based on scarcity and limited choice.”

Photo by: CLUC

Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, sees the  problem more as a consequence of “unbundling.” Quoted in an extensive article on Google by James Fallows in the June Atlantic Monthly, Varian says, “Newspapers never made money on news…What paid for newspapers were the automotive sections, real-estate, home-and-garden, travel, or technology, where advertisers could target their ads. The Internet has been one giant system for stripping away such cross-subsidies.”

In either case the solution offered is in monetizing the web. Rice describes a number of attempts to do so, most of them “content farms.” Instead of journalists deciding what their audiences should or might be interested in, they now respond to what their audience tells them to write about. Farm operations scour the Internet to find out what topics are hot and then assign writers to produce articles on those topics. Income comes from ads that are paid for on the basis of page clicks and the writer gets a percentage. So far, Rice indicates, it is not much, with a few exceptions. As the founder of one such operation, Choire Sicha is quoted by Rice, “I don’t think anybody has any idea of what anybody should be paid for a piece.” A danger in this approach, as some note, is catering to the lowest common denominator. For example, one serious start up’s most popular post was, “Megan Fox Has Wacky Hot Chick Syndrome.” Or, from the advertiser’s standpoint, the value of pages that generate clicks but no relevance to their marketing message.

Google, which has been accused of being a chief cause of newspapers’ economic distress, sees a more long-term solution, including pay walls, which it considers no longer a question. The paywalls will be justified by quality content.

According to Fallows, Google foresees that as more people go online for news and information, the value of online advertising will go up. And, precisely because they will be “unbundled” page views will become more valuable. Online readers will select the content that interests them and that, in turn, will enable online advertisers to better target their message.

Photo by: Jenny W.

Reporting on the recent AP board meeting, Shoreline News sees “a glimmer of hope for beleaguered news providers” in that the AP intends to offer centralized business development, negotiating for its member newspapers and thereby helping them better extract revenues from web and mobile platforms. The E newsletter quotes AP Chairman Dean Singleton: “We need one voice, not only to work on business relationships but also new products that we might go together and also application frameworks so we decided AP should speak for the industry and work for the industry.” Journalism as a platform, Shore says.

An Arbitron and Edison survey, reported in a Mediapost Research Brief reveals 48% of all Americans over 12 years of age have a profile on one or more social networks. For teens it is 78 % while more Americans, 42%, rate the Internet as the most essential medium in their lives compared to television, radio or newspapers. Another Research Brief supporting that study tells the reaction of 200 college students who went ”24 Hours Unplugged” at the University of Maryland. They reported, “going without media in their world meant going without friends and families.” According to the study the students get their news and information in “disaggregated ways” and have only casual relationships to actual news outlets.

The takeaway for journalists, according to the report: readers and viewers of the future see them (journalists) as both irrelevant and indispensable. Apparently they don’t care how news and information comes to them, they just want it.

Not directly related but an interesting prediction in the shift in values cloud computing could bring comes from Max Kalehoff writing for Online Spin. As an example he offers music collections. With literally thousands of tunes at our finger tip for little or no investment and no longer needing to invest in records, tapes, or discs or to provide the space to store them along with the equipment to enjoy them, music collections no longer become a personal expression of our taste and mean less to us.

Photo by: CLUC

Increasingly, it is the Internet shaping us.

Its ubiquity, interactivity and immediacy means (among other things) communicators cannot bluff, puff or hide as Dave Morgan observes in his Online Spin Columns for Media Post, “Branding In the Age of Authenticity.” He sums this up for brand marketers: “brand slogans in the future will be those uttered by marketers’ customers, not those that marketers broadcast at them.” (An increasing concern for Toyota).

In a “Pollyanna-ish” blog for SearchInsider, Kathy Colbin says, “Greed is out; dishonesty will be revealed, and, ironically, the more you prioritize doing the right thing over the bottom line, the more your bottom line will benefit. “This direction is inevitable, thanks to a simple phenomenon: the proliferation of ever-more-powerful search capabilities and the rapid disappearance of whatever semblance of privacy we once had. We are experiencing a top-down, bottom-up convergence of forces that compel us to just be better people.” Really.

A snake in this Garden of Eden is seen by Kurt Cagle in his “The Rise and Fall of Journalism ” (Part IV) for TechNewsWorld where he is managing editor. He adds another characteristic of the Internet that he sees shaping journalism: “pertinence.” His line of reasoning is that the Internet is supplanting communities of place with communities of interest whose members are scattered geographically but gathered by “a shared theme, topic or cause.” In this view, “moderators who act primarily to insure that inbound content from contributors do not stray too radically from the role of the interest group” are replacing “editors”. This may be obvious but it is also problematic with the rise of the “Semantic Web.” Semantic tools read through blogs, articles and documents to determine what they are about (apparently without the bother of a human reading them). This may save time but it also may fail to recognize that, “user-generated content does not necessarily just represent true facts, but also contains opinions, distortions, analyses and biased content.” (Again, a growing problem for Toyota).

Wherever the road ahead leads for auto writers, traffic will be faster, more congested and definitely noisier. And it will be “mobile first” according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.  In his keynote address to the Mobile World Congress, as reported by Midmarket Eweek’s Nathan Eddy, Schmidt said, “smartphones are the high-volume endpoint of three trends“ (connectivity, computing power and cloud computing) and that, within three years the sales of smartphones will exceed those of PCs.” (Ed’s note: Google is actively promoting or developing products and services abetting all three trends and competing vigorously with Apple and Microsoft in all three).

AOL is set to introduce a device that will enable connection to multiple communications devices. The FCC is pushing for greater reach and faster speeds for the nation’s Internet services and cloud computing means your cache of data is always where you are (and growing). Those and related trends raise significant questions about how technology is affecting communications content. David Koretz, writes in an Online Publishing column, Please Stop Talking, “We have become a nation that is a mile wide and an inch deep.” He says it is not hard to imagine that in 10 years, “Consumers will sit behind a fat broadband pipe getting email, instant messages, social networking updates, and text messages while simultaneously consuming Web sites or video. Good luck getting their attention.”

Michael Learmonth, writing in Advertising Age, asks, “Did the Internet kill quality? Or just redefine it?” He answers “yes and yes, particularly if you define ‘quality’ by the standards of professionals in content industries that produce the long-form TV, film, journalism and literature once considered the highest forms of information and entertainment — the kind that brands once paid handsomely to associate themselves with through advertising.”

Careful AWCom reader Stephan Wilkinson raised that question on a smaller scale, scorning misspells, grammatical errors and word usage in response to bloggers’ comments posted at www.autowriters.com/blog. In a follow up email he attributed the decline of quality to “non-writers who use the Internet. Many of them really don’t know how to spell or punctuate; sure, they do in a basic way, but not seriously.”  Tom Kelley’s Tom-Tom in last month’s AWCom Newsletter offered some guidelines for auto writers who want to be heard in the future: Accountability (identify yourself and your sources), Transparency (who is funding your work) and Verifiability (where you are read, seen or heard, how often and by how many).

Learmonth concludes his piece with this nutshell quote from Break.com CEO Keith Richman, “Creating content for the web is an art and a science. There has been a lot of talk now about the science. Those guys studying the science of it will be forced eventually to focus on the art of it.”