In the Developing The Data Story seminar at news:rw last Friday, Professor Paul Bradshaw took the audience through the history of journalism and how it has adapted over the last decade to surmount several technological barriers.
Whilst looking at the navigation structure of The Media Briefing (a client), I’ve been realising how obsolete media sector categorisations are. They really describe where an organisation used to be, or perhaps where the majority of revenues come from at the moment.
But, when you look under the skin of most media companies, there is a recognition that the past is not the future. The historical industry categories become less relevant, as media businesses become ‘transmedia’. And this isn’t just about all media channels going online. The entire spectrum is up for grabs.
The history of media is a story of fragmentation of packaging. Read more →
The Guardian is leading the development of a YouView and Android prototype service designed to help consumers discover TV and video content.
The media brand has partnered with business innovation agency Golant Media Ventures, customer intelligence business Idio and music metadata experts Decibel, after securing funding from the UK’s Technology Strategy Board.
The partners will now develop a multiplatform system that will “pour Guardian content” into an app that will direct visitors to a variety of rich content aggregated from TV, film and music rights holders.
idio is sponsoring Paywall Strategies 2011, a conference taking place in Cavendish Square, London, on 25th February.
The line-up and delegate list are absolutely superb, so do go ahead and register if you haven’t already (tickets will sell out).
It will be key for anyone involved in strategy, technical or implementation roles within newspapers, consumer or business media world including:
It’s safe to say the competition is heating up between content creators (that is, publishers), and their former best friends, the ad agencies. Kirk Cheyfitz, the CEO of Story Worldwide, is quick to say that it is the ad agencies who will lose out because‘creating great, engaging content is emerging as the key skill in marketing-and they don’t have it’. Read more →Over the last few weeks, we have collected together some great case studies from around the web. These are examples of publishers or brands using semantic analysis engines or other semantic technologies to derive business value. They cover uses both in the end-delivery of content, and also in back-office functions. For any new joiners, these approaches are usually underpinned by semantic extraction – that is the process of analysing content to derive meaning by identifying the key concepts and meaning within or implied by the content, and listing them as descriptors, or tags.
As even just the few case studies below show, using these technologies and approaches can help your organisation reduce manual classification, moderation and analysis work, reduce editorial time, win new business, launch new products, improve audience insight, increase reach, revenues, dwell-time, usability and advertising targeting.
The below is certainly not a conclusive list, and if you have an example, with some measurement of the resulting benefits, please do link us to it in the comments, or let us know the details.
I was listening to a video interview with Stevie Spring last week on The Media Briefing, and something she said jumped out at me:
“There will always be a place for the printed artefact… we are slowly entering an ecosystem where some content is temporary, that you just want to access, and some content is more permanent, and you want to own it, if only for a period of time. It’s not just about ‘collect and keep’. So I think we are transitioning almost irrevocably into artefact and access, and there will be room for growth in both, certainly for the foreseeable future.”
What is Wikileaks?
Conceived in 2007, Wikileaks has this year become a household name after a series of controversial publishings of confidential military and diplomatic documents. To be precise, its sensitive publishings are submitted by mostly anonymous sources; within its first 12 months it had already accumulated a database of more than 1.2 million documents.
So, to much fanfare, the PPA (Periodical Publishers Association, don’t you know?) has launched The Future of Publishing, a prominent section on its site where it has placed videos of many (very intelligent and experienced) talking heads, discussing the future of various publishing sectors and models. There is some great content. And, to be clear, I think the PPA does some great work – and this initiative has some real value.
But.
I’ve read through the site, and watched many of the videos. There are some hugely influential people giving their views. And there are some great comments. (And some not so insightful comments, like “We’ve got to be present now as much in a digital way as in a paper way. And we can do it.” Hmmm… Yes, it is almost the end of 2010 after all…). But it’s the delivery format that concerns me.
Two weeks ago, at the Like Minds Conference we listened to Guy Clapperton bemoan free content, and then last week the twitterverse lit up with commentary as The Times announced their first paywall subscribers figures, which could be seen as good/mediocre/terrible (select your bias here). However, I am more interested in a different type of “free”.
It is best put by Razorfish’s white paper titled Nimble (by @rlovinger – a MUST READ), which posits that content should be certainly free as in libre, but not necessarily free as in gratis. This rings particularly true after a few conversations last week with major publishers that have major difficulties in exploiting the value of their huge archives, due to technological constraints.
