Archive for the 'Quoted and Cited' Category
The mensch that roared
Is Craigslist insignificant? I’ve weighed in to a small debate:
Publishers underestimated Craigslist once with devastating results. Newspapers, which derive nearly 80 of their revenue from classified advertising, lost half or more of their lucrative classified business over the past five years, a loss that now threatens the economic stability of the industry. So while, as my friend and former publisher John Greenman suggests, Craigslist may not be remarkable for the amount of money it takes from a single newspaper market, it is hardly inconsequential. Were it not for its mostly free approach Craigslist could do much greater damage.
Now the question is whether publishers will make another, perhaps fatal, mistake by missing the point of the Craigslist experience: shifting trust in the digital marketplace. Craig Newmark is a mensch, the trusted face of online classifieds, an always-on customer-service celebrity with the world’s biggest buddy list. “Trust is the new trust,” is how the enigmatic Newmark once explained it to me. What he means is that in an environment where anyone can do what he does, the authentic expression of trust is the key differentiator. That may not be entirely true, but it is enough true to crush a greedy, feudal business predicated on controlled distribution and an arcane classification system for categorizing commerce among and between people. It is the emergence of everyone as an online broker in an open, connected marketplace that warrants coverage, breathless as that may be.
tags:business models common good newspapers Quoted and Cited No commentsiFOCOS Quoted & Cited: Social Marketing case studies in Knowledge@Wharton
In: Knowledge@Wharton
Dec. 12, 2007
Link: Social Marketing: How Companies Are Generating Value from Customer Input – Knowledge@Wharton
Quoted and Cited: Bloomberg on Murdoch’s Dow Jones offer
Bloomberg asked for comments on the Dow Jones-Rupert Murdoch saga, and I explained that I had no special insight into the situation. Rupert Murdoch offered a lot of money for Dow Jones, and so far no one else has offered more or come up with a business case for doing so. See: Burkle, Greenspan eye group bid for Dow Jones – Newsday.com
tags: No commentsNachison on PBS NewsHour – April 18-2007
iFOCOS President Andrew Nachison appeared on the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday, April 18, 2007. He discussed the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shooting – and how the digital media witnesses and others used to tell the story reflects the rise of We Media.
tags: No comments“The story is unfolding all around us. Marshall McLuhan used the notion of media being accoustic and you really get a sense of that today, that everybody is a story teller. The information is coming at us from many different sources. And the Blacksburg shooting, for me at least, was a really poignant example of this.”
“Young people do this intuitively and naturally without thinking about it, without a sense of wonder when they send a text message or they send an email or they shoot a video or they post a message to their friends on MySpace. But it’s not just young people. That’s the exaggeration. Technology is allowing people to share information and to share feelings and to tell stories in a way that just wasn’t possible before. And the big story is not that we’ve got all this wonderful fabulous technology making life better, the big story is that story-telling is exploding by virtue of this technology.”
“What’s news and what’s journalism, those are professional definitions that help us define work we do as professionals, or not as professionals. But story-telling is much broader than that, and a lot of what we’re seeing is reflecting the emotional impact of this experience.”
We Media analysis and links
I’ve been reflecting on our experiences at We Media Miami and digesting a great deal of reporting and analysis about what happened. It’s ALL been helpful. The diversity of viewpoints again underscores the eclectic and complex nature of “We” – and the promise of invention and innovation driven by the We Media community.A number of exciting ideas and outcomes emerged from our conversations in Miami, including a variety of projects and collaborations we’ll be talking more about in weeks to come.
Meanwhile, here are some We Media links:
- You can find a still-growing archive from the forum – now with audio and some lovely photos: here.
- Robin Miller of Slashdot produced a nice montage video – just ignore my babbling about cheese and skip ahead to the palm trees and sunshine.
- The We Media blog includes a compilation of the “ahas” suggested throughout the forum.
- Steve Rosenbaum, a film-maker-story-teller and newly funded CEO of Magnify.net, has been hanging and talking with us for several years. He sees how our conversation and the work of iFOCOS has moved forward. “Since my last visit with the WeMedia team, things are different. In an important way. It’s changed. the WE in WeMEDIA got bigger, the ‘MEDIA’, got smaller. Or more intimate, more more focused. Not sure which.” Steve, yes – and thanks for noticing.
- Jemima Kiss must have typed her fingers to the bone with all of her live blogging and follow-up reporting for The Guardian, starting with our opening-round fire alarm and continuing this week with an item about Craig Newmark, who spent some of his time in Miami doing virtual battle with Wikipedians over the content of his own biography.
- Rebecca Weeks, the director of business development for Real Girls Media (which just launched Divine Caroline) captured the frenetic flavor of a real-life forum with lots of people and ideas swirling around everywhere – sometimes you’re not sure who’s saying what. Kinda like when you say, “I saw it on the internet. Somewhere.” In Rebecca’s case, the Miami story incorporates the insights of “a panelist” and “an audience member.” Yes, I heard them too.
- Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin American-Statesman, wrote for his newspaper that Miami seemed less rancourous than the previous two We Media forums – and I agree, “but a few grenades were tossed between the new and the old.” Rich wrote:
The media are an unsettled lot today, with new media drawing audiences but rarely making money. Some rather ceremoniously swear off the almighty dollar.But not all. The angst rose when a panel of venture capitalists said they would insist on financial returns, traditional as that may be, and when foundation executives spoke of “investments” in new media based on performance instead of merely handing over money.
- More on the angst and ennui of making money in Rich Skrenta’s follow-up thoughts. Rich, CEO of Topix, must have had a bleak flight back home. Citing the failure of Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, and many other citizen journalism projects that have “largely failed,” Rich wrote:
By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it’s commercial, someone owns it, and it’s not “we” anymore.
That’s got to be especially bad news for the failed projects on his list that are new or still breathing – such as NewsTrust; but good news too, since NewsTrust is non-profit (Discosure: I’m an advisor). Is Rich right? I don’t think so, and I’ll elaborate on this down the road. To begin with, most new businesses fail. Period. Meanwhile, the definitions of success and failure have changed for media (though I’ll stipulate that going out of business counts as failure). Modest success – and profitability – is not failure. It’s the long tail, which leads to …
- Wired Magazine editor/Long Tail author Chris Anderson was not in Miami, but like many others who weren’t there, he contributed to the conversation. He responded to Rich: “We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomenon is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomenon.”
