Category Archives: unbundling

Steve Rubel: As Curators Proliferate, Media Brands Face Loyalty Crisis

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"Suddenly media brands are facing increased competition from an array of upstart curators that are growing in popularity. These services, which include Flipboard, Feedly, Zite, Pulse and News360 - a Russian app that's my personal favorite, pictured above on the Blackberry Playbook (client) - curate and organize news from hundreds of sources often by topic into rich displays that are available on virtually every mobile platform. Some of these tap into your personal social network to make the experience even more personal. All make it easy to share."

Mail Online: Google called ‘deeply unethical and tax avoiding’ by ex C4 boss

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Luke Johnson: "Effectively, Google invests negligible amounts in Britain, pays negligible amounts of tax on its underlying surplus to contribute to civil society, and yet extracts vast sums in advertising revenues. The tragedy is that those advertising revenues siphoned off to California should be
used to help fund high-quality content – TV programmes, radio shows, newspaper and magazine articles."

George Brock Blog: Taking a (little) brick out of the paywall

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George Brock: "The Times ... now operates what I call an 'extreme paywall': the charge applies to everything except the front page. Behind the barrier sit millions of fragments of information, ranging from the important to the specialist to the insignificant. ... A system that locks in so many items of such different value ... without being able to distinguish between them can’t work in the long run."

Observer: Rupert Murdoch’s paywall at the Times may not be a disaster

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Peter Preston thinks the Times is trying to put the unbundling genie back in the bottle: "So, once I've stumped up cash for access, I don't necessarily look at paywalled paper newspaper sites in the same old digital way. I may read them as I would a print newspaper. I'm not clicking around, adding page view to page view, following a tale that interests me from site to site. Consistency counts. My habits have changed because I've paid good money. The stuff behind the wall looks like a newspaper and basically exists to be read as an electronic newspaper. There's a certain logic here."

The Atlantic: How to Save the News

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James Fallows: "after talking during the past year with engineers and strategists at Google and recently interviewing some of their counterparts inside the news industry, I am convinced that there is a larger vision for news coming out of Google; that it is not simply a charity effort to buy off critics; and that it has been pushed hard enough by people at the top of the company, especially Schmidt, to become an internalized part of the culture in what is arguably the world’s most important media organization."

The State of the News Media 2010: Audience Behavior

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"[For] this year’s State of the News Media Report. First we surveyed 2,259 American adults on landlines and cell phones about their news consumption habits ... Only 21% say they tend to rely primarily on one destination; only a third even say they have a favorite news website. But these online news grazers do not range far. Most (57%) rely mostly on two-to-five websites. Only 12% use more than six."

New York Times: Online News Readers Use 5 Sites or Fewer, Study Says

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"Only 35 percent of the people who go online for news have a favorite site, and just 21 percent are more or less 'monogamous,' relying primarily on a single Internet news source, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, in a report to be released Monday by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. But 57 percent of that audience relies on just two to five sites"

Google Public Policy Blog: Newspaper economics: online and offline

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Google chief economist Hal Varian: "[The] real money in search engine advertising is in the highly commercial verticals like Shopping, Health, and Travel. Unfortunately, most of the search clicks that go to newspapers are in categories like Sports, News & Current Events, and Local, which don’t attract the biggest spending advertisers. ... This isn't so surprising: the fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news. They’ve made money from the special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on. These sections attract contextually targeted advertising, which is much more effective than non-targeted advertising. ... Traditionally, the ad revenue from these special sections has been used to cross-subsidize the core news production."

Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: How much is an article worth? ‘Dead tree’ thinking could hinder digital content economy

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Patrick Smith on unnbundling, the ever-present elephant in the room during digital content discussions: "But to reach a competitive pricepoint, [Rupert Murdoch] and other publishers will have to massively realign the value of each piece of news and comment from its current-day, paper value of one or two pence to fractions of pence."

Wired: Tablets of the new covenant

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Some magazine publishers think tablets are going to create a more print-like, less unbundlied experience. This isn't going to work, is it? Peter Kirwan in Wired: "Consumers reading tablets will experience something 'more immersive', akin to a print based newspaper or magazine. 'When I'm sitting down to read a newspaper or a magazine," says [Ken Bronfin, president of interactive media at Hearst Corporation], 'I'll give it 30 or 45 minutes. I think I experience the medium and the advertising in a totally different way."