25 October 2009 with 52 comments
Nothing will replace newspaper companies or what they do. For the past few months an un-holy alliance has consumed the media nerds on Twitter as two traditional foes have attempted to etch the above idea into stone. For those who make (or used to make) a living in the newspaper industry, the idea is at the crux of nearly every editorial and is used as an argument to support micro payments, government funding, an illegal form of price fixing, and, you know, vice. For those outside the industry, the biggest rallying cry came from NYU professor Clay Shirky. He calls it the ‘great unbundling’ and asserts that there will never be another competitor to The New York Times; its pieces will be atomized and continue to spin into products like 538 and Craigslist
Shirky provides an extensive historical analysis to support his claim and while I agree with most of it, I think he ultimately misses the conclusion. Not only will the original mission of newspapers like the NYT sustain itself online, it will be revived in a way their founders could have never imagined. What’s lost in most discussions about the future of news is just what that original idea for a newspaper like the NYT really was and how the internet is in a unique position to execute it for the first time. [Read more →]
6 August 2009 with 91 comments
The past few weeks have come with two major reveals for the weirdos who follow online social networks. The first was big news. Twitter’s internal documents leaked and the identity-crisis of earth’s most popular start-up is now public. The second was more under the radar but just as important. In a memo that went out to staff, the CEO of MySpace admitted that their users are caught between three competing notions of what MySpace is or should be.
Twitter and Myspace are different companies in different markets but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that they share, and will always share, the exact same problem. MySpace and Twitter are hugely popular for uses neither company anticipated. The mission of each company is so vague that their products are stretched and molded into a variety of different uses. Instead of targeting and building their business around one of these users they take their sudden popularity as a sign they have a killer product. They don’t.
Scale is Everything
When an industry is in transition or an idea like ‘social networking’ is still being fleshed out, getting explosively popular without knowing the nuances of why is a curse. Twitter is young but in my opinion, it’s already too late. It has grown too big, too fast, for too many different purposes. It will take 2 or three years but Twitter will be lapped by a variety of similar services with focus and actual business models; how Facebook developed in response to MySpace sheds light on what kind.
How MySpace Scaled
Since its inception MySpace has gone after users as if they were Pokemon’. MySpace managers ran competitions on sign ups and the employes used a slew of methods to capture. The result was a sprawling network of users but by 2005, it seemed to be working. If you looked at the stats, MySpace was an utter phenomena. It destroyed Friendster and after it was purchased by Murdoch it was getting all types of press and valuations. What the raw stats didn’t tell you is that user habits on the site looked something like this: 
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9 June 2009 with 37 comments
It has been a long time coming but the NYT’s and the uber popular silicon valley blog, Tech Crunch, finally smashed into one another. This weekend’s Sunday Times came with a trend piece in the Business section on how big tech blogs (like Gizmodo and TC) publish ‘groundless’ rumors for hits. Many considered it to be a kind of hatchet job directed at the site and for the past few days it triggered a sprawling controversy where everyone from Jeff Jarvis to Charles Author weighed in.
The analysis arrived at a pretty classic conclusion, Tech Crunch Vs. NYT is really an example of David Vs. Goliath where one isn’t following the rules that the other is making. This is the case (and if you haven’t read the Gladwell piece, you must) but there is a more helpful way to think about what is happening. It comes down to this: print news sources and web news sources are made for entirely different types of information processing, print works best in batch and online works best in real time.
Tech Crunch and others like it are not breaking rules so much as they are doing what works for their medium. Each platform suits a specific type of news brand and answers core questions differently.
How To Build a Great News Brand
Print Vs. Online
Print
Gestalt: Batch Processing. The medium requires that Information is processed in chunks. A program takes a large set of data files as input, processes the data using a system, and produces an output file.
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