Media Maze

The successful regional broadcaster Triangle TV is to pulling out of Wgtn. (see article below).

There is no denying that UHF broadcasts in Wgtns geography is tough for UHF signal spread, this along with income concerns brought about their demise. It is a shame, no doubt the longer established Auckland based broadcast will continue, what with a greater audience, easier broadcast distribution and a presence for quite a period will continue to ensure its Auckland success.

Stratos the SKY broadcast based composite programme of their UHF channels continues across NZ.

I think the inability to get to a wider Wgtn audience was probably their biggest problem, and hence the decision to pull the plug.

Wonder if they thought about an amped Internet model, with more of a hyperlocal content for Wgtn / Auckland audiences? It would seem to me that all the old programme material they have should be available on demand via the internet... pretty simple in todays world, but these guys run on very tight budgets, perhaps its coming..

I admire these guys especially Jim Black as they tried an succeeded, one failure in one region does not mean that their business model is doomed.

I wonder how some of the other regional UHF stations are fairing at present, what with advertising revenues way down and their broadcasting infrastructure costs going up year on year.

Triangle pulls plug on Wellington
Last updated 17:30 27/03/2009

Triangle Television is ending transmission in Wellington at the end of this month.
There had been disappointing programming support, funding, sponsorship and commercial interest in Wellington, Auckland-based Triangle said.
"In fact we have less padding to survive the downturn because unlike other TV services, like the state-owned broadcaster, we have to rely on funding from the communities and we receive little from New Zealand on Air," Triangle chief executive Jim Blackman said.
Ongoing transmission problems had also hurt the Wellington service.
Triangle would continue to broadcast on TriangleStratos, available on Sky and Freeview satellite services, and TelstraClear cable.

Triangle launched in Auckland in 1998, and in Wellington in 2006

(Via .http://www.stuff.co.nz/)

And direct from Triangle TV website http://www.tritv.co.nz/

Triangle Television is pulling the plug on its Wellington transmission from March 31. Jim Blackman, founder and chief executive of the free-to-air Triangle Television and nationwide channel TriangleStratos Television, says Triangle is not immune to the same economic realities that other TV stations and media are experiencing.

“In fact we have less padding to survive the downturn because unlike other TV services, like the state owned broadcaster, we have to rely on funding from the communities and we receive little from New Zealand on Air,” he says.
Local programming support, funding levels, sponsorship and commercial uptake of the Wellington service has been far lower than hoped for. The Wellington service has also had ongoing transmission problems, which has affected signal strength and viewership in some areas.
“As we do not see this situation improving in the short to medium term our must focus on those areas of our activity which are more viable,” Mr Blackman says. “The good news is that Wellington viewers and producers will still have the option to see the majority of Triangle programming via TriangleStratos, which is available on Sky and Freeview satellite services and Telstra Clear cable. We will also still accept locally made programming from Wellington to broadcast on those platforms.”
Triangle Stratos is available on Freeview Channel 21 and Sky Channel 89. It is also on TelstraClear cable on Channel 89.

Mr Blackman says although the Wellington decision was necessary, overall Triangle and TriangleStratos have been gaining market share as their reputation for offering an alternate voice to New Zealanders on news from around the world spreads. The channels screen news and current affairs services in English from Al Jazeera, Euro News, Deutsche Welle (DW), Voice of America, PBS, McLaughlin Group (US politics), Frost over the World (David Frost) and Tongan, Fijian, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, French, Swiss, Flemish, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Thai and Japanese language news.

For more information contact:Jim BlackmanCEOTriangle Television Ltd and Stratos Television LimitedPh +64 9 360 4610Email:
jim@tritv.co.nz

Interesting stats from Media post in this report. More importantly is the comment highlighted giving a solution to the current problem, sounds like my model that I mentioned before.

Newspapers Online Bigger Than Local TV... In Video Ad Revenue?
by Wayne Friedman, 8 hours ago

It's bad enough both newspapers and local TV stations are getting kicked around in this economy (and, in the case of newspapers, even when the economy was good.)But now comes word old-media newspapers actually beat newer-media local televisions in overall revenue when it comes to -- are you ready for this? -- video advertising revenues! What?
Borrell Research will release a report soon that says newspapers made about $165 million last year from streaming video advertising, while TV stations made $105 million -- more than a 50% gap.
Not only that, but another traditional print vehicle -- yellow pages -- did almost as well as TV stations, pulling $85 million to $100 million in online streaming video.
One note here: Streaming video ads are still a tiny piece of the pie for older media. For example, for newspapers it comes to just 5% of Web site revenues. It's a bit more for TV stations -- 10% of their overall revenue take.
Newspaper sites have opened up Web areas for small and mid-size businesses' video advertising, which is also being used as video content.
This is not something TV stations are used to. They are more familiar with selling mainstream local 15- and 30-second commercials for network-supplied programs, syndicated programs, or local newscasts.
TV stations still have the big brand names that -- in theory -- can turn this equation around. But they need to work fast. For years, marketing executives have touted the next big online thing as the growth of local portals and local Web destinations.
Perhaps TV station executives are distracted; many have wide eyes when talking about mobile technology. But just repurposing news, weather updates and local TV shows may not be enough for local market mobile phone users -- nor for demanding local video advertisers.
Newspapers beating TV stations in their own backyard makes them the unlikely video kings -- for the moment.

2 Responses to "Newspapers Online Bigger Than Local TV... In Video Ad Revenue? "
Jim Courtright from Big Thinking By The Hour
commented on: March 27, 2009 at 11:33 AM
We have a theory about how local newspapers and local broadcasters will ultimately survive. Through merger. Local TV news is short, incomplete and expensive to deliver. Newspaper news is more more in depth, covers more topics, and is cheaper to produce. Simply add to the mix the ability for newspaper reporters to pick up consumer cameras, edit on their laptop computers, and deliver video stories over the Internet, and you have a broadcast news station on steroids. Then the local broadcast station handles video ad sales, and voila, you have a business model. Neither entity keeps the old form, but the combo of the two survives to thrive over the Internet. Jim Courtright Partner Big Thinking By The Hour, Inc.

Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited; hollywood5459@verizon.net
commented on: March 27, 2009 at 11:28 AM
You will find it is mostly embedded in the sales structure. One part of it is that as the rates rose high and swiftly at local TV stations, it shut out the smaller advertisers completely. Whereas, many newspapers still had avenues for message delivery at more affordable spaces. Although that is drying up at major metroplitan newspapers, they still have contacts mulling around. The salesforce at major newspapers are (were) 20-30 times or more larger than a local station, too. There are more reasons, but I could just bore the audience.

(Via .)

Hear the compelling argument, and the reasons why I believe one of these will succeed locally in NZ both for text and video. A great startup!

With a good CMS say Wordpress or Spacesquare, PNG Labs or Telestream for video delivery, OMBs, Mogulus or UStream for CDN live video content, Vimeo,Youtube, Kulbyte for streaming, Google Reader for research, Analytics for Stats, Adsense for income, a good VJ, a bout of Citizen Journalism via Crowd sourcing, use Twitter, mix it all up, keep it light and agile operationally and finally bootstrap it, equity via time. With it all on the cloud, financials with Xero for the investors (probably on your own) and a good work ethic, it might work, I think it would.... oh and a good economy for advertisers hmmm, perhaps not yet...make a great white paper..

From across the ditch by Duncan Riley.

Hyperlocal websites have for a long time been an albatross of the 2.0 world; many have tried to create vibrant startups in the space, and many have failed.
There is some argument about the definition of hyperlocal; some say its news at a town or suburb level, while others argue its news for a community, but not an entire city or large town. For the purposes of this post, Hyperlocal means community news, serving a town or local Government area, often below a large city or State.
That there is demand for community news is a given, the issue has been delivering hyperlocal news online with a sustainable business model. The problem so far has been one primarily driven by competition: many towns and local communities have been served by a local community newspaper for years, and while some of the attention has switched online, the switch hasn’t been large enough so far to sustain hyperlocal news sites that by their very nature have a limited and small audience constrained by geography.
2009 though will be different. Hyerlocal websites, both existing and those to launch will thrive as they become the only place to find community news; in 2009 community newspapers will fold in record numbers.

Community Newspapers in a Recession
We already know the broader trends for the newspaper industry: declining circulation, and declining advertising. Some of the largest newspaper groups and papers in the United States are now in serious trouble. Which will remain at the end of the year can’t be predicted, but we can draw one conclusion: community newspapers, having the smallest profit margins to begin with, will be the first to fold as they are the easiest to close.
Community newspapers consist of a number of different formats. We see in some places paid for daily newspapers serving communities of under 60,000 people. The majority though are weekly or bi-weekly, with a mix of paid and free. They all share a common thread though: a high reliance on advertising.
The bread and butter of community newspapers comes from real estate, automotive and classified ads. Community newspapers owned by larger companies get some retail and national advertising, but usually at no where near the volume a big city or state newspaper gets them.
Classified advertising is in its death throws today. Where as once upon a time you’d list your second hand goods in the local paper, more people today would list them on Craigslist or eBay. Automotive relies on local dealers looking to drive business, and the number of local dealers is in decline along with the broader automotive industry. What advertising there is now faces stiff competition from larger newspapers who are cutting their rates, driving the returns down, and that’s presuming you’ve still got vibrant local competition from car dealers: many smaller communities now often don’t, or have very few.
Real estate is the last domain where some community newspapers still thrive. Despite the switch to online in other sectors, real estate has lagged behind employment and general classifieds. My local community newspaper here in Australia for example has half of its content dedicated to real estate ads; Realtor’s may list properties online, but they still haven’t given up on glossy ads or real estate liftouts. This is going to radically change in 2009. The problem comes back to money: house prices in the United States fell 18% in 2008, and in some places fell over 33%. House sales are usually made on commission of sale and sometimes with a fixed price component. If the price of houses in the local community has fallen, and the commission rate has not gone up (given the market it’s unlikely they’d go up), the return to real estate agents on sales is lower, and that’s presuming they can find buyers, particularly in smaller towns or outer suburban areas. Where there is a fixed price component, usually set to cover advertising, the amount simply may not be available; a large section of the market today in the United States is repossessions, and those that aren’t are often people trying to exit their homes because they can no longer afford them; many simply can’t pony up thousands for advertising. The internet, with its lower costs will thrive in real estate in 2009, driving an even bigger drop in returns for community newspapers.

Bloat logic: print vs online
Community newspapers will fold in 2009 as owners are no longer able to turn a profit, or sustain losses any longer. The killer will be costs: even a small town newspaper could have a staff of 6 or 10 or more (usually more, but I’ve worked with papers in the past that often have 2 local reporters, with the rest of the paper filled by syndicated content from the company network). Millions a year to run, with no hope in sight of a turnaround in advertising fortunes. The model is dying. Some may switch to online only, a trend that will accelerate this year, but the bloat logic problem still remains: high overhead costs for reporters and editors in small markets.
This is where hyperlocal websites step in. Communities still want local news, and left without a community newspaper they will still seek that news esewhere, and the internet is the place they’ll have to turn. Radio is often not local through networks like Clear Channel, and television news may offer some local news, but mostly news higher up the news scale (city, state, nation, world).

Hyperlocal news: one size won’t fit all
The void left by community newspapers won’t be filled by a one size fits all hyperlocal news product. The very reason community newspapers will fold applies to hyperlocal sites (advertising, scale), although to a lesser extent due to lower overheads.
What we will see is different models in different places. Some of these have been described elsewhere; the labels are mine, so apologies if the terminology doesn’t sit with what others are saying.

Blogs
Blogs and bloggers are already starting to fill the void of community news. Local bloggers are increasing as the community turns online for news. Small scale local blogs that exclusively cater to local content will increase in 2009.

Dedicated community news sites
Local communities start their own site, allowing anyone to contribute, perhaps with a volunteer editor to filter the content before it goes up. It may or may not show ads, and may be for profit or not-for profit. These may be in the traditional news site format, or a group blog format. There’s no strict rule on the model here: some sites now run advertising but use any money earned to run the site on a not-for-profit basis. Some are simply advertising free community sites run by individuals that involve community input, and some may be for profit from the start, with individuals or companies taking a cut, and/ or investing some of the money in hiring writers or staff on a small scale. Community news sites will bloom in 2009, although by volume of traffic may remain small.

Hyperlocal startups
Startups that offer local news in many places will rise to offer hyperlocal news where community newspapers have fallen. We’re already seeing some sites do this now, although usually at a higher level (large towns, small cities). The challenge will be to incentivize locals to participate; Citizen Journalism is constrained by goodwill, and while people may happily contribute to a not-for-profit, they may be less inclined for a large company. Having said that, there may be enough people anyway, you only need to look at what CNN is doing with iReport to know that finding willing participants may not be a major problem.

Big media hyperlocal
Large media companies are already moving into local communities, aggregating and often facilitating local content. The New York Times Company is being sued by Gatehouse Media, one of America’s largest community newspaper publishers (by number of papers) for that very crime; Boston.com, the online portal for the Boston Globe links out to community news on other sites and on blogs. As mention above, CNN has iReport, that despite the odd issue has captured many contributions, although not so much targeted yet at the hyperlocal space. Those big media companies that survive 2009 will do so due to an increased presence online, and hyperlocal news that taps into citizen journalism offers growth opportunities.

Conclusion
Some will undoubtedly be sad by the closure of their local papers. Many papers often have long historical roots in the community and for many years have been the only outlet for community news. What needs to be understood by those who call for Government assistance for community newspapers is that journalism and community news doesn’t disappear with the local paper, it just switches to a different medium, a medium that is more efficient and in many cases may provide more news and give voice to more people than the paper ever did. That medium is the internet. Hyperlocal websites will boom in 2009, and the voice of local communities will become stronger because of it.

http://www.inquisitr.com/14219/hyperlocal-websites-will-boom-in-2009-as-community-newspapers-fold/

Well looks like I was wrong in my last post around costings for these Whitelabel live video services.

Dependent on volumes it looks like Mogulus Pro beats Ustream Watershed.

Look carefully at the attached Scribd link.

I still think white label products are for pay per view events rather than for wide broadcast.

I wonder if you could source time on say Stratos (Sky Channel) at a more efficient price point. Admittingly that is only for a NZ audience, and there is no way to limit viewers access.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12554839/Mogulus-Pro-vs-Ustream-Watershed

Truly Ustream is stepping up in the broadcasting game. What with the recent release of Watershed and now a mobile platform, it would appear that Mogulus whilst making recent offers is off the mark with pricing.

Having used both platforms, it appears that the individual via Watershed is placed with a better price break. Both are expensive versus the open plan with advertising, available on both platforms, but if one is broadcasting to a paying audience, or a client is footing the bill it can pan out.

Prices quoted are US. No doubt in NZ our mobile data plans with cell providers would kill the mobile plan as an option, yet one can only pray as to what the future holds.

Broadcasting an event live to viewers on their cellphone. Qik (http://www.qik.com/) will have to be quick to beat this for wider distribution.

Watershed Launches Monthly Plans and Private-Label Mobile

Dear Watershed Customer,
We are pleased to announce the launch of Watershed Monthly Plans and Private-Label Mobile Broadcasting! For users who prefer to pay a flat rate, Watershed now offers monthly plans that allow users to pay a flat monthly fee for viewer hours.
Monthly Plan Options*$49/Month - Includes 500 monthly viewer hours$179/Month - Includes 2,000 monthly viewer hours$879/Month - Includes 11,00 monthly viewer hours

To learn more about our Monthly Plans, please go to our Watershed Pricing Page . If you'd like to switch to a monthly plan, simply log into your Watershed account, go to your Profile page, and click "Plans" in the left-hand navigation. Note: There is no fee for switching to a monthly plan.

Watershed Mobile
Watershed Mobile allows customers to create a completely custom mobile application that combines the power of Watershed's robust and highly scalable broadcasting technology with the versatility of mobile phones. Users can now broadcast from anywhere at anytime under your brand. It's as simple as 1-2-3!Supported phones: Nokia N95, E51, E66, N76, N81, 5700, 6110, and 6120.Note: Watershed Mobile is only available on Monthly Plan accounts.

To learn more, please see our Mobile Product page and our Mobile Support page.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us via our Contact Us page.

All the best,Watershed Team

Came across another player in the "Live Video" market.

Beside the current players of Mogulus, Ustream, Kyte and several others this application differs in that it serves as another way to get contribution linking back to source ASAP, rather than live CDN.

Target market is newspapers to get the breaking live action to the web. There are similar products Todocast( http://www.todocast.tv/), Streambox (http://www.streambox.com/). Telestream (http://www.telestream.net/) Kulabyte (http://www.kulabyte.com/) as well, but an infinitely smaller platform, price break and as always a turnkey solution.

This versus the popular and rather older setup via BGAN cellphone application used by all the major networks around the world http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS156899+09-Jan-2008+BW20080109 to get footage back to network or whoever else aka video via satellite.

This appears somewhat different to the latter in that its using Flash based technology with low latency and minimal costs ($2000 Nz for licence and annual fee), via internet. Two products RT and RT Pack (being a turnkey laptop).

Can't what to see first reports, no doubt will be targeting NAB.

The impact of small video cameras and their use is permeating all forms of video distribution via CDN. This with the abilities of small format cellphones to produce outstanding web video quality (eg Nokia N95) are all well documented on the internet.

The really interesting issues are around who is using these low cost factor tools for journalism.

From Jeff Jarvis blog below is an illustration of this via Blid a German newspaper, and the resulting benefits, sought of crowd sourcing video journalism.

Its a shame these tools are not widely available here yet, price points seem around $500 nz.

Flipping for the Flip
On Peter Day’s always-informative business show on the BBC, Cisco’s John Chambers said earlier this month that a downturn is a chance to go into new lines of business. Buying the maker of the consumer hit video camera Flip is certainly is that. I think it could be genius. It’s about new ways to communicate easily, new networks. The Flip has many surprising uses.
Last year at Davos, I showed it to Kai Diekmann, editor of Bild, the giant tabloid (in spirit if not in paper size) in Germany, and he lunged for it, saying he simply had to have it. Bild had been doing amazing things with MMS on mobile phones, turnking all of Germany into paparazzi by having them send photos to the number 1414; Bild pays for photos it uses. You should use video, I said to Diekmann. We are, he said. But have you seen the Flip? I asked and pulled it out.

I know from Bild staffers that Dieckmann dispatched them to buy a bunch of Flips in the U.S. (they weren’t available in Europe) and out of that came a fascinating business and news move: Dieckmann went to another manufacturer and created a Bild-branded video camera just like the Flip. The paper offered them for sale for 69 Euros. In five weeks, he sold more than 21,000 of them. Note well that the software on the camera defaults to sending video to Bild. So now the paper has thousands of cameramen all over Germany.

Note also his hint at “user-generated advertising.”

(Via. http://www.buzzmachine.com/)

Website aggregators Scoop have been running since mid January this year a local Wellington feed of Scoop.

I'll watch this with interest to see if it curtails some of the plans I have for a hyperlocal blog based around multimedia.

Their stats are impressive given the short time, but definitely the result of Scoops wider reach as a news feed.

Wellington.Scoop is now two months old. Our first day was January 14. Since then we’ve received more than 11,000 visits from more than 8,500 people who’ve viewed more than 22,000 pages.
Our most popular article so far has been our description of the rapid rise and fall of Wellington’s Apple store, which attracted more than 700 readers and more than a dozen comments including two from the owner of the store.
Next most popular: Why Wellington doesn’t need any more traffic lights, in which we name Wellington’s most indefensible traffic signals.
Third in popularity: Stop the sports centre, save Manners Mall! It was published when Andy Foster lodged his appeal against building the indoor sports centre near the airport.
Of our hundreds of news reports about Wellington (all archived by subject and date), the most-read was the announcement that Jetstar flights would be coming to Wellington Airport. Second most read was the announcement of the Monet exhibition at Te Papa.Third in readership numbers: this weekend’s police report of themurder in a Johnsonville service station.
We are tracking our top traffic sources. More than 54 per cent of visitors come from Google, 30 per cent from other Scoop pages, and 9 per cent come directly. A total of 177 visitors have been referrals from Facebook. And we also have a technical profile: 58 per cent of visits come via Internet Explorer, 28 per cent via Firefox, and 9 per cent via Safari.

(Via .)http://www.scoop.co.nz/wellington

A Web Site’s For-Profit Approach to World News
'The founders of GlobalPost.com have created a hybrid business model of free content and paid subscriptions, combined with ads, to try to cover the globe. Will it work, watch with interest.

Do foreign journalists povide the same insights as having your own correspondants abroad?

This is an interesting experiment.

By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Published: March 22, 2009
Overseas reporters have been a casualty of budget-chopping news organizations, leaving an opening for the online start-up GlobalPost. But at a time when many news executives are exploring nonprofit business models to keep specialized reporting flowing, GlobalPost, which made its debut on Jan. 12, is intended to be a moneymaking venture.
With 65 correspondents worldwide — drawn from a surfeit of experienced reporters eager to continue working in their specialties even as potential employers disappear — GlobalPost has begun offering a mix of news and features that only a handful of other news organizations can rival.
Recent articles, free at GlobalPost.com, included reports on Thailand’s Islamic insurgency and Indian yogis worried about the financial crisis.
That ad-supported reporting is only one part of the GlobalPost business plan. If it is to succeed, it will depend in part on how many people sign up for a separate paid section of the site, which was to have been available in test mode beginning last week but is now expected to go online in the coming days.
Called Passport, it offers access to GlobalPost correspondents, including exclusive reports on business topics of less interest to general audiences, conference calls and meetings with reporters, and breaking news e-mail messages from those journalists.
Passport subscribers, who pay as much as $199 a year, can suggest article ideas. “If you are a member, you have a voice at the editorial meeting,” although the site will decide which stories to pursue, said Charles Sennott, a GlobalPost founder and its executive editor. He said Passport is meant to “create a feeling of community” for subscribers who might otherwise see newsrooms as “impenetrable and fortresslike.”
GlobalPost correspondents, who include the former Washington Post writer Caryle Murphy in Saudi Arabia and a Time magazine correspondent turned novelist, Matt Beynon Rees, in Jerusalem, are paid extra for Passport work. Their basic compensation is $1,000 a month for four articles, plus shares in the venture. The site had 500 applicants for the jobs, Mr. Sennott said.
Only a couple of dozen people have signed up for Passport, said Philip Balboni, GlobalPost’s other founder and the president and chief executive. The site is depending on marketing partnerships to generate subscriptions, some discounted, and hopes to have more than 2,000 by year’s end.
Two months in, the Boston-based company says demand for the free site — the mainstay of the business — is ahead of expectations. It has logged 250,000 unique users who have visited at least once, compared with the 90,000 Mr. Balboni had hoped for by now, and 1.1 million page views, more than half from returning visitors. “People have clearly liked what they’ve seen,” Mr. Balboni said, adding that the site has had visitors from every country except North Korea, Chad and Eritrea.
Advertising remains slow, he acknowledged. Liberty Mutual Insurance signed on for a year, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University has been advertising on a trial basis. “I think it will just take time,” Mr. Balboni said. “We are in an incredible down market.”
More encouragingly, a third revenue stream has been growing, as the company has signed up a growing number of news outlets, including The Daily News and The Boise Weekly of Idaho, to carry its reports and have use of its correspondents.
CBS Radio News recently signed a nonexclusive deal. It will be able to call on GlobalPost correspondents during breaking news, as a backup to its own reporters, said Harvey Nagler, CBS News’s vice president of radio.
Public television’s “Worldfocus” weeknight newscast features reports from GlobalPost correspondents, who carry inexpensive Flip digital video cameras when in the field.
The site was started with $8.5 million from private investors.
Mr. Balboni, who created the New England Cable News network, said he was a passionate defender of for-profit journalism. “I believe deep in my heart and soul that the discipline of the marketplace makes for a stronger organization,” he said. “It gives you a far greater chance to be a self-sustaining enterprise, without having to turn to government or foundations,” which can be mercurial, he said.
Long before the debate about whether newspapers and magazines should be charging for Web content, Mr. Balboni envisioned having consumers pay for at least a part of GlobalPost, he said. It was a lesson he learned after years in the cable TV business, which is supported by subscribers as well as ads. Having created a hybrid model, he said, “now we have to prove it in the marketplace.”
Alan D. Mutter, a media investor who analyzes news-business models at the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, praised GlobalPost in an interview “for being thoroughly modern in its approach to revenue, in that it understands it won’t be simply advertising or subscriptions.” He added, “They’ve identified every conceivable revenue stream I can think of.”
But questions remain, he said, including how many news organizations still have the budget to pay to use its articles, and whether GlobalPost’s executives can create compelling content that will draw enough subscribers. “I’ve seen other publishers who offered premium content, and the content wasn’t good enough to make you want to write a check,” he said.
“This is definitely a forward-looking model, but it remains to be seen whether the audience materializes and whether they can execute,” Mr. Mutter said, adding that “I think everyone wishes them well because they are pretty close to what the future will be for news publishing.”

(Via .)http://www.nytimes.com/

This blog posting by Clay Shirky is mandatory reading for anyone interested in how media is changing, has been changing for the last 10 years, and now because of an uncertain economy, about to change completely.

I have visited this blog post more than once and sadly or optimistically can also see the downfall of all current media companies following the same path, be they Radio ,TV or print.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

(Via .)http://www.shirky.com

As I mentioned below with the US school sports right. This issue is becoming increasingly predatory, as the converging media organisations fight for coverage in the face of their dwindling subscribers and who owns what and the way it is broadcast.

This from across the ditch in Austrailia

Senate inquiry to decide who owns sports match footage

Simon Canning March 16, 2009
Article from: The Australian
A NEW Senate inquiry might set a global precedent for online sports reporting and result in a digital "anti-siphoning list" as administrators and media groups feud over where news footage taken at sports events can run.
The inquiry, which launched last week, comes in the wake of a series of stand-offs between sports administrators, press agencies and media companies over the rights to use photos and video footage of sports online.
"The potential precedents for this are enormous," the head of a major news agency said.
"This will set a global benchmark -- it has been coming to a head for a long time."
There has been growing tension between news organisations and a number of sports in recent years as the line between traditional newspaper, TV and radio reporting has blurred with the growth of digital media.
This summer three major international press agencies -- Agence France-Presse, Reuters and AAP -- boycotted coverage of the Australian cricket Test series after they refused to sign accreditation documents restricting how images and videos gathered could be used.
Senator Anne McEwen, chair of the Senate's environment, communications and the arts committee, said the inquiry was the result of an election promise and had been pushed by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.
The inquiry will look at the balance of commercial and public interests in the reporting and broadcasting of sports news, the nature of it and the effect of new technologies such as video streaming on the internet.
It will also look at the public's right to access sports news and the rights of commercial broadcast rights holders to control or limit access in order to drive a commercial return. The inquiry will also investigate the use of media accreditation as a method to control reporting of events.
The simmering feud between media companies and online operators has flared several times without being clearly resolved.
In 2006, Cricket Australia threatened to ban Fairfax Media and News Limited journalists from covering the Ashes series after both groups refused to sign accreditation documents. The issue was finally resolved.
CA had attempted to put limits on how much video footage could be used on newspaper websites. Both the AFL and NRL have had similar issues, concerned that news organisations are linking online stories to unauthorised footage posted on websites such as YouTube.
In February, Telstra won a Federal Court case banning News from linking websites to copyrighted AFL material posted by third parties on YouTube.
Chris Warren, federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, said many Australians were unaware of the extent to which their access to sports coverage was limited by agreements that media companies were forced to sign in order to get inside grounds.
"This is a matter that has been of immense concern to the media all over the world and control over access to events is being used to control access to images," he said.
Debate has centred on the Copyright Act's "fair use" provision, which allows snippets of video to be used online for the purpose of reporting news.
The inquiry is expected to attract submissions from all major sports organisations.
One sports media analyst said local sports bodies could also seek the assistance of international sporting organisations in making submissions.
"It's not just cricket and it's not just Australia," the analyst, who asked not to be named, said.
"All sporting bodies from FIFA to the English Premier League, PGA and LPGA are going to be analysing this very carefully and may even seek to have a say."

(Via .)http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/

Thanks to this I/V gain insight into the new wave of VJing, and opinion from on of Britains best

At the Integrated Multimedia Video Journalism panel with David Dunkley Gyimah, British VJ(video journalist, lecturer and publisher of View Magazine.

David Gyimah
Gyimah began his video career with BBC had a stint at Channel One as a VJ then back to BBC and is now a Lecturer and two years into a PhD study.
Gyimah defines VJ as “Simply it is the craft of one person producing a factual video story from the start to it being broadcast or going online.” Go here to read {a lot} more.
Gyimah said when he began with Channel 1 (a 24 hr news channel modeled after New York 1) in 1994 that the 25 odd VJs were very “Anti TV” and very much had the mindset that video journalism would replace traditional broadcast TV news because it had “so many assets that it couldn’t help but lead the future.”
He said they were met with network push-back with attacks like calling it “rubbish” because “one person can do it all.” The VJ model was very threatening to the unionized media professionals.
In 1996 the VJ revolution experienced burn out when “We realized that TV is not dead.” He compared his profession to the “X-Men of the news” as they were the outcasts among the journalism community.
Currently, the atmosphere has changed and with the advent of the Internet being turned to for news more often, there is a new rise in video journalism.
“When it comes to the net, there is no code yet as I believe that is set in stone,” said Gyimah. “We’ve all been taking TV’s language and applying that and it hasn’t quite worked. Video journalism needs a more cinematic- hightened visual base.”
He went on to explain that, “In a visual medium pictures drive the narrative. As a visual medium your pictures are king… You shoot with the edit in mind- when you’re shooting your story. You’re shooting the finished product.”
He says that a VJ should approach a project very focused and actually take very little video with possibly 40 minutes of video to 15 final minutes and all in short, quick cuts.
“It’s highly risky, but it’s doable.”
He said that a VJ should be so comfortable with their skills that shooting like this should be a natural as talking, in that you should be able to choose your shots and clips as quick as you would words and phrases as you speak.He said it’s “about shooting the edit line.”
“You don’t need to shoot all that stuff,” he said. “Let the visuals drive the narrative”
He also explained that for video journalism to survive it has to be able to eek out stories that network news don’t cover or for some reason won’t cover.He said that broadcast news are losing viewers and when news shows are changed to attempt to regain viewers its the graphic intro and the music that is changed while the story telling format remains the same.
Video journalism has an aesthetic movement derived from French new wave and has a free form film making quality to it that appeals to a younger viewer.

(Via .)http://www.davidleeking.com/

Thought I had better post those links to these sites, given the info below on them

http://fort-greene.blogs.nytimes.com/category/locals/

http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com/

Published: Sunday, March 8, 2009

The field of journalism is ever changing and progressing. Journalists now have the option to write for papers, magazines, blog sites and a myriad of Internet publication. The world of online news has stories covered by video, pictures and written stories that allow people to be in touch with the world with a double click of a mouse. Internet is where media consumption is headed, and media outlets are doing their best to keep up with the new trends of reporting and news coverage. With the days of print slowly coming to an end, the news industry is trying to make the online portion of journalism original and accessible, covering topics both local and national. The newest trend growing is “citizen journalism.” These additions to the field will be watched closely to see whether they help or hurt existing journalists in the field. According to The New York Times, they launched two Web sites last Monday featuring citizen journalists from five different communities in New Jersey and New York. The communities covered are Milburn, Maplewood and South Orange, N.J. and Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, N.Y. The material for these sites comes from local residents of the communities with a Times staffer overseeing the site. There are initial recruited contributors, and the mission of the sites is to encourage and instigate people in communities to do their own reporting. This is being done to get residents to use their creativity to help build a more local online community. This new branch of the Times Web sites are also collaborating with the New York Graduate School of Journalism to help teach citizens how to be good citizen journalists. Jim Schachter, the editor of digital initiatives, said the goal of the sites is to educate the community on how to be good contributors and also create a real quality community that figures out the answers to questions on the minds of people in each place. This new venture of the Times is a good idea to get people involved in participating in news coverage and reporting. This newspaper covers events and issues on an international level, and it can be hard to cover everything that’s going on. These citizen journalists will give the Times the ability to cover small town instances from a local’s point of view and the story will also be humanized. It also gives the chance for everyday people to get a glimpse into how journalism works and what it takes to write and present a story to the public. It is possible to think that these stories will inspire readers to investigate situations further themselves and also find their own issues to be reported in these communities. It also allows for areas that may be neglected in news coverage because other events take precedence over them to finally have their stories told by the way of those who have first-hand accounts of what happened. Although there are these many positives that will come with the ability for citizens to present the issues that they find important, one can also wonder if there will be any negative effects with this new aspect of journalism. The fact is that an everyday citizen is not the same as an experienced, trained journalist. Many writers who are starting out can sometimes editorialize too much in their stories instead of just attributing the proper information to those who said it. There also must be a balance on the two sides of a story. There is the risk that the readers of these stories will get confused by what is fact and what is opinion. These citizen journalists will learn what is acceptable when reporting news and what is not. They are not presenting a blog or editorial to The New York Times — they are supposed to be presenting a news story. The Times is a prestigious name in news, and if these stories aren’t written the right way they run the risk of ruining the confidence that the readers put on them everyday. There needs to be a system of checks and balances that goes on between the citizen reporters and the staff overseeing what goes on with the stories on the site. One of the biggest names in the news industry is not going to just pull anybody off the street to report for them, and it is safe to assume they will undergo a series of training on how to get the best story possible. There is the possibility that citizen journalism will be a very successful addition to The New York Times Web site. The worry could be that the need for trained journalists may be slowly fading away as the need for printed papers goes too. There will only be a need for teachers to help educate people on how to properly write the story and editors to oversee what is going on. It may take awhile for that to happen but it is not a possibility to rule out. But for now we should think of citizen journalism as a positive addition to the media. As long as it is done correctly, these people may give information on issues the public hasn’t even considered and give us a look into the lives of people living in certain areas and what kind of events are going on there

(Via .)http://www.dailytargum.com/

It didn't take long for the veil to fall on streaming video of this event. Obviously outside of edit comment it leaves to much at risk, which is unfortunate in these open source times.

I thought that this would get stamped on, and now has. The ideas behind raw and unedited content was to much for the judge, equally the ability to make this happen now versus say a few years ago creates dilemmas from unedited content like here to rights issues (like sports below). All media is clambering to get on board this to hold onto viewers / readers etc, but it seems here the judge deemed enoughs a enough lets go back to the old school.

http://www.tv3.co.nz

Rules governing website coverage of the David Bain trial have been updated after fresh concerns were raised over footage being streamed live from the courtroom.
In a decision released today Justice Graham Panckhurst said minutes from his previous ruling showed the application for streaming by TV3 "was not pursued".
The TV network had been permitted to run footage provided it used a 10-minute delay. Its website warned viewers the footage "is subject to strict suppression orders and may not be available at all times".
However, lawyers for both sides spoke out after audio was broadcast of a discussion which occurred after the jury had been cleared from the courtroom.
There were also concerns that witnesses may watch parts of the trial before taking the stand, breaching an order for their exclusion.
Justice Panckhurst said websites would now be limited to "conventional news coverage" with content edited before being aired.

(Via .)TV3.co.nz

Again the US is looking to follow with low cost replacements of current media, I believe this model is workable, the success in Seatle (see posts below) bode well, but equally there are a few casualties. It seems the argument is to stay local, focussed, low cost, and use multimedia.

Journalism Goes Local With Wave of Start-ups
New Blogs Attempt to Reinvent the Model for Community News
by Michael Learmonth Published: March 09, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- We're seeing the newspaper business collapse in slow motion, but what will replace it? That's the question behind a wave of start-ups trying to find a new model for local journalism.
The New York Times dipped its toe in the water with the launch of two local blogs it calls The Local: one covering the Brooklyn communities of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, and another covering the New Jersey suburbs of Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange. Each site has a dedicated Times reporter, but they share an editor and take contributions from bloggers and journalism students.
"What we are doing here is seeing if we can contribute usefully to a form that has been growing but struggling for some time," said New York Times Deputy Managing Editor Jonathan Landman. "How do you bring good community journalism to towns and communities that could use it?"
Patch, a start-up backed by Google's president of U.S. sales, Tim Armstrong, has launched a local site in the same New Jersey communities as the Times and plans at least a dozen more launches before the end of 2009. Like the Times, Patch is assigning one journalist to each community and will link to other news sources and take contributions from bloggers.
There's nothing new about the idea, which dates back to the mid-'90s and has had at least one recent well-funded failure, Backfence, and a few isolated examples of small, sustainable businesses, such as Gothamist, Baristanet and Brownstoner.
Few options left but with papers such as the Rocky Mountain News going under, the owner of both Philadelphia papers going bankrupt, and the San Francisco Chronicle and other major dailies teetering, what once looked like a good idea is starting to look like the only idea for reinventing the model for local news.
CEO Jon Brod said Patch is targeting communities around the country in the 20,000 to 50,000 population range. "We intend to be a very profitable business by keeping our costs incredibly low," he said.
Yet even the most successful, self-sustaining local websites and blogs find it hard to build advertising-based businesses. Brownstoner founder Jonathan Butler laid off his only employee in December when real-estate advertising fell by half.
Baristanet, run by former New York Times New Jersey columnist Debra Galant, is one of the best-known local blogs in the New York area but supports only one full-time employee, Ms. Galant, bringing in "six figures" in ad revenue last year.

None of these efforts sees itself as a replacement for a large daily or even a small community paper. One start-up thinking bigger is San Diego News Network, populated with former Union-Tribune journalists and backed by entrepreneurs Neil Senturia and Barbara Bly, who expect nothing less than to take on the local daily when their news site launches March 18. They raised "more than a million" for the news site, which will have a much smaller cost structure than the Union-Tribune thanks to wire news services such as the AP and only 10 employed professional journalists. It will also link to bloggers and hire some freelance contributors.
No doubt we'll see more big ideas soon. Steven Brill, the onetime journalism entrepreneur and founder of Court TV, American Lawyer and Brill's Content, resigned as CEO of his non-journalism start-up, Verified Identity Pass, last week to, as he said, "turn toward the ideas I've been tinkering with related to the business challenges facing quality journalism."

(Via .)Ad Age

In from USA battle brewing over school rights to sports coverage. This is akin to NZ Rugby Union rights to all rugby in NZ, including little Johnny playing in the weekend, a fact that not many NZers would know.
The new debate is over a newspaper streaming coverage of a semi on the net. This wouldnt have occurred a couple of years ago, but Media is launching in to new distribution to hold onto readers / viewers. I wonder how long till this issue raises its head here, the Bain case (below) shows the field is changing and fast

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003948385

Article albeit from late 2007 about success or not of hyper local news content.

Interesting to note that the content fom Rocky Mountain News and there success with hyperlocal while great has to be taken against there recent demise as a paper due to economic / financial crisis. From my view it would appear the only success is to stick with the internet as the distribution model, think lean and great content.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/12/your-guide-to-hyper-local-news347.html

(Via .)PBS.org

First result in of quick turnaround video from NZ Press / Hearld after yesterdays decision by Justice Graham Panckhurst to let coverage ex Trial be available, see post below.

Will post first court coverage when available.

Look for the small insert play button in article with still shot

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/2003600/David-Bain-trial-jury-picked

(Via .)Stuff.co.nz

And from the Herald

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/video.cfm?c_id=1&gal_objectid=10560297&gallery_id=104767

Yep the great and original low powered FM station which now broadcasts on Maori allocation frequencies has sold to Radioworks effective the 28th Feb. Apparently the current economic climate meant not much of an alternative for George so the big player has stepped in. The frequencies owned by George are being leased to Canwest Mediaworks so that the owners are still meeting the requirements of the broadcasting rights.

http://www.mediaworks.co.nz/Default.aspx?tabid=134&articleID=676&language=en-US

This just in and no doubt I will be following with interest tomorrow that the media organisations have sort High Court opinion on "Streaming" trial of David Bain. This against guidelines from 2003, where this wasn't even contemplated.

I'll be watching tomorrow with interest.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/2000019/Judge-allows-Bain-retrial-video

Apparently now everything but Live streaming, watch with interest and post examples if breaking of other medias new methodologies. From National Radio this must be at least 10 minutes after court time, so issues could be struck if needed.

Insight into the continuing saga of newspapers in US. This time from LA Times.

This against my Dominion Post where readership is up 3000 a day (1.2%), daily print circulation is 92055, 33000 unduplicated online readership. All positive stuff but with an insert in today's paper explaining this no doubt to say we are OK, together with a lot more prizes to continue with a print subscription.

The overriding byline 'We believe strong stories, backgrounders and exclusives in print and breaking news online are the keys".

(Via .)LATimes.com

8:12 AM, March 4, 2009

Last week I asked readers of this column to send in questions about the Web and social media. The premise was that, because I do much of my writing for this blog, I often interact with online readers, for whom leaving a comment is a fast and frictionless process. But the print newspaper is not an interactive medium, which makes conversations with readers — and between them — a trickier proposition. So I thought I’d try an experiment and attempt to bring an online-style discussion into print.
A couple of dozen readers wrote in, and more than half of them completely disregarded the assignment, ignoring my question in favor of commenting upon the future of The Times and the printed newspaper itself. I was delighted at what a webby reaction this was — sidestepping the main topic in favor of an evidently more interesting tangent. In that spirit, I’ll answer the individual questions via e-mail so we can dive back into the troubled waters of newspaperdom.
Several readers were less than sympathetic to the plight of the newspaper industry, writing that The Times and other papers have only ourselves to thank for our uncertain future. “When I hear of newspapers’ demise, I can’t help but think of the music business or the American auto industry,” wrote Howard Schlossberg of Woodland Hills. “It is so clear to me that you (the industry) brought on your own problems that I frequently wonder why you can’t see it.”
David New of Manhattan Beach was on the same page. “The question you and everyone else at the L.A. Times should be asking its print subscribers is: How can we save our paper?”
Well, it may sound radical, but my answer is this: We can’t save the paper, and we shouldn’t even try. Let me explain...
...by way of a distinction: Newspapers like The Times, which was founded in 1881, have distributed the news in paper form since they began. Until recently, there was no reason to use separate terms for the industry and its physical product — the word “newspaper” sufficed for both. But as we’re seeing now, that word is no longer enough: One “newspaper” is an institution whose mission is to gather, distill and present a world of information to its readers.
The other is just a piece of paper.
And as much as we cherish the newspaper that arrives on our doorstep every morning, as a medium for delivering news, it loses to the Web in too many ways. At the top of the list is, of course, currency. What you read on front pages is, quite literally, yesterday’s news — while what you see on home-pages is what is happening in the real-time present.
If you’re an environmental type, you’ll know that newspapers are not a green product, either. The Green Press Initiative estimated that in 2006, newsprint consumed 95 million trees, to say nothing of the energy consumed or the pollution generated by printing and vehicle delivery.
Recently on “Charlie Rose,” the Web entrepreneur Marc Andreessen dispensed a bit of brutal advice to the newspaper business: “You’ve got to kill the print edition.” That way, the massive resources newspapers use for the print version could be routed into their thirsty Web operations.
Andreessen’s position is extreme — and he admitted it would mean “acute pain” — but it’s hard to ignore his credentials as a media visionary. In the 1990s, he co-created Netscape, one of the first major Internet browsers. Now he’s on the boards of Facebook and EBay, and was a person to whom Barack Obama turned for insights into Web media and social networking at the outset of his campaign.
Andreessen told Rose, “If you’re the guy delivering ice to peoples’ iceboxes, at a certain point you’d better go into the refrigerator repair business...If you’re the village blacksmith and the Model T comes along, you’d better become a mechanic.”
That Darwinian model is already playing out. The latest casualties arrived last week as Denver’s Rocky Mountain News printed its last edition and the Hearst Corp. said it could shutter the 144-year-old San Francisco Chronicle.
So what if papers take Andreessen’s advice? Many readers are less than excited about the prospect of an all-digital newspaper.
“People read the newspaper, they scan the Web,” wrote Kathleen O’Donnell Hunt of Huntington Beach. “The newspaper is a meal, the Web is a snack.”
“Reading the newspaper is like reading a book,” agreed Elizabeth Dobbs of Vista. “Getting online is like walking into a library. I can get lost in the library of the Internet, flitting from one bit of information and e-mail to another.”
That’s a bull’s-eye. The Internet is a medium without limits — it has no bottom, no end and it continues to grow explosively. With all its competing types of chaos, the Web is ill-suited to provide the peace and quiet that deeper reading requires. It’s a rough market for anything longer than a few pages — books and newspapers included.
But the Web isn’t the only alternative. If you’ve been following the saga of Amazon’s Kindle, the electronic reading device the Web giant has had trouble keeping in stock, you might feel optimistic about the future of slow-read media.
Just so, we learned last week, on the heels of Hearst’s grim news about the Chronicle, that the company was also planning to market its own e-reader for periodicals, reportedly with a larger, more newspaper-friendly screen.
Which sounds pretty good — on paper.
-- David Sarno

An interesting NZ programme that I will plug, that probably has a limited apeal on this networks major brands, but worth a watch, and great to see ondemand via Youtube.

Never been the greatest fan of Russell but they do have some good material around new media

For the last few years there have been a number of successful sites (blogs) that have maintained a hyper local news orientation within the US.

I have wondered from afar as why this model would not be successful in NZ built around larger geographical zones eg Auck, Wgtn etc with focus on suburbs within this zones, yet I have seen no examples?. The US model in most successful cases has about a population of around 250K and up.

Given I believe that the content for the majority of the these is text, no doubt the coming years/months will incorporate video, and as such probably surpass regional TV of old (like that was successful when run by TVNZ but to the credit of some regional TVs stations recently).

In fact probably given wide content (both text and video) put to shame regional newspapers and network television by being directly in touch with the community involved. No doubt the overriding issue is monetization of this to make it possible. It is interesting to note that the example below does not use Google Adsense, but direct advertising. Also interesting is the large amount of postings per month, following on from incepetion, orginally below 100 postings per month, now up to an exceeding 300 per month. That is heavy content posting, all credit to them.

Angela Connor on her blog http://blog.angelaconnor.com/ has interviewed this story from Seattle by Tracey Record and her husband in 2 parts here is the link to the second more about the nuts and bolts of her operation.

http://blog.angelaconnor.com/2008/01/01/monetizing-neighborhood-news-more-from-tracy-record-of-west-seattle-blog-part-2-of-2/

It shows that dedication and hard work can pay dividends for new enterprises. No doubt low startup costs to those in the know.

http://westseattleblog.com/blog/

Further to this a view of how these enterprises are doing nationwide, and early signs of how they are weathering the recession.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/davidwestphal/200902/1660/

Finally an online video of the current state of Seattle Hyperlocal news blogs

http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=5210832

Anyone got a lead on a NZ hyperlocal news blog?

Whilst YouTube is probably the best known and cheapest CDN since Googles purchase they have been looking for ways to make money from it. While at an early stage, it appears they are following the Adsense model of payment keywords for promotion. With 13 hours of video being uploaded every minute, no doubt some people will be looking at anyway to increase exposure of their video material, excluding social network promotion this maybe an avenue for some to cut through the mire.