Yahoo Moves Aggressively into Crowdsourced Local Content

Posted on 26. Aug, 2010 by Toby in The Publishing Industry

Paid Content today reported that Yahoo is moving into producing much more local content and that it is going to be using its recently acquired AssociatedContent platform to produce the content via crowdsourcing.

Yahoo will likely have good success with the strength of its online presence and the effectiveness of the crowdsourcing model in heading into this segment. The question for other local publishers: what do you do know? Acquire your own crowdsourced platform (Associated Content cost $100M). Or maybe obtain a crowdsourced content platform / virutal newsroom though a SaaS partnership?

Forbes to go Crowdsourced

Posted on 14. Jun, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry

Today David Ewalt, an editor at Forbes, live-tweeted a company meeting. In it Louis Dvorkin, the former CEO of True/Slant, which was recently acquired by Forbes, laid out a new bold strategy for Forbes. Here are the tweets (most to least recent):

Value for contributors isn’t explicitly defined yet. My own take: there will be both financial & non-financial rewards based on yr. audience

A couple people asking if this is HuffPo model — my answer would be no, it’s more entrepreneurial, about developing wide swaths of talent
If you are interested in writing about travel, real estate, wine, food, cars, sports, health –any forbes lifestyle topic– drop me a line!
Meeting adjourned! The big takeaway: If you have something smart or unique to say to the world, we’ll make it our job to help you say it
Reorganizational details tbd – this is more about philosophical direction
Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent. We will help you develop your own brand and talent
If anyone has questions I’ll try to ask it if you hurry.
Lewis calls it “incentive based entrepreneurial journalism.” This isn’t about trying to get people to give us content with no reward.
Forbes’ original reporting and investigation not going away. We’re adding a level 2 bottom of the pyramid: 1000s of outside contributors
The big idea: We are looking to significantly expand our stable of outside contributors. A merger of Forbes brand & the True/Slant model.
New Forbes edit boss Lewis Dvorkin having meeting right now with his editors. He says it’s on the record, so I’m tweeting from it live.

Seems to be a really courageous and I think effective new path for Forbes.

Interestingly Paul Carr later in the day let loose on TechCrunch about how foolish he thinks this strategy to be:

There are almost not enough words to describe how wrong-headed this move is: Forbes’ online editorial standards are already in the toilet and Dvorkin has just yanked on the flush. Not only will this new breed of hacks add thousands of pages of self-promotional, unedited (Forbes simply doesn’t have the resources to monitor thousands of contributors) drivel to Forbes.com but, by lowering the barrier to entry to anyone with a keyboard, the publication will also scare away those top tier contributors – captains of industry, statesmen and the like – who are prepared to pen a free article for Forbes just for the kudos that comes from being asked.

Old habits die hard.

The Blog: Becoming the Default Publishing Format

Posted on 27. May, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry

Today Newsweek re-launched its site with a new design. It’s great: simple & clear.

It’s funny how it’s very much a blog in its appearance, with a stream of stories. Two column.

More and more media are ditching their crazy, confusing layouts where they try to satisfy everyone in the turf-war for homepage space. Instead the simple two-column-with-stream layout pioneered by blogs will continue to take over more and more designs.

So how long until the New York Times ditches its 5-column zig-zag mess?

Grogger as an Add-on Service

Posted on 25. May, 2010 by Toby in Company Updates

Most every time we talk to a publisher about Grogger they get excited. They recognize the power around letting their audience contribute posts, how that can drive engagement, better content and more content. And they see how Grogger’s tools to help them attract and filter that content are key to making it all happen.

But then there’s the leap they have to take: switching from their existing system to the Grogger system. And while many folks continue to sign up for Grogger, we’ve concluded that many more would–particularly those with existing sites–if we could reduce the leap.

Thus, we’ve started to work on “Grogger as an Add-On Service.” If you’ve ever used UserVoice or GetSatisfaction you’ll know how they allow you to quickly add “user feedback” on to your existing site. Grogger is going to do the same thing for user contribution / posts. And instead of a CMS migration, it’ll just take the install of a plug-in or some javascript. With no disruption to your site or even work, you’ll just be able to try out the power of social publishing, for free.

You can see the beginnings of what we’re doing in these rough wireframed use cases.

We would be eager for your feedback. We’re putting together a list of early beta users. If you’re interested, please let us know, and we’ll keep you in the loop as our development progresses, learn from your requirements, and give you early access to our system.

The plan for the first release is a Wordpress plug-in as well as an API that will allow integration for any platform. Over time we’ll build more plug-ins for other CMS platforms. We’d appreciate feedback on this as well.

We’re really looking forward to making it much easier for publishers to bring the power of social publishing into their sites.

WaPo creates community-powered political site

Posted on 17. May, 2010 by Toby in PubSocially, The Publishing Industry

The Washington Post has launched a new site, the “Political Blog Network.” Harvard’s Nieman Lab reports that it “is packaging content written by unpaid bloggers, hoping to engage its audience, give writers a platform, and make some money selling ads.” It notes the significant shift for a major media company like WaPo to utlilize the model where “a small number of professionals are paid to curate the work of many more unpaid writers.” The article notes how the compensation for the contributors is not cash but rather distribution and exposure.

New Grogger Commercial

Posted on 13. May, 2010 by Toby in Company Updates, How-To's

Check out our new Grogger commercial. What do you think? We’d appreciate your feedback!

Digg and the Scale of Communities

Posted on 12. May, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry

Mike Arrington wrote on TechCrunch today about the problems facing Digg and how it is struggling to get beyond its initial success to a greater scale. His point is that Digg is captive to its community and that the best companies often have to defy community feedback to take a service to the next level.

All good points. Maybe, however, there is simply a limit to the scale of a community. Arrington identifies the “250,000 or so hard core Digg users” as the heart of the problem. 250K power users as the problem?! Most sites would kill to have that many power users.

The problem with Digg is that it is one site, one service, one brand, one set of community leaders (Digg employees), one community, one vibe / ethos for all things. Within a community dynamic, you can only have so many big contributors, so many “traffic cops,” so much inter-communication among the community, after which it is no longer worth while and effective for more users to contribute.

A counter point: Facebook , Yelp, or Twitter, for example, have met no limits in the size of their communities. But the difference there is that they are not one single entity. Facebook and Twitter are endlessly segmented by friendships and follows. Yelp is broken down by cities, types of entities being reviewed, etc. And it ultimately has some sort of focus on business reviews.

Digg strives to cover all things, with all posts filtering up to the Digg home page. That’s ultimately one community, and it has hit its maximum.

The future of media is every more niche and more diffuse. Digg however is trying to an NBC or CBS. There’s only so much content that can be fit on a single channel or conversely, that a single community can contribute. But the future is going to have tens of thousands of channels or content communities, each run by leaders with specific knowledge and connection to each topic.

And that’s the problem for Digg.

Open File Launches: Crowdsourced Local News Site

Posted on 11. May, 2010 by Toby in PubSocially, The Publishing Industry

Nieman Lab today announced the launch of OpenFile, a crowdsourced local news site covering Toronto.

As Nieman reports, OpenFile “combines the core maxims of new media: community engagement, emphasis on locality, bottom-up approaches to news.” In particular, the service is right on about using the community to produce content and to shift the role of journalist from reporter to curator. Among the services core principles are:

2. Always collaborate: The line between journalist and reader should be fluid. Apart from gatekeeping and quality control, we must be responsive to our readers. Our technology choices should be democratic, collaborative and pragmatic.
6. Curate the conversation: Shift the role of the journalist from fact-gatherer to news producer. We will shape and direct stories in concert with our readers.

The site states that its content production process begins and ends with its community and they’ve set forth a very compelling new model of its staff will collaborate with the community to produce content:

1. You come up with a great idea for a local news story.
2. You submit that great idea to OpenFile by opening a file.
3. An OpenFile editor reviews your idea, and either assigns it to a reporter or posts it to the OpenFile site to gauge community response. Members can then add to your idea and help it grow.
4. If the story is deemed a good fit, the OpenFile editor assigns it to an OpenFile reporter.
5. The reporter posts the story and publishes it to the OpenFile site.
6. The published story is viewed by the OpenFile readership community, who can supplement it with additional images, video, comments and more.
7. Local news prospers. Everybody wins. Huzzah!

OpenFile has the right formula in place. Looking forward to keeping an eye on their progress.

Seth Godin, Micro-Magazines & the Future of Media

Posted on 06. May, 2010 by Toby in Uncategorized

Today Seth Godin reacted to the pending sale of Newsweek and asked the question regarding media: “Is there a business here?”

He answers yes, but he defines a new form, the “micro magazine,” as the spot where future success lies:

While there are still people hoping to make a living writing a blog (not as a tool for something else, but as an end into itself), that’s awfully difficult to do. Micro-magazines, on the other hand, feel very different to me.

What’s a micro-magazine? He goes on to define it as:

  • Having a very specific audience (call it a tribe)
  • Enabling that tribe to connect by sharing the ideas in the magazine among them, as well as supporting it with a forum or blog
  • Being longer than 140 characters or even a blog post, so significant ideas can be exposed in detail

In other words he sees a future for media of many properties each going after very specific topics and audiences. Those audiences are contributors of content themselves. But the submissions go beyond just tweets and have longer form style.

And he’s bullish on this format:

There’s room in the market for 100,000 profitable micro-magazines . . . expect that once someone figures out how to be the voice of a tribe, the revenue will take care of itself.

To Have a “Community”, Users Can’t be Second Class Citizens

Posted on 06. May, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry

Today CyberJournalist.net reported that The Nation re-launched its site. The headline: “The Nation launches new site built on Drupal, emphasizing community.” The Editor of The Nation posted too talking about how media is undergoing dramatic change and how “What we’ve decided to do is go for it.”

Now I don’t meant to belittle The Nation. They indeed are taking bolder steps into social media than most. But will this work? Let’s look at how they’re “emphasizing community.” Here’s their new site header:

Indeed you’ll see that there’s a new “community” link in the header. Here comes community, right?

Not really. Think of the big community sites: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc. There’s no “community” link in the header. Community isn’t a side show. EVERYTHING is the community.

Furthermore, there aren’t different classes of users. There’s not the employees who can actually initiate and create content and then the users that can then do “community” reactive activities like liking and commenting.

If you really want user to participate, to build a “community,” then users have to be able to function at the top tier, and not just react to what the “pros” produce but produce themselves.

For media organizations to truly get going with “social media,” they need to take this next step.

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