thoughtsignals

Want to broadcast your own call-in talk radio show? No problem. Thanks to BlogTalkRadio you can. Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz reports the site is drawing 2.4 million visitors a month, and giving lots of folks like us a new voice.

Most shows are hosted from home by bloggers who need no special equipment and pay no fee. The only requirement is that they put a link to the program on their Web site. On BlogTalkRadio’s site, visitors can search for programs by name or category.

The process is nearly idiot-proof. The host logs on to a Web page with a password, types in when he wants the show to air, and then — using a garden-variety phone — calls a special number. The computer screen lists the phone numbers of guests or listeners calling in, and the host can put as many as six on the air at once by clicking a mouse. Listeners can download a podcast version later.

Is thoughtsignals radio in the future? Maybe (after grad school) — stay tuned.

(Hat tip to my colleague Kathryn who first brought this to my attention.)

New owners of newspapers — folks like Sam Zell, who made his fortune in real estate — are now saying the outlook for the papers they bought is worse than they expected.

David Carr writes:

These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves.

A lot of these deals were done in the last two years, when the economy was still good despite the troubles in the newspaper biz. With the economy headed downhill, the systemic problems with newspapers will get amplified.

However, what continues to be missing from this whole discussion about the business of newspapers is the lack of innovation in newspaper business models (not in newsrooms, which have been trying new things like crazy the last few years).

Chris O’Brien, who has worked for newspapers as a business reporter for years, gets it right:

I see tremendous energy going in to breaking new ground in gathering news, telling stories, and creating community. What I don’t see is an equivalent amount of innovation occurring around the business models that will support journalism going forward. What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.

This model is dying.

I don’t know that I agree that selling ads, per se, is a dying business model. It’s what Google is based on after all (however, unlike newspapers, Google has produced a number of innovations in advertising). But basically, that’s right. There is lots of experimentation going on in the nation’s shrinking newsrooms, not so much in the other departments.

Cnet has an interesting interview with John Battelle, founder of the blog network Federated Media and an expert on Google, online publishing and other things. He says what I’ve been thinking for years, and what makes the Internet so interesting to me as a writer:

I believe even more than ever in the value and quality of content. What I think has changed is that the creation of content, and I’m using content very broadly here to include services as well as traditional approaches to content…but I think the creation of content has decoupled in the last five years. Decoupled from the media business–I mean Viacom, Time Inc, CNET, Wired, Condé Nast–and that decoupling means that talented producers of content, for the first time have access to distribution, tools of production, and the ability to actually execute and produce their own content without having to attach themselves to traditional media businesses.

Link.

Warren Ellis has a short, but insightful, set of points on what he’s calling ‘burst culture.’ None of this, as he points out, is new. But many, many people in traditional print media still don’t get it. It’s all basic economics: low barriers to entry, easy monetization, etc.

I love print. I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go. The web isn’t a replacement medium — it’s *another” medium. That said, if your concept of a magazine is something designed in one-page bursts, or three pages that only carry 500 words due to the mass of images, then, really, you’re not doing anything the web can’t do better, are you?

Despite the success of magazines like the New Yorker in the last few years notwithstanding, many print publishers seem to believe the future is in imitating the kind of content the Web does best. Maybe we should be rethinking that approach.

Link.

The LA Times finally brings some sense to the nonsensical discussion about whether the end of newspaper book sections somehow heralds the end of books:

INDEED, more than at any time in the last 40 years, there is a bounty of news, features, criticism and gossip about books in newspapers, magazines and journals, blogs, radio and TV, podcasts and an ever-growing number of book clubs and festivals. It’s by all appearances a flourishing literary moment in a culture that traditionally values other forms of entertainment, and it raises the question: Why should two key elements of that mosaic, litbloggers and book reviewers, be trading shots at all?

Link.

Startup newspaper BostonNOW is printing excerpts from local bloggers in its print edition.

John Wilpers, editor in chief of BostonNow, a free weekday daily introduced last month, said he wanted to fill the paper with items that local bloggers submitted to the BostonNow Web site.

Last week, editors began culling posts and running excerpts next to articles from reporters and newswires. The blog items, which appear in gray boxes, are still relatively few, but Mr. Wilpers said he thought the feature would grow.

Mr. Wilpers, who previously edited two other free commuter newspapers, Metro Boston and The Washington Examiner, said he wanted to address what he believed was the news industry’s biggest problem: an inability to connect with the communities it covers.

I expect there will be a certain amount of moaning that this is another sign of the end of newspapers (no, their declining circulation, readership and ad revenue would be the sign of that). However, I also expect that we’ll see a lot more of that. Other newspapers are already doing this in one form or another, and many papers are printing excerpts from their own bloggers in the print edition (a sure sign that momentum has shifted from print to the Web).

Newspapers have a long history of printing things that aren’t really news — comics, recipes, letters to the editor, horoscopes, etc. This isn’t that new. But it is a good idea.

Link.

Authors and book publishers are using quickly recorded audio books to whip up publicity for book sales, sometimes releasing the audio versions before the print version.

Because audiobooks are so fast, inexpensive and easy to record, the dynamic seems to be changing, with publishers looking to the audio format to fuel interest in paper books that aren’t quite ready for the printing press.

And with the ubiquity of iPods, that interest can be generated quickly: recordings need not be pressed onto CDs and packaged, but can quickly be uploaded to iTunes. Sometimes these recordings will be made with well-known authors whose next release isn’t quite ready for bookstores, and other times with newcomers like Ms. Fogarty whose work has gained a following another way.

Ms. Fogarty said that when she was first contacted by Ms. Winfrey’s show, she thought, “I’m going on ‘Oprah.’ Gosh, I wish my book were done.”

Fogarty is the source of the online Grammar Girl podcasts, which can be found here. Two fairly obvious observations about this:

1. Technology changes everything.

2. It’s a good thing that publishers are focused on marketing, rather than on silly things like whining about the disappearance of newspaper book sections.

Link.

Just kidding. I’d love to have your ads (maybe, we can talk).

But for advertisers wary of placing ads in places where the content may be unpredictable and perhaps inappropriate, Feedburner has introduced AdClimate. The tool enables advertisers to identify key words that are problematic and keep their ads off posts that contain those key words.

By way of example, let’s say you have an aversion to the word, “wingnut” and the thought of your ad for pinenuts showing up in a publisher’s blog post about the history of wingnuts would be totally unacceptable (hey - who are we to judge?) AdClimate to the rescue. In addition to screening a multi-language default list of inappropriate language, advertisers can submit their own list of keywords next to which they don’t want their ad to appear - wingnuts and all.

Do other online ad providers, like Google, do this? I don’t know. I bet this will be popular, though.

Link.

Online Journalism Review has a Q&A with Baristanet co-founder Debbie Galant, a former New York Times Columnist.

On the site’s approach to journalism: “We are much more … shooting from the hip and smart-alecky. We’re more like the front of the book in Newsweek or like those sly Entertainment Weekly-type magazines.”

On earning a living: “We’re now after two years really starting to make some decent money. It took at least that long to build up the readership so we could become a viable competitor in the local advertising market. It certainly helped that during that time Liz and I both have husbands who were bringing in the health insurance and the steady income.”

On the competition: “Our shining hours have been during fires and this microburst last summer that was just like a tornado and that’s when we utilized the medium really well. … And the local newspaper surprisingly enough, even though they were out reporting it and even though they have a website, they didn’t use that material and saved everything for their newspaper on Thursday–which was two-and-a-half days after everything happened. And so we just really felt like we completely kicked their butts.”

This is fascinating stuff, well worth a read if you’re interested in the future of local journalism and in the idea of hyperlocal journalism especially.

Link.

Underneath all the very real concern about the future of daily newspapers and other “mainstream” media are questions about what will happen to the expensive, time-consuming journalism such organizations have traditionally done. Washington Post media writer Howie Kurtz raises the issue:

Newspapers and networks face the same dilemma: too many people doing other things with their time, from Web-surfing to podcast listening, or simply losing interest in news altogether. Some of these customers are consuming the companies’ wares online, which is great for exposure but doesn’t produce the revenue needed to support long-form reporting. If this erosion continues, it would be bad news for serious journalism, and good news for corrupt politicians.

Link.

There’s also an online discussion where Kurtz and some of his readers get into it a little more.