the social networks flameout dance

The always-sharp Paul Davis writes about the speed with which social networking sites are burning out, and diggs (pun intended) down to the core of what's needed if social networking is going to be anything more than a fad.

The only way I see these social networks as having any kind of lasting impact, the sort that could develop a legitimate social-networking media buffet with the credibility of a legitimized old-media powerhouse, is if the networks currently at the top (and the major ones to emerge) strive for some sort of shared standards of interoperability among platforms.

Yowza is right. Can you imagine?

hyperlocalism in a way that is both local and hyper

Discussions abound still about the move towards "hyperlocalism" by corporate newspaper chains, the irony of laser-focused local coverage apparently entirely lost on a corporate boardroom that has never seen some of the cities they're dictating changes in.

Meanwhile, as it always does, true innovation in real local coverage comes from--guess who--locals that give a shit about their communities, not about making stockholders happy. A wonderful example of truly hyper localism was referenced today by Gapers Block (a great example of ground-up localism at a slightly-less hyper level): The Marshfield Tattler.

You've got to love any site that begins reports with phrases like, "I haven't had a chance to write about the new family down the street," or, "Yesterday afternoon, I ran into Jesse on the street. I hadn't seen him for a while" (that entry under the title "Guess Who Got the Microwave?"). It's truly what's important to the author about her community, from events to people, to the routine. It's a chance to see her world through her eyes. It's not "real" journalism, but it's a hell of a lot more interesting than most of the hyperlocal examples being trotted out by big business and it lets' you know a lot more about the community to boot.

Is content truly free now?

Publishing 2.0's Scott Karp has a brilliant analysis of the concept of "free" content that stands most of the conventional wisdom on its ear. His argument--and I'd have to say that it's ringing pretty true with me--is that of course content isn't free: we pay for internet access, we pay for computers, etc. The problem is that by and large we won't pay twice, once for distribution and once for content. You only pay once to have a magazine brought to your door, not a second time to open it--why would we expect something different from the Internet? Of course in the digital age, you're paying someone else for distribution. And therein lies the problem.

Everyone is thinking about the shift in the economics of content in terms of paying for content, but what publishers are really facing is a shift in the economics of distribution. We’re still paying for a bundle of information to be delivered to our homes — it’s just that now that bundle is traveling via fiber optic cable rather than newsprint.

Content, paid and otherwise

With the New York Times announcing that their idiotic TimesSelect subscription service is finally coming to a close, the web has been filled with the pronouncement that paid content has finally and absolutely been proven impossible to pull off. I think that's a false assessment of the situation, since TImesSelect--a service that essentially just put their opinion writers behind a toll booth--was a poor decision to begin with. In addition, it overlooks (as, let's face it, these things always do) the fact that niche journalism has been able to and continues to be able to pull off paid content (Josh Hooten's excellent Herbivore.com being an example that springs immediately to mind).

All that said, Jeff Jarvis, who I often find to have drunk a little too much of the Kool-Aid, does raise a good point that's often overlooked in the whole print vs. digital debate when he says:

Don’t let anyone tell you that this is bad for the content business. It’s only good sense. Having worked in the magazine business, I saw this even at the dawn of the internet: As I said above, a magazine has to pay up to $30-40 in marketing costs to acquire subscribers; it can pay up to $5-7 to print and distribute a copy of a glossy magazine; it has high editorial costs. Add that up, and a magazine can find itself in the hole $60 or more per subscriber in the first year of a subscription. And they get as little as $1 per issue in subscription revenue. Yet clearly, a magazine can make money because that subscriber’s value to advertisers is much greater.

It’s the relationship that is valuable. It’s the relationship that is profitable, not the control of the content or the distribution.

Well said and exactly right: The amounts spent on acquiring readers for print publications is huge, and it's much simpler online where good content can act as your best marketing tool. Toss in the actual physical cost to print (not write) and distribute and you've got even more money on the table. Take all that out of the equation and you begin to make up the losses due to the lower cost of online advertising.

All your base are belong to Craigslist

One of the major factors pointed to in the death of alternative weeklies like the Chicago Reader, along with the stagnation of the traditional newspaper industry, is the decimation of the classified advertising market courtesy of Craigslist. Craigslist, the story goes, offers classifieds for free, while the newspapers charge for theirs. It was a good racket too, the story continues, with newspapers bringing in millions from their classified sections--but now that it's offered for free, newspapers can't compete.

On one level that's true, but having used Craigslist for the first time to sell off some of the Punk Planet office's less desirable objects (a vacuum? some old filing cabinets?) this week, I can tell you that the true power of Craigslist is not simply in the price of the ad: it's the simplicity in placing it and the speed in which it gets answered.

On Craigslist, there's no registration process, you simply write the ad, plug in your e-mail address, and you're essentially done. Because they're not attempting to monetize the process there's no need to collect any more information than that. And once you're done your ad is live immediately--not next week, in the Reader's case, and not tomorrow, as in a daily paper's situation--and it's responded to immediately. I had sold off that old vacuum cleaner approximately five minutes after placing the ad. The filing cabinets took about 15. (Interestingly, the one thing that has yet to sell is a CD player, which tells you pretty much all you need to know about the state of the music industry right now.)

That's what's killed print classifieds--the ease and speed of Craigslist. Free factors in for sure, but it's not the thing that keeps people coming back, ease of use and speed of sale is.

More on the Reader and the myth of "hyperlocalism"

So the new owners of the Chicago Reader, Creative Loafing (ugh), have announced that the entire production of the paper is moving to Atlanta. The entire Reader production staff, along with its award-winning art director, will be out on the streets within six weeks. Additional rumors have the paper's printing being outsourced from long-time printer Newsweb in Chicago all the way out to North Carolina, where it will be trucked 14 hours cross-country. Once they're through, it's a safe bet that a good amount of the editorial will be produced out-of-town as well--after all, you don't have to live in a place to review a movie, right?

These moves away from Chicago by a company that claims to be "pioneering the opportunities offered by convergent print, web, and new media applications" (ugh) underscores why my bullshit detector goes up every time I hear someone talking about "hyperlocalism" as the savior of newspapers.

Hyperlocalism--for the three of you that don't already know--is the latest buzzword for locally-focused content that's combined with community-driven content. When you hear the investment brokers and money handlers talk about it, they always dredge up the example of junior-high school sports scores--traditional newspapers can't dedicate the space to print them, they say, even though plenty of parents want to know them. That junior-high sports scores have no real bearing on anyone's life (junior-high schoolers notwithstanding), and that real local news doesn't ever seem to register in analysis hasn't stopped the hyperlocalism bandwagon from picking up steam.

But there's always the question of production: Who's driving that wagon? In typical "convergence" fashion, it's big media companies, silicon valley startups, and cheerleaders from among the technoscenti. There's often not a damn local (let alone a hyper one) among them. And so hyperlocalism is bound to fail the same way the Creative Loafing (ugh) run Reader is bound to fail: "Local" is a word that still means something--you can't replicate it from 1,500 miles away, no matter how much money you spend.

Chicago Reader, RIP

So the venerable Chicago alt-weekly announced today that it's been sold to a Tampa-based alt-weekly publisher with the unfortunate name of Creative Loafing. That the new owners have entered a market much larger than their largest holdings (Tampa? Sarasota? Jesus...) seems like a bit of a kick in the sack for the Reader, which has been kicked quite a few times already.

Once the end-all be-all for what was young and happening in Chicago, as well as one of the flag bearers for high-quality (if, let's face it, sometimes quite boring) alt-journalism in the country, the Reader has been on a slow, painful slide from the top for years now. It was a slide started by the introduction of "The Red Papers," competing commuter rags introduced by the Chicago Tribune and the Sun Times (who started their Red Streak for no reason other than to toss something in front of the oncoming onslaught of the Trib's Red Eye). The Red Papers undercut the Reader's ad rates and promised a much larger circulation (and, good god, much worse writing). The entrance of Time Out Chicago further stretched the ad market as well as took the legs out of the Reader's editorial coverage, offering a more readable look at the goings-on in the city (the Reader's attempt to freshen up before TOC's arrival, an odd and confusing redesign, didn't help matters from the start).

But the biggest nail in the Reader's coffin--and the nail being driven into all the other alt-weeklies in the country--was Craigslist. Back when I worked at the Reader (in the production department, which I think it's now safe to say I tried to unionize during my two years of employment) the classifieds commanded the largest and most labor-intensive section of the entire paper. It had an entire floor of sales reps and production on the section would have its own night. It brought in millions of dollars a year--dollars that were then able to be spent on "real" journalism elsewhere in the paper. It was the lifeblood of the paper, as it is for many alternative weeklies around the country.

The Reader even adapted to the Internet quickly--their online classifieds were the go-to page for apartments and jobs in the city for years. But they charged for those listings, and they found it impossible to compete with the Craigslist juggernaut (and frankly, how could they?). The classifieds slowly shrank, the final insult being the awkward incorporation of the entire classifieds section into two different parts of the paper. What was once a four-section paper suddenly became three--I'm sure the new owners will fold it all down to one soon enough.

And so it is that the once-mighty Reader is absorbed by a C-list alt-weekly chain, not even good enough for a New Times buyout, let alone a purchase by the Tribune. The owners I'm sure were well compensated, but those that work the long, thankless hours at the paper now face very uncertain futures. It's hard being an object lesson, as every other underpaid employee at a weekly is watching to see what happens to them, and I'm sure they will weather this storm just as poorly as you can imagine (my thoughts go out to each and every one of them).