Disruptive Dialogue Podcast #4 - 03/27/2007

The fourth episode of the Disruptive Dialogue podcast is now available.  This one was recorded in Bow, NH and is 31:20.  You can download this podcast as an MP3 or subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you never miss an episode.

Topics:

• 00:34 - Opening & Introduction
• 02:39 - Print Media - Dead or Alive?
• 13:12 - Live Blogging
• 22:56 - News about Twitter, Podcast statistics, and Kathy Sierra
• 27:35 - Listener Comments
• 29:46 - Wrap-up & preview of next episode

Show Notes:

• CastingWords.com
• InfoWorld ceasing to publish print edition
• Tim O'Reilly on San Francisco Chronicle troubles
• Samuel Zell to buy Tribune Co.?
• New York Times/Boston Globe Circulation & Revenue Data
• Steve Crescenzo on live blogging
• Shel Holtz on live blogging
• Shel Israel on live blogging
• Jen McClure's comment on live blogging at New Communications Forum events
• Steve Rubel on SMS costs for Twitter
• Erik Schwartz on Twitter's monetization potential
• Arbirtron/Edison Media Research stats on podcasting
• Kathy Sierra's disturbing situation

To Comment:

• Leave your comments here
• Call the Disruptive Dialogue comment line: (206) 424-4733
• Email me your comments in MP3 format (no more than 2 minutes and 5 MB, please)

TRANSCRIPT:

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome the fourth episode of Disruptive Dialogue for Tuesday, March 27, 2007. I'm your host Chip Griffin, and I appreciate you taking the time to tune in. If this is your first visit here, I really appreciate you taking the time to sample my podcast. And hopefully I will be able to provide you with some useful news and commentary on the business of online communication.

Before I get into the content of this week's show, I do want to mention that transcripts are now being made available of these podcasts. If you visit the DistruptiveDialogue.com a few days after each podcast is released, there will be a complete transcript posted along side the show notes. Hopefully this will serve as a resource for those of you who want to go back and refer to specific parts of the show after you've listened to it. Or alternatively, if you don't have time to listen one week, but would like to skim through the transcript - feel free to do that as well.

For this I'm using a service called CastingWords, and I've used them with great success in the past, and expect that they will continue to do a good job going forward. Now on this week's show we'll be talking about print media, and whether or not it's dead or alive. I also have a segment addressing the issue of live blogging, and whether or not that's a threat to the republic or at least to conferences.

I also have a few short news items, and a listener comment. And of course I do encourage listener comments, because the name of the show after all is Disruptive Dialogue. And without your comments, it isn't a dialogue, it's simply a one-way broadcast. And finally, if you tune in throughout this whole podcast, I will come back at the end, and share with you some information about next week's show. So, with that - let's go to print media, dead or alive.

[music]

Chip: Ladies and gentlemen, may we please have a moment of silence for the print media. OK - forget about that. This is really kind of silly. Folks, there's a lot of discussion over the last 48 hours or so, about the death of print media. It ain't dead - it's not going to die. You will continue to have print media alive and well for many years to come - that's right.

I am not going to sit here and tell you that as much as I love blogging, social media, and the Internet world, that we will no longer have newspapers or magazines. It's absolutely absurd to think that that's the case. But, let me explain sort of the genesis of this latest debate over the future of print media. And really it's a lot less debate, and a lot more piling on against the publications. But nevertheless, it began towards the end of last week when word leaked out.

I believe it was late Friday or early Saturday, that InfoWorld, one of the steamed publications in the tech community would cease to publish as of, just about a week or so from now. Let me go ahead and read from their official blog post on the subject from Steve Fox, their Editor in Chief.

Steve writes - "Yes the rumors are true. As of April 2, InfoWorld is discontinuing it's print component. No more printing on dead trees, no more glossy covers, no more supporting the U.S. Post Office in its rush to get inky copies on subscriber's desks by Monday morning, or there abouts. The issue that many of you receive in your physical mailbox next week - Volume 29, Issue 14, will be the last one in InfoWorld's, storied 29-year history. But, let me dispel any other rumors - InfoWorld is not dead, we're not going anywhere. We're merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism - the web at InfoWorld.com. You can still get all the news coverage, reviews, analysis, opinion and commentary that InfoWorld is known for. You'll just have to access it in a browser, or RSS reader. Something more than a million of you already do every month."

So, InfoWorld is going away - sort of. They're not printing, but they're a high tech publication. Certainly there are going to be sectors where print publications are less palatable. And in the high tech community, where people are much more comfortable with the RSS readers, and going to the websites to read their news, it's a likely target. So, that's a piece of evidence number one, that proponents of this print media is dead argument have used.

The second comes from a post by Tim O'Reilly who talked about the San Francisco Chronicle. And here's what he says. He says, "I hate to play valley wag, but I'm hearing rumors that the San Francisco Chronicle is in big trouble. Apparently, Phil Bronstein the Editor in Chief, told staff in a recent emergency meeting that the news business is broken, and no one knows how to fix it. And if any other paper says they do - they're lying." And Tim says, "Reportedly the paper plans to announce more layoffs before the year is out."

He goes on to write in his blog post at O'Reilly Radar, and I will include the link in the show notes. He says, "We talk about creative destruction, and celebrate the rise of blogging as citizen journalism, and Craig's List, as self-service advertising. But, there are times when something seemed great in theory, arrives in reality, and you understand the down sides. I have faith both in the future, and in free markets as a way to get there, but sometimes the road is hard. If your local newspaper were to go out of business - would you miss it? What kinds of jobs that current newspapers do would go undone?"

So, Tim seems to be predicting the death of print media, although he laments it. Now, this is contrasted with a story that got a lot less attention, but this appeared in today's New York Times for Monday, March 26 - and it's about a man named Samuel Zale. And let me go ahead and read the opening of this story by Kit Seeley, and Terry Priston. I think it sets the stage very nicely.

"Samuel Zale's first foray into publishing came when he was in high school in the 1950s. He would visit the magazine vendors under the ell tracks in Chicago, and buy up copies of Playboy for fifty cents. Then he would go home to the suburbs, sell the magazines to his pals for three or four times what he paid. 'I see markets, ' he once said in an interview with CNBC, recalling that venture. 'I've always been intrigued by inefficient markets.'"

The article goes on to say that, "Mr. Zale, who went on to make billions in real estate, is seeking inefficient markets again - this time in newspapers. He is in the midst of negotiations with the Tribune Company, which owns some of the nations most storied dailies - including the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun. It also owns 23 TV stations, and the Chicago Cubs."

Later in the article it says: "Mr. Zell, 65, has said that he would get into the media business not because he has any special affection for newspapers or wants to wield editorial control, but because he wants to make money. He called himself an opportunist last week in an interview with the AP, adding, 'I probably am not as pessimistic about the future of the newspaper business as others might be.'"

So, certainly a contrary indicator. This is a gentleman who certainly doesn't sound like he is in the business to lose money, and in fact he thinks that there is hope for the newspaper industry. Now, he doesn't really describe the hope that he sees in any detail, but clearly he and his advisors must have some plan there, and I think that that's really the key here. I think print media will survive as long as they find ways to innovate. There are certainly publications that will die along the way.

There was news, for example, over the weekend, that Life Magazine is going away for, I believe, the third or fourth time in its history. It had been resurrected a couple of years ago as a newspaper insert, but let's face it, Life Magazine is not the kind of publication that people tend to be looking for today. People are looking for focused publications on individual subjects if they are looking at magazines, and general interest ones tend to have a lot less appeal to the consumer public.

Now, I also wanted to throw in here, into the mix, a couple of hard statistics that I think show that some publications get it, and will be able to cope, and some don't. Interestingly, both sets of data come from the New York Times Company. The first is for the New York Times itself, and the numbers that are published on their web site suggest that their circulation numbers are actually up slightly, year over year, from 2005 to 2006. If you look on their web site, it shows that the March 2005 number was 1.136 million, and in March of '06 it is 1.142 million. So up slightly. Obviously new number will be out shortly, and it will be interesting to see how those stack up.

But now, from the same company comes the Boston Globe, and from that same time period, the Boston Globe went from 434,000 subscribers down to 379,000 subscribers. That is a greater than ten percent decline.

So clearly the New York Times seems to have found a niche where the Boston Globe hasn't. The question is, is this simply a size-of-publication thing? Is it because the New York Times is a national newspaper and the Boston Globe is a regional metro paper? Who knows? It could be that, it could be other ways that there are structural differences there. But even within the same company you are seeing a dramatic difference. I think this is something worth looking at.

Even if you look at the revenue numbers, these revenue numbers tend to support the argument that over the course of time, some newspapers will get it and some won't. I was looking, for example, at the numbers for the New York Times Media Group and what they call the New England Media Group, which I believe includes the Boston Globe, and they break out the revenue for the company into these different sectors. So for the New York Times Group itself, it shows that revenue was up overall 2.1 percent from '05 to '06. Certainly not significant, but it does suggest that that portion of the publication is not having financial problems per se. In fact, their numbers, from a circulation perspective, circulation revenue was up 3.5 percent. It was actually advertising where they were hurt most, because they were only up a half-a-percent there.

By contrast, the New England Media Group, which includes the Boston Globe, declined by 5.9 percent, if I'm reading my numbers correctly--sometimes I can't read my chicken scratch--and their advertising revenue was down nine percent, their circulation revenue was down 4.5 percent; but interestingly, their other revenue--which, I believe this is where they put in the Internet revenue, but I haven't done enough research to verify that--was up 25.9 percent. Unfortunately, that's still a small piece of the pie at approximately $47 million for 2006, out of a total New England Media Group pie of $635 million.

Anyway, a lot of numbers here, and I think this probably merits a longer blog post where it is easier to see the data. Nevertheless, my point is that clearly some publications are getting it and some publications aren't, and so it is really a matter of print media figuring out how to deal with the new world, rather than simply writing off print media as a dying breed. But I would be interested to hear what you think. Do you think print media is dead? Do you think there's hope? Will publications be able to figure things out and continue to survive, or are we really looking at a world that goes almost entirely electronic and online?

[music]

"Is Live Blogging a Threat to the Republic.?: Take II."

A few weeks ago on Disruptive Dialogue, I talked about Steve Crescenzo's post about the new communications forum, where he suggested that live blogging was a serious problem for conferences. In particular, he took issue with a description of a panel that he participated in, out there in Las Vegas, that was written up by Shel Israel of Naked Conversations. Shel Israel, in Steve's mind, got it all wrong. Whether or not he did is not really the question here, I don't suppose. It is really what the future of live blogging is, and whether or not it is a good or a bad thing, whether or not it is something that conferences should continue to permit, should they actually encourage it, and should they consider prohibiting it.

So there are a lot of choices on the table for conferences to make, and Shel Holtz--the other Shel of the blogosphere, yes it is confusing, I mix them up myself all the time, including just earlier today. In any event, Shel Holtz talked about it in a post over the weekend, and it generated a considerable amount of comment traffic.

I was one of the participants in that discussion, because I have been mentioned throughout this string of posts by Steve, Shel, and the other Shel. They all cited my post as an example of live blogging of the same session that came to a different conclusion than what Shel Israel's did. Now, I don't really think I came to a different conclusion, necessarily, I simply reported on it differently. My take on live blogging is a little bit different than Shel Israel's. I simply try to write up my notes in real time as I see things, and tend to minimize the amount of commentary and judgment that I make. That said, I think every blogger needs to make his or her own choice. In fact, when I live blog the demo conferences in the fall and winter, I tend to include more opinions in that, quick takes if you will on each of the products that I see there.

In any event, the discussion in Shel Holtz's blog, let me just quote a couple of things from his post. And actually, part of it's a little bit lengthy, but I think it's very worthwhile for listeners to this podcast to hear.

He says, "As Steve notes, bloggers aren't journalists. At least, a lot of them aren't. I'm not, Shel Israel isn't, neither has claimed to be." Now, this is an important point. The fact that we are not journalists, we are simply bloggers, and to each blogger that means something different. There are certainly bloggers that view themselves as quote-unquote "citizen journalists", whatever that term means, and I'm not going to get into that debate here. But, the fact of the matter is the standards are and should be different. None of us as bloggers, or most of us as bloggers are not professionals and do not live by a specific code of ethics, etc. That said, we do have an obligation to our readers to do the best that we can, to be as accurate as we can, and to be as transparent as we can.

Interestingly, the criticism of bloggers for addressing issues in real time is something that could easily be directed at the traditional news media as well. Certainly TV and radio reporters frequently let their opinions and facts loose in real time. If you watch after a presidential press conference, for example, the reporter will pop up from his seat, turn around, and tell you exactly what he heard. He doesn't take time to digest it before he reports, he simply does it on the spot. And as soon as he's done summarizing what the president said, the analyst in the studio will then immediately offer their opinions. So, certainly mainstream journalism does the exact same thing, live reporting.

Let me quote a little bit more from Shel Holtz's post. He says, "The fact is, live-blogging has become a core component of many conferences and events, especially those dealing with technology and social media. There was live-blogging at the Oscars and election night. CNN even invited a bunch of bloggers to do their live-blogging in a big room where CNN reporters could interview them as they blogged."

He also says, "The difference between what live-blogging really is and what Steve perceives it to be is dramatic. Steve sees it as reporting, and inaccuracies in the reporting leave misinformation on the public record. But blogs are far less about reporting than they are about conversation. Personally I see live-blogging as a service. As someone who can not attend a conference or a session of a conference, the ability to read the post about it offers me insights that I would not otherwise have been privy to."

I agree entirely with Shel when he says that. In Shel's post he also talks about why various people live-blog, and he says that while he thought I did a good job, he has no idea why I live-blog. So, let me just take a moment to address that point. I live-blog essentially for three reasons.

The first and foremost is it helps me to focus my thinking and it helps me to retain more from the session. Let me explain. I frequently will attend a conference session that I'm perhaps less interested in than other. After all, most conferences are several days long, and after you spend some time in the various events, the mind can wander. It's a fact of life. But as I live-blog events, I'm forced to really pay attention to what the speaker is saying, because I want my blog posts to be as accurate and complete as possible. To me, it's part of building my reputation online.

So, that's the first piece, the focus part. The second part is to share information with colleagues. I have twenty employees or so at Custom Scoop and it's great to be able to share information back with them when they're not able to attend the conference with me. It's a way to share information and hopefully broaden their horizons at the same time that I'm broadening my own.

Finally, I do live-blogging because I have found that it is a very popular feature on my blog. In fact, whenever I live-blog, it causes spikes in traffic which means two things to me. One is it's giving more exposure to me and my personal brand, if you will. But also, it is apparently something that people are actual interested in reading. Fundamentally, as bloggers, or at least myself, the way I blog, I want people to find things interesting on my blog to read. I don't blog necessarily for myself, although some of my posts are for that purpose, for the most part I blog for the same reason that people would publish in regular publications. I want to have an audience that is interested in what they are reading.

Now, one of the things that did come up in this whole discussion on Shel's blog was some discussion by Mark Regan and David Murray of Regan Communications who suggested that perhaps at future Regan conferences--and they host a lot of conferences in the communications industry--they might ban live-blogging. Certainly this is within their rights, I am not one of those bloggers that believes that I have an absolute right to live-blog whenever I want. But I would certainly hope that Regan wouldn't go down that path.

I know that Jim McClure of the Society for New Communications Research and the co-founder of the New Communications Forum has been clear that that will never be the policy at a New Communications Forum event in the future. I'm happy to see that, and frankly it doesn't surprise me. At a New Communications Forum-style event it would be sort of foolish to prevent live-blogging since the event is for and about social media.

Nevertheless I do hope that Regan would be very cautious in pursuing that idea, because I believe that live-blogging really does a service to people who can't attend events. And most importantly for conference organizers, it shows the value of those conferences so that people will be more likely to participate in them in the future, which ultimately means more revenue for conference organizers.

In fact, I know that there are several events that I have attended in recent times and that I plan to attend later this year in large part because of what I read on blogs, about what went on at those events. For example, I am going to attend Gnomedex later this year and that is based significantly on live-blogging that I read during the event last summer as well as some video streaming that I was able to watch at that time.

So, I'd be interested to hear what you think about live-blogging. Do you find it to be a valuable service? Do you find that if you're a blogger it's something that you like to do? Is it too burdensome, do you think that it's a lot of fun? Do you think that it helps you focus? Go ahead and share your opinions and we'll go ahead and play those comments in a future episode of Disruptive Dialogue.

[music]

Just a few quick news items today, beginning with Twitter. I'm not going to spend a lot of time debating the merits of Twitter today, maybe in another show I'll get more into that. But I do think that it's worth mentioning a storyline that came out. I first saw it from Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion, but actually Eric Schwartz of the Phone Show blog apparently had a similar thought about ten days ago or so, and they're talking about the economics of Twitter. The approach here that Steve Rubel took was concern that Twitter could be running up huge Short Message Service--SMS--charges, particularly in Europe, because in Europe the sender pays, whereas in the United States the recipient pays, and there has already been quite a discussion online about how expensive Twitter has been for those people who have signed up to get the updates on their cell phone. But the question is, is Twitter running up huge bills without a revenue stream? So that's the first question.

The second question that gets addressed here in the Phone Show blog is how you monetize Twitter. That's really a question that I think folks need to be concerned about, because it's not enough these days to have a service, you have to figure out how to actually generate revenue from it. This post, by Eric Schwartz, makes a very interesting point. He says: "Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters. Now, 140 characters is not the actual limit of SMS, it's 160 characters"--which means, as Eric points out, that there are 20 characters that Twitter can control and potentially use to deliver ads. So that may be the first indication, that I've seen at least, of how Twitter may monetize their service, and given the number of messages that are transmitted, it would seem a feasible way to do it--they wouldn't even need an ad in every message to potentially be profitable.

So, on from Twitter to podcasting statistics. Podcasting statistics that came out last week were from Arbitron and Edison, and there just three quick little stats that I thought I would share with you.

The first is, awareness of the term "podcasting" has gone up significantly from their last survey, a year ago. It has gone from 22 to 37 percent. Unfortunately, that doesn't translate into more listeners of audio podcasts or viewers of video podcasts, because both had a statistically insignificant increase. Audio podcast listenership went from 11 to 13 percent, and video podcast viewership went from 10 to 11 percent. So clearly it is still a medium in its infancy, but the fact that I am here podcasting before you suggest that I think that it's still an important medium.

Finally, just a short mention of Kathy Sierra. She is a blogger in the Tech Space who actually, this week, was supposed to be presenting at the eTech conference in California. Unfortunately, she has been the subject of death threats. Now certainly, a lot of us as bloggers receive nasty comments from time to time, and the more prominent ones have received death threats, but in Kathy's case it apparently has gone far beyond that, and seems to be almost an organized campaign of intimidation, where some anonymous individuals have been not only posting comments suggesting that she should be killed and tortured and other such hideous things, but they have actually posted pictures and graphics online in an effort to detail just how it should be done. Clearly this would be disturbing if I received them, and I can only imagine how she feels, so she is living in a state of virtual siege right now as the police investigate and try to determine who is doing this, so that she can move on with her life. So obviously my thoughts are with Kathy, and I wish her the best of luck in dealing with this situation.

That's all I have for news items today, so on to the next segment.

Announcer: Now it's time for listeners' comments. You can join the discussion by calling the comment line at 206-424-4733, or you can email your comments as text, or as an MP3 file, to ChipGriffin@Gmail.com. And now here's Chip with this week's feedback.

Chip: Just one comment in the mailbag today, and it comes from Brian Helfrick, who is a colleague at CustomScoop. Here's what he writes: "The sound and production quality of this podcast is extremely crisp and clear; sounds great."

First, thanks for that, Brian. I've been trying to improve the quality over time, and I'm glad that you think I've accomplished something.

He then goes into some more substance: "Regarding FOIA"--which I talked about in the last episode of Disruptive Dialogue--"government is for the people--at least, I hope it is. A blogger is and should be just as influential in reporting as traditional media, and should have the same access. Hopefully the blogosphere will be a form of checks and balances for the FOIA system, to make sure FOIA is actually documenting and archiving government documents correctly, as they should be. How amazing that more of the general public would be able to access documents better, clarifying what our government is actually doing. I personally hope more information being accessible to the masses is a win-win situation for us all, even though it may result in some government staffers doing extra legwork."

That was in response to the news item I had next week about Senator John Kerry's bill that would improve access to FOIA information for bloggers, and put them on par with the general media. In that broadcast, or podcast rather, I had suggested that perhaps it would be an additional burden on the system and actually make FOIA more difficult rather than more accessible, but Brian obviously feels that it is something that we should strive for even if it is difficult to achieve, and I don't necessarily disagree with that, because I have, as I've said in the past, used FOIA very successfully, and believe that it is an important tool for citizens to use to get information about what their government is doing.

With that, I hope that you will take some time to submit your comments this week, and we'll go ahead and share them on this podcast next week.

[music]

And that will draw to a close the fourth episode of Disruptive Dialogue, for Tuesday, March 27, 2007. I appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through to the end of this podcast. You got to listen to me talk about the impending death--or not so much--of print media, the future of live blogging, and of course some news and comments. I encourage you to share your comments on any of these issues, going forward, so that we can continue the dialogue, and coming up on next week's show I hope to have some segments from the Web Innovators' Group meeting that will be taking place in Boston later this week, on Wednesday evening. It's an event where startups get to show their stuff and share their ideas. It is also a meeting jam-packed with entrepreneurs and investors, so there will be plenty of food for thought and discussion that will hopefully fuel a great show next week. So until then, I'm your host, Chip Griffin.

[music]

Announcer: For show notes and more information about this podcast, please visit www.DisruptiveDialogue.com, or visit Chip's blog at www.PardonTheDisruption.com. To share your feedback, you can call the comment line at 206-424-4733, or you can email your comments as text or as an MP3 file to ChipGriffin@Gmail.com.

Transcription by CastingWords