Content Wise

Notable Links: July 10, 2009

• NYTimes.com: European Publishers Call on E.U. to Protect Copyright - They want better control of—and the chance to generate online revenue from—search engines’ and aggregators’ use of their content.

• Poynter.org: YouTube Launches Reporters' Center to Foster Citizen Journalism - and to facilitate collaboration between citizen video journalists and mainstream news organizations.

• MediaPost.com: Mag Bag: 279 Mags Fold In First Half of '09

• Manolith.com: The Story (so far) of Twitter - An illustrated history of Twitter; it stops short of the recent Iranian demonstrations, but captures other milestones.

Publishing Headed for the Toilet?

As implosions and cutbacks continue to rattle our industry, you can now keep track of the body count via a Twitter feed called The Media Is Dying.

Created by an anonymous public relations employee, and previously accessible only to selected viewers, it reports on media layoffs and personnel changes in updates of no more than 140 characters at a time. Unfortunately, the tiny size of these "tweets" doesn't make the news any easier to take.

And if you had any doubts about publishing being headed to the toilet, a new cell phone app will dispel them. Sit or Squat is a Web-based collection of user-generated reviews of public restrooms around the world. The site recently added mobile applications that, tying into the global-positioning abilities of iPhones and Blackberrys, help users on the go (who need to go) find nearby facilities with good reputations.

Actually, it's a pretty clever combination of user content and mobile technology to create practical, "have-to-know" information. The New York Times Bits blog reports that the Web site registered more than a million page views last month and that 25,000 people have downloaded the iPhone app.

Twitter Stars on TV News

The microblogging tool Twitter now has its own television show, sort of.

CNN's wired anchor guy Rick Sanchez is doing a daily newscast (3 p.m. Eastern time, noon Pacific) that features tidbits generated by his audience via Twitter and other social and mobile media. Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion and Craig Stoltz at Web 2.Oh Really? have the details.

Personally, we've got a love/hate thing going with Twitter. By getting users to answer the question "What are you doing," it pumps more personal grunts and groans into the ever-raging mudslide of mundane musings on the Web. And yet, we've found it can be a handy way of glimpsing the activities of family, friends, and colleagues. (Michael's feed is at http://twitter.com/mgoldsf. Susan's is dormant at the moment.)

Perhaps more intriguing, people keep trying to use Twitter to commit actual journalism and online marketing, something that all publishers should be exploring. We did a tiny experiment in team Twitter coverage of Stanford's magazine and book publishing course in June; we'll try it again more seriously for the upcoming workshop on Web publishing.

Checking Sanchez's Twitter feed just now we see he has more than 15,000 "followers" and is tracking 13,000 feeds. Say what you will about the quality of his show. It looks like he claimed a big-time presence for CNN in the "Twittersphere" and found a promising new conduit to the audience.

Glimpses of the Future of Publishing

Four stories surfaced in the last week or so that suggest some answers to that nagging question in our industry: What is the Future of Publishing?

Squint, and you might see the vague outlines of what magazines and books may turn into in this increasingly multi-platform world.

1. The Industry Standard is back—with an online betting pool.

The magazine that chronicled the Internet explosion and then fizzled along with it in 2001 has been reborn, not in print but on the Web only. Its centerpiece is a prediction market, using ersatz "Standard Dollars," that aims to tap the wisdom of the Standard's crowd of expert readers and commentators.

If the market becomes a reliable trend-spotter for the tech industry, this could be a killer app. True, that's a big "if." Whatever happens, we think it's a creative attempt at an online extension for a brand that many believed had petered out. (Check out PPX, another magazine-related prediction market, at Popular Science's site; it covers "the future of science and technology." Simon & Schuster set up its own market, Media Predict, to spot ideas for books, recordings, and other media products that are likely to succeed; we wrote about it last year.)

More details on the Industry Standard's market and comments from Derek Butcher, vice president and general manager, are at Tech Crunch and the New York Times.

2. Here comes a unified, multi-platform book delivery system.

Writing about Amazon's plans to purchase Audible, Brad Stone at Bits thinks this is a real possibility:

"How about a service that allows you to seamlessly switch from reading a book on your digital device to listening to the same book read aloud as you get in the car, or if your eyes are tired, or if you simply want to hear a crucial scene acted out? And then switch back to the printed page?"

3. Cell phones are reading magazines.

Wired, Billboard, and Car and Driver have all recently published bar codes within the pages of their magazines in an effort to kick start their "mobile initiatives." Why? It's much easier to get cell phone users to tune in to related material if they don't have to manually type in those pesky Web addresses. Car and Driver's efforts are among the most ambitious so far, as Joanna Pettas reports at FolioMag.com:

"Car and Driver published more than 400 barcodes in its annual Buyer’s Guide in late December. Each car in the guide had a corresponding barcode linking to a microsite with pictures, reviews and a link to the full road test..."

4. And now, a platform to publish physical objects.

Three-dimensional printers—something in the neighborhood of Star Trek's transporter or replicator—have been used for a while now by aerospace and race car engineers, doctors, and artists. So reports materials scientist Mark Miodownik in the Independent.

As the technology continues to grow more sophisticated, it's not hard to envision the emergence of companies that enable their customers to "print out" a whole variety of physical objects: call them 3-D publishers. All right, maybe you have to squint a little harder to see it. But that's what they told Gutenberg, isn't it?

From Web to Print: User-Generated Magazines

While most of us are focused on moving print publications to the Web, two Web sites are working in the opposite direction.

JPG, a photo site, and Everywhere, which covers travel, gather user-generated material in order to create slick glossy magazines in print.

Both sites are owned by 8020 Publishing, which is backed by Halsey Minor, founder of CNET. Not only is 8020’s production process going contrary to most, it expects to make its money primarily from subscription revenue and to “limit advertising.”

The publisher’s trend-bucking model, described fully in last week’s New York Times, is an experiment worth watching.

Assignment Zero Launches Pro-Am Journalism Site

An intriguing new species in the world of online collaborative journalism has just been hatched. Assignment Zero is an experiment in "crowdsourcing"--that is, enlisting large groups of contributors to research and report on news and trends. Its organizers describe the project as "pro-am" because it relies on professional as well as citizen journalists.

Here's how one of Assignment Zero's founders, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, explains the idea:

"Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?"

Last summer Rosen proposed a similar project called NewAssignment.net (which we wrote about here). He also popularized the phrase "the people formerly known as the audience" to describe how Web site users are increasingly in the driver's seat.

For editors and publishers who are trying to convince audiences to participate in their Web sites (and who isn't?), it will be instructive to stay tuned as this project confronts such challenges as:

• How to organize and supervise an enthusiastic but possibly unruly crowd of amateurs in a virtual newsroom.
• How to coach an enthusiastic but possibly unskilled crowd of amateurs to create raw copy of reasonable quality.
• How to assess the credibility of these citizens.
• How to attract enough professional volunteers to turn the crowd's contributions into coherent coverage. (And, incidentally, how to address the backlash from pros who don't appreciate this push toward unpaid labor.)

In fact, Rosen issued a help-wanted call on his blog yesterday: It seems they're getting plenty of "ams," but they could use a lot more "pros." If you'd like to watch the adventure of "open Web publishing" unfold from the front lines, here's how to get involved.

User Content Sites Are Booming

Sites that enable users to create, collaborate on, and share contributions are among the top 10 fastest growing destinations on the Internet, reports Nielsen/NetRatings. They include:

• ImageShack (photo hosting): 233% growth in traffic over last year
• Flickr (photo sharing): 201%
• MySpace (community free-for-all): 183%
• Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia): 181%

Nielsen’s press release has more details (a PDF document).

The message for editors and publishers: If you want to grow your audience, find ways to build social computing activities into your site.