Reflections on Day 2 of the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google

A few new terms and ideas stand out from the final day of the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google headquarters.

First, Hilary Schneider, executive vice president of Yahoo, stressed the importance of two key words: relevance and simplify. Amen. Those two words are great touchstones for anyone working on the Web

Economics Professor Marshall Van Allstyne of Boston University introduced a term new to me to explain how to make money in a "free" world: proprietary complementarity. He gave hope that it's possible to make money in a "free" world. Industries can succeed by giving away things for free, he argued. And he cited a number of examples to support his case, including Adobe giving away Acrobat for free but selling Distiller software and Microsoft selling software but giving away the system development tool kit. He said news "needs a complement." You can't own facts, but...

And finally, Jeffrey Ulin, a lawyer with the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, argued why the long tail theory won't work. The conclusion from his talk is that the cost of content is going to have to come down because "windows" for making money from content (at least in the film, TV world) are compressing in time. I think it would have been hard to come away from the conference not thinking that the need to continue reducing the cost of producing content isn't going to go away even if the economy comes back.

The final day was packed with good speakers, not all of whom I can do justice to here. But I'm told that presentations will be posted on this slideshare page. Also, you can read the twitter feed of participants from the first full day here on coveritlive.com. The feed from the second day is here. You can read my presentation from the first day here and see my slide deck here.

Alan Mutter of Newsosaur organized a very rich conference, certainly unlike anything I've attended that catered to the newspaper industry. We need more such collaboration across the traditional divide between newspapers and technologists. My only suggestions for others trying to do something similar are that it should become a standard that all such meetings stream live on the Internet and that all presentation slide decks go live immediately on the Web. The meeting was on the record, with reporters in the room, except for the evening conversation with former News Corp. COO Peter Chermin. So why not stream it live, especially when it comes from as sophisticated a technical location as Googleplex? Then instead of the Twitter feed being essentially reportage of the event, it could become more commentary and conversation during the talks. It would have been cool to have the twitter feed projected behind the speakers or beside their slides, for example. And the same could be done on the Web, where the twitter feed could run next to the live video.

A few other thoughts:

It came through loud and clear that readers/users are still looking for somebody to help cut through the tangled Web and make it easier to use.

The growth curve for Web advertising still seems huge, but the ineffectiveness and dismal quality of a lot of Web advertising also seems obvious. Much to be done on that front. This is also scary for newspapers, because that money shifting to the Web is going to have to come from somewhere.

In news organizations, it seems like newsrooms are perceived to be "getting the web" more than advertising departments.

It's unbelievable that no newspaper company has a simple, easy-to-use self-serve advertising vehicle. I'm talking display. Although classified in many cases is also so bad that I had one accomplished journalist tell me he gave up trying to place a classified online at a newspaper that was once a Web pioneer.

NPR is a great success story of the last few decades, and Ellen Weiss, its vice president for news, demonstrated why. Smart. Funny. But she also offered a word of caution for those who think nonprofit status is easy or a panacea. Even NPR is seeing its model being disrupted because it gets almost 40% of its $166 million budget from member stations (those annoying fund drives) and in the Internet era people no longer have to listen to NPR through their member station. I'm a big believer that newspapers should shift to a membership model along the NPR line. But she explained why membership is so difficult for start-ups. It takes time to build the loyalty NPR has built.

Chi-Town Daily News is another example of how while non-profit is a welcome addition to the mix, it's not "the solution." Geoff Dougherty, founder and CEO, spoke and I couldn't help but admire his commitment. He's switching from non-profit to a for-profit to try to make the effort work. What happened there would be a good case study for a serious, in-depth article.

On the other hand, it's clear that there's tremendous energy on the non-profit front and good things are happening. California Watch is an exciting development, for example.

Good thinking on how to capitalize when Yahoo! drives millions of page views to a newspaper's Web site

In writing about steps newspapers should take to survive and thrive, my third recommendation was, "Realign the internal operations of local newspaper companies to make marketing, advertising and editorial partners every step of the way."

Reader and friend John Leach, managing Partner at Digital Strategies LLC, pointed out how the recent experience of The New York Times, when it received more than 9 million page views on one story in a few hours from a Yahoo! link, was a good example of how what I was proposing could help newspapers. If news organizations were restructured in the way I described, they'd be better able to capitalize on this kind of opportunity because the whole team would react instantly, together. Instead, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab story, the Times sold remnant ads on the page getting the fire hose of traffic.

John wrote me: "You talked in No. 3 about putting together news, advertising and marketing staffs along the lines of what you described for CNN at the Democratic convention when you talked with the (CU Journalism School) advisory board. It's a great idea, and it's long overdue.
An online advertising staff has to be as nimble as the online news staff in order to take advantage of opportunities like the one the Times had -- and the same thing goes for the online marketing staff. As I pointed out in a brief comment to that post, the online advertising staff should have sold a client like Bing on being able to pick up 1 million or 2 million page views from a big event like that one, which is an ideal place for Bing to promote its new search engine. It could have done something similar with other big advertisers.

"What an opportunity that presents to deliver extraordinary value to a key advertiser, even if it's for a price halfway between the usual rate and the dismal remnant rate.
Instead, newspapers are functioning online like they do in print -- selling ad space, building the ad and putting it into that space on a set schedule. It's the equivalent of posting the day's paper and stopping there. Why can't we have breaking news ads to go with our breaking news?
The Times also could have targeted a marketing campaign for itself onto those pages -- getting far more value than it did from remnant ads. After all, the Times undoubtedly was getting visitors who hadn't been to the Times very often before, and visitors who hadn't been there at all, and that's a prime group to tell about what the Times offers in breaking news, in-depth coverage and multimedia. It's also a group that might well buy Times photos or other products."

I think John makes great points. Are newspapers nimble enough and are they structured to seize opportunities that present themselves quickly? Instead of complaining about the link economy, they should capitalize on it. By the way, I'm not saying the Times was complaining. But John is right that in my previous post on Yahoo! driving traffic to the Times I undervalued the opportunity that kind of traffic represented by not reiterating the importance of advertising, editorial and marketing working side by side.

Fascinating post about Web traffic

The Nieman Journalism Lab has a fascinating post about a Yahoo! link driving record Web traffic to the web site of The New York Times.

The Times got more than 9 million page views in a couple of hours as a result of the link, but couldn't make much money from the traffic.

This story relates to my previous post about how newspapers should think about building their business on the Web. Perhaps raw traffic isn't the best measure of success, or what newspaper people should be looking for. Just as fighting for tighter copyright laws isn't the right path. It's attracting the right traffic that counts - and providing services to users and advertisers that benefit them financially.