Don’t dump your email account for Facebook -- yet

Versión en español aquí.

I was suprised and delighted to read today that the New York Times studied its readers’ habits for sharing articles and found that they prefer email over social networks.

The implication for web designers is that they should make email sharing a prominent tool on their websites or they might miss a big potential source of traffic.

For some reason, I still like managing my online life through email. Daily calendar alerts remind me of appointments. I subscribe to maybe two dozen newsletters so I don’t forget to follow developments in digital journalism or the business of media.

How to decide whether to offer podcasts on your site

Versión en español aquí.

At the moment I am leading a course for Latin American journalists who have created their own digital news media (blog for the course in Spanish is here).

We just analyzed the multimedia aspects of a number of websites and a question arose about the value of offering podcasts. The simple answer is that it depends on the purpose of the site and the characteristics of the audience. 

There are tools available to offer a bewildering array of different services on your site, but before you deploy any of them, consider these questions:

• How likely is it that this new service (podcast, video, audio, poll, blog, forum etc.) will attract a new segment of the target audience?
• Do our competitors offer this service? If we can’t do it better than they do, maybe we should not consider it.

The three key roles in a digital media operation

The biggest mistake that journalists make when they start an online news operation is that they don’t include marketing and technical people from the beginning.


Journalists are pretty good at figuring out how to tell stories online but they haven’t a clue about how to generate enough income to survive. They don’t know how to sell and even consider the notion somewhat repulsive. 

Murdoch was Bubble Boy with Myspace purchase

If ever there were an example of what happens in a bubble economy it is News Corp.’s purchase of Myspace for $580 million in 2005.

Now the social network that was a media sweetheart has been sold for $35 million to Specific Media, an advertising network. In other words, it lost 94% of its market value in six years. Myspace did earn back its purchase price early on with a lucrative ad contract with Google, but it has never lived up to its expectations.

The reality check of Myspace comes at a time when a market value of $100 billion for Facebook is being discussed by supposedly sane people -- that is about 170 times the price Murdoch paid for Myspace.

And although Facebook shows a lot of promise, remember that the market value being discussed is 50 times revenue. I remember when a really good newspaper property might sell for two or three times revenue. That was before Bubble Boy.

Digital-first gets another advocate: UK Guardian CEO

John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register Co., has been generating a lot of buzz for his revolutionary pronouncements to newspaper editors that they need to put digital first, print last. (Here are his 10 Tweets to transform newspapers.)

Now he has something of an ally in the UK.  In an interview with Paid Content, Guardian Media Group CEO Andrew Miller echoed some of the scary phrases of Paton by saying that Guardian is realigning the business to be digital first.

He also predicted that all newspapers will eventually exit print, although he would not say when.

African news service thrives as cooperative

Justin Arenstein never really wanted to work for a big corporation, but that is how he started out in journalism. He was a reporter working on contract covering one of the desperately poor shantytowns of his native South Africa.

He and his colleagues ran afoul of corporate management by covering the death squads that were assassinating black activists opposed to apartheid. They quit en masse and decided to start their own news organization, which was the beginning of what is today the African Eye News Service.


African Eye functions as a cooperative, with each reporter keeping half of the revenue generated by his or her own stories and the rest going to support the enterprise. Launched 18 years ago, it has 15 full-time journalists and a network of correspondents covering six countries -- South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania and Malawi. It has gained a reputation for editorial independence and aggressive investigative journalism.

News organizations have attracted $187 million in grants since 2005

The new ecosystem of small news organizations continues to evolve at breathtaking speed. When you consider that it has been only four years since the news industry’s business model went into free fall, the number of new organizations and their quality are impressive. 

Also impressive is the financial support that they have attracted. J-Lab has just updated its database of grant activity to news projects since 2005, and the totals are: 

• $186 million 
•  from 274 foundations
•  to 146 news projects
•  775 grants
•  23 states