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  • 07 Jun 2010 at 12:50 PM

Betty White Hosted an SNL Episode; Now We Need @BPGlobalPR to Write One

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As much damage as has been done to BP—its market cap slashed by more than a third, its image decimated, its executives shown to be rich bumblers—you could pretty easily argue it’s only gotten a fraction of the pain it deserves. It hasn’t even been able to stop the flow of oil, let alone begin the long process of the remediating the gulf region it’s destroyed, yet somehow the force of public condemnation doesn’t seem strong enough. In amoral fashion, financial types are already discussing whether BP stock is now cheap enough to be a smart buy, and this Reuters story provides a tally of the consumer opposition to the company. It’s a rather gloomy accounting unless you’re roused by a handful of Facebook groups that add up to tens of thousands of people.

Which is why we need to get all Betty White on BP’s ass.

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  • 04 Jun 2010 at 2:06 PM

What Would William Randolph Hearst Say About the iCrossing Deal?

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When William Randolph Hearst died in 1951, television was only just beginning to firm its grip on American culture and newspapers still set the agenda. The Internet hadn’t even been imagined. Yet, I believe, it’s safe to say that if Hearst the man could weigh in on Hearst the company’s latest acquisition — not a newspaper, a magazine or even a website, but a company specializing in buying search keywords and performing social media — he’d like it.

Hearst, after all, was the guy who uttered this immortal line: “Putting out a newspaper without promotion is like winking at a girl in the dark — well-intentioned, but ineffective.”

It’s a sentiment that might be well-over a half-century old but one many publishers still struggle to understand. Hearst knew it wasn’t enough to just produce news stories, how ever well-reported or beautifully-written, and hope that readers would come. Even in the primitive tech environment of Hearst’s time, news media suffered from fragmentation, with multiple broadsheets and tabloids competing for reader’s interest in any given city or town.

Hearst knew that to succeed in that cluttered environment a publisher had to be a bit P.T. Barnum. And, as a result, the Hearst name will forever be associated with yellow journalism techniques that led to a war and mainstream acceptance of all kinds of crazy psuedoscience.

The point here is not that audience development should come at the expense of truth, but that you can’t ignore the environment in which your content lives. If you do, it won’t live for long. That’s as true now as it was then. The difference today is rather than be part Barnum, it’s best to be part Ballmer.

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The Media Business Might Need a Savior, but Steve Jobs Isn’t It

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When Steve Jobs speaks, people listen. Not only do they listen, but their jaws drop slack, a droplet of saliva drools to the chin to dry and the head nods in happy obedience.

Steve Jobs ImageThat’s all well and good when you’re talking about hordes of mindless fanboys who have given over their souls to the Apple CEO and his product line, but it’s a bit disconcerting when you consider how well Jobs’ spiel plays in a media business desperate for new ideas on how to preserve itself. As we plow deeper into our Age of Non-Monetization, it’s easy to see the attraction to Jobs’ sales pitches, like the one he gave at the AllThingsD conference last night. There he once again struck his Jesus Christ pose, a would-be savior replete with the increasingly gaunt, almost ascetic visage that is so easy to submit to. It helps that he’s got the hardware, the closed-off ecosystems so difficult to disrupt, and the swelling market capitalization to boot.

He’s also got a great line that underlies his media-oriented addresses, even if he never quite drops it literally: I saved the music industry and, dear news providers, I can save you, too.

Too bad it isn’t true.

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The Big Lesson From the Facebook Flap: The Digital Ad Business Needs to Regulate Itself

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If you were Mark Zuckerberg today, you’d be forgiven for extending your Memorial Day vacation an extra 24 hours and do whatever it is you would do for fun if you were Mark Zuckerberg

Weeks of getting pounded in the media over your company’s approach to privacy had amounted to nothing more a particularly pesky meme that, finally, seems to have run out of steam. Quit Facebook Day came and went, with just over 34,000 announcing their decisions to sign off of the social network. That represents .0000755556 of Facebook’s total user base of 450 million. Surely many more have deactivated their accounts recently, albeit without any public declaration, and it’s a bit arbitrary to call the game for Facebook just because a gimmicky event didn’t result in a user hemorrhage of MySpaceian proportions. But it’s pretty certain that Zuckerberg and company, despite some dubious decision-making and awful PR, have faced down their biggest challenge and won.

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Newsflash: Newsweek.com’s Minimalist Redesign Isn’t Bloggy

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When major news organizations born in print revamp their digital homes, more is generally regarded as more.

Newsweek Redesigns Its HomepageWith its new look website this week, Newsweek has bucked that trend, going for a clean look and feel that stands in sharp contrast to the feature jumble you get from Time.com, The New York Times and other massive news operations. Rather than try to jam as much on the homepage as possible, Newsweek gives you a mercilessly pared down version of world events, surrounded by white space, all in a clear attempt to live up to the tagline, “What Matters Most.”

It might be tempting to call this approach bloggy, as Editorial Director Mark Miller and others have done, but that couldn’t be more wrong. If Newsweek leadership really wanted to incorporate the best of the culture of blogging, they wouldn’t have drained the site of the personalities that provide Newsweek with what value that still remains: Its commentators. Strangely, there’s no preening of Newsweek’s crew of heavy-hitting authors until you get to the bottom of the page, where the likes of Fareed Zakaria, Howard Fineman, Daniel Gross, and Dan Lyons are listed in tiny type. It’s a curious decision in light of Newsweek’s strategic overhaul of a few years back to focus on opinion and commentary at the expense of newsgathering and, naturally, newsgatherers, hundreds of whom were laid off and bought-out.

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Publishers, Follow The New Yorker on iPad Pricing. Please.

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I currently pay $2.99 a month for access to the The New Yorker on my Kindle. It’s actually a great way to read the magazine’s almost entirely text-driven content. And it’s probably an improvement on print when you consider how hard copies of the New Yorker tend to pile up. With the Kindle subscription, you always have a bunch of them with you and the content tends to stay fresh over time. All said, the Kindle version is handy and priced correctly.

But recently I’d been wondering whether I’d be willing to pay a separate fee when I buy an iPad later this year. Happily, that’s not a decision I’ll have to make.

David Remnick New YorkerYou wouldn’t expect the The New Yorker, whose move to the web been a bit like one of its articles — long, slow, with plenty of twists and turns — to be a trailblazer on anything digital. Yet Editor David Remnick’s announcement this week that it’s offering one pricing option across all platforms except print is a welcome bit of news.

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An Imaginary(ish) Conversation Between Carol Bartz and Mark Zuckerberg

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Yesterday was a big day, PR-wise, for Mark Zuckerberg and Carol Bartz. Zuck used the austere pages of the Washington Post to soothe concerns about Facebook’s will to invade privacy, while Bartz showed up on stage at a TechCrunch conference to defend Yahoo against one of its loudest critics, TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington. Both CEOs displayed their usual communication approaches–hers a defensive and blowsy vulgarity and his near-fatal boredom.

What follows is an imaginary conversation based on actual quotes from a video account and the op-ed.

Mark Zuckerberg: Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas.

Carol Bartz: There’s no single strategy at Yahoo.

Zuckerberg: People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today.

Bartz: Yahoo is a company that is very, very strong in content. It’s moving towards the web of one…. People come to check the things they like. You can just get it together… Yahoo is one site people always stop at.

Zuckerberg: Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years.

Bartz: If that’s all you’ve got, you better quit now.

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  • 21 May 2010 at 2:51 PM

In Deal for Associated Content, Yahoo Buys the Farm

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Earlier this week, Yahoo purchased Associated Content for about $100 million, giving Yahoo an enormous library of inexpensive, search-engine optimized content and the means to produce much more of it. Associated Content is usually described as a content farm or content mill, but you could certainly pick many other descriptors for its model: the mass production of low-cost and, I would argue, low-quality articles.

Associated ContentRemember those Chinese factories that made cheap Mattel toys that had be recalled? Well, this is the digital publishing version of that. But instead of producing toys with poisonous lead paint or tiny magnets that will break off and choke your kid, Associated Content and its army of more than 300,000 writers like JerseyNana (pictured)–who generally get paid between $3 and $7 per article– might tell you how to dislodge a cheap toy from as asphyxiating infant’s throat. A good chunk of the more than 2 million articles published since the company’s launch in 2005 attempt to deliver practical information on subjects like health, cars, technology and entertainment.

Much as BP has impacted the Gulf of Mexico, Associated Content’s gusher has changed the ecosystem of the web. By nature of its Google-friendly headlines, Associated Content stories often hog top search results on many common queries.

That’s one of the qualities that attracted Yahoo as it faces off with AOL, which recently announced its own plans to get into the content agribusiness to replace the cratered dial-up internet access business it was built on, how-to-video studio Demand Media, Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, and, of course, major destinations in each specialty field, from ESPN to WebMD, who all participate in the great scrum for search-result dominance.

Naturally, Associated Content has its critics, who can be divided into two classes: those offended by the low payment given authors and those offended by the utter drek it often produces. In interviews following the deal, Yahoo executives were quick to defend the quality of the newest addition to its portfolio. Said Yahoo Media VP James Pitaro, “They have very good quality across all media. I would say quality is their main differentiator. Their editorial process is more rigorous than what we expected.”

Given the low cost and, uh, democratic editorial approach, this is clearly a claim worth vetting. So I spent some time wandering the rows of Associated Content’s contentfield to sample the new inventory Yahoo will be offering its advertisers.

What I found was a blend of bland conventional wisdom, salt-of-the-earth pontificating, off-the-cuff quackery, jumbled grammar, awful logic, failure narratives, and straight-up weirdness that will one-day offer unparalleled fodder university courses in narratology and epistemology, assuming of course that those fields don’t get boiled down to Associated Content articles.

Click through for a few representative articles:

Matt Creamer is executive editor of Breaking Media. You can follow him on Twitter at @matt_creamer.

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5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Online Porn Business

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Ever dream of building a porn website? Then you should have become an academic. Maybe you would have been one of the five “security researchers” from the Technical University of Vienna, Sophia Antipolis and University of California- Santa Barbara who set out to answer one of the most pressing questions of our time: How do adult websites make money?

To get us an answer, they built their own smutty destination, which yielded plenty of insight into an oft-ignored and steamy little corner of the content business. Their findings were reported on MIT’s Technology Review today. Although it disappointed by not linking to the site, the post is otherwise chock full of factoids. Here are five you need to know:

1. Turns out being a successful porn mogul isn’t as simple as aggregating a bunch of bukkake videos. Once you’ve got the content, then you need the eyeballs and that means anteing up in a surprisingly complicated game of web traffic arbitrage. Or as the article rather kinkily describes it: “a seething ecosystem of traffic affiliates constantly skimming clicks and pennies off of one another.” If you’re interesting in getting into the porn-traffic brokering racket, know that $160 will fetch 47,000 sticky little clicks in the rather robust-sounding market.

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  • 17 May 2010 at 11:37 AM

The Facebook Exodus Will be Small — And Very Canadian

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When May 31 rolls around, I’ll do what I do on the last day of every other month: Pay my rent and some other bills, go to work and come home. What I won’t be doing is quitting Facebook, despite the best efforts of some to turn the day into a mass rejection of the social network.

Facebook PrivacySince Facebook rolled out yet another round of changes to its privacy settings earlier this year, the platform has been the subject of fierce criticism from an especially noisy core of early tech adopters. They’ve been hammering at Facebook’s arrogance on their blogs and in interviews and some internet celebrities, like Google’s Matt Cutts and Engadget founder Peter Rojas, have left the platform altogether. Quitting has become a sort of meme in and of itself, aided by the same buzz factor that has made Facebook a global hit in the first place.

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