Niche value: Old is new

Another, perhaps, old term for news you choose, was niche content. Here's a veiled way of saying once again that when people choose their news, it's valuable and they are willing to pay for it. From the Guardian Media Group, 2/2/10. Headline: GMG CEO: Paywall Would Suffocate Us, But Niche Content Could Sell. by Robert Andrews.

The Guardian has already ruled one big paywall at the director level and the editor level. Now there’s no doubt, as Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall tells the FT: “It is not really the way the web works ... It is the wrong thing to do right now because the jury is out about whether that is the way consumers are going to get information.”

More intriguing, says FT: “GNM has looked at six different pay models including the ‘pay wall’, which she believes would ‘suffocate our journalism, stymie it, contain it’.”

But McCall is keeping options open: “That is not to say there are not areas of specialist content that cannot be charged for.”

McCall, whose GMG also owns a slice of B2B publishers Emap and Autotrader and has a Guardian Professional B2B division of its own, has, for some time, wondered whether some Guardian content might be considered specialist enough to charge for, in the same way that B2B titles and business media are able to charge. In May, she told the FIPP World Magazine Congress: “Realistically, there will be some parts of your website, (such as) MediaGuardian, lots of specialist areas where we do brilliantly, where we should think about how we charge for content that is not easy to replicate.”

(Full disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media and paidContent.co.uk is among the Guardian-owned niche properties that is exploring pay options).

But the idea that MediaGuardian would become a paid-for site was quickly retrenched from as merely that - an idea.

Guardian News & Media annual losses grew 40 percent to £36.8 million in 2008/09, pushing parent GMG to an £89.8 million pre-tax loss.

Guardian.co.uk is the UK’s most-visited newspaper website, with nearly 37 million monthly uniques, but investment in the site between 2002/03 and 2008/09 exceeded income
by £20 million, despite web income reaching

Is content really king?

That's been a concept that has been in and out of vogue ever since the internet showed up to the party. For awhile, distribution was king, then software was king, then networks, then hardware, etc.
Although the whole revolution has not played out, my guess is that the content will prove out to be king.
As Murdoch decides to put all his entities behind a pay wall, that issue will play out and the best content will win, wherever you can get it.

How could printing be necessary -- today?

Many people wonder in this day and age why printing even matters. Isn't everything going to be digital? they ask.
Here is an apocryphal story. A 10 year old girl who would never read anything on paper, according to her father, spent hours one December morning researching where the best place would be to cut down a live christmas tree When she had finally picked out the best spot, she printed the website home page, and then she printed directions to the site.
The point is this: People print what is important.
Perhaps it's in our DNA. I make the analogy to painting. More than 150 years after the invention of photography, putting paint on canvas is still believed to be the most effective way to illustrate reality. Certainly the most valuable, as paintings regularly fetch prices way beyond their relative value before the invention of photography.
That's why printing is so important.

Can you get your IM exactly right?

No.
In fact the individuated media algorithm has yet to be written. We all know that content keeps growing exponentially. As of 2009, Google indexes millions of websites of content. However search is still stuck in 2000, vintage Google, which delivers a hierarchy of headlines and first sentences based on who knows what. It's the search that must be refined. And will.

Will individuated content be hard to find?

Au contraire.
Easy. Easy. Easy.
For instance all the popular magazine articles are expected to be found on one online newsstand. Consolidation has always been the name of the game online. Technology news: Tabbloid.com. Media news: Newsandtech.com. World news: Cnn.com or Yahoo.com or Msnbc.com ro drudgereport.com or huffingtonpost.com.
And that will be true of all content someday -- or it won't be content. All content will be available digitally online. There already is too much to pick from. Not too little. The tools to parse and search all that content from an individual's point of view are becoming more and more sophisticated.

Why is traditional media and advertising broken?

There are many explanations. But the simplest is that there is simply now a better mousetrap: social media. All of us have always weighed the opinions of our friends and neighbors over any media critic or advertising spieler. Now our friends and neighbors have a way of speaking to us -- of characterizing for us -- everything from the war on the other side of the world to, yes, the grill we are thinking about purchasing. Here is a wonderful blog that clearly points out the value of social media in the traditional field of retail research/advice, which, in a simple twist of fate, becomes individuated news: http://www.accrisoft.com/index.php?cid=103167&src=blog&srctype=detail&refno=9&category=Economy&curlid=717

So what was the Pony Express news?

Slow. To say the least.
Not as slow as the boats from England to America at the turn of the 19th century.
Anyway, the telegraph was invented and although at first no one knew what to send through the lines, the Civil War changed all that. Send news of battles. So suddenly people in Massachusetts could find out almost immediately what happened in a skirmish in say far-off Virginia. Especially the names of those dead and wounded.
Overnight, news began to be published using the telegraphed, Morse coded stories.
In the West, the pony express was still the primary source of news and information, but only until the late 1800s when the lines arrived.
No one relied on horses after there were telegraph poles.