While confusing pandering for readers with a writer creating a brand, Weingarten suggests that the craft of journalism is being redefined “so it is no longer a calling but a commodity.” A suggestion that implies that somehow news organizations brought this fate on themselves by no longer giving readers “what we thought they needed. Now, in desperation, we give readers what we think they want.” Within the craft of journalism, apparently, there is no greater sin than meeting market demand. What Weingarten seems not to understand is that even in the good old days of newspaper prominence, readers never ate their vegetables if they didn’t like them, they simply turned to the sports page, or the comics. The newspaper, as a package, exists because it has to give readers a lot of what “we think they want” to subsidize what “we think they need.”

Out of all this, Weingarten comes to blame the commoditization of journalism on branding when, in fact, branding is the solution. When faced with commodity prices for its microprocessors, Intel branded them with its Intel Inside campaign. Think of Florida Orange Juice and Chiquita Bananas – successful branding campaigns that rescued products from commoditization. As a collection of blogs and micro-sites, Glam may have a more immediate reason to create writer brands, but it’s a model that can be followed by news organizations. And, except for the fact that in the past only a select few of its writers became brands, it’s a model that is familiar to them. Columnists have always been brands, but brands created by their employer. Today those brands, the newspapers, are declining, and becoming simply a collection of writers. And a collection of unbranded writers is just a heap of “content.”

The industry is being reshaped by technology—but by undermining the mass media’s business models, that technology is in many ways returning the industry to the more vibrant, freewheeling and discursive ways of the pre-industrial era.

From The Economist

Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School prof who coined the term “net neutrality” and current senior adviser at the FTC, was profiled in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He quickly comes off just a bit too cute for his own good, ticking off every box on the hipster checklist – tattoos, vintage Hondas, Burning Man, honeymoon in Antarctica. All this and a Harvard law degree. Clearly this is a guy who thinks big thoughts. Well, yes, and it’s those thoughts that seem so dangerous.

The article tells us that in his book The Master Switch, “Wu warns that ‘an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear.’” Wu then goes on to make a case for that potential to be realized in the federal government. He says “his goal in joining [the FTC] was to help ‘reinvigorate the role of a public counterforce to private power.’” Later, as the article describes a class Wu is teaching at MIT, it says he suggests that “in theory, the government could say, ‘Well, this company has clearly shown it’s corrupt. … So let’s just nationalize their source code.’”

When it comes to advocacy of government power, statements like these speak for themselves. They should also give supporters of net neutrality pause when the concept’s father is seen to be arguing less for an open Internet, and more over just who should control it.

All day long, [the front page editors] receive emails from reporters, editors, publishers, publicists and flacks from organizations that include but are not limited to, the following: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, McClatchy Newspapers, the London Guardian, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, C-SPAN, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, etc. Those emails all ask the same thing: Would you consider placing this content on The Huffington Post?

Is this the rope that will be used to hang original sources of news? Or are these editors and publishers using HuffPo for free distribution – distribution that in

other industries would normally cost money? Can these people really be acting so aggressively against their own interests, or are they rational actors in a new content ecosystem? Surely it’s the latter. While news executives argue about “aggrelooters,” those charged with driving traffic and ad inventory understand that the aggrelooters are really free distributors.

According to the survey, since 2007 a consistent 70 percent of Americans state that they enjoy reading printed magazines even though they know that they could find most of the same information online, and 55 percent have continued to subscribe to printed magazines.

Seems pretty simple – formats matter. It’s lazy thinking to believe that simply because the same information may be available in a new format, the old format is dead. Nor is there reason to believe that a print publication’s web site must be a direct replacement. There is no law of physics that requires all content in a print product to be available in it’s digital version. They’re two different products and meet different needs for their audiences.

Another interesting result:

Additionally, a majority of U.S. respondents state that an important feature of printed magazines is the advertising that helps them learn about new things for themselves and their family.

For all the promise of targeted advertising in digital formats, it seems that print ads do a pretty good job of reaching their target audience. I wonder if a majority of people would say the same about online ads. Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? There are no “network” ads running in the pages of a print magazine hawking solutions to belly fat, only ads that are intended for that publication. And they’re not all measured as direct response ads no matter the creative. In fact, tablet advertising seems to have so much potential precisely because tablets are a platform that allows ads to build off of and extend what’s right with magazine ads.

And finally:

“Enthusiasm for printed magazines is consistent across all age groups, a unique result in consumer attitudes across all the media categories, we surveyed,” said James McDonnell, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Enthusiasm for a legacy product is a good thing, even as you plot it’s destruction.

Image via Wikipedia

Despite the ascendance of search advertising and click-throughs, brand advertising is not going away, and publishers and brands must work together to create and deliver new ad formats and methods to rejuvenate it. Thankfully we see signs of this happening from iPad iAds to AOL’s Project Devil. Yet whenever a publisher comes out with a new ad unit that they sell for a premium, marketers want to determine its worth using the same old measures – mainly click-throughs – that have been so unsuccessful in the past at measuring branding value. It’s short-sighted because, if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that current ad formats are awful and people who click on them are usually poor targets. New effectiveness metrics then, although much more difficult than new ad formats, are also vital.

While not a new ad format, social media advertising (and I don’t just mean simply advertising on social media sites) is now leading the way in brand advertising. Social media gives marketers the ability for their brands to display more personality, better target, and more fully engage resulting in a more robust experience for consumers, and content producers need to learn how to play in that arena. There may be no better evidence of this than the current willingness to use social media marketing despite many companies’ inability to measure its effectiveness. Instead of pretending they know which 0.1% of their advertising works, marketers are back to wondering which 50% works. And that, sad to say, is progress.

Update: Some evidence from eMarketer that tablet ads really do offer a better consumer experience.

Publishers might be offering more aggressive iPad subscription discounts if it weren’t for factors like the recent recession, said Terry Snow, CEO of Bonnier. “If this were 2005, you might find everyone a little more aggressive on single-copy prices and subscription prices,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Let’s be careful on our new venture not to price ourselves too low to have a business model.’”

Meanwhile, some good arguments have been made about why that price will be a lot lower.

So in my view, there are three main reasons we see the pricing we do:

• “OK boys, don’t blow it again. We screwed ourselves with free content on the web, it looks like people will pay for apps, let’s get us some of that revenue. Oh, and let’s start high because those nitwits will probably pay, and if they don’t we can drop it later. And advertising, well…”
• “We’ve made advertising on the web really suck – it’s ineffective, lives in ad ghettos, and most people ignore it except for the chain-smoking, lottery ticket buying, slots playing 0.01% who click on them. How can we have faith that our ad sales people will be able to articulate why in app ads are way better, better even than print, and should cost as much as print? And how do we stop marketers from measuring the effectiveness of their ads by, well, whatever they can measure, relevant or not? Better charge readers a lot in case advertising doesn’t work out.”
• “Man it takes a lot of resources to build one of these app things. Every time we do it it’s like starting from scratch. It’s really expensive – we better charge a lot.”

I’ll call the first reason price experimentation. It’s a good thing to do, as long as you don’t ruin your market by going too high, which we must be close to. I don’t know for certain that the third point is true, but reports would suggest that. The Wired app weighed in at 500 MB, perhaps largely because it’s a bunch of images. This is not sustainable. Publishers will have to create flexible templates that can be reused because otherwise yes, it’s going to cost a lot for each issue.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s the second point, though, where I think publishers are selling themselves, and the device, short. On the iPad, ads are exciting and glamorous again which also means they are way more effective than online. They can contain beautiful video and graphics, allow e-commerce in the ad, and provide an experience only dreamed of in print, much less online. The ABC has begun counting publishers’ apps as part of their print circulation, meaning that app ads are being priced like print ads – a very good thing. Ultimately, quality publishing is more dependent on advertising (or some other brand revenue source) than subscriptions. As I’ve said before, subscriptions are no silver bullet and while I think publishers should experiment with charging, they’d be better off spending most of their time redefining the advertising model.