immediate future.

Social networks in the UK – Twitter climbing, Facebook leading but stagnant

2009-10-08T13:00:05Z

Just for fun I thought I’d use Google Trends to compare the leading social networks in terms of how much traffic they’re getting from UK web users. This first chart shows that Bebo and MySpace both declined at a fairly similar rate over the past 12 months, while Twitter has been steadily climbing.

What’s interesting is that all of these sites seem to have levelled out over the past couple of months at approximately the same volume of visitors – between 110k and 150k unique visitors per day. Obviously there are some clear long term trends here, so it will be worth revisiting this graph in a few months time to see how things have changed.

Now let’s see what happens when we open the door and let the big hairy Facebook gorilla into the room…

That puts things into perspective a little, doesn’t it? But when we look at the trend, it seems Facebook has been stuck on a plateau of around 2 million unique daily visitors for the past 12 months. If anything, the trend seems to be drifting ever so slightly downwards.

There are a couple of caveats to this. First, this data is based on Google’s own estimate of website traffic, rather than the sites’ own analytics – although I’d argue that if you were going to trust any third-party estimate of traffic volume, Google’s would be the most accurate.

Secondly, these are visitor numbers, not user numbers. Facebook’s UK user numbers have increased over the same period (although they seem to have levelled out recently too) which could indicate that users are visiting the site less.

Another issue with these stats is that they are likely to miss a large chunk of regular Twitter users who do not use the site through their browser, but through third party tools like TweetDeck. Some analysis puts the number of users who access the service via such tools at 68%, so that’s a potentially huge volume of Twitter users who aren’t accounted for in this graph.

This would put Twitter far higher up the chart than Bebo and MySpace, but still nowhere close to Facebook. Despite a clear upward trend, Twitter still has a long way to go before it can compete with Facebook in terms of audience size.

Is your online PR strategy ready for real-time search?

2009-10-01T14:17:46Z

You might have heard a lot of chatter about real-time search recently, with Facebook buying Friendfeed (a microblogging service with some strong real-time search technology) and Google unveiling Caffeine, a more real-time focused version of its own search technology. Although real-time search is currently more hype than reality, it seems likely we’ll see the technology being used a lot more over the next 12-18 months, so online PR and marketing people should be paying attention.

What is real-time search?

In conventional web search, results are influenced by the authority of a page – well established websites with a high number of links from other trusted sites tend to rank highly. Real-time search is much more focused on what’s hot right now – what are people currently talking about on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

If you searched on the word “Pie” using a conventional search engine, you would expect to see some websites of big pie manufacturers, pie recipes from big cookery sites, the Wikipedia page about pies, and so on.

Real-time search, would be more likely to show you a current news story about the Prime Minister being hit in the face with a custard pie, a popular viral video of puppy stealing a pie, or some reviews of a new American Pie movie -anything related to pies that is currently generating a lot of buzz.

This is all very exciting, so it’s led a few people to declare that old-search is dead and real-time search is the future. This is nonsense. While real-time search is certainly going to get bigger, conventional search isn’t going away – if anything, the two will simply merge to provide blended results of high authority content alongside real-time results.

What does this mean for brands?

We know what we want from conventional search – our clients should be at the top of the page for relevant keywords, and the rest of the page should be filled with authoritative third party recommendations. This is what SEO and online PR is all about.

But what’s the goal with real-time search? If you want to consistently appear at the top of real-time search results, your brand is going to have to consistently be interesting enough to get people talking. This, I would suggest, requires a kick-ass online PR strategy.

What should you do about it?

Brands need to get a lot better at monitoring what’s happening online, to stay informed about what the rising trends are in their key markets and what subjects are generating online buzz. Forget monthly or even weekly reports – too slow, you lose.

Second, reaction times need to improve. If it takes you a week to get anything approved, you’re wasting your time. As real-time search becomes more important, comms teams will need the flexibility to respond to issues quickly, while the public is still interested. When one of those funny complaint letters about your company goes viral, nobody will care that you responded brilliantly if it doesn’t happen until a week or two later.

Take a look at your crisis comms plan and consider updating it for the real-time comms environment.

It’s not just about responding quickly to the bad stuff. Keeping on top of trending topics will help you to spot opportunities for positive conversations that your brand can be a part of, although this doesn’t mean you have to pounce on every new meme and beat it to death with corporate messaging.

The essence of all this is reaction time. If your brand wants to be involved in fast moving online conversations, you will have to find ways of keeping up or risk being left behind.

What do the new Twitter terms and conditions mean for brands and PR?

2009-09-24T16:34:23Z

You might be aware that Twitter recently updated its terms and conditions, so we thought it was worth highlighting what these changes might mean for brands that use the micro-blogging site.

Advertising

Although no specific announcement has been made regarding advertising, the new terms make it clear that Twitter is seriously considering using adverts to generate revenue. Clearly, this will have an effect on organisations which use Twitter as a PR and marketing channel – the main implication being that they could end up with adverts on their pages that they have absolutely no control over.

We suspect what will happen is that Twitter will roll out advertising at the same time as paid-for ad-free accounts to kill two birds with one stone, since no business would want to allow third party adverts on its page, least of all if it had no say over what those adverts will be.

Content Ownership

Twitter makes it clear that publishers still own the copyright of their tweets, but by publishing them on Twitter they allow the company rights to distribute that content through its websites and API. There’s very little to worry about here, Twitter isn’t about to start doing nasty things with people’s content, since that would immediately scare away all of the business users which are most likely to contribute to its future revenues.

One potential issue in this area is that the content is published to the API which third party developers can then use for any number of things. At the moment there’s nothing bad happening in that space, but it’s worth keeping an open mind about what unscrupulous people might use the content for in future – although it’s safe to assume that Twitter will quickly block access to anybody who’s using the API for illegal/spammy behaviour.

UPDATE: Netimperative reports that Twitter has ruled out introducing advertising this year.

What does the new Facebook @ reply feature mean for brands and PR?

2009-09-15T15:04:28Z

You may have read that Facebook recently added a new feature which allows you to ‘tag’ other users in updates, which works in the same way as Twitter’s @ reply feature. We think this will have a significant impact on brands which are active on Facebook.

How does the new feature work?

When writing a wall post, users can now easily link directly to the profile of other another Facebook user, fanpage, or group. This can (and will) be used by consumers to specifically direct comments at brands on Facebook.

What does this mean for PR?

If you have a fanpage or group on Facebook, users can now address comments directly to you from their wall. The comments they address at you will be displayed on your wall as well as their own.

This means that Facebook now allows users to engage in public and highly visible conversations with brands, in exactly the same way as Twitter. As with all conversations that take place in a public arena, there are opportunities and risks: negative comments will be seen by large numbers of people, and brands which either fail to respond, or provide an inadequate response, are likely to suffer.

Conversely, actively engaging with consumers who direct comments at your brand can have real benefits. A recent survey by Trendstream found that 30% of people say their opinion of a brand improves as a result of it listening to people’s comments on social networks.

What action should be taken?

Assuming you are already regularly checking your Facebook page, you probably don’t need to carry out any additional monitoring and we expect that in the short term most brands won’t notice much difference.

However, as Facebook users become more familiar with this new feature we expect that it will be used in a similar fashion to the equivalent Twitter feature, and brands will begin to notice an increasing volume of comments directed at them. As this becomes the case, you may need to allocate resources to responding to these comments – ignoring them is not an option!

17 things you should know about building links

2009-09-14T14:20:46Z

I read an interesting post at SEOmoz about the different factors which influence how valuable a link is in terms of improving the target page’s search engine rankings, and wanted to share it with my colleagues. But being a busy lot I knew they probably wouldn’t have time to read the whole thing, so below is my heavily summarised bullet-point version – I hope it does justice to the original article (which I recommend you read, if you have the time).

1) Get lots of links from third party websites.

2) Make sure those links use anchor text which includes relevant keywords.

3) Links from sites with high PageRank are better than links from sites with low PageRank.

4) Stay away from spammy sites (both in terms of inbound and outbound links).

5) Links from high-authority sites are good – but ‘authority’ is still a bit hard to define.

6) Get links from a wide range of different websites, diversity of links is good.

7) Links between sites which have a clear pre-existing relationship don’t have as much value.

8) Links should be embedded in a website’s main content area – sidebar and footer links are less valuable.

9) Links from websites with content that is relevant to the client’s website are thought to be more valuable – but don’t get too hung up on this, good links from generic sites are also helpful.

10) Links that are embedded in editorial copy are better than other kinds of links.

11) Geography may play a part in SEO.

12) Links that use the ‘nofollow’ tag are generally worthless, but there is speculation that the search engines do give some value to nofollow links on high authority sites like Wikipedia.

13) Plain HTML links with good anchor text are good. Image links with good alt text (the stuff that pops up when you hover over a picture ) are good. Non standard links, which are embedded in weird bits of code are not good.

14) If the page linking to your website also links to spammy sites, this is not good – it is what SEO people refer to as being in a bad neighbourhood.

15) Search engines sometime penalise websites for spammy behaviour. Links from a website which is being ‘punished’ are not good.

16) If you have a lot of links that look similar (badges, widgets, syndicated press releases, etc) there is speculation that these links are not as valuable as the kind of varied and diverse links you would find in editorial copy.

17) It is better to build up lots of links over time than to get one sudden burst of links. Sudden bursts probably don’t hurt, but they should be part of a long-term SEO campaign.

Predicting future search trends: Ninjas Vs Cheese

2009-09-22T09:01:34Z

Last week Google quietly added an interesting new feature to its Insights for Search tool, predictions of future search trends. If you don’t already use Insights, you should, it’s a useful tool for monitoring search trends in order to get a good picture of how consumer interest in specific brands and topics rises and falls over time.

Google’s latest improvement to the service, based on some very clever science which I won’t try to bluff my way through, enables you to see what the future consumer interest in brands and topics could be.

There are a couple of points to make about this. Firstly, for a lot of searches you don’t need a sophisticated algorithm to predict future trends, because the annual pattern is so consistent that it’s easy to make an educated guess about how the chart will look for the next twelve months. For example, the trend for the search term “cheese” is highly predictable, so most people could figure out the pattern for themselves.

Secondly, there’s no way the prediction algorithm can account for unexpected events, since it relies purely on past data to extrapolate future trends, so like all predictions it’s only of limited value. However, it may well prove to be helpful for planning, once we’ve ascertained how accurate its predictions are for the less obvious trends. For example, the search trend for the keyword “ninjas” is much less obvious than that of “cheese” and this is where the tool could be really useful, in spotting more complex trends and patterns that a human observer would not be able to identify.

This is obviously going to take a little time – we need to record Google’s predictions for search trends now, and revisit them in future to see how accurate they were. If they stand the test of time, then we’ve got a powerful new tool at our disposal.

How bit.ly will change the world

2009-08-12T11:37:10Z

On the surface, URL shortening services such as http://bit.ly are a great idea, because they can turn long, messy web addresses like this:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/support_services/article6788774.ece

Into nice tidy addresses like this:

http://bit.ly/g4ol9

This is especially useful for posting to Twitter, since it saves valuable space, but a lot of people have got into the habit of using URL shortening services all the time.

There’s an obvious problem with this from an SEO point of view. For a start, the shortened URL contains no anchor text, and secondly they do not pass on PageRank. Since these two things are fundamental to Google’s ranking algorithm, any links to your company website that use a URL shortening service are practically worthless in terms of SEO value. They will do nothing to improve your site’s ranking for the relevant keywords.

[EDIT] As pointed out in the comments, it seems bit.ly and other URL shortening services do pass on PageRank (a few of these services do not) but the anchor text issue is still a problem, links without embedded keywords don’t provide much value.

But that’s not all. As the recent closure of http://tr.im has illustrated, sometimes URL shortening services go out of business and that means that all those millions of links on the internet which use that service will suddenly stop working.

So the long and short of it is: for online PR purposes URL shortening services are best avoided where possible, but sometimes they’re necessary, like on Twitter.

Here’s the really interesting bit

But there’s more to this story. They may have certain disadvantages and risks, but as long as Twitter is going strong, it’s fairly certain that bit.ly will be doing quite nicely too (did somebody say buyout?) and that creates an interesting situation.

Twitter is a hotbed of viral activity, with news and trends being retweeted backwards and forwards, spreading across the web faster than ever before. Given that bit.ly is rapidly becoming the de-facto URL shortening service, it is an amazing and unprecedented position in that it has access to a live, detailed view of these trends as they are developing.

Before anybody else knows what’s making an impact on the web on any given day, the people who run bit.ly will already have a clear picture of what people are looking at, what is spreading around the web, and how it’s spreading. If they’re smart, they will already be analysing that in all sorts of clever and interesting ways to figure out how they can extract value from it.

For most web users, bit.ly is just a handy way to make unwieldy URLs a bit more manageable, but for businesses it’s a goldmine of up to the minute data on consumer trends and behaviour, on an amazing scale. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see bit.ly selling customised dashboards to provide businesses with snapshots of that data in the future.

Twitter’s business model may still be a bit hazy, but it’s certainly created fertile ground for bit.ly to develop into what could be one of the most powerful and valuable business tools on the web.

[UPDATE] It seems tr.im has decided to stick around after all – although the service’s owners have a few things to say about the relationship between Twitter and bit.ly

How The Carphone Warehouse uses Twitter for customer service

2009-08-07T09:20:42Z

Following the release of our Truth about Twitter report recently, we were contacted by Guy Stephens, the Online Help Manager of mobile phone retailer, The Carphone Warehouse, who wanted to highlight some of his company’s experience of using Twitter to support its customer service operation.

Since we’re not planning to produce another Twitter report in the near future, Guy kindly agreed to let us interview him for this blog post. It’s made a lengthy article, but if you’re interpreted in a big brand Twitter case study from the real world, you’ll find plenty of great insight below.

Can you give us an overview of what CPW currently uses Twitter for?

We have various accounts, which are used as follows:

@carphoneware – This profile represents the corporate voice of the company, and is used to tweet company announcements. It employs a formal tone without too much emotion.

@guyatcarphone – This has been the main customer service profile. It uses a personal, friendly tone to respond proactively or reactively to customer complaints and queries. We also use it for customer service alerts, help tips and so forth. I will be moving back to providing help and support to our customers via Twitter.

@becksatcarphone – Becks will be taking over from me to provide customer service. She is our first actual customer service agent to be providing customer service support for our customers. We will be adding more agents in time.

@erkanatcarphone – Erkan will be providing information and answering questions specifically about the iPhone and other handsets we sell.

@stuartcarphone – We use this one specifically for BlackBerry related information

@steveblancpw – Steve is the UK Sales & Customer Director, he’s only recently started using Twitter.

@shaneatcarphone - This is for official PR announcements, daily share prices, etc.

@cpwhelp – Help tips, service announcements. We’re building this one up at present.

@cpw1team – this was set up for a senior managers’ conference held in June. It was the first conference we tweeted and yammered live from. This allowed us to connect with employees, customers and generally anyone interested in getting a live tweetfeed of what was happening at the conference. I think this might have been a first in the UK. We had Charles Dunstone and Andrew Harrison speaking, and we officially tweeted about Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse partnering up again.

What drove the decision to engage with people through Twitter?

We realised that people were seeking out new customer service channels, often using social media to create their own peer-to-peer self help networks. It’s clear that information is decentralising, and as a company the challenge for us was working out how to engage with our customers in this new world.

Companies are being forced to use whichever channels their customers are choosing, rather than continuing to focus on their own websites and call centres. We also saw examples such as BestBuy, JetBlue, Dell, Zappos, doing great things in this space.

Do you feel Twitter provides any specific advantages over the other channels you use?

From a customer service perspective, Twitter speeds up the identification process of a problem (although not necessarily the resolution of it, just the identification). Once the issue has been identified, then it is resolved using traditional channels such as email or phone.

It also serves as an early warning system. Various issues were higlighted on Twitter 24 hours or so prior to the launch of the iPhone, so we’ll take this lesson and ensure we’ve got the appropriate resources in place ahead of the next big launch.

In terms of customer service channels, emails, phones and letters are the most popular route that customers use to contact us. These are essentially 1-to-1 and private. No one else will see the customer’s enquiry apart from the person who wrote it and the person who reads it. Twitter and social media on the other hand, have completely opened up this world.

They are public mediums, where the resolution of an issue often takes place within a very public and populated arena. An arena in which bystanders are often more than willing to add their own experiences, suggestions and recommendations. This opening up of a historically closed space, is forcing companies to recognise the value of transparency, openness and collaborative working practices with customers firmly at the heart of it.

What are the main challenges you have encountered with Twitter so far?

It’s an evolving medium, so there’s a lot of learning as you go along. Sometimes that doesn’t sit too well with companies, because it opens them up to risk.

In terms of customer service, we’re looking to get our customer service agents directly onto Twitter, dealing with customers directly rather than through me. This is going to be great for customers, but it raises the issue of how scalable the service is.

One of the advantages of Twitter is the speed with which it can help you identify customer service problems. The challenge we face is how can we take the best of Twitter, such as that speed, or any social media platform and apply it to traditional customer service channels.

Moving forwards one of our challenges will be how best to involve all the different parts of the business and employees who want to get involved in this space in a coherent and effective way, not only for themselves, but also for customers. This requires making sure everyone who wants to get involved knows what is required of them, the risks involved, as well as the opportunities that are available.

What was the rationale behind running several different accounts?

We felt it was very important to be specific about how we wanted to use Twitter, rather than have generic jack-of-all-trade accounts. This might not be the case for smaller companies, but for The Carphone Warehouse it has ensured that in each area we go into, can build up their own personality and characters as they see fit.

We also deliberately had a more formal account for the company which we use for corporate info, announcing our results, etc. To be honest, on one level we probably didn’t think about it too much either, as we were learning as we went along.

Do you have a particular strategy for deciding who to follow?

There’s no overall strategy or hard and fast rules about followers. At the end of the day, I’m probably like anyone else, if they look interesting I’ll follow them. I tend to follow them as an individual (’me’) rather than someone with their corporate hat on.

I think in both instances it’s more about building up credibility and trust within our customer base, rather than actively seeking followers. I would say that The Carphone Warehouse is still very much operating on Twitter in a somewhat functional way, we have not got to the level of a Frank Eliason at ComCast or Tony Hsieh at Zappos, who operate on a thought leadership level as well.

With the corporate account we deliberately do not follow lots of people as many add no value to the account. Those we do follow are linked to our business in some way such as Robert Stephens (CEO of Geek Squad). Being less ‘personal’ the account benefits from staying lean as far as followers are concerned. Its growth in followers is because people want to follow and it’s growing steadily.

Have you found that using a specific ‘tone of voice’ on Twitter works particularly well?

What you read is what you get, and our tone of voice reflects that; we’re there to help or to provide information. We encourage conversation with our customers and it is important to understand their frustrations or concerns and be open to listening and responding in a timely and efficient manner. In order to do that, our tone of voice has to be more empathetic, open and honest. Whilst our corporate account is more formal, there’s still an element of personality that comes through.

We’re trying to create a sense of ‘freedom within a framework’ for our employees who want to get involved in this space. We can’t stipulate how they should sound or what they should say, that works against the whole idea of social media. There’s room for lots of different opinions but coming from The Carphone Warehouse it would be in our approachable, honest and open tone of voice. Our challenge is to create a framework that allows that to happen.

Do you actively post comments that you want people to retweet?

We do not have an RT policy or guidelines. If you find it interesting and want to RT it, do. If you don’t find it interesting, dont. There’s no doubt that we try to RT colleagues where we can in Geek Squad, Best Buy, TalkTalk etc, but it’s still got to be interesting.

CPW has a quite sophisticated customer service IT system – is the Twitter customer service channel linked to that in any technical way, or are you just managing it personally?

At present, Twitter is not integrated into the business at a systems level. This is coming, and now that we are starting to put our customer service agents onto the front line, we’ll have no option but to find a way to ensure that Twitter is not only seen as a valid customer service channel, but is also integrated more fully into the business. We don’t know what that will look like, but I would imagine within the next 3 months or so, we’ll start seeing Twitter stats appear on weekly reports.

We are also planning to add Twitter and other social media sites such as Digg, StumbledUpon, Delicous to our online help content so that customers can share it if they like it.

What lessons have you learned from your experience with Twitter so far, and what advice would you give to other organisations who have yet to get started with the channel?

Be specific and clear about how you want to use Twitter. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.

Just have a go.If you’re feeling a bit nervous,start small, become confident in one area, whether that’s customer service, sales, marketing, PR etc, and then as you become more familiar and confident, grow your offering from there.Then get the directors on boardandusing it.

Be prepared to change the way you think. It is an open medium that cuts across business units, it forces you to become more transparent in the way you work, and you begin to realise that actually customers can operate quite happily without you. You need to find your rightful place within their social spaces.

Ultimately, Twitter is just another channel. You’ve still got to understand your customers, how they engage with you, and what motivates them. Once you start understanding that, you can then understand whether Twitter is really for you. Twitter isn’t for every company, so don’t feel the pressure to join if you can’t find value in it.

If you do decide to join, do it wholeheartedly, embrace the space and the opportunities it offers, and simply keep listening to your customers, they’ll tell you everything you need to know.

Encourage people to have a go and, if you can, help them to understand how toget thebest out if it. Sharing good content means that youwill attract good followers etc.

Two thirds of brands on Twitter are being ignored

2009-07-30T15:54:12Z

Here at immediate future we think that the best way of measuring how well you’re doing on Twitter is by looking at the number of times you get retweeted. As we’ve previously written, retweets are the means by which messages spread virally across Twitter, so the more interesting your conversations are, the more you can expect to see your posts retweeted by your followers and their followers.

While many brands tend to think the number of followers they’ve got as the best measure of success, we think that’s a flawed approach simply because it’s so easy to pump up your follower numbers that the figure is largely irrelevant. OK, you’ve managed to persuade 5,000 people to follow you on Twitter, but how many of them are really paying attention to what you’re saying?

Retweet volume is a much better indicator of how well you’re getting your message across on Twitter, if you’re saying interesting things and people are paying attention, they will retweet your posts. Obviously, having a higher number of followers helps, but only if you’re engaging with them.

It’s better to engage with 100 followers than to be ignored by 5,000.

We looked at the sample group of 140 brands in our recent report ‘The Truth about Twitter’ and ran them all through www.retweetrank.com to see how they compared. The site assigns each Twitter account a percentile – so for example, if you’re in the top 1% of retweeted users, that’s very good; if you’re in the top 5%, that’s not as good but still ok, but if you were in the top 95%, you suck.

Bear in mind that a huge amount of Twitter accounts have few followers and are infrequently updated, so it’s safe to assume that around 80% of all Twitter users never get retweeted.

Next, think about those top 20% of Twitter users who do get retweeted, at least occasionally. Most of those are going to be private individuals, brands are only going to make up a tiny percentage of those users. However, when you consider that a business is investing resources into using Twitter specifically for the purpose of reaching out to its audience, you would expect any brand that was doing a half decent job of it to be in at least the top 5% of retweeted users.

Guess what we found? Out of 140 brands, 40 were in that bottom 80% of Twitter users who never get retweeted. This means that 40 large, well known brands, are completely failing at Twitter because they are not provoking conversations with their followers.

Another 40 of those brands made it into the top 20% of retweeted users, but that’s not really difficult since you typically only need to get a handful of retweets a month to get there. Considering these guys are, presumably, employing communications professionals to manage their Twitter feeds, that’s a pretty poor result.

In the top 10% there are 23 companies, which is a relatively respectable place to be in the rankings. Ideally, you want to be in the top 1% of retweeted users, who can expect their tweets to be copied and republished hundreds of times a week, if not more – 37 of the 140 brands we looked at were occupying this top 1%.

To cut a long story short, what this really means is that approximately two thirds of brands on Twitter aren’t engaging with their followers particularly well.

If you want to find out more, download one of our reports: The Truth about Twitter, or Twitter for PR and Marketing Professionals.

Why we all need newspapers to find a viable online business model

2009-08-07T09:23:40Z

Newspapers, as everybody knows, are still struggling to get to grips with the internet. For a few years they threw all of their resources into establishing a strong online presence and trying to pull in as big an audience as possible, under the optimistic belief that if enough people were reading the online content, a viable business model must somehow evolve sooner or later.

That business model hasn’t materialised, and the publishers are left grappling with the long running problem of how to make money out of online content, especially when advertising seems to be plummeting.

Some of them have cried foul, and blamed news aggregating services (primarily Google News) for unfairly profiting from their content. Google’s public response to this accusation was to point out how incredibly easy it would be for the newspapers to prevent their content from being indexed by search engines, if that’s what they really want.

Of course, that’s not what newspaper publishers want, and it’s highly unlikely that any of them followed Google’s advice for blocking search engines from their sites.

If you browse through the comments left by people on the numerous blog posts dedicated to this subject, it becomes clear that few people have any sympathy for the newspapers. They are largely viewed as arrogant, plodding, old media dinosaurs that deserve to die if they can’t adapt their business models to the new online world.

There’s a big problem with this. Most businesses which took a beating during the internet revolution struggled because they were replaced by a better online alternative, but that’s not the case with newspapers. Healthy democracies depend upon the kind of high quality, impartial reporting that a properly functioning free press delivers and despite the evolution of citizen journalism, right now nobody is capable of providing a suitable alternative to the service provided by our best newspapers.

The free press is too important to society for us to sit back and let the markets decide its fate. If we don’t find a way for independent journalism to survive, we risk irreparably damaging one of the fundamental components of the democratic process.