February 14, 2010 – 11:46 pm
For publishers: How much money is lost because of stolen contents? Of that, how much can be realistically reclaimed? Before getting into numbers, an overview.
In recent weeks, I’ve gained a first-hand media perspective on anti-piracy technology. The technology is Attributor’s, and the media is Agence France-Presse, one of the big three global newswires along [...]
November 15, 2009 – 6:49 pm
I love my country. Among many things, I enjoy its business attitude. In the media sector, it is an unabashed mixture of entrepreneurship, bold risk-taking and fearless independence. You can’t spend a week here without someone telling you : “Hey, you know what? We’re about to send some of our journalists, paid by the Ministry [...]
November 9, 2009 – 8:59 am
You probably heard of Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons, the former Forbes writer. He’s built a justified reputation for using his blog to do a kind of Steve Jobs pastiche, by turns analytical, satirical, occasionally vulgar and, yes, insulting every possible target in the Valley and in the MSM (Mainstream Media).
You’ll recall I criticized [...]
November 1, 2009 – 11:27 pm
Everybody wants to go local. Internet-wise, it sounds like the new flavor of the month week. Going local is a digital and idealistic version of Mao Zedong’s “hundred flowers blossom”. (The Chinese dictator did actually encourage the expression of dissenting opinions; this turned out to have unpleasant consequences for those who took Dear Leader to [...]
October 25, 2009 – 7:46 pm
Picture this in today’s American media: an Edgar Hoover-like chief of a major police agency cozying up to veteran reporters of Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker. To these cronies, the chief feeds dirty information, unverified gossip, unproven suspicion of corruption of X or Z, all of it “dug up” [...]
October 25, 2009 – 7:45 pm
If there is one side of Scandinavian medias’ strategy I find particularly convincing, it is their ability to cooperate as much as they can, and to compete on what matters most, that is the product, the user experience, the reader. To describe this, Americans, the world’s best neologists, invented the world “coopetition”, cooperation + competition. [...]
October 19, 2009 – 9:11 am
A few weeks ago, professional blogger Kevin Dixie received a strange proposition: a US‑based company offered to buy from him 30,000 reviews for a new iPhone application at $1 per review. Positive reviews, needless to say. Moreover, the marketing company proposed to extend the deal for 30 applications, about 10 to 20 times a month. [...]
October 12, 2009 – 5:05 pm
All conversations I keep having about the economics of a news web sites revolve around two key ideas: how to increase both the duration and the depth of a visit. In this respect, much work remains. For August 2009, here are the numbers of page views, as measured by Nielsen Net Ratings on the French [...]
September 6, 2009 – 10:08 pm
Let’s start with sobering facts :
the top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004
today’s learner will have had 10-14 jobs… by the age of 38
new CEOs landing in a “great” company will devote most of their time, months or years, to placing the right person in the right slot.
How does the media [...]
August 23, 2009 – 9:47 am
In today’s context of massive revenue depletion, everyone (almost) agrees on one thing: digital media revenue sources will have to be diversified. There is no magic bullet, no dominant model that will guarantee, by itself, a sustainable revenue stream. Time to think the hybrid way. Free will coexist with paid-for, different users (occasional vs. intensive) [...]
August 9, 2009 – 11:55 am
This week, I downloaded the iPhone application of the British newspaper the Independent. It’s a new breed of app, taking advantage of the new features embedded in the third iteration of the iPhone OS. For a daily newsmedia, Push Notification is the most interesting new feature, combined, in this case, with an offline reader. On [...]
A well-established brand is supposed to be a key asset. Everybody keeps dreaming of building a long-lasting brand with lots of positive attributes. How true is it for media ? In the rapidly changing environment, in the massive shift towards electronic media (and the vaporization of value that goes along with it), how relevant is [...]
Get a demo of a Bloomberg terminal. You’ll be is blown away by the depth of available data. Thousands of statistics, historical tables, sources… Everything is available through the proprietary terminal. Bloomberg started by offering a real-time news flow dedicated to the needs of the financial community, traders, analysts, etc. Over the years, the system [...]
Updtated with a video on PolitiFact Guide to Fact-checking
The idea for this column came to me last March; I was flying back from Stockholm. Schibsted, the Norwegian media group I work for, had asked me to be part of the jury for its yearly Schibsted Journalism Award. I was both honored and curious to be [...]
“If they start making products people don’t want, and start losing users, then Apple’s strategy will run into problems.” You can see the full NYT Business section story here. My wife and I love to read the papers in the morning. French-born, we still marvel at this American icon: the newspaper route, the nice deliveryman [...]
From multimedia productions, to Computer Assisted Reporting
Last Thursday, I presented a series of great news related multimedia productions before a group of students of the Sciences Politiques School of Journalism where I happen to have a small gig. I was curious to see their reactions. Too often, journalism students are mostly interested in the pursuit [...]
