Every Friday we round up media & tech industry news you may have missed.
But as David Kaplan points out, it’s kind of hard to do that without human editors, who cost money (just ask Patch). Since Examiner doesn’t want to spend that kind of money, it instead will “use a mix of peer reviews and incentive pay” to make the content better, with the incentive pay being based, at least in part, on peer reviews. It’s an interesting new twist on incentive pay in the digital world, which has been tied thus far to how much traffic a post gets, not how good it might be.
“We don’t just want to reward driving traffic alone as the basis for paying contributors extra,” Examiner VP of Quality Mitch Gelman says. “We think popularity and quality have to be equal and our payments to contributors will reflect that.”
There are a few tidbits worth quoting at length here. First:
The syllogism that helped journalism prosper in the 20th century was simple: Produce the journalism (or “content”) that people want, and you will succeed. But that may no longer be enough.
The key to media in the 21st century may be who has the most knowledge of audience behavior, not who produces the most popular content. Understanding what sites people visit, what content they view, what products they buy and even their geographic coordinates will allow advertisers to better target individual consumers. And more of that knowledge will reside with technology companies than with content producers.
And:
Now we are entering what might be called Hyperlocal 2.0, and the market is still up for grabs. Google, which garners two-thirds of all search advertising dollars nationally, doesn’t exert similar control over local advertising. Locally, display ads — all those banners and pop-ups — are a bigger share of the market than search ads.
In today’s internet economy, the real value and, in my opinion, the only viable model for successful online business is in product. Products. Real, tangible products. An iPhone app. A digital goods marketplace. A software product. A social network, perhaps. Something that has measurable customer acquisition and a real exchange of monetary value.
We understand there are nine editors now doing so in San Francisco, New York City, Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Washington D.C. … Yahoo is supplementing its staff of local editors — who are each responsible for major cities — by aggregating local news, deals, and events in specific neighborhoods and cities on Yahoo Local, which it overhauled late last year.
For example, digital magazines will contain modules that can be rearranged by users. So a reader of the Economist, for example, could move sections around depending on which regions of the world they were most interested in.
set of tools to help take stock of your community’s news and information
resources, and take action to improve them,” according to a Knight spokesperson. There is also a free webinar about the toolkit next week — April 14 at 2 pm EDT.
Such a slim percentage is generally not worth celebrating. But given that the severe declines between 2008 and 2009 are still etched in the memories of most publishers — plus the fact that collective newspaper ad sales are still in negative territory — it’s hard to fault the magazine industry for patting itself on the back for having four positive quarters in a row as of Q1.
