I took some vacation last week and missed Steve Lohr's email asking me for comment on search optimization. Looking over the resulting New York Times story, "This boring headline is written for Google," a couple of things come to mind:
"Platform agnostic" is one of those phrases that makes me crazy. Apparently it makes AdAge's Simon Dumenco crazy, too. This week's rant is a must-read, especially for people from the editorial side who may not be tempted to read a journal that focuses on the ad side.
It's great to hear that the Guardian Unlimited is now officially turning a profit. Many people assume it's easier to make a profit when you're big, but on the Internet things just don't work that way. From where I sit, it seems much easier to build a profitable online news operation on a local/regional scale.
I haven't been blogging much lately because I've been busy on a project. I can't disclose the details yet, but here are some of the issues:
Participation. It's been clear all along that the Internet is a network, not a broadcast channel or a hierarchy, that everyone can participate, and that eventually everyone will participate. Some things that didn't work 10 years ago are now possible because we have the critical mass online to make them work. Hyperlocal community networking would be just one of those things.
Yahoo News has launched local pages for metropolitan areas across the United States, aggregating local news from RSS feeds and via screen-scraping. Users of Yahoo's personalization tools will get a link that aggregates their hometown news by default, and a cluster of local headlines on the news.yahoo.com page.
It's a provocative introduction to the "State of the Media 2006" report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism: "Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die?"
It's not that bad, the report says: "We believe some fears are overheated. For now, the evidence does not support the notion that newspapers have begun a sudden death spiral. The circulation declines and job cuts will probably tally at only about 3% for the year. The industry still posted profit margins of 20%."
About eight years ago, the McClatchy Co. surprised just about everybody by making the top bid for Cowles Media, owner of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where I worked. The reaction in the newsroom at the time was: "Who?"
The bidding had been secret. Everybody figured one of the biggies -- the Tribune Company of Chicago, or the Washington Post (which already owned a share of the Star Tribune) would be the victor. But who was this McClatchy outfit?
