AP's new video service: Microsoft-only for now

AP's new video service has emerged from its beta test period and you can expect to start seeing it on potentially thousands of local newspaper and broadcast websites.

It's an experiment with a new business model for the AP, which is a membership organization. Typically members pay "assessments" for various levels of service. This project is different: members pay nothing and theoretically can make money by sharing in network advertising revenues.

Baa baa black sheep, Myspace and news

News organizations are a lot like sheep. They graze together. Where they graze, the pretty much eat everything, right down to rock. When one gets spooked, they all get spooked. A sheep stampede is a thing to behold.

Writing for Poynter, Kelly McBride notes an outbreak of highly negative coverage of MySpace.com: "In the last month most MySpace stories come in three categories: Advice for hapless parents, criminal behavior and danger."

The power of the newspaper brand

It seems that everywhere I go, I hear a lot of talk about the advantage our newspapers have in that they have the strong, trusted brand in our communities. But here's a story that is circulating in the industry that turns the table on that belief.

A major newspaper recently conducted some focus groups to understand consumer perceptions of its online entertainment content. The content was very good, but usage was low. Consumers seemed to prefer to use other entertainment guide / calendaring services from net-centric companies.

How to offset the decline of print

Vin Crosbie's address to the WAN advertising expo is getting coverage from the Guardian and from WAN itself. WAN reported: "But on-line media produce 20 to 100 times less revenue per reader than newspapers do, he said. To put it another way, for every print reader lost, newspapers have to replace them with between 20 and 100 website readers to gain the same revenue."

The father of citizen journalism

Last week in Orlando at the NAA Connections conference, Lisa Desisto of the Boston Globe was given the NAA's online innovator award. In her gracious acceptance speech she acknowledged her two fellow finalists -- Dave Morgan of Tacoda Systems as "father of targeted advertising" and me as "father of citizen journalism." This, of course, immediately prompted a round of jokes in my corner of the room about illegitimate offspring.

Careful with that 'citizen journalism' label

Out in Colorado, New West writer Howard Rothman is critizicing YourHub.com for allowing shills for local politicians to "post whatever they like in 'news stories' and 'columns' which carry no costs like a traditional advertisement and have a degree of implied authenticity that elevates them beyond anything a paid ad could dream to achieve."

Is he right?

A traffic mashup

Back in the last century when I was at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, we built one of the first online traffic maps. It definitely wasn't the first even in the local market -- a local tech development firm had already built one as a demonstration. We considered using theirs, didn't like their terms, and assigned a programmer to create our own. It took some time, some socket-level Perl programming, some artwork and some creative uses of ImageMagick. MNDOT was happy to provide the data. A few weeks later we had it online.