GateHouse Media, a big newspaper company, is holding an in-house contest for ideas that will generate $50 million in new earnings, Poynter reports. (The rules are here.) The winner can get up to $1 million.
The contest is a great idea. But it should be open to all, not just GateHouse. The best ideas aren’t coming from inside media companies these days. They’re coming from everywhere.
Editor & Publisher: Journos in Bay Area Launch ‘Chauncey Bailey Project’. In a collaboration reminiscent of the 1976 “Arizona Project,” more than two dozen San Francisco Bay Area journalists are launching the Chauncey Bailey Project to continue the investigative reporting the Oakland Post editor was pursuing when he was murdered on Aug. 2.
This is heartening news. A few weeks ago I questioned the relative silence in the journalism community about Bailey’s killing. I subsequently heard from a friend who’s involved in this new project that people were going to push this hard, and here we go.
Jay Rosen offers “What I Learned from Assignment Zero.”
A great deal, it turns out…
We’re still not clear what happened, but the site may have been under some kind of attack. Happily, we’re back up, at least for now.
The news that MSNBC has bought Newsvine is a very big deal in the new media world. MSNBC.com has done a lot of excellent online journalism over the years, and pulling Newsvine under its wing make perfect sense.
Now we need to see the experiment taken to a more logical conclusion, because Newsvine and its competitors are getting only part of this right — and a company with deep pockets could take it further.
Along with Digg and Reddit and others, Newsvine is one of the sites that has led the way in the voting-on-news arena. But popularity is an extremely crude tool when it comes to understanding quality, better than nothing but not much better.
They and the host of competitors out there need to add reputation to the mix. Whoever gets this right will win, big, and so will the rest of us as we move toward seriously useful community vetting of news and information. We’re not even close yet.
Next Thursday evening, Oct. 11, we’re hosting Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Oh Yeon Ho of OhmyNews at the University of California, Berkeley. The format will be a conversation with these founders of two of the world’s most important citizen-media organizations. Joining us will be my co-instructor in a journalism course at UC Berkeley, Bill Gannon, head of Web operations for LucasFilm and former editorial director of Yahoo.
The conversation takes place at Sibley Auditorium in the Bechtel Engineering Center.
See more details here.
(Note: Jimmy Wales and Oh Yeon Ho are advisors to this Center, and I’m an investor in Wales’ for-profit company, Wikia.)
Not an original thought, of course, but it’s hard to miss the fact that the statue of Vladimir Lenin in the central square of Etakerinburg, Russia, is surrounded today by heavy traffic, construction and billboards of global enterprises. This city, closed to outsiders less than two decades ago, is in the middle of a construction and economic boom.
The journalism, as noted below, does not fully reflect the modernizing part of Russia. The regime in Moscow has clamped down heavily on broadcasters, and has put pressure on major newspapers, though so far it hasn’t done anything serious online in this regard.
I’ll be visiting Ural State University today, as well as a growing business magazine. A fascinating and full week is coming to a close.
By the way, as a local resident noted to me, Comrade Lenin is pointing directly at what has become the central-city upscale shopping street.
These are students and faculty at Chelyabinsk State University in the heart of Russia, where I’m on a week-long visit to meet with journalists, scholars and media executives. The trip, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, has been eye-opening.
It’s never a surprise to find bright, engaged people in other places. The world overflows with such folks, here and in many other places.
I do have mild surprise, however, at the speed with which the ideas behind citizen journalism are spreading globally. There’s a growing recognition that is a key part of our media and journalism future.
Certainly there’s been some serious skepticism, which is natural and valuable. The questions are helping us to fix the problems in this arena, and to discover new ones. (A local state-run TV station reporter, for example, was fairly insistent on making our interview into a bloggers-versus-journalists bout, and was plainly miffed when I declined to go along with that construction.)
The Russian government has clamped down on traditional media in a powerful way. Television news, I gather, is for all practical purposes a government PR machine, and many (though certainly not all) newspapers are self-censoring for fear of annoying the Putin regime and/or local and regional authorities. The Internet is, for now, a relative bastion of free speech. Citizen media, in that context, takes on more and more importance, as does the notion of entrepreneurial journalism that competes with the traditional press.
Needless to say, I’m learning as much as I’m teaching on this trip. More later…
A reminder — there’s less than two weeks left before the Knight Foundation’s deadline for its News Challenge grants . This is the second year of the program, and the foundation has reserved some $5 million for innovative journalism projects.
If you have a good idea — and we need lots of them to get to the next generation of journalism — go for it.
(Note: The Knight Foundation has sponsored one of our projects here, and I’m an advisor to or co-founder of several of the initial group of grantees.)
(This is the third in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)
Affiliate programs involve you marketing the products or services of another website in some way. Perhaps the most well-known example of this is Amazon’s Associate Program, which allows you to point your readers to Amazon’s website (via a deep link) to buy certain products. If there is a sale, you get a small percentage (Amazon pays up to 10%).
The Amazon products you advertise can be an arbitrary offering your readers might like or products relevant to a blog posting (a CD you mention, a certain laptop, a book on a topic you are writing about, etc.). EBay offers a similar type of direct relationship. It allows you to place relevant auction ads on your site and offers monetary incentives based on both a percentage of eBay’s revenue when your reader has the winning bid, and the number of new eBay users that sign up after clicking through your site’s ad.
For those who are somewhat less savvy with web programming or who want a little more design customization from their auction ads, there are even “sub-affiliates” who facilitate or enhance the affiliate experience—for a cut of the proceeds, of course. One example of such a “sub-affiliate” is the aptly-named AuctionAds.
In addition to direct relationships and “sub-affiliates”, there are also affiliate networks that operate similarly to ad networks (more on those later) in that they act as mediators between you and hundreds of advertisers. LinkShare is one such affiliate network that allows you to pick the company whose products or services you will promote (including many well-known brands). The selected company will then review your site for content compatibility and, if accepted, you will start displaying their ads. Unlike most advertisements, those from affiliate networks do not pay you for each time a person sees or clicks the ad—like the Amazon or eBay link they must follow through to “action” by buying or signing up for something. When this occurs, a commission is sent from the advertiser to LinkShare, who keeps a portion for its networking service before paying the rest to you. Other examples of similarly-functioning affiliate networks are Commission Junction and ClickBank.
While a banner ad of random products for sale can be as ignorable as any other imposed ad, these customizable connections to generally-trusted ecommerce names can provide value to your reader if used correctly. What determines “correctness” may depend heavily on your content and design.
Why content matters: People who are interested enough in a topic to be reading about it will generally be the most likely to want to purchase a related product or service. For a site like DVD Talk, linking to Amazon may provide a convenient service when presented alongside a given review. The same DVD link to Amazon may not, however, be as appropriate coming from a political blog. Instead, Bill Clinton’s book might be more applicable.
Why design matters: If the ads and “buy me” buttons pepper every page or if the content seems to be secondary to the marketing—or worse, inspired by or inseparable from the marketing—people may feel untrusting or put off. On the other hand, if the ad or button is relevant and apparent but unobtrusive, it’s more of a service (“by the way, if you want it…”). You can even explain to the reader that their purchase will help your site.
Best practices
While these systems are used well all the time, I would really appreciate some examples from all of you of truly outstanding utilization of affiliate programs to be used as reference.
(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)