John Battelle is leading a panel composed of Shelby Bonnie (CNet), George Conrades (Akamai), Martin Nisenholtz (NYT) , and Mike Ramsay (Tivo).
(Hmm, looks like more Suits On Stage. Let's see how this goes.)
John asks about copying, Cory's talk, etc.
Shelby says you can't fight the trends in technology. We've all had to figure out what the Internet is doing to us and what we really need to defend. News.com is untraditional--they linked to their competitors. Competitors thought it was stupid, but users loved it.
Martin says that giving away all NYTimes content on the Web was a crazy idea. They had a lot of business ideas at first, but they managed to do it. They're in the middle of opening up The Times.
John asks Mike about being in the middle of the cable folks (and content owners) and the customers. What would Tivo like to do and why's it hard?
Mike responds but not quite to the question. (I want to hear features and products.
Hmm. I'm trailing off again. They're not talking much about media "as a platform" as far as I can tell. This is about content and who owns it.
John asks what's getting in the way of offering customers what they want.
Everytime we try a new idea, we get kicked out of someone's office. Tivo was an example. "You're changing prime time! You're skipping my ads!"
John asks if the panel buys the premise that copying and the Internet really will destroy their businesses?
The industry doesn't understand some of the technical limitations. They're paranoid.
DRM helps the content providers feel a bit more comfortable.
Olympics example.
Switch from utility to emotion. Journalism is about story telling and that's emotional. NYT: "We have a massive UI problem."
John asks about the false wall between bloggers and journalists.
CNet says they want to bing 'em in. It complements the job they're doing. Bloggers create very rich content.
NYT wants to differentiate between news and opinion, which is how the NYT is structured internally. Blogs are very often about opinion. NYT wants to be used as a source in blogs, but they're worried about letting bloggers in because of the news/opinion boundry. Apparently reporters can't have opinions?(!)
John says that the editor's should be helping. Others argue that it's the reader's job--the readers are doing fact checking.
John asks about the advertising business in media.
CNet: Two years ago you couldn't convince anyone that on-line ads would work. Now we know better. And it's growing. Tension between what users want and what advertisers/marketers want. Users want diversity of sites, marketers want fewer big sites.
John things it's a tech problem that we can solve. AdSense was a first start.
Measurement is a problem on-line. And targeting--it's easier on-line than on TV.
Steve Gillmor is asking about PodCasting.
NYT likes the new My Yahoo and the traffic it generates. :-) Feedburner mentioned as pushing the business along.
Google news--good or evil?
Marc Canter suggests an on-line, open, free database of all other media.
Cory asks about Tivo and Replay. What if they had worked together?
(Holy crap, it's cold in this room!!!)
See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.
Posted by jzawodn at October 07, 2004 12:20 PM
>>NYT wants to differentiate between news and opinion, which is how the NYT is structured internally. Blogs are very often about opinion. NYT wants to be used as a source in blogs, but they're worried about letting bloggers in because of the news/opinion boundry. Apparently reporters can't have opinions?(!)
The issue is that no one ever distinguishes between opinion and news any more...that's dangerous. With so few companies controlling news today on most media and bloggers generally unaware of traditional journalism ethics, ensuring that there is a clear, bright line between opinion and news is critical to the sanctity of informing people objectively (which is what journalism purports to do).
Journalists can have opinions - they need to just label them as such. Blogging has clearly revolutionized many aspects of information and opinion publishing but it shouldn't change the obligations of good journalism when it tries to fill that role for its readers.
Jeremy,
Interesting on the measurement aspects. So if it's cold, was it poorly attended? To bad they did not stick to the theme of the conference.
Thanks for the great blogging on the conference. I wish I could have stayed longer.
Stuart
