AAN Association of Alternative Newsmedia

The Media Oxpecker: Gawker's Got a Comment Thread in Brooklyn to Sell You

may 25, 2012 02:30 pm

Today's awesome stock photo via Shutterstock

Every week we round up industry news you may have missed while you were busy winning.

"When the word came down that The Times-Picayune would no longer be a daily newspaper, it wasn’t from the paper's owners, Advance Publications. Nor was it from senior management or newsroom officials. It came as a brief item on The New York Times' "Media Decoder" blog, written by David Carr, and sent out over Twitter at 10:33 p.m., when the newsroom was largely empty." - Gambit editor Kevin Allman.
For coverage and commentary on the Times-Picayune situation, we defer to our friends at the Gambit, who are doing a heckuva job covering the story.

In the search for revenue "beyond the ad," Gawker Media's Nick Denton is looking to the comments section. The company temporarily shut down its commenting system last month and launched a revamped system that, Denton hopes, will attract brands that want to engage with Gawker readers:
[Content director Ray] Wert was quite open about wanting to ape Reddit's AMA ("ask me anything") feature for his new advertorial conversations.

The idea is for these things to be more a PR/marketing product than a brand-advertising product. The idea is to get challenger brands, in particular, to take part: they tend to be very open and transparent about what they’re up to, and they love the idea of engaging with the public as much as possible, if they can do so in a reasonably controlled environment. When that kind of a brand has some kind of news they want to share, doing so through a Gawker Media sponsored post will be a pretty effective way of getting the news out to a large number of people while at the same time sending the message that they're trying to be as transparent as possible and are happy to answer lots of questions in a friendly and conversational and open manner. The metric for success, says Wert, isn’t going to be the number of pageviews they get; rather, it will be the amount of earned media they get — the degree to which other media outlets pick up on the initial announcement and the rest of the information that the company reveals in the comments section.
Why Michael Wolff isn't sold on Facebook, and thinks it will bring down the entire web with it:
From a revenue perspective, it's an ad-sales business, not a technology company. To meet expectations—the expectations that took it public at $100 billion, the ever-more-vigilant expectations needed to sustain it at that price—it has to sell at near hyperspeed.

The growth of its user base and its ever-expanding page views means an almost infinite inventory to sell. But the expanding supply, together with an equivocal demand, means ever-lowering costs. The math is sickeningly inevitable. Absent an earth-shaking idea, Facebook will look forward to slowing or declining growth in a tapped-out market, and ever-falling ad rates, both on the Web and (especially) in mobile. Facebook isn't Google; it's Yahoo or AOL.

AOL's Tim Armstrong would like you to believe that only Patch can deliver local content:
"To not believe in Patch, you have to believe that consumers in a town don't want local information, they don't want local advertising or commerce, and they don't want a platform they can engage on."

Patch announced this week that it is eliminating 20 manager positions.

"My hyperlocal site was fine, but it didn't pay."

Is Warren Buffett a skeptic or sentimentalist when it comes to newspapers?
Buffett loves newspapers, but he doesn’t love them all equally. What he loves best are smallish papers in smallish markets where civic feeling runs high and competition is at a minimum. Those are the papers whose readers are most likely to be willing to pay for them once they erect paywalls, as Buffett intends them to.

Researchers at the University of Central Lancashire are developing a "smart" newspaper that responds to touch.

Anyone can do data journalism, says the Guardian's Simon Rogers.

Here's Danny Sullivan on the wild west of paid links. (h/t Amy Webb)

A new tool will help advertisers track "viewable ad impressions."

Six platforms publishers can use to fill unsold ad inventory.

Brands expect higher return on investment from local ad campaigns versus national, says a study.

Copy editors need to master digital headline-writing and say goodbye to obscure pun headlines, says Steve Buttry.

Eight reasons journalists should consider PR.

And finally, David Carr on being a reporter:
It’s the grandest caper there ever was. Really, if you can find work to be, sort of, professionally curious. I’ve always liked it, no matter how much I was working or not working. If you can find a way to make the economics work, it’s a pretty good way to go.