The Open Road

I read an intriguing article in The Atlantic over the weekend, discussing the probable implosion to The New York Times and what its future may be. One paragraph, in particular, struck me:

At some point soon--sooner than most of us think--the print edition, and with it, the Times as we know it, will no longer exist...What would a post-print Times look like?

Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. This would allow the Times to continue to impose its live-from-the-Upper-West-Side brand on the world without having to literally cover every inch of it.

In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters--now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases--could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting in with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world, unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.

This is a similar prognostication to what I offered up recently, one that I find increasingly compelling.

Ironically, my very presence here on CNET may confirm it. CNET's Blog Network is filled with non-CNET employees, like me. We offer CNET breadth, allowing CNET's staff reporters to offer depth in particular areas of interest (e.g., Stephen Shankland focuses on Google and Yahoo, as well as search, online advertising, portals, and digital photography). That depth will then be picked up by other publications to feed its breadth, while they choose to go deep in other areas.

Symbiotic, interesting, and effective. So long as the depth is strong, people will pay for access to that content, be it through subscriptions (I am and hope to always be a paid subscriber to The Wall Street Journal, as there's little more comforting than reading it on my couch at the end of a day), advertisements, or some other means.

Such a strategy enables the media to be many things to many people without having to undergo the burden of failing to be all things to all people. I think it's a winner.

Browsing through Dan Farber's review of a recent Pew Research Center survey on news readership, I was reminded of one of the central tenets of blogging: blogging helps to destroy the business models powering its original source material:

While the Internet is growing as the place where people go for news, the revenue simply isn't catching up fast enough. The less obvious part of the Internet overtaking newspapers as the main source for national and international news is that much of the seed content--the original reporting that breaks national and international news and is subsequently refactored by legions of bloggers--comes from the reporters and editors working at the financially strapped newspapers and national and local television outlets.

I've long recognized this, and have taken my share of swipes at a new web mentality that celebrates aggregating largely amateur content, without providing the financial incentives to replace such content with professional content. But what to do about it?

Looking at my own readership patterns, I tend to read the front and back of magazines and newspapers. That is, I read the headlines (much of which derive from original research and authorship on the part of that publication) and the op-ed page. Everything else tends to be minor filler, "Associated Press" content that doesn't motivate me to purchase.

Is the new model for media to discard the AP and focus on original content?

I don't mean the model that The New York Times has taken, focusing on a publication that is almost entirely of its own making, nor the experiments that The Wall Street Journal is making.

Rather, I mean making media heavier in two core areas: the big stories that no one else can do better than a given publication, and the commentary on the big stories and everything else, because the commentary on the little stories arguably makes them much more interesting.

And so, TechCrunch thrives because its founder, Michael Arrington, is an industry player that has conversations with technology's movers and shakers that others get less often, if at all. I'd wager that people read The New York Times as much for its columnists as for its slant on the news. Ditto for The Wall Street Journal. I read Businessweek starting at the back, plowing through commentary and then usually giving up once I get to the "news."

Less filler, more killer: is this the new model?

If I'm not alone in how and what I read, then the answer to media's woes is to stop pretending to be all things to all people, and instead to significantly up investment in a limited but potent brew of original news reporting, focused in areas in which one's staff has competitive differentiation, as well as the best commentary for this and everything else.

Reading through this Wall Street Journal article, I'm increasingly worried about Zimbra. The article traces Microsoft's efforts to buy Yahoo!'s search business while leaving the rest of its business(es) to an AOL Time Warner or News Corp. This might be good for Microsoft, and it might be good for Yahoo!, but where would it leave Zimbra?

Zimbra doesn't fit any of these companies. Arguably, it could fit well inside Microsoft (if Microsoft wanted a serious upgrade to its web-based Outlook, something extensible that could attract a development community, contrary to Paula's well-reasoned opinion), and still has a future within Yahoo!. But these others?

It's not about what happens to Zimbra users' data should Microsoft acquire Yahoo! and take Zimbra along with it. It's what happens to Zimbra, the product, should anything other than wholesale Yahoo! acquisition happen.

Microsoft is smart enough to recognize great technology: I can't see it dumping Zimbra. But if a News Corp. were to acquire the Zimbra assets, what would it possibly do with them? The best we could hope for would be an asset sale that would see Zimbra move to, say, Google, Apple, or Adobe.

As a Zimbra customer, I want it to stick around. I love the Zimbra experience, even despite some glitches. With a Yahoo! bifurcation into search/everything else, however, I'm worried about what will happen to Zimbra.

The New York Times is reporting that Google News, the world's eighth-ranked news site, is struggling to maintain a 10 percent growth rate, far behind that of rivals like Yahoo! With no ads, few visible improvements to the service, and only 11.4 million visitors in May, as compared with over 35 million to Yahoo! News, Google News appears to be the forgotten child within Google.

Google, of course, defends the site, but I found the defense a bit odd:

[Google's Marissa] Mayer called Google News one of the company's most innovative products, and said that it helped the bottom line because Google News readers were among the most active users of Google's search and other services. News results also show up on the company's main search pages, along with ads.

"It directly feeds the main business," Ms. Mayer said.

Maybe. But innovative? Yes, there may be some secret juju juice to News, but it doesn't make itself apparent to users of the site. Google aggregates and presents news stories. It's a service that I use and like, but innovative? That's not the word I would have used.

One thing I'd like from Google News? Clear separation of opposing views. Given that news is now largely a commodity, I like to quickly get past the facts of what happened to what people think about what happened.

For example, it would be great to have News not only co-locate differing perspectives, as it does now, but also to call out the different sides of any given debate so that I could select articles to get both sides. I'd "pay" for that by viewing ads.

Today I read my first ever Scoble blog post. If it's any indication, perhaps I've been missing something, as his contention that "noise" is more interesting than "news". What does he mean? That the earliest-breaking "news" isn't news at all: It's the random chatter in the crowd that holds insight well before the mainstream media groks that point:

Last year I got a tour of the Wall Street Journal's West Coast printing plant. They print 60,000 copies an hour. At the end of the tour the head pressman said "I've been reading this six hours before you did for more than 15 years now and it hasn't helped yet." Why? Cause the news isn't where the action is: the high value bits are stuck in the noise.

As Scoble goes on to note, Google News and Techmeme only carry news from "group" news sources. This means that I'm on Google News because of my CNET affiliation, but most bloggers are not, which is a huge loss for these "news" sites because sometimes (though not always) the best data is not yet organized and packaged into mainstream "news."

This is why I don't read news. I read commentary. I find it more interesting. Someone has to report the news so that we have grist for the blogging mill, but without the commentary the "news" isn't worth nearly as much.