Learning from CNN's Success

Battling for the top slot in online news are CNN.com and MSNBC.com according to an article in the New York Times by Brian Stelter this weekend.

Stelter says in 2008 "MSNBC.com's network of sites received more visitors than CNN.com's network, according to Nielsen - though CNN.com's visitors still viewed substantially more pages." CNN.com's visitors view about 1.7 billion pages a month.

What I found most interesting about this article, is that CNN.com apparently struggles with the same issues as every other news Web site. Their bounce rate is high. They have fought to develop a coordinated editorial strategy. They are searching for an elusive unique signature. Their advertisers are developing an appetite for digital only ads. Success costs more and challenges site stability.

There is an interesting line in the article which has CNN.com executive K.C. Estenson "huddled with staff members at YouTube ... to discuss a collaboration."

Add to this an article a little further on the in paper that describes how young Web users increasingly turn to Youtube.com as a search engine. Apparently they want answers to their questions in video. And they search for answers not at CNN.com, but at Youtube.com.

This raises the other old question of where a news organization should focus its attention in a world where the mechanics of publishing have changed. CNN.com's huge size may mean it is a destination for years. But smaller operations should spend more time considering themselves not as destinations, but as contributors to destination sites whose names, like Youtube, are more associated with traffic than with news.

All good food for thought. And perhaps most encouraging of all, CNN.com has apparently be profitable for eight years.

Geography and Revenue

One of the great aspects of communities on the Internet is that they are thought communities. They are not limited by the geographical restrictions of the real world. I can be an active part of a worldwide community as easily as I can contribute to my online neighborhood yard sale.

But geographical confinement is what has kept news organizations in business since ink first hit paper, and it is still how they define themselves today. From the names of the businesses down. The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald.

But the Web favors centralization. So to work on the Web you've either got to be very big, or have something so original that visitors can't find it anywhere else.

What the old media organizations did, and do, is bring centralized information to a local audience. They did this because that was the only way that the audience could access that information. But now that the reader, or audience, can get its international news anywhere and everywhere, there is no value in a local news organization delivering it. So a local newspaper has to do something that only a local newspaper can do. Like; local news.

This may seem amazingly obvious, but it seems to have eluded many news organizations. International news may still be a useful impulse buy, to leave by the checkout (or off on the right rail), but front and center has to be the original information that a user can't get anywhere else. That's your raison d'etre. That's were your value is to users. That's the future of your revenue.

Exellence in Journalism 2008

The Project for Excellence in Journalism yesterday released its 2008 report on the State of the News Media. This always creates some fanfare and it's not hard to find articles on the report today. (e.g. SF Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, Poynter.)

Ironically, or perhaps offering a statement about the state of journalism today, of the two hundred articles thrown up by Google news few are anything more than a republishing of the AP or Reuters story. (And the AP story, at the time that I read it, had a number of typos in it.)

The full PEJ report is available at journalism.org.

Reuters reports "In a study of more than 70,000 stories appearing in newspapers, cable and network television and radio news shows, pieces on the war in Iraq and the U.S. presidential campaign occupied nearly one-third of the coverage.

""The whole rest of the world filled less than 6 percent of all the space," Rosenstiel said. Domestic issues such as education, welfare, religion or labor each accounted for less than 1 percent of coverage."

Visual Radio

BBC reporter Spencer Kelly writes that radio stations are thinking about visual radio where glanceability enhances the radio listeners enjoyment. That is; key images appear on a digital radio screen that explain the story or tell the listener/reader/viewer more about what's on the radio.