Just for a sec imagine that local markets will sustain only two or three TV stations in the near future, as it happening with the newspapers industry.
Those who can’t survive might be forced to shut down the station and re-emerge as a local media company with a focus on a non-linear video.
Clips would be published to the web, mobile and cable/satellite VOD. Local vertical content, like lifestyle and music, will be intermingles the day’s news.
Online video must be surrounded by some text content as well as aggregation, community and tools –like an events calendar that’s tied to the video archive.
All this video can’t live by itself.
Some would go for mobile, but in a small screen experience. On cable/satellite VOD video is designed for shorter viewing, not repurposed from TV shows.
In terms of contents, everything should be local and focused on the stories that everyone is talking about.
The team must be small and everyone must do everything.
Seattle newspaper shifts entirely to the web
The 146-year old newspaper and Seattle’s oldest business, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer stop publishing last Tuesday and went just online, with a work force of 20 news gatherers and web producers, plus 20 newly hired advertising sales staff. In a way, it is not a newspaper dying, it is a news source being reborn.
SeattlePI.com resembles a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper, says the New York Times. It will compete with an established local news site, Crosscut.com, and with the well-stablished SeattleTimes.com.
The new P-I site has recruited some current and former government official to write columns, ant it will repackage some material from Hearst’s large stable of magazines. It will keep some of the paper’s popular columnist and bloggers and the large number of unpaid local bloggers whose work appears on the site. “Seattle Views” is called this selection, plenty of commentary pieces written by well-known Seattleites.
In SeattlePI.com everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and cruate the home page. This is how the Web site has been opperated for year, and so far has been a very effective formula for growth.
Media digital trends
The 2009 edition of Pew’s annual State of the News Media Report paints a bleak picture of the state of the Media. The key finding are here.
Let’s concentrate in digital trends.
- Expansion and innovation are coming from outside of traditional news industries.
- Banners, pop-ups and other display advertising in the current form cannot supply sufficient revenue to replace lost dollars and support worldwide newsgathering operations. The real growth online continues to be in search advertising, and no one has figured out a way to combine search advertising with news in sufficient volume.
- National websites and aggregators like Google and Yahoo are fast making inroads in attracting local advertising.
- The areas of growth in news are small. Advertising in online video and rich media is growing swiftly, a compound rate of 33 % over the last five years, although it still only represents about 10 % of Internet advertising.
- Mobile technology is rising, and news organizations are scrambling to establish themselves in this new land. There are 40 million active users of the Mobile Web, and advertisers spent $1.3 billion to reach them in 2008, up 59 % from a year earlier. However, in the Media, old questions of revenue persist: Will the tiny banner ads pay enough to finance the effort?
- Online ad spending grew about 14 % through the first three quarters of the year, most of it benefited Google and other search providers. The cost to reach 1,000 viewers fell by half in 2008, to an estimated average of 26 cents.
Yahoo goes into TV-style production for the Internet
This week Yahoo announced the latest in a series of niche Web shows. Yahoo’s executives say they have found a sustainable model for making original video online, in part by explicitly not competing with television.
Producers find their biggest audiences and then build short Web shows for those groups of people. The ability to mine search queries and traffic data to better identify user interest is one of their assets.
An example: Yahoo now recaps TV in two-to five-minute-long daily show called “Primetime in No Time.” It has an average of 400,000 daily streams, making it one of the most popular recurring series made for the Web.
Yahoo has signed up long-term advertising sponsors for each of its original shows; the TV recaps are sponsored by Verizon Wireless and the celebrity mother segments will be supported by State Farm Insurance.
Besides TV and celebrity mothers, Yahoo also produces technology news videos for its finance Web site and game highlights for its sports site.
Experts say in the New York Times “that this shift in strategy comes as the Web video market matures and media companies seek profitable projects in a battered advertising market.”
