Yabot Blog

We have entered into the era of the amateur.
When we usually think of amateurs we think of persons not doing it right, not perfected in their skills and not as good as a professional.
But what is actually an amateur? Wikipedia says: Translated from its French origin to the English "lover of", the term "amateur" reflects a voluntary motivation to work as a result of personal passion for a particular activity.
So, a professional is someone doing it for the money while an amateur is doing it for her passion. This is a significant difference.
The change in Media is disruptive, publishers are scarred and acting irrational and readers just expect to get news at no (direct) cost.
Enter the Amateur, someone doing this for her passion, not for direct financial remuneration, but for other causes. Mike Nierengarten is touching upon this in his blog entry The Future Newspaper, where he suggests that future newspapers may be crowdsourced but edited.
An other advantage for the amateur is that she may not be schooled in the field she is working. Today's dramatic change in the media industry as well as other industries require leaders without tradition of the industry, leaders that look upon the business with a fresh set of eyes, not tinted with history and "old knowledge". This approach has been proved successful several times, for example with the InnoCentive project where R&D is crowdsourced. MIT lecturer Karim Lakhani says, “We actually found the odds of a solver’s success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise” (from The Rise of Crowdsourcing in Wired).
The professional is a thing of the 1900s, let us once again embrace the amateur that work with passion, without expecting direct financial compensation but getting paid for a job well done.

Posted by Mats Ingelborn At 11:59 Location cz | Comments (0)

Some weeks ago the EPC (European Publishers Council) published the "Hamburg Declaration regarding intellectual property rights" (original PDF) that strongly urge "improvements in the protection of intellectual property on the Internet".

I think we all agree that a job well done should be remunerated, the problem is that with the physical newspapers we've never really paid for the news but for the printing and distribution. Regardless of the journalists opinion and independence the news has in most cases always been paid by advertising. Newspapers has never sold news to their readers but readers to their advertisers, and that has not changed with the coming of the Internet.

The online news era has just started and as the publishers started giving news away, news will continue to be free. "They can’t put genie back in the bottle", as Chris Anderson say in his latest book Free.
Another relevant theory of Anderson's is that anything that is available in abundance (breaking general news for example) will always be free while more specialized articles can be charge for as they are scarce. This is what Anderson call the freemium model - give away the general news and charge for the premium articles. The problem however is that there are very few publishers with content that are of premium quality and that readers will be willing to pay for.
So, if publishers will have to continue to rely on advertising for financing the free news and paid access to their premium stuff they still need readers to find them. Readers will not be loyal, they want to find the articles they are interested in not just the articles a publisher believes to be interesting.

The Hamburg Declaration want legislation against sites such as Yabot and Google to republish and refer readers to them. It states "Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it. Over the long term, this threatens the production of high-quality content and the existence of independent journalism".
The question they need to ask is, how shall readers find their news stories? The model of an annual subscription where readers loyally visit a few news-sites every day to get their intake of news is not realistic. We see Internet users searching for everything these days. Most people start at Google and search regardless of what they are looking for. News will be no exception, and why should it be?

Letting third party services publish teasers on news stories will allow the publishers to reach new readers - a new person to "sell" to their advertisers and maybe even get the reader to pay for the full content.
Enforcing the suggested restrictions will just cut off this possibility and kill news as we know it.

I would recommend the EPC to read Chris Anderson's Free and act accordingly. One cannot keep an old pricing scheme in a totally new world.
The problem is that most publishers are "old men" with lots of experience. Experience has always been a most valuable asset, but now it is actually the opposite. This time the change in media is so radical that "the experience" cannot make the right decisions.*
They act in panic, blinded by the drop of traditional income, not being able to adjust their business model as any business has to when the market change. With the Hamburg Declaration they try to change the market to fit their old business model.

* Translated quote from the Swedish blog Media Means Nothing by Stefan Hyttfors

Posted by Mats Ingelborn At 19:55 Location cz | Comments (1)

After talking to friends, family and colleagues over the past weeks it has dawned on me that Twitter (Twitter.com) is becoming our preferred news ticker. The first one I heard using this definition of Twitter was my friend Leif Josefsson when explaining Twitter to a mutual friend. Then I realised that Twitter has all the traits of a news ticker, not just its format, but most importantly its content.

Lets start with: What makes a story newsworthy?
1. Timing: The word news means exactly that - things which are new.
2. Significance: The number of people affected by the story is important. A plane crash in which hundreds of people died is more significant than a car crash killing a couple.
3. Proximity: Stories which happen near to us have more significance. The closer the story to home, the more newsworthy it is. For someone living in France, a major plane crash in the USA has a similar news value to a small plane crash near Paris.
4. Prominence: Famous people get more coverage just because they are famous. If you break your arm it won't make the news, but if the Queen of England breaks her arm it's big news.

Definitions from (MediaCollege.com).

This is exactly what Twitter provide us. Its Timing is more or less instant. People are tweeting from everywhere about everything. The Significance is automatically covered as you only follow people that you are interested in and you care what happens to them. Proximity follow on that as you want to know that happens in their surroundings. Even if not all Prominent people use Twitter, stories about them travel fast within the Twitter community. Just look at the Michael Jackson story that spread in Twitter faster than in any other media.
Adding to this the Twitter time line format is very similar to a traditional news ticker just constantly prompting the latest. And as a follower you can choose to read and take in news stories or just disregard them as any news editor would.

So, Twitter may be the best news source ever as its starting point is the people and things we really care about. And when a story is significant enough it will break through the personal and (rather) small news bubble we have defined. But we must not stop consuming broader news or we will most definitely become very limited in our views and not get the whole picture.

Just as I'm about to conclude this blog entry I receive (via Twitter of course) a reasearch paper from Cision on how Swedish journalists use Twitter. And I think that Cision's findings confirms my views as only about 16% see Twitter as important for their research which make sense as most journalists want the bigger stories not necessarily the stories that are close to Twitter users and their interests.

So, if we start to view Twitter as a personal news ticker it totally make sense to let Yabot have your selection of news stories published to Twitter. The relevant stories from the "traditional news media" (ie the stories you are interested in) is then mixed with the personal news from friends, family and celebrities.

Posted by Mats Ingelborn At 12:12 Location cz | Comments (0)

The Michael Jackson story can be used as a very good example of how new media works and how it interacts with old media.
49 minutes after the 911 call was placed the small entertainment gossip site x17online.com breaks the story. It take a further 20 minutes before the much bigger site TMZ.com posts the news and the story really takes off.
Personally I read it on Twitter just after midnight (CET+1) and re-tweeted, less than 2 hours after the story first break on the Internet and about the same time TMZ posts news on Jackson's death. Before that CNN posted a story on Jackson's cardiac arrest as well as some author of Wikipedia adding the info to Jackson's page.
Old media web sites publish the story about 20-30 minutes later and even more remarkable is that Google News show it some 30-40 minutes later (10 minutes after the old media).

My conclusion is that people are faster that computers and that even new media can be slow media...
Google News and of course Yabot play on a different field than real-time search as provided by Twitter and others. Goggle and Yabot rely on news being available on many different sources, do not continuously crawl the Internet (well not ever single second) and it take a bit of time to index, sort and display the retrieved stories. The Twitter community re-tweet gossip and news as wild fire and that is not what Yabot intend to compete with. But the tabloids that rely on gossip and full page photos of accidents and stories of chocking horror must be chilled to the bones. This story killed the tabloids as radio and other ether media was many hours ahead and papers. Paper media need to rely more on in depth stories and elaborate on subjects.
I think this is the way forward for traditional newspapers. To provide in depth views and comments on current events not just report on the breaking stories - that is for online media to cover.

I may be of an other (older?) generation but I still like my morning newspaper and find it difficult to open the laptop next to my cup of tea and toast on the breakfast table.
The media scene must become more balanced. Not ALL publishers should (or could) be in all spaces. TV, radio, newspapers and online have different purposes, with some overlap of course, and need to coexist rather then compete for the same space. Not everyone and every business must have online as a focus strategy. Use it as a compliment and be the best at what you already do.

/Mats, cofounder Yabot Ltd
(Timeline from SEOmoz.org)

Posted by Mats Ingelborn At 20:01 Location cz | Comments (0)