Heard of the Young Turks? No? Well, according to its founder you will soon, because it’s going to demolish the mainstream media in America. In fact, it could win an online poll against Jesus, he said.
The ‘first live, daily webcast on the internet,’ the alternative show has had over 207 million views on YouTube. It charges $10 a month for its full content option; and takes $2.5 for every 1,000 views on YouTube.
During one of the liveliest parts of the day at yesterday’s Guardian Changing Media Summit, at the final keynote roundtable, Cenk Uygur (pictured left) said:
“Old media is a lot of trouble. It’s a question of what’s going to survive and what’s not going to survive. Are newspapers in America going to survive? Hell no, no way.”
Audio – with audience and panel reaction
Newspapers might have only ten per cent of the advertising revenue next year (down from around 50 per cent in the 1950s, Uygur said) but that was too much in his opinion: “It shouldn’t be anywhere near 10 per cent. As they say here in Britain that’s mental.”
Shaking off a heckler, Uygur said that his online talkshow’s content could easily compete: “NBC’s content is nowhere near as good as mine”.
But the best quote: “Our viewers are awesome; we call them the TYT army: we can never lose an online poll. We can do an online poll against Jesus and we will win.”
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
Richard Titus was shocked to discover that one of Associated Northcliffe Digital’s portfolio businesses was just throwing away its transaction data, when he first started as CEO.
They told him they wiped it each week: “Well, hard drives are expensive.”
“It’s very hard to copy; it’s very hard to steal; it’s very hard to pirate and it has incredible large scarcity.
“Data with its scarcity is one of the most important assets most businesses have today. Most businesses give it away; don’t collect it; they wipe it off their hard drives.”
AND, the digital consumer division of DMGT, looks after Associated and Northcliffe digital media sites, as well as online classified sites such as Jobsite.co.uk, FindaProperty.com & Primelocation.com. A significant part of its business is in Eastern Europe, Titus said, where its classified sites are ‘market leaders’.
Its new hyperlocal network Local People was focussed around bringing community-oriented information to groups of 20-30,000 people.
Titus, who previously worked for the BBC, also emphasised the potential to make advertising money out of small and medium enterprises, he said.
Titus said that the “the thing that most matters in digital today is your relationship with the customer”.
Journalism.co.uk is attending today’s Digital Storytelling conference – a free one-day event looking a new tools and techniques for multimedia and online journalism. If you’re interested in following the day, use the liveblog below or follow the hashtag #ds10 on Twitter. You can also watch live coverage using the video player below.
We’ll try to share the best bits of the day on the site.
Last week Journalism.co.uk attended a roundtable discussion about the future of video – for publishers, journalists and advertisers. Those gathered around the table, including representatives from the BBC, the Financial Times, the Economist and Thomson Reuters, were adamant that online video news and analysis is an important part of the multimedia mix and can be a source of revenue for “publisher broadcasters”.
Contrast this view with that of several regional website editors I spoke with at a recent meeting of the Digital Editors Network in Preston: investment in kit and training done, many admitted they’d axed news channel-style video on their websites, because of a lack of demand and now resources to keep it up. Some admitted their approach to video had been wrong – e.g. trying to replicate TV bulletins on a newspaper website – while others said dwindling resources had removed video from their web priorities’ list.
But there is clearly demand from advertisers and viewers for web video as a format – look no further than YouTube and the week’s latest viral videos.
And those providing the technology and options for advertisers to get involved are part of a burgeoning market if an announcement today from Videoplaza, which provides technology for serving up ads in and around online video, is anything to go by: the Scandinavian company has secured a $5 million investment round.
The investment will mean that Videoplaza, which already works with Incisive Media and myvideorights.com in the UK and La Vanguardia in Spain, can expand into new markets – both geographically and technologically, founder and CEO Sorosh Tavakoli told Journalism.co.uk yesterday.
This week the company signed its first Russian client and moves into Germany and further expansion in the UK and southern Europe are also on the shopping list, he says.
When it comes to making money from video on new platforms, publishers need to be prepared and have the options in place to take advantage of these new screens and viewers when they reach critical mass, he explains, adding that Videoplaza has been working with publishers to produce business plans for their video strategies to show to management where the money lies.
“I think there’s only a few carefully selected publishers who are seeing return on video. There’s a lot do and only part of that do we help them with and that’s the technology. But technology is an enabler in the end,” he says.
“We have experience from a lot of different clients in a lot of different markets so we can help our publishers come up with a lot of interesting packaging strategies, for example, working with a local newspaper, we’re not working with Proctor & Gamble and national ads, we have to do something more creative that will get the local car dealership on board.”
Key to Videoplaza’s strategy is making clients look at where video fits in with their wider business strategy. As such, the firm helped one radio station customer to develop an in-house video production service for advertisers, using their existing resources; elsewhere, with a TV client, a system has been developed where TV programme sponsors must sponsor related content online – a good example of helping advertisers bridge the gap between old and new media, says Tavakoli adds.
Sometimes with video advertising ideas you have to go backwards and educate advertisers and clients rather than push them into ‘the next big thing’ – creativity can then be sneaked in, he adds. Video advertising can be disruptive by its very nature, he says, and creating a good user experience while making as much money for the publishers as possible is a difficult balance to strike. One solution the company has introduced to a client is the option for viewers to turn off a pre-roll ad on videos after seven seconds – giving the user control, but the publisher’s advertiser a guaranteed timeslot.
But perhaps more significantly the company wants to use fresh investment to develop its products for ‘new tv’ – the myriad of screens and platforms through which people are now viewing online video and in particular the idea of connected TV. While there may only be a few publishers currently seeing returns on their investment in video, with ‘new TV’ comes new opportunities, says Tavakoli. The firm has already experimented with some forms of interactive advertising on La Vanguardia’s mobile videos and Sweden’s TV4 iPhone app.
We see a big change in consumption of video from ‘old TV’ to ‘new TV’, where the old TV is a big black box that receives a broadcasted signal that everyone else receives as well; where new TV is something a bit more unique and screen independent and more plentiful in terms of types of content. The ‘new TV’ needs an advertising platform built for it and we’re trying to build that platform.
From the publisher’s perspective – here’s Stephen Pinches from the FT on opportunities for publishers and IPTV:
Danish police had been searching for Rumenian murder suspect Marian Clita for a good 24 hours when Norwegian journalist Andreas Lunde Googled him, found his phone number and got him on the line.
In a scoop that almost beggars belief, ABC Nyheter’s Andreas Lunde, tracked down the man wanted for the brutal murder of Norwegian Scandinavian Airline stewardess Vera Vildmyren in Copehnhagen, a man sought by both the police and the press, with a simple Google Search.
“I found a blog post he had commented on, using his name and phone number when doing so, put the Rumenian land code in front of the number and called,” Lunde told Danish TV2 News.
Clita picked up the phone, confirmed he was indeed Marian Clita, professed to be unaware the police was searching for him, but, when asked if he had any knowledge of the murder, said he would get a taxi to the police station in ten minutes – and kept his word.
Later, ABC Nyheter called him again, and Clita said he had reported himself to the police and was waiting for them to find an interpreter. The police said Clita had told them: “I have killed a woman I Copenhagen” and thanked Lunde for tracking him down.
Lunde wasn’t actually on the Clita-case, but, as he told a former colleague, “I wasn’t on that particular case, but I’m a journalist and I’m curious, and when I get hold of his number it becomes my case.”
A video-journalist, Lunde has on many other occasions proved how willingness to experiment with new and old technology and storytelling techniques can be used to enhance journalism. In this case, two fairly dated tools, Google and a telephone, were the keys to the story.
For the record: I’m a media columnist with ABC Nyheter and as the president of The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA). I have a keen interest in promoting and sharing good online practices.
BBC News Online was initially devised in 1997 as a response to CNN’s online news page, claims its creator and former Editor-in-Chief, Mike Smartt.
“The reason that the BBC decided to go online was that CNN went online in 1996. And because the BBC doesn’t do anything in a hurry, it took it a very long time to actually make the decision.”
Speaking at the University of Coventry as part of its ‘Coventry Conversations’ series, Smartt told of the early days of online news and the difficulties faced by both designers and journalists.
Online journalism had to wait for technology to permit it to expand to its full potential, he said. Deadlines were demolished and journalists were regularly spending over half an hour to write a code with their story, only to have to go back again when a space, comma or any other character wasn’t in place.
The BBC were very wary of going online at first, Smartt said. “Initially, in the BBC, the journalists rejected the idea for two reasons: the money that was used to finance it was obviously coming from radio and television, so there was some resentment, and the internet was seen, amongst the people in the more traditional media, as competition,” he confessed.
When they did push ahead with the idea, experience was obviously thin on the ground. “My only qualification was that I used one of these” he said, showing a picture of his laptop back in 1997. The initial website was running from a server similar both in size and internal technology to his original laptop, he said. “Actually, for three weeks when we first launched the server, big in theory, … looked like this, that’s what we served News Online from, for three weeks, in the corner of the Newsroom.”
He also spoke of the problem of deciding what a story should look like online, whether going on the internet meant that people were looking for “three Ceefax sentences” or something more in-depth. The BBC’s 1996 ‘Online News Concept’ outlined goals that are beginning to be met only recently: valuable text, high-quality pictures that load fast, high-quality audio, full screen videos and full interactivity.
The content of the first test pages was mostly made up of jokes, but the team, led by Smartt, had to redesign the site again and again until the first BBC News Online page was finally agreed upon. He showed one version of the front page with a lively design and a high number of images, but explained why they couldn’t go with it: “If you remember back then you had dial-up, and you literally rang them up, and then this sound came along, and then you were connected, and only later up came the site, very, very slowly.”
Smartt finished with a warning to those who are not prepared to embrace new forms of journalism: “If you can’t handle multi-media, and you will have to in future, you are doomed in this business.”
Follow coverage of Coventry University’s event ‘Afghanistan – are we embedding the truth’ in the liveblog below from 1pm – 4pm or view the livestream:
The discussion will examine coverage of Afghanistan in the news and wider media with correspondents in Kabul. There’s more details at this link of the line-up, which includes Channel 4′s Alex Thomson and Kevin Marsh from the BBC College of Journalism.
The International Press Association (IPA) is holding an “extraordinary general meeting” today in Brussels.
The meeting, entitled ‘What does the future hold for Brussels-based journalists?’, will address the steep decline in the number of EU accredited journalists working in Brussels.
Media organisations are increasingly downsizing, cost cutting and closing their operations in the capital of Europe (…) What are the consequences of these phenomena for Brussels-based media, and, more importantly, for informed reporting of the EU?
Accredited journalists based in Brussels and members of the association are invited to discuss the following issues:
Communication and information policies of the European institutions and in particular the Commission
Conditions regarding work and residence of journalists based in Brussels
Improvement of contacts and collaboration at the heart of the press corps based in Brussels.
The ‘first live, daily webcast on the internet,’ the alternative show has had over 207 million views on YouTube. It charges $10 a month for its full content option; and takes $2.5 for every 1,000 views on YouTube.
Newspapers might have only ten per cent of the advertising revenue next year (down from around 50 per cent in the 1950s, Uygur said) but that was too much in his opinion: “It shouldn’t be anywhere near 10 per cent. As they say here in Britain that’s mental.”
