As you may have noticed, newspapers have had a rough 2009. But you may not quite appreciate the magnitude of the collapse.
So far this year:
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study today that claims bloggers and journalists have an “uneasy” optimism about the future of news media on the web. But, the study says, their optimism definitely trumps that of broadcast and print employees in traditional media industries.
According to the study, most journalists who work in the online news industry believe that the internet is having a negative impact on fundamental journalistic values, including a loosening of standards (45% of respondents felt this way), increased emphasis on speed (25%), and the addition of voices from outside the traditional media institutions (31%). While there’s no doubt that the internet is changing the way journalism is conducted and delivered, I’m hesitant to think that speed and increased diversity of viewpoints from outside the industry is detrimental to journalistic integrity.
Online journalists are cautiously optimistic that their publications have viable business models compared to traditional forms of media. Over 60 percent of respondents reported that their online news units were making a profit. But only four out of every ten online journalists are “very confident” that online news can find a profitable business model for journalism, and are worried about the money-making prospects of internet advertising. Roughly two-thirds of journalists surveyed predicted advertising would be the most important form of revenue for news websites in three years. That in itself might be an overly optimistic projection for online advertising revenues, which today only accounts for less than 10 percent of overall newspaper advertising dollars in the U.S., and actually showed a slight decline last year. Print advertising, however, is diving faster than anyone expected.
Ed:
DJ Chang
- March 30th, 2009 at 9:10 am PDT
Ed: Is the smart money moving from newspaper to TV, then web?
Hearst Corp. wants to buy the remaining stake in local TV operator Hearst-Argyle (NYSE: HTV). The company is offering $4.00 per share in cash, which Hearst says represents a 91 percent premium over the Hearst-Argyle's closing price on Tuesday. Just after Hearst's announcement, Hearst-Argyle was up about 1.9 percent to $2.13. Trading was halted shortly afterward, Marketwatch reported.
Hearst currently owns about 67 percent of the Hearst-Argyle's outstanding shares of Series A common stock and 100 percent of its Series B common stock. That represents 82 percent of both the outstanding equity and general voting power of Hearst-Argyle. Release
Thank you and good evening.
It is a delight to be with you this evening and to see so many long-time friends and colleagues. We come together at a time of extraordinary change and challenge to what many would call a profession, but I suspect most of us feel is a calling.
Journalism – whether published in newspapers or magazines, broadcast on television or on the radio; or consumed online or on a mobile device – is under enormous stress, both from the permanent shifts set off by the Internet and from the cyclical forces unleashed by this current severe economic downturn.
But something even more fundamental is going on around us and it’s at the heart of this conference and our common desire to carry the banner for News Literacy far and wide. Journalism is being transfigured by the new information ecosystem and its very definition is changing. Given the volcanic explosion of Web sites, search engines and social networking channels, how could it not?
In some ways, journalism is expanding and offering us great opportunity. In other ways, it is contracting; resulting in a wave of self-doubt among practitioners of our craft and confusion among our consumers.
So let me go back in time for a moment.
Four years ago, I was asked to speak at Google’s Zeitgeist conference. My colleagues and I brainstormed about that speech and decided that a lot of the engineers in the room – many of whom had the very best educations that our system can offer – really didn’t know what journalism was.
Remember, this was the era when some thought that blog networks were going to replace the kind of journalism that we practice at The Times. So we created a video, letting our own people explain what they do to the hundreds of digerati that were in the room that day.
I want to again use this video to ground my remarks in fundamental principles, ones that all of us here tonight feel are so critical to maintaining the unfettered flow of reliable facts and knowledge that sustains our democracy.
That was 2005, which in retrospect looks like the good, old days. While we have improved our tools and our commitment to providing world-class news and information anywhere in the world remains strong, the business model is under tremendous strain.
High-quality journalism – from covering City Hall or Iraq – is getting harder and harder to pay for. Traditional revenue streams are, in many cases, anemic and getting weaker. Due to the combination of secular and cyclical pressures I mentioned earlier, the immediate future looks, at minimum, grim.
As Paul Krugman, the Times’s Nobel Prize winning economic columnist remarked recently about the financial hurricane: “If this goes on much longer, I think I might give it all up, move to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and start a Ponzi scheme.”
Now I am not here to wax poetically about the past. It was, in its way, much over-rated (unless you’re reflecting on the glory days of working as a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, under the skilled leadership of Bill Kovach, a great boss, who was here earlier today.)
Nor am I here to bemoan our fate. Quite honestly, I am tired of reading about the death of … take your pick … journalism, newspapers, engaged readers. Even The Times today was wondering out loud on the front page as to where newspapers where heading, et tu brute. My view is that what we offer, in all its iterations, is quite valuable and our profession will endure.
In a recent signed editorial in The Times, Eduardo Porter cited another Nobel-prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, who said that China’s horrific Great Leap Forward could not have happened in India because newspapers would have closely chronicled the suffering of the people.
Closer to home, each of us can cite an example of some public or private sector boondoggle that was upended because an inquisitive journalist was paying attention. Whether delivered in print or online, in a blog or a video, quality journalism will always have immense social utility. As Bill Keller, our executive editor, noted two years ago, journalistic organizations are: “an institutional bulwark against powerful forces that would tame or silence us.”
While Wikipedia and online aggregators serve their purpose, serious news gathering operations are more necessary than ever as the public and private decision- makers and the concerned public gathers the news and information needed to more thoughtfully progress into a most uncertain future.
And finally, I am not here to tell you I have the answers to our current dilemma – attracting more revenue, be it by charging for an online article reporting on the day’s activities in the Middle East the way iTunes charges for U2’s latest hit single; or examining new journalistic organizational structures, such as moving from a traditional profit-making model to a not-for-profit entity whose funding is secure in the hands of, say, Bernie Madoff.
One of the many reasons why such a solution is so elusive is that what works for The New York Times is not going to work for Newsday or The LA Times; what works for NYTimes.com is not going to be a solution for Politico, Salon or Slate. As I will discuss shortly, each site has a different relationship to the Internet and has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
In our heart of hearts, we all wish there would be the equivalent of the deus ex machina moment when the gods descend and provide us with a perfect business model for the new media. Alas, Mt. Olympus has been quiet for quite a while, and real life tends to be a bit messier and less predictable.
As an aging devotee of Outward Bound adventures, I prefer to think of this as a challenging river trip. We know where we are and we know where we are heading. What we do not know is what’s exactly around each bend. What is needed isn’t certainty, but rather flexibility, aligned with courage, stamina and expertise; all of which will be critical to the success and safety of our journey.
What is of even greater import is our adherence to core values; maintaining loyalty to those bedrock beliefs that have sustained quality journalism through so many economic and political cycles. (ed: The anchor that slows innovation. Speed and quality can complement. Don't let the quality standards and lack of understanding of technology - stop innovations targeting productivity.)
At a recent NYU Media Talk, the irrepressible David Carr remarked that: "News has always been the killer app."
In a pithy way, he expresses a deeply-held feeling. It reminds us that quality news matters and that how people will get this quality journalism will continue to evolve. At The New York Times Company, we state this journalistic value proposition or what we call our Core Purpose, just a bit more formally – what a surprise: To enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news and information.
And on Monday, David’s media column caused quite a stir. He raised a lot of questions about the original sin of providing free content online and what we can do to either put the genie back in the bottle or create an alternate economic model that rescues newspapers.
And this returns us to the biggest issue before all of us tonight and tomorrow: what do we need to do to earn enough revenue to maintain robust newsrooms and uphold the rights and privileges granted to us by our Constitution?
It’s obvious, but let me say it anyway: for many of us, our long-term financial success will be determined by how quickly our digital revenue growth outpaces the downturn in our print revenues.
At The New York Times Company, we are focusing on three key levers to achieve this breakthrough moment: attracting more users, deepening their engagement and then earning revenue from their usage. To do all this will require making bets on how this new medium will evolve and making investments in that vision.
This is certainly not an easy task. Our insights into human behavior and technological evolution may guide us. Two main contributors to The Times’s online success are here tonight: Jon Landman – to whom I am indebted for being invited – and Vivian Schiller. Both will tell you with great pride and enthusiasm that we have been busy creating a new form of Web journalism that is both informative and compelling. At least they had better be telling you that.
For instance, if you came to NYTimes.com at noon on January 20, you would have seen: (ed: investing in features. note that news is almost an afterthought. Rather than investing hundreds of thousands per event, isn't this an enhanced photokit page?)
Taken as a whole, the experience was immediate, personal and compelling. And you didn’t have to struggle to leave the mall.
Engagement is the name of the game. Serious news sites must create a new, more organic, more personal relationship with its readers. While there has been a “Letter to the Editor” forum in newspapers since the late 19th century, journalism’s relationship with our readers has been one-sided.
We need to be able to respond to our audiences’ demand for interactivity, community, multimedia, news and information on an increasingly wide range of topics.
We have to respond to their desire to do something with the content we make. Our readers want to share it, or blog it, or comment on it, or tweet it. They want to use our journalism as raw material for what they make. This can be a very good thing because it does enhance our audiences’ involvement with our sites, but it also takes us back to issues of authority and what is and is not “Real Journalism.”
And, we want them to feel that they are part of a vital, ongoing conversation and that there is something missing in their lives when they stay away for too long.
Our strategy must be rooted in the fundamental premise that we must be OF the Internet, not merely ON it, requiring all of us to move from publishing our content on the Web to becoming full Web publishers.
For years, we hoped that financial success would just come from making our products more accessible, informative and entertaining. The idea was simple: work harder, be more creative and thoughtful, and the revenues will return in force. Regrettably, there were larger, more complex forces at work and we are now confronting some hard truths:
With this in mind, there are now all kinds of solutions and tactics being offered up to allow online news sites to adapt financially to the changing conditions, but it is a little bit like the banking crisis. We know there is an answer out there somewhere, but we are not sure what it will turn out to be.
So the immediate response of journalism organizations, including ours, to all this economic and technological disruption, is to make substantial expense reductions. These have included closing production facilities, creating new methods of distribution, reducing the size of our newspapers and layoffs.
Remember what Bill Schmidt, The Times’s deputy managing editor, was saying about the expense of keeping reporters in Iraq? Now, with the sad state of news media finances, there has been a substantial reduction in coverage of that critically important area of the world. Afghanistan will undoubtedly also receive short shrift from the world’s newsrooms because of cost.
As I noted earlier, the demand continues, but we are still left in the paradoxical position of having a product that an increasing number of people use, but which has decreasing revenues and profitability. This, coupled with radically different user experiences, argues for new goals and initiatives.
We need a thorough and realistic assessment of the audience scale necessary to achieve our respective economic ambitions or consider alternative business models.
We must engage in a deep and realistic examination of the value we add for marketers, of the services that we offer today to support that value, and of the new services we will need to offer in the future. We must invest in creating the skills and competencies to accomplish these things.
We also need to pursue a set of industry initiatives that support quality news, the protection of intellectual property, the value of quality content in the advertising marketplace and, speaking of this conference, news literacy.
Taken together, this is about re-conceptualization and more thoughtful execution. It is about being bold and willing to think about all the available options and imagine a future that seems within our grasp. It is about constant reinvention and taking full advantage of the Web, an amazing laboratory for entrepreneurs, technologists and, of course, journalists.
NYTimes.com has already experimented with different strategies for collecting revenue:
In the mid-90s we collected fees from our international users, but we then changed course and opened up the site to our worldwide audience on July 14, 1997 – Bastille Day, a most fitting metaphor for tearing the online walls down.
A little less then a decade later, we launched our TimesSelect experiment, which for a modest fee provided exclusive access to Op-Ed and news columnists on NYTimes.com, easy and in-depth access to The Times’s online archives, early access to select articles on the site, as well as other exciting features.
After two years, as the Web evolved, it became necessary to change our priorities and our focus. While TimesSelect generated more than 200,000 subscriptions and around $10 million, we decided to end this initiative. We realized that the exploding world of search meant that the ad revenues resulting from our increased traffic – created by offering this content for free – would grow faster than the subscription model.
Today, in the face of the economic downturn, we have renewed our analysis of how paid content can augment our core advertising business. The trick, of course, is to garner incremental revenue from the user without significantly cannibalizing the high rate ad pages that now account for a very significant amount of money.
Unlike many local news Web sites that still depend mostly on declining classified ad revenues, NYTimes.com has a very large national display revenue stream. As we develop new pay-for-content ideas, we must carefully balance our ability to generate meaningful dollars from both sources.
Most of our thinking revolves around the fact that we have almost uniquely achieved substantial scale throughout the world and have become part and parcel of the global discourse. This achievement has significant journalistic and financial ramifications and we do not want to take any steps that significantly reduces our presence on the Web.
Other prominent news-gathering sites may be less interested in scale and that might give them the flexibility to pursue an even more aggressive paid content strategy. What we have learned over the last decade and half is that the Web has very few generally accepted rules for financial success, and they are inevitably overturned by the next digital cycle and next breakthrough algorithm.
Some of you may be wondering: Does all this activity portend the end of print?
Of course not. It is still a popular and profitable medium. (ed: false economics)
There are more than 830,000 readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for two years or more, up from 650,000 just over 2 years ago.
And just today, the Center for Media Research released a study, which revealed that:
This is good news: print and digital can co-exist in the marketplace. But, as we have learned over the past 15 years, we need to become even better at integrating our print and Web properties. They offer two very different products and two distinct value propositions. Our challenge is to both integrate while embracing the unique strengths of each medium.
As we think about all these economic issues, we have to keep in mind why we are here tonight. Your News Literacy Project sends a strong message that the journalistic and academic professions must do all that we can to keep our audiences, especially the younger generations, well-informed.
In last Sunday’s Week in Review, there was an excellent article by Kate Zernike, “Generation OMG”, which discussed how the children of this generation are responding to all the recent upheaval and how growing up during the Great Depression provides some useful parallels.
We can help ameliorate some of the ensuing discomfort by ensuring that our children not only follow the news, but understand what is happening. They need the tools to make sense of what is taking place around them. They hear their parents and friends relentlessly talking about a weak global economy, brutal conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the increasing threat of nuclear proliferation.
By the way, you should read “The Inheritance,” a new book by our Washington correspondent, David Sanger, which offers some very insightful comments on some of these topics.
This is all very scary stuff. Our children need Real Journalism:
They need reassurance that the world is not coming to an end and that history teaches us that humankind is quite resilient, especially during periods of crises and controversy.
They need to know that we have persevered during World Wars, a Great Depression and the Cold War and we have the wherewithal to overcome what we face today.
The News Literacy Project will help us teach this invaluable lesson and The New York Times Company is very proud to be part of your initiative. I commend and applaud your efforts.
Together we can create a future where quality journalism thrives, where it lives organically alongside the many new forms of user generated content, amid the chaotic and swirling global conversation taking place on the Web.
Together we can ensure that citizens, especially our young people, understand the cornerstone attributes that make quality journalism important in their lives, such as verification rather than assertion; accuracy as opposed to speed and sensation; transparency and the idea of correcting one’s mistakes. In short, many of the things, my colleagues talked about in my short film.
And together, we can take these messages to our young people so they will understand how different kinds of information in this wonderfully diverse, multiplatform world can, do and will exist together.
Thank you for inviting me.
Good news for everyone who’s been insisting that the New York Times (NYT) needs a radical overhaul in order to survive the digital era: CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr. agrees with you.
The bad news: It’s 2009, and he doesn’t know what that overhaul should be.
Back to the good part. In a thoughtful speech he delivered at Stony Brook University in Long Island last week, Sulzberger did a nice job of laying out how the Times got to the position it’s in now — watching print dollars shrivel up while online dollars trickle in. Can’t argue with any of this:
* Let us start with the fact that a deep, cyclical downturn has dramatically affected key areas of commerce, including the real estate, employment, automotive and retail industries, the lifeblood of American newspapers and local television.
* The Internet has proved to be a far superior advertising platform for listings. The classified businesses are disappearing from newspapers and are unlikely to migrate in any significant way to news Web sites.
* Selected display categories are also subject to secular shifts as users move from print to digital consumption. Beyond that, marketers are growing skeptical of the ability of display ads on any platform to capture the consumer’s attention in a fragmented media landscape.
* And, Internet businesses have proven incapable of replicating the economics of print. Few people have been willing to pay for online news. Advertising rates for online inventory are relatively low. And news Web sites are poorly organized to take advantage of the contextual advertising model that dominates the Internet.
So what to do? Alas. “It is a little bit like the banking crisis. We know there is an answer out there somewhere, but we are not sure what it will turn out to be.”
Sulzberger does say, as his employees have mentioned before, that the Times will probably need to start charging some people some amount of money for its online product. But he also suggests that the bulk of the Times will remain free online, because “we do not want to take any steps that significantly reduces our presence on the Web.”
He also makes a vague reference to “the protection of intellectual property”, though I think the paper has recently been demonstrating what that means. And he also insists that the paper won’t give up its print product, because “it is still a popular and profitable medium.”
In the end, Sulzberger basically punts: ” What we have learned over the last decade and half is that the Web has very few generally accepted rules for financial success, and they are inevitably overturned by the next digital cycle and next breakthrough algorithm.”
The rest of the speech, available here, is well worth reading. But if you’re one of the people who despairs about the paper’s future — or finds delight in the notion of its demise — you may not find anything here that changes your mind.
And now RIP to the Rocky Mountain News, its last issue is Friday. We're fast approaching the tipping point where a major city in the US will not have a daily newspaper. So watch for any of the following to join the list in 2009:
Denver Post
Detroit News, Detroit Free Press (each moving to 3 issues a week next month)
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Newsday (Long Island)
Newark Star-Ledger
Philadelphia Daily News
San Francisco Chronicle (losing $1 million per week)
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (may close as early as next month)
Seattle Times
The reasons have been well chronicled by others like Poynter Online and I won't waste time rehashing familiar arguments and analyses. But one complaint about newspapers is that they increasingly are out of step with their readers, who for too long were ignored at the bottom rung of a one-way hierarchy which defined their relationship.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: "Openness and transparency isn't an end state. It's a process to get there."
It was only a coincidence, but the Rocky Mountain News announcement came on the same day that Facebook declared that it would embrace a community-driven process for governing. Responding to a controversy earlier this month over changes to its terms of service, Facebook said it will henceforth put any proposed modifications to its membership up for public debate in a "notice and comment" forum.
Not everyone was impressed by the announcement. Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a scorcher over at ReadWriteWeb, dunning Facebook's management for losing its grip. But if I read Marshall correctly, he's not slamming the company for its bid to be more transparent. Rather, he's arguing that Facebook still hasn't fully absorbed the real reason behind the flap.
What's delusional about the company's position? Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing. (You complain about us because you love us!) We'd argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.
Fair enough. And voting may not be the best idea out there. Still, I think Facebook deserves credit for at least trying. Listening to the conference call on Thursday, I found myself wondering whether some of the very decades-old newspapers now going through a horrid time might have fared had they found a way to similarly engage their readers once the Internet went commercial. How long, for instance, has it taken for newspapers to let its reporters begin blogging? How about the inclusion of reader comments--let alone taking feedback on how to make coverage more relevant to the community's needs? Or reader blogs, for that matter? (There still aren't many of the latter.)
There are obvious differences between Facebook and a big city newspaper and I'm not suggesting that the cure here is simply to sprinkle some Web 2.0 fairy dust and everything will be as it was 25 years ago. But Facebook is also a media company and as Larry Magid smartly writes, its 175 million users are the ones who supply the content. Giving them a voice in policy making, whether to quell a brewing storm or to get out ahead of the next one--that's less interesting to me than Facebook's willingness to experiment.
It's not a perfect system and there doubtless are going to be rough spots ahead. Still, I'm going to cut them a break. It's easy to be cynical about the motivations but if Facebook has found a way to offer up more transparency and yes, even as Marshall suggests, participation over governing, then the company has hit upon a formula that will keep it relevant. Wish The Rocky Mountain News and its industry cohorts would be able to say the same. Sigh.
Update, 12:33 p.m. PST: A Brooklyn blog reports that The New York Times next week will begin neighborhood blogs. Thanks to a pointer from TechCrunch, where Jim Schachter, the editor for digital initiatives at the Times, confirms the pilot program. Schachter also asks the following:
Can we create a combination of journalism, technology and advertising that people who don't work for us can adopt? How much or how little oversight by us would be needed to keep the quality high? Would people pay to be associated with us? Would there be enough revenue that some split between us and a non-NYT blogger would work? I'd love to know what readers here think.
The number of unique visitors grew from 34.6 million unique visitors in December 2007 to 40.1 million in December 2008. NYTimes.com was the #1 online newspaper destination in December 2008, with 18.2 million unique visitors. USATODAY.com and washingtonpost.com took the #2 and #3 spots, with 11.4 million and 9.5 million unique visitors, respectively, Nielsen Online reported. The New York Daily News online edition experienced the highest growth in unique visitors (99%), while Boston.com was the only online newspaper to experience a decline (-6%). “Nine of the top 10 newspaper Web sites experienced positive year-over-year growth,” said Chuck Schilling, research director, agency & media, Nielsen Online. “News coverage in December ranged from how the 2008 holiday season would be affected by the weakening economy to Obama’s latest nomination for his administration, all of which helped to drive this impressive growth.” Online Newspaper Readers Visiting More Frequently In addition to an increased number of unique visitors to newspaper sites, readers also are frequenting these these web destinations more often than they were a year ago. The number of total visits to the top 10 newspaper sites increased 27% year-over-year, growing from 199.6 million in December 2007 to 252.7 million in December 2008. “Despite the current troubles for the traditional newspaper industry, people are visiting newspaper sites more and more often to stay on top of current events,” said Schilling. “The challenge for newspaper publishers today is to learn how to capitalize on this active online readership and translate their increasing engagement into revenue.”
The top 10 newspapers in the US collectively saw a 16% year-over-year increase in unique visitors to their websites in 2008, as well as a 27% increase in the total number of overall visits, according to data from Nielsen Online.
Ed: Will Obama lead a new wave of new media spending?
I love this. The White House has a Director of New Media. How cool is that?
Macon Phillips, formerly Director, Strategy and Communications for Blue State Digital (or still? not sure) is filling the role. Blue State handled many of the Obama camp's digital media efforts -- things like Web site development and other organization and communication tools (not really the ads though).
Phillips's first post to the WhiteHouse.gov site notes that the revamped-site "will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world."
He expounded on three priorities of the administration's new media efforts: Communication, Transparency ("executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review"), and Participation ("we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it").
This last priority is pretty interesting. We'll have to wait and see what is deemed non-emergency legislation as so much of the stuff we can expect to come out of congress will be in the emergency column in the near future, one would imagine.
Of course, any citizen has been able to access any legislation online in the past by accessing the House and Senate sites. However, having such documents easily linked to on the WhiteHouse site could result in more citizen engagement. Plus, a promise to wait five days to get the country's reaction is a novel one.
Check it out here, and while you're at it, don't forget to read about former First Pets!
This morning the Washington Post launched WhoRunsGov.com, a site where readers can learn background information about the new Obama administration, members of congress, prominent military officials and others who now "run government."
Is the Post following the trailblazing work of organizations like the New York Times and the UK Guardian in making the newspaper of the future a database of public information, layered with analytic, visual and programmatic added value? That's what we have hopes for, but it's not clear yet that the Post knows what to do with its new site.
WhoRunsGov is built on a Mindtouch Dekiwiki, the same sophisticated platform used by many other organizations to assemble data-centric application sites built largely on mashups. We've seen some awesome work done by IBM with a Dekiwiki for example, pulling in data using Dapper and mashing it up with maps APIs.
WhoRunsGov, on the other hand, looks mostly like a content site right now. A mix of political news and a would-be search engine magnet in the form of 240 pages about high profile political figures. The site is a moderated wiki, it includes blogs and it aggregates relevant news coverage from the Post and around the web. That's cool, but it sure could be cooler.
Earlier this month the Post hired political blogging star Greg Sargent away from Talking Points Memo to write the lead blog on WhoRunsGov. Sargent's posts should be good and popular, but we'd love to see them augmented with content based in a paradigm fresher than the old broadcast media. There's a lot of third party data that could be pulled in to WhoRunsGov and there's outbound APIs that could make it a much more valuable site, ultimately increasing its draw and traffic.
What would that look like? For some inspiring examples, check out Little Sis, described as "an involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited & maintained by people like you." If you remember the Flash visualization theyrule.net, Little Sis is of the same vein, but a living site.
Little Sis is getting a lot of love from the Sunlight Foundation and its grand slam site OpenCongress.
The UK Guardian is doing a lot of things in this direction, most notably their initiative Free Our Data, where they are agitating for release of public data for the purpose of mashups. That's pretty hot.
The New York Times has released multiple APIs and just announced a conference called Times Open, "for developers interested in working with NYTimes.com as a news and information platform." (Disclosure: the NYTimes is a syndication partner of this site.)
The coolest political tech initiative we've seen in a long time is Memeorandum Colors, a Greasemonkey script on top of some really innovative data mining to determine the political leanings of blogs participating in the hottest online discussions each day.
Compared to those kinds of initiatives, WhoRunsGov looks a bit boring so far. There's a lot of potential though, and we hope to see the Washington Post's new initiative develop with more impact than it had when it came out of the gate.
The BBC Music project has been in beta since June of last year. According to silicon.com, Matthew Shorter, Interactive Editor for Music at the BBC, the project is "a part of a general movement that's going on at the BBC to move away from pages that are built in a variety of legacy content production systems to actually publishing data that we can use in a more dynamic way across the web." That dynamic backend technology - semantic markup - adds additional context to data about the artist which can include anything from previous bands, past collaborators, venues played, and more. The metadata is then linked together to create relationships that you may not have even known about before. Most of the information for the project comes from MusicBrainz, an open content music "metadatabase" that lists information for over 400,000 artists. To make a BBC music page, the contextual information surrounding the artist is imported to their BBC page. By using the artist's "MusicBrainzID," web page creators can integrate the artist's Wikipedia biography, too. Reusing this content is a better use of their time and energy, says Shorter, because the content is already available on the public domain. As more projects like this take advantage of the publicly available metadata available, the beginnings of a real semantic web can finally take root.BBC's Semantic Music Project
The BBC Music Beta project is an ongoing effort by the BBC to build semantically linked and annotated web pages about artists and singers whose songs are played on BBC radio stations. Within these pages, collections of data are enhanced and interconnected with semantic metadata, letting music fans explore connections between artists that they may have not known existed.
Britannica Wants to Be More Like Wikipedia: Lets Users Contribute
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica is about to open ups its articles to edits by its users. Jorge Cauz, Britannica's president, tells the SMH that readers will soon be able to make edits to existing articles and create their own content. These updates, however, will be vetted by Britannica's staff, which hopes to review every edit within 20 minutes.
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