It’s called the Publish2 News Exchange, and was formed by Publish2 Inc. It allows publishers to create and manage content sharing networks, retain full rights to their content and control over who can use it, as well as where and how, create their own content newswires that partners and customers can easily access, and connect their publishing system to automatically import/export content via feeds or FTP.

We reported in March of 2008 that the company had received $2.7 million in funding, but then it was looking like the company was going after more of a Digg-like model, only powered by journalists. Now CEO Scot Karp is calling it a "new Associated Press for the 21st century."

"With Publish2 News Exchange, newspapers can replace the AP’s obsolete cooperative with direct content sharing and replace the AP’s commodity content with both free, high-quality content from the Web and content from any paid source," says Karp in a contributing post at Seeking Alpha. "With Publish2 News Exchange, we’ve created what the AP should have become, but can’t because of a classic Innovator’s Dilemma. The New AP is an open, efficient, scalable news distribution platform. We’re enabling newspapers to benefit for the first time from the disruptive power of the Web, and from the efficiency of content production on the Web."

"Publish2 News Exchange solves the problems that have prevented newspapers from creating an efficient, scalable alternative to the AP," adds Karp. "We bridge the gap between print publishing and Web publishing by connecting natively to outdated newspaper print publishing systems. We support the standard formats used by the AP and the technologies that newspapers already use to move content between print and Web systems. Our self-serve permissioning system enables newspapers and other publishers to distribute content to whomever they choose on whatever terms they choose."

So far Publish2 has newswires for such publications as AutoBlog, Engadget, WalletPop, Aol Small Business, TechCrunch, and others. We’re talking about web-based publications going to print.

The service has already raised questions about the point of catering to the dying print model, but Karp maintains that print drives not only newspaper operations, but web publishing, and as long as print is around, he wants to make it "more like the web."

The Publish2 News Exchange is available for free to news organizations and journalists around the globe.

It’s a good post that needs to be read by every executive at major media companies today, and in many ways a lot of it seems like common sense to those who have been watching the transformation occur and understand what’s going on.

Specifically though I wanted to address Scott’s final principle:

Advertising must create value

Google turned search advertising into the most profitable media business on the web by following the basic principle that advertising must create value for consumers. Search advertising is so powerful because the ads are relevant and USEFUL.

The most successful new advertising models will be those that create huge value for consumers, not those that manipulate users or violate their privacy (i.e. be like Google, not Facebook)

As we browse the web today, display advertising is generally not as relevant and as useful as search advertising. Search has a big advantage in that it knows the specific direct intent of the user at that moment in time provided by a keyword. While a lot of the display ads we get are entirely untargeted and seem useless.

To be fair, there are a lot of display ads that are targeted now based on behavior, geography, and other factors that end up creating value for the user.

There is a lot of movement with technologies like Yahoo’s Smart Ads, better behavioral targeting, and other technologies that are going to continually move display advertising to be more useful and relevant to the user. As I posted recently, this should lead to higher click through rates, higher conversion rates, and lead to higher CPM rates for advertisers.

Unfortunately, part of this increased targeting technology effort needs to be focused on scale as the amount of web inventory continues to explode. User-generated content is inventory that has achieved the lowest CPM and response rates due to the engagement of users in the sites they’re on, as well as the high frequency of as impressions each user is seeing. How can improved targeting technologies and ad budgets continue to get more relevant while also scaling to meet the inventory explosion?

When that happens, advertisers, publishers, ad networks, ad exchanges, and most importantly USERS will benefit.

Comments

Scoble, whose account is later reinstated, is denounced for being a publicity-seeking limelight hog, and for using a script from Plaxo that is an egregious breach of Facebook’s terms of use (since it uses optical character recognition to grab email addresses, which the site keeps as image files).

Some have sided with Scoble, because they feel Facebook should allow users to export their data, while others argue that the site can do whatever it wants, and when you sign the terms of use you effectively agree that you accept that. Whatever you think of Scoble and Plaxo’s script, however (which seems a little devious to me), there is an important issue at the centre of this Techmeme frenzy, as Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 and others have pointed out: Who owns your data?

In a post I came across this morning, Paul Buchheit (the guy who created Gmail) makes an interesting point, which is that many other services — including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and LinkedIn — allow you to import your addresses from some other program or service. I just finished doing exactly that with Last.fm, and I’ve done it with countless other services as well, including (most recently) an aggregator called Spokeo.

So how come you can do that with every service except Facebook? That doesn’t seem right. The Data Portability Group has extended an invitation to the site to join their push for a single standard. Marc Canter thinks we need better access controls for our data, and Chris “Factory Joe” Messina thinks that we need to move away from using our email addresses as the core of our online identities, and move towards a URL-based system. One thing is for sure: this issue isn’t going to go away.

Comments

Gawker announced they are shifting their business model from quanity to quality:

Where there was a shortage of attitude and commentary, there’s now a surfeit. And what’s in heavy demand, and short supply, is linkworthy material, by which I mean a secret memo, a spy photo, a chart, a well-argued rant, a list, an exclusive piece of news, a well-packaged find.

With them determining quality based on the ability to garner links and pageviews, do you think that is going to improve content quality, or just cause more mud slinging and noise? The easy way to get more page views is controversy, as pointed out by Scott Karp and Scoble.

2008 will probably be a nasty year for online content quality, as the true flaws of PageRank and the selfish nature of bloggers with new found power shine brighter than ever, feeding off one another. Blogs that once acted as hubs spotting good ideas and sending visitors to them will now take your best ideas, reformat them, add a bit of original content, drop the attribution, and get the pageviews they need to get paid. Where they once linked at your new content look for them to link back to their recent greatest hits from 2 days ago. Every post builds off the last. Every blogger for themself.

Google has Knol. Wikipedia has Wikia search. Yahoo has answers. Mahalo has how tos. Topical channels that highlighted content will get greedier with links. Virtually every clean traffic source is trying to become the end destination too.

People will eventually get sick of controversy and traffic hoarding the same way we became banner blind. Anyone just getting started out might be able to make some moves into the market with controversial content, but for those who are already established the key to future growth will be going back over your old ideas, refining them, making them more accessible, and producing them in better formats. 10 pieces of anchor content will pull a site further along than 1,000 me too posts. And linking out will still help too, assuming you pay your content writers based on something other than pageviews.

Comments

The focus of the debate right now is Gawker, where Nick Denton has apparently started paying his bloggers based in part on how many views their posts get. This one has been around for awhile, but now it’s official thanks to a memo on (Gawker-owned) Valleywag.

It’s also something that has come up before, including about a year ago when ZDNet said that it had started paying its writers on the same basis, i.e. a salary combined with a bonus based on traffic (I wrote a post about it at the time). And there have been other occasions as well, including when Business 2.0 magazine — which was then being run by Owen Thomas, now better known as the senior editor of Valleywag — started compensating writers based on their blog traffic.

In his memo, Nick says something that is very true about the difference between blogs and traditional media. While digital media gives editors or publishers the ability to track and compensate based on traffic:

“At newspapers, a reporter’s reputation depends on the opinion of their editors, which can be fickle. Some people get on because they play the office politics well. Or simply because they’re more aggressive in lobbying for more prominent jobs, or pay increases.”

The key question, of course, is whether rewarding bloggers for traffic is a good thing or a bad thing. One argument is that “incentivizing” bloggers to boost their traffic encourages them to make their posts more sensational, and will lead to them writing about nothing but Britney Spears or whatever they think people will be looking for, instead of deep and thought-provoking posts about serious issues. This is similar to the argument about people writing just because they want to show up on Techmeme.

The opposite argument is that it’s good to give writers a stake in the success of their blogs, something that encourages them to take an interest in their community. Will that encourage them to “sell out?” Perhaps. But maybe it will also encourage them to respond to comments, link to others who are discussing the same issues, and so on. Even former Gawker editor Choire Sicha thinks it’s not such a bad idea.

The bottom line is that — as Scott Karp notes at Publishing 2.0 — rewarding writers based on traffic is both good and bad. In some cases it will make that writer more engaged, and in others it will simply encourage them to post on whatever cheap train wreck is going on around them, hoping for a quick traffic boost. But I think in the long run it is likely to make them more intimately involved in their blogs, and more interested in developing a relationship with their readers, and that’s a good thing.

Comments

Blogs can be used to practice journalism, they can be used to practice drive-by celebrity character assassination, they can be used as a gigantic time-sink so as to keep people from doing real work (and occasionally, as in the case of The Smoking Gun, they can accomplish all three at once). They can be about serious subjects, with well thought-out opinions, or they can be the blitherings of a know-nothing with a typewriter.

Asking whether blogs can be journalism is like asking whether pencils can be used for journalism, or whether people who type can be journalists. Sure, they can, but that doesn’t mean they always are. You could make the same statement and replace the word “blog” with the word “newspaper.” Do all newspapers practice the rigorous, fact-based, dual-sourced journalism people think of when they use the word? Hardly.

What Nick Denton is looking for seems to be the prototype of a new kind of journalist, practicing something close to what Jeff Jarvis calls “networked” journalism (which Jay Rosen is also working on). An excerpt from the job posting Nick put up for a Gawker reporter:

“At its most elevated, the new Gawker hire may experiment with a new form of reporting, unique to online, in which ideas are floated, appeals made to the readers, and the story assembled over the course of several items, from speculation, and tips from users.”

Nick’s brand of Fleet Street-style journalism may not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s no question that it’s journalism. The fact is that until recently, only a small group of people had the tools required to engage in journalism. Now, the tools are virtually free, not to mention instantaneous. The combination of those two things has up-ended the journalism business — such as it was — and continues to do so.

Comments