Nichepapers: Xtreme Journalism?

August 1st, 2009 Comments

A friend writes:

I’m puzzling through an idea–of extreme poles in new editorial models…and curious how you foresee a media landscape that allows for Demand Media (this) and and Mediastorm (this). There are some really interesting commonalities under the hood of how these products are assembled and how execs at various companies see licensing and syndication and the future of content. What’s your take?

Great questions.

As I understand it, the Demand model is predicated on extreme micromedia production. Early on, Demand bought top level domains of users’ spelling errors: you typed deman.com instead of demand.com, Demand bought deman.com and filled the page with content that would sell related Google ads. Eventually, Demand began to generate new authored content to fill those pages. And now it has a micromedia “own & operate” model that makes it more lethal than, say About.com—which relies upon expensive journalistically legitimized authoring.

What’s interesting about the Demand model is that it seems to prove out Umair Haque’s Media Economics theory that new technologies have vaporized production costs and created new economies of scale and scope in search, production, and distribution, making production far less expensive relative to buying attention. Smart aggregators in the micromedia world such as Demand are now becoming major media players, using behavioral matches to SERP to place their bets on which subject areas to invest: an efficient relationship of content production to customer need. In the long run this has a chance of becoming an irresistable black box portfolio investment model of content production. Demand isn’t a “nichepaper” as Haque recently called for in his “Nichepaper manfesto”: it’s the extreme of micromedia, but imo it’s the extreme that will ultimately push nichepapers to real innovation at the margin. (I’ll write about Haque’s Nichepaper manifesto at a later date, but this piece actually contains some of my qualms about it.)

The X Games: Xtreme Micro meets Xtreme Macro

So what about the other side of my friend’s question How can you have a big enough tent to support experiementation at the level of narrative. Mediastorm, like the work Jonathan Harris does with Sputnik Observatory, is an artisanal multimedia company creating new journalistic narratives; both it and Harris’s Sptnk are also non-profits. They seem to fly  in the face of the smart aggregation theme. How can they survive in the same ecosystem when economies of scale seem to congregate around low margin data plays?

My answer: I don’t think they can, at least not outside the non-profit realm. Artisanal production doesn’t scale. Not that what they are doing isn’t valuable: this is exactly the right kind of innovation at the front-end of narrative remix that magazines  need to cozy up with if they intend to survive in an e-book world where there are higher margins and costs. And there’s good economics here too: as Haque says, companies that invest in “altering, remixing, and filtering microchunks” are the aggregator 3.0: he calls ‘em Reconstructors. They consolidate vertically and then fragment vertically. They are in essence  “broadcatchers” who believe that “people will consume the media they like best.”

But wait a minute: That sounds just like the Demand model.

A more likely model for the production side is what Demand is doing in terms of cheap production, what Visible World is doing in terms of cheap, modularized TV ad production—in case you missed it, Google did a deal with Visible World last week to abet its tv advertising—and to get increasingly focused using metadata production and semantic technologies such as DITA to mesh taxonomical CMS categories along with SERP and user-based tags and create dynamically generated aggregated results pages. (Let’s also mention Mahalo while we’re at it: Jason Calcanis’s company is combining high- and low-touch elements together to make search more authentic and matched to customer need.)

Touch me, baby

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think high level editorial touch is going anywhere. You can’t use machines to generate moral purpose and one thing that’s perpetually left out of this debate about the future of newspapers and the scale economies that Reconstructors and Broadcatchers can achieve—the essential impact editors can bring to aggregation. That’s one reason I think the AOL model will be a winner: someone (editors) needs to bring the moral outrage, aesthetic value, and connective heart to content, and machines can’t do that.

So we’re stuck somewhere in the middle between the extreme micromedia and extreme artisanal remix production. Just where we should be, because the truth is that what’s needed is different strokes for different folks: different kinds of companies and even different units within companies have different needs.

If you have a big vertical database of SERP in something like real estate, autos, or dating. you’re going to need much more data efficiency at levels of geography and cost than you would if you were publishing politics or gossip or movies. The data needs are very different. Gossip and politics and personal finance can also benefit from the principles of Reconstruction—on both the front-and-back-end.

Conversely, microniches and vertical segments with strong SERP need real human touch to come alive: Consumers want more than data. They want passionate engagement and love for real estate porn or for more consumer transparency with auto dealers or more focus on sustainable transportationwhen in addition to—maybe even as an engine of—search. But as I said, your mileage may vary depending on how close you are to SERPs.

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